"soundhaspriority" wrote in message
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
. ..
http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/1107awsi/
"Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is
dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world
is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during
the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind
of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for
example) that had legitimized every other serious
scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a
source of endless derisive amusement among rational
people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I
am associated by so many people with the mess my
disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I
never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What
I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always
tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing."
Arny, you got to give JA credit for running it.
I give JA for realizing that something has to change with high end audio
journalism for his magazine to have a future.
Regardless of what you think of the purity of his motive,
he did it.
Purity? When did purity matter to anybody? ;-)
Here's the underlying fact that drives JA:
"Judging by online forums and by the e-mail I receive, there are currently
three areas of passion for audiophiles: vinyl playback, headphone listening,
and music servers."
I'm surprised that he didn't present any results from formal market surveys.
I am astonished to find that my occasional
shrill letter to JA about multichannel merely mirrored
the plaint of an audio "great."
Bose was right about one thing - reproducing the perceived sound field, and
not just two point sources, is of the essence.
J. Gordon Holt was, himself, a fanatic, in the most
positive sense. He and the other pioneers whispered
herertical thoughts to the postwar generation. "You have
to hear this." "You're going to hear something you won't
believe." "Have a seat while I spin this up."...
It's been decades since high end audio systems enjoyed that sort of primacy
over a well-done mid-priced system.
And they listened. All through college, and graduate
school, my
generation -- yes, boomers, yearned for the moment of
earned success when we could be transported from our
chairs to the sonic magnficence of the world's great
venues. I really don't think the boomers killed it.
It was killed by the profiteers who saw money in solipsism.
I don't know if it ever had a chance for survival, because
the evolution of something like high fidelity is in
direct contradiction to Gresham's Law, and analogs: "Bad
xxxxxx drives out good."
The high end fell into that trap.
But if there was a way out, the audio press may incur
some responsibility for not pressing the solution.
They followed the cash.
And this is why: high fidelity was popularized by fanatics,
with the best possible connotation. Those fanatics lost
their collective voice.
They also lost their rational minds and were swallowed up in tons of
floobydust, agressively sold by you-know-who.
Was this the consequence of
natural selection, or failed competition for media
resources?
It's just the process of natural selection following its course. The high
end lost its way in terms of quality of the media experience. Zillion-buck
cables don't work in the long term. SETs aren't the answer. Vinyl is less
than 0.5% of the market or less. DVD-A and SACD were solutions looking for a
problem.
As high fidelity became, for a brief time, a
larger part of commerce, there emerged voices from within
the industry who poorly honored the mantle of the
fanatics they replaced. The "dumbing down" of hifi was
quite analogous to the decline of the movie as an art
form, and the general devolution of the mass market when
driven from below, rather than above.
Here's a piece of friendly advice - elitism doesn't work. Not even the elite
really like it.
My understanding of JA's brief explanation to me, back in
the 90's, is that a magazine such as Stereophile is
largely driven, by the interests of the readership.
However its a closed loop. The magazine has influence and can lead the
interests of the readership. Stereophile has figured out how to make money
out of only 1/3 of the current interests of its readership, that crazy vinyl
thing. I don't see them doing much of anything with music servers and
headphones.
He told me that the readership had little interest in
multichannel, and he doubtless made this determination
from a position of knowledge.
But, how representative was the knowlege?
But the fanaticism that
gives birth to new fields and later revitalizes them is
not accessible to logical analysis.
Sure it is, you just have to take your head out of the sand.
And it never comes from inside corporate America.
Sure it does.
It comes from a startup in a garage.
Not true. Look at cell phones - the name of the garage was Motorola. Look
at consumer digital audio - the names of the garage were Sony and Philips.
And forget not the fact that the PC was an interesting toy until IBM sort of
screwed up and picked up the mantle and told the world that it was OK.
This must be on JA's mind. What can one man do?
Note that the ABX associates managed to insert the following into JGH's
mind:
"As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility
during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic
honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized
every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal."
JA has freely admitted that he led the charge of the herd that "refused to
submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for
example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since
Pascal."
Let JA eat cake! ;-)