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High-end audio as a subject of a university thesis.
I just glanced at it, but from my overview it seems interesting.
Follow Ups:
how many of the committee members to whom she had to defend her thesis were audiophiles.
In restricting her study essentially to an examination of two print publications--something she did, as she acknowledges in her introduction, out of convenience--and foregoing the far more logistically complex task of interviewing live-body audiophiles, she's constructed a two-dimensional--no pun intended--stereotype.
Having catered to high-end, Stereophile- and Absolute Sound -reading customers while working at Garland Audio in San Jose (and briefly in Berkeley) from 1977 to 1980 (corresponding to at least a portion of the period she reviewed), I'd suggest that the buying clientele was economically more diverse than what her reader-poll model suggests. And while the customer base was predominantly male, in several instances women either made their own purchases or participated actively with their significant others in making purchase decisions--significantly, as equal partners in the listening process that led to those decisions.
One impression--and it's strictly that, an impression--I have (and had then) is that women of that era who had their hands full with managing a household, especially one with children, may have been too busy with that monumental (and socially-approved) task to devote as much time to "focused listening" as their male partners. Now that's a subject I'd have liked to see addressed in the thesis, as it might have provided a more balanced view of why high-end "resisted feminization."
Jim
http://jimtranr.com
Basically, according to the Abstract, which is all I read, 'audiophilia' is a reaction to "perceived threats of feminization and massification".That could make for a lively discussion, although from the inmates responses, I could see the paper does not succeed at this.
Abstract:
"High-end audio hobbyism, or audiophilia, is a perplexing and often misunderstood culture with roots in the prehistory of audio recording technology. Certain audiophile characteristics, including an almost exclusively male constituency, elitist tendencies, and a privileging of knowledge, are as distinctive of audiophilia today as they were at its inception. It is the goal of this thesis to extract the origins of these traits and to explain how and why they have remained at the forefront of the culture despite, and sometimes as a consequence of, social and technological transformations. This project attempts to explain the origins of audiophilia while highlighting how the culture communicates, organizes, and defends itself against the perceived threats of feminization and massification. A discursive analysis of audiophile reactions to the introduction of digital audio is used as a case study to illustrate the intricate and often specious rationale of high-end audio culture."
[I should note that often, all we really want is a good listening experience. But the massification and feminization angle should make good cocktail hour conversation.]
Edits: 11/14/14
Well, I read the chapter headings and read some of the beginning comments and quickly realized that this entire paper could have been boiled down to a page or two at best.
The reason for its length and the "research" poured into the effort was solely for the pursuit of a degree. What a massive waste of time, and the author didn't learn much other than than how to execute a writting assignment
The same approach could have been aimed at car enthusiasts, boat lovers, coin collectors, and book club geeks.
The fact that mostly men are attracted to this hobby is simply becuase we are wired that way. My wife loves music but choses to focus her attentions differently. There is nothing elitist or anti-mainstream about this hobby. The more the merrier.
Close all those damn universities! They is all commies in thare anyways right?
I just found that a subject as silly as high-end audio finding its way to academe worth bringing to the attention of the brain trust here. Silly moi...
We should all be grateful it did find its way there even if we disagree with the observations and conclusions, but that is simply too liberal for the churchy assembly here I guess.
...small liberal arts ones in Canada.
Close all those damn universities!
Note that five years following the publishing of her thesis that required three years' worth of effort, the author remains a "grad student".
Failure to launch.
My wife got her Doctor of Pharmacy degree and residency in less time.
the ultimate audiophile.She would have certainly written a different paper if she had.
Link below:
Edits: 11/13/14
nt
he died shortly after I got back into audio. I think I made it to the second VSAC in Silverdale in about 1998 or 1999. Terry Cain introduced me to his web site at about that time and it was a downhill ride for me after that! He was gone before I had a chance to ever meet him. Now Terry is gone as well.
Tiodes, alnico and other deadly sins.
Cartoon above modified by the asylum's own long gone 'Mobile Homeless'
Link below:
Lots of memories there.
If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.
—Leonard Cohen
Very informative! Thanks for sharing.
Nt
...pretty weak in 2009.
So 1986.
in the last 30 years. ;-)
Reading it as I did was painful. It is filled with half-truths, over-generalizations, and "straw man" arguments. It focuses on two audio magazines as though they were peer-reviewed publications that represent the universe of audio. The author mis-understands complaints regarding early commercial digital reproduction in the home. The text is more suitable to a magazine article by a biased (or innocently misguided) author than a scholarly effort at discovering and revealing some aspect of our existence that was unknown previously. Due to the magnitude of its errors and unsupported conclusions it belongs in my opinion in the trash heap without regard to its accidental incidences of truth.Cheers,
Ian
Edits: 11/13/14
Simply because it was the first time that I ever saw audio as a subject of a "serious" university level paper.
I am not the editor of Reader's Digest for your information.
Good to see how you guys are so afraid of discussion of any kind that could threaten your beliefs.
...any grad student can do a well-researched long-winded paper on practically anything to support their own opinion.
Probably any high school debater today...
No doubt you posted it because it supports yours.
She has the audiophile subculture down to a T.
Kelly Heward's research showed that "masculinity, elitism, and knowledge about sound" have long been characteristic of audiophile subculture.
I was fascinated to see how petty Harry Pearson could be in analog vs. digital controversies in the early 1980s and how snarky he could be with letter writers. J. Gordon Holt in the same period could be petty, too, but generally was more equable. I'm glad I never knew either one of them.
I don't know what audio point of view you see in there.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
> I was fascinated to see how petty Harry Pearson could be in analog vs. digital controversies in the early 1980s...>
Harry was right - early digital sucked and he was one of the few to take a stand.
Today analogue is still marginally better at reproducing and communicating music.
"A fool and his money are soon partying."
I said empty .
If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.
—Leonard Cohen
Sounds more like sour grapes from this woman:
Women also lack the essential knowledge for participation (are you listening, Sue?). Popular discourse surrounding audio had been gendered throughout the history of these technologies. Articles and advertisements aimed at women have tended to focus on aesthetics and star power, while texts aimed at men emphasize musicality and technical savvy
As for me, I'm all about musicality. :)
Apparently you did not understand what you read. She was describing parts of the audiophile subculture with main traits of "masculinity, elitism, and knowledge about sound." You might know this if you bothered to read the thesis. Audiophilia has long been a man's club with few exceptions, despite the fact that women hear better.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
She was describing parts of the audiophile subculture with main traits of "masculinity, elitism, and knowledge about sound.
I have no problem understanding what I read. Just find the first two parts of that assertion amusing. Just like your posts. :)
Who cares what she thinks or writes, what's her phone number?
-RW-
The paper makes no attempt at all to find out or discover anything. The paper begins by presenting her opinions as fact, after which it proceeds to attempt to back those opinions up with a mountain of irrelevant data. End result is a big fat load of nothing. For God's sake, even the title is a mess, full of snide insinuations. And exactly what the hell is "Anti-Mass Sentiment"? Sounds like somthing that's mucking up the Warp Drive.
Edits: 11/13/14
An anti-mass attitude means elitism, which looks askance at the mass of non-audiophiles, and mid-fi buyers. She looks at the terms used in the audiophile subcultures, including those use to denigrate non-audiophile beliefs.
-----
"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Edits: 11/14/14
she must prefer a high compliance cartridge? :P
Edits: 11/17/14
Heh, heh!
-RW-
And exactly what the hell is "Anti-Mass Sentiment"? Sounds like somthing that's mucking up the Warp Drive.
LOL!
When you Google the term, you find three exact matches. :)
Interesting. I came to a similar 'sour grapes' conclusion after skimming through just 20 pages. I'm not sure I can stay awake through 100+ more pages.
One of grad student's rants centered around the "Digital Threat". Does anyone actually believe that the Redbook recordings and players released in the early 80s are as good as what is available today? Jitter wasn't understood then. It is now. She attacks those who understand that it is the arbitrary selection of word size and sampling rate that determine the overall quality by suggesting that such a position was only taken because the required technology was more expensive and therefore elitist . Are we "elitists" because we observe the obvious? What claptrap! As IT guys, we fully understand why it was not practical to offer the necessary storage media capacity in 1982. Marketing triumphed.It would be interesting if she were to revisit The Threat in the wake of SACD and the almost universal use of higher resolution digital masters and the availability of high rez downloads today - in an age where the cost of digital storage has gone down by a factor of millions ! She commented briefly on the early days of the digital recordings that were delivered as pressings. I guess she doesn't understand Dr. Stockham's Soundstream recorder sampled at 50k , not 44.1k. The CD format was empirically a step backwards from the first commercial standard.
Edits: 11/13/14
With all due respect, I think that your perspective is a bit too narrow,
In industrial engineering, at some point, in those days two to three years before product release, the company had to "freeze the technology" so they could devote all their efforts to making it work and making it capable of mass production and making it as cheap to make as possible.
Was the CD SOTA technology for 1982? Of course not. It was more like, SOTA for 1976, with four years of industrial engineering and a year and a half of testing and marketing.
I was an avid spectator at the launch of CD, and a columnist and contributing editor of the world's first CD-only music magazine (DIGITAL AUDIO). The CD format was in part driven by marketing, but it was also driven by a need to make it reliable and relatively affordable, and, as such, it was one of the most successful format launches in history.
In, theory, by 1982, there was better technology. But it was not cheaper and more reliable.
IMHO, the irony is, that played back on today's best DACs (such as, in my experience, the Bricasti M1, or Grace's new m920), "Red Book" resolution is totally adequate for all but the most critical of music listeners.
ATB,
JM
Was the CD SOTA technology for 1982? Of course not.
Perhaps you can enlighten me as to the higher capacity media available in 1982. The DVD format was another decade in the works.
but it was also driven by a need to make it reliable and relatively affordable.
Do you consider the cassette lacking in those qualities?
"Red Book" resolution is totally adequate for all but the most critical of music listeners.
Adequate, yes. Perfect sound forever ? :)
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