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Hi all
Wow, reading this thread makes it very clear lots of folks really trust their judgment but don’t trust there hearing alone.
So many people that have a problem with “blind testing” cite conditions which are not part of the test such as not being comfortable, being pressured to decide and such, all of which is unrelated to the big picture.
I suppose it is necessary “Not to see” what the real point is if your going to be so strongly against it.
For a moment lets assume everything one can buy in hifi is real, I mean it actually does something that you hear. This means the claims for things like the wood blocks, expensive wood knobs, C-37 tuned lacquer, magic clocks and all the other exotica are all valid and the performance of all cables is relative to selling price.
Can you think of ANY area where a business is set up where harvesting your spare cash is involved, that is not largely BS and illusion? I mean things like diamonds; exotic cloths and all the vanity products are not priced based on cost to manufacture but what the traffic will stand.
How much that is, depends on marketing and the image one can generate.
In the case of diamonds in particular, this is a good example of something common as sand in some places who’s value is entirely based on control of the supply and marketing.
So, what if you said “well some of this stuff is BS”, you become more skeptical and ask questions. Questions like “ since there was a beach in Africa that for miles and miles was diamonds, what exactly do I get for that large stack of cash buying a diamond?”
Or, “I hear nothing when I tap on this knob, yet the $500 replacement knob claims it will improve the sound of the electronics by damping the control, what exactly do I get for my $500 per knob?”
People, as intended, are essentially unaware that we are programmed by all the marketing forces we are constantly exposed to.
Consider, what your friends or acquaintances have bought that didn’t make sense to you, think about “the demand” in the dim bulbs in the inner cities that kill for fancy gym shoes or sports jacket that cost less than a half dollar to manufacturer yet sell for hundreds.
Our primary information source as a nation IS the same business that markets all that to us, shapes our world view by careful omission and inference. No one seems to mind or even be aware of it, which takes a lot of money and effort.
How does one become more discerning with ones spare cash?
You start thinking of reality checks, ways of determining if the price is based on some actual effect or effect only in your brain from marketing programming, like a pair of $800.00 pants or $5000 watch or a $300,000.00 car etc.
Frankly, I don’t buy the argument that unlike your sense of taste, smell, vision, touch, telepathy and everything else, that in hifi, using only ones sense reduces what you can discern.
Yes, there is often a gap between what you can discern in a proper blind test or all of your senses and what one might get “with knowledge” but that gap is often the difference between what you know and think vs what you can genuinely detect.
Remember the Pepsi challenge? When you can’t see the can, Coke tastes a lot more like Pepsi and vise versa, once Pepsi grew to a comparable size, such blind tests were to both companies disadvantage as the result (little taste difference) didn’t help either sell product but harmed the market image of both.
Hifi is all about the money and the various strategies to get it from the customer.
Some of it is real, some of it is not, if your receptive, you can hear both just as sure as you are sitting there. Much appeals to vanity, uses plausible but wrongly applied technical explanations tailored to play off the curious magazine reader’s background.
Or, you can think it is all real, your in the matrix after all.
Its sort of like this.
There have been many oil shortages over the years, each one was followed by a step function in price. In the 1960’s, selling oil was so profitable to make may rich, support thousands of small oil companies and still have 3 to 5 guys come out to “service” your car for under 30 cents a gallon.
Now, the oil companies have become a few conglomerates, becoming more efficient, have not made any capitol investments in refineries in ages, have paired service down to a foreigner in a glass box and after the last oil crisis they very quietly announced they made more profit than any industry in the history of the world.
Some day we might have a real shortage but so far, none of them have been, they were all essentially marketing strategies to bump profits ever higher.
With the government getting a cut also, there is a strong an anti incentive to change this.
OR one can believe what all the snake oil companies tell you.
Best,
Tom
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