Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

RE: The more it costs . . .

Very true. Unfortunately, reviewers buy into and perpetuate the scam of high priced capacitors, speaker cables, amps, and other equipment by focusing heavily on what a product costs. How many times have you seen a magazine write up boasting about this $50,000 system or that $100,000 system instead of just describing the system without a reference to cost or just mentioning cost matter-of-factly at the end of a write up? The insinuation that usually gets made is that if it costs $50,000, it must be better than another system that "only" costs $25000. We've all heard and most would probably agree with the "law of diminished returns". So why fixate on what something costs. It costs what it costs. Any amount of extraordinary effort and materials put into a product doesn't guarantee a detectable improvement. If we do hear an improvement or degradation, we should be committed to identifying it and measuring it.

There are very few truly scientific, objective reviewers. John Atkinson is about the only one that comes to mind as he spends most of his time trying to correlate what is heard with what is measured. I'm not saying he's never boasted about the sound of a set of cables. And I'm also not saying that cables can't sound different. What I am saying is that it is not enough to simply say that auditioning something is all that matters. If you audition something and you can reliably hear a positive or negative difference - THAN IT SHOULD BE MEASURABLE. If no measurements exist to back up what is claimed to be heard, then it's not a good enough excuse to throw our hands in the air and say it can't be measured. EVERYTHING CAN BE MEASURED - INCLUDING THE DEGREE OF SOMEONE'S WISHFUL THINKING...


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  • RE: The more it costs . . . - villastrangiato 06:18:37 05/15/12 (0)

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