|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
67.250.121.136
In Reply to: RE: That is why Pacific Microsonics went out of business posted by Charles Hansen on August 19, 2009 at 19:54:47
Ironic, because farther down the road with the advent of MP3's & over compressed CD's, there doesn't seem to be a need for any better sounding format(s).
G
Follow Ups:
So they just buy the cheapest crap they can find.
Remember when you couldn't buy a telephone because the phone company owned them and you just paid a rental fee per month? Those were damned near indestructible because the phone company knew that was the best way to save money in the long run.
Try and buy a decent phone today. They are all made in China. One drop and they either die or crack. Even without any abuse they will die after a short time anyway. If you ever opened one up you would laugh at the construction compared to the insides of the old Bell telephones.
Same with audio. Most people are happy with cheap crap. Crappy equipment, crappy downloads, doesn't matter as long as it's cheap.
The people who visit these forums are an aberration. There are 300 million people in this country, and about 300 thousand audiophiles. That means that only one person in a thousand will pay extra money to get better sound.
So it's a small market. It's enough to support small companies, but while a small company can build great audio equipment, a small company cannot market music on a national level. Only big companies can do that, and to be big they must sell to the general public. Who only cares about price and that's why we have to listen to cheap crap for our music sources.
"while a small company can build great audio equipment, a small company cannot market music on a national level."
It seems to me that you may have it backward. As a boutique hardware manufacturer you of course are stuck with poor economics of scale. As you well know the amount of product marketing, research, engineering, manufacturing engineering and tooling is about the same if you are building a hundred or a hundred thousand and the parts cost is higher.
However, most of us don't buy new gear all that often once we have a satisfying system and duplicating devices is of limited interest. Few have more than two or three systems.
Music however is no longer dominated by the cost of pressing and distribution. The internet has removed most of those barriers and the remaining remaining speed barriers are falling rapidly. I don't see much of a barrier to small businesses going into the music business.
Capturing and distributing public domain music in decent resolution, ie > 50KS/s at a low cost/copy could be great for everyone including the performers. The key is quality/cost and that should be very deliverable. For one thing at the right cost I wouldn't mind having perhaps a dozen performances of most pieces. I already often have several to choose from and like it. Sometimes it's even fun to listen to them sequentially and experiences the differences.
Distributing high-quality, high-value music would be a perfect matching to go along with high-performance gear because the more really good recordings a person has access to, the more they will want something extra special to play them on.
Rick
The problem is that the small number of customers for low volume music includes the same low proportion of audiophiles. So there may not be more than one or two customers total if the volumes are really low. The effort to add an album to a web site isn't recovered at these volumes.The key is for the musicians to recognize and want the better sound. Then there will be the motivation to make it happen. Unfortunately, many musicians don't really care about sound, given that they are listening to musical ideas and not sound waves. (Or they have gone deaf prematurely.) Hence the challenge.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Edits: 08/21/09
Post a Followup:
FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: