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In Reply to: Re: No news here posted by Soundmind on August 25, 2006 at 06:53:17:
Soundmind, you should really stick to violins. Perhaps you can get a large manufacturer to mass produce them, and get really good results. As you know, your simple attitude toward hi fi equipment, won't work with qualitiy musical instruments, not that people have not tried.
I purchased my first classical guitar in 1960. I already had a very good electric guitar, but when I went to the music store to get strings for it, I casually picked up a classical guitar that was displayed on the wall. I fell in love, and though I couldn't afford it, I purchased it anyway. This guitar was made in Sweden and was called an 'Espania' I loved playing this guitar and took it everywhere. Unfortunately, someone stole it out of my car in 1962, and I was at a great loss. I tried to buy another 'Espania' guitar, but it didn't sound the same. I then tried to buy a Goya (made in Sweden also) but I turned it back in to the music store, because I could not live with it. I then bought the best guitar that I could find in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1963, but I ultimately traded it for a voltmeter.
So where does this lead? Well, every guitar that I had purchased at that time was hand made and cost real money, and each had a different personalty. Being fussy at the time, and finding a 12 string Mexican guitar that I came to love, I stopped looking for my classical guitar replacement for several years.
Now to my point:
However, in 1970, I found a bargain classical guitar in a music store that cost retail for about $50. It looked perfect, played in tune, and in every way that I could see, and even first hear, it was acceptable. I bought it, hoping that it would sound even better after a few months or years of playing. Well it was not to be! It just sounded barely OK, and stayed that way. I finally just gave it away in disappointment. How did the Japanese do it? How did they make a beautiful guitar, yet a mediocre one? Was it the wood, the varnish, the glue, the bracing? I couldn't SEE any difference. Still, it was there! I had bought a MIDFI guitar and I came to dislike it.
It is the same between midfi and hi end.
It is very difficult to make the best stuff possible.
It is like making a race car, rather than a family sedan. If you want to compete with the others, you have to use the BEST connectors, wire, parts, topologies.
Where a mid fi manufacturer will use connectors that look good, they are just gold flashed potmetal. That's how we can tell the difference sometimes. We just use a magnet. Visually, they can be perfect, and even better looking than the 'good' connectors. How embarrassing! This is true with wire, circuit boards, parts, everything!
What about something in-between like the equivalent of an expensive Honda, BMW, Mercedes? Well they are limited production, just like Parasound, where I usually design products. Are there sonic compromises for having to use limited mass production, instead of hand crafting? Of course, and I know them well. Yet, the retail price can be 1/3 what an equivalent amp might cost that is truly hand made. This is NOT the fault of the craftspeople who make the custom amps, but the cost of 'keeping the lights on' when you can make only a few components a week or month and the REAL COST of quality passive and active parts. This is hi end, folks!
Follow Ups:
There are a small minority of craftsmen in many businesses who go to extraordinary lengths to produce the highest quality products possible but even there, one place or another, many of them fall short somewhere along the line. But for the overwhelming majority of small manufacturers with garage style operations, their products are inconsistant in quality at best.I'm reminded of something which happened over 20 years ago. Another engineer dumped a project on me he didn't want to do. The security manager of the large software development site I worked at had purchased a replacement computer room card entry access system from a company in Central NJ which had just been spun off from a world famous British military electronics hardware company. Shortly after I was to see why with my own eyes. The salesmen who sold this system took me to the factory and gave it a big buildup. After the high level meeting with the plant manager and other top level management, I got a tour of the plant...a garage with a few people sitting at tables hand assembling equipment, a fenced parts crib, and a computer for testing. When 14 card readers arrived at my office, I spread them out on a table. Many of them had different parts from each other, some had obvious short circuits, two even had the same serial number, and workmanship uniformly stank. I sent them all back with a message that they were unacceptable and would all have to be completly reworked or replaced. The manufacturer was furious. It came back a few weeks later marginally better but eventually the entire system was scrapped for one built by a major manufacturer. This is typical of my experience with garage style operators. Even if the founder was "passionate" about his work, those who inherit the business usually aren't and are only interested in cutting every possible corner including quality. I have no issue with hand made equipment...if it is well made. BTW, even the AR2as I recently renovated, built to very high consumer standards would not have passed inspection for soldering to military specifications standards. How lucky I was to have a father who was the Quality Control Manager of a famous electronics company for 14 years which built only military gear.
Craftsmen who are dedicated to building the best musical instruments and have learned their craft over a lifetime by being apprenticed and starting out by sweeping the floor as children are not in this category. They are in a special trade. Don't compare them to the garage manufacturers of high end audio equipment. Especially the ones who farm out their work to prison sweatshops in China.
Soundmind, you are very prejudiced against people who make custom audio electronics for a living. I happen to be one of those people, and I have worked with many audio manufacturers who make similar audio products. Many, if not most of these people, have years of academic training and manufacturing experience. Look at Roger West for example. What is wrong with you?
This is how it is, folks!
It is difficult to make anything perfectly and consistently. First you can personally make a prototype or two and get it going. Then you might make a limited run of 25 or so. Well, soldering every board yourself, gets really old, and so you usually hire a solderer or two to help you. I have ALWAYS hired good solderers. One was Swiss trained, another worked at cable making at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, a third was NASA trained, etc, etc. They also get tired of soldering and sometimes make mistakes. Then, I have to find their mistakes, (never the same one) to get the unit to work. You can imagine how much fun that is.
Now, what about limited production, like Parasound? Well, here comes the compromises, which are minor, but real. Automated production with pick and place machines also involves wave soldering, that looks good to the eye. However, polystyrene caps are mostly out, because the final cleaning will probably destroy them, if not the soldering process itself. Also, the quality of the solder will be different, because I just can't tell some manufacturer in Taiwan to use SN62 solder, in their production line. They also have to make products for Carver, etc, etc, who demands no such solder quality. A pick and place machine always seems to leave excess leads on the components that will tarnish with time, and probably change the sound. Oh well, that's the price of cost savings. Now, what do the mid-fi guys do? They turn everything that they possibly can into an integrated circuit. Good pots? Goodbye! Good IC's? Too expensive! Use the cheap ones that cost a few 10's of cents each. Sony does this, and so does just about everyone else.
I have the greatest respect for Dan Banquer's selection of components. He was trying to do a good job, that should have been acceptable to most anyone. Bourns pots are good!
Bourns pots are not cheap! Audible Illusions uses Bourns pots, as well, and I have independently measured and listened to them. However, TKD is even better and even more expensive, That's what we used in the CTC preamp, and WE had to pay a minimum of $320/stereo pot set OEM for each preamp. It is now almost impossible to get them, because they are not being imported anymore, due to a price doubling at the wholesale level. NOW what are they going to cost?
It is just like buying quality aged wood from a certain tree to make a guitar or violin. It costs money to do it right. The Yamaha guitar that I bought for $50/ 36 years ago, must have taken a shortcut in the wood department when they made the instrument. I can't blame them, but then I didn't like the results, as the funky 12 string of Mexican origin with a large cigarette burn on the front of it, ran rings around it sonically.
Now, please Soundmind, I am not writing this just for you to pick apart, it is for the silent majority who read this stuff and who are interested in why good audio often costs so much, and also to offset then negative propaganda about audio that you insist on submitting.
"Soundmind, you are very prejudiced against people who make custom audio electronics for a living"NO! I am prejudiced against people who set their own arbitrary subjective standards which cannot be verified independently and who are pretentious about them to the point of declaring them to be beyond what others who have set objective standards which can be verified can achieve. Golden eared wizards, the ultimate determiners of what is good and bad who as it turns out have questionable hearing accuity for a variety of reasons not the least of which is a long history of self abuse. As for the so called objectivist manufacturers, their claims are documented and their products are held in the highest esteem by professionals where cost is a secondary factor to performance and reliability, not hobbyists who can and are sold the moon on the strength of their ignorance every day. Having built many A/V projects as a project manager working with A/V consultants and contractors and having worked for one myself for a short boring stint, I know when Bryston has to compete against Crown to bid a job, all the bullcrap they shovel at consumers goes out the window, prices become very competitive, and there's no room for games. You don't sell a three year no fault warranty to pros on inferior parts, weak design, or poor manufacturing standards.
"It is just like buying quality aged wood from a certain tree to make a guitar or violin"
It's one thing to buy selected wood and age it for 20 years to make a violin. It's another to say you can only make an accurate speaker by building an enclosure using Russian birchwood or using 100 pounds of silver in the crossover network capacitors and that's why they have to cost $125,000 a pair. Not everyone out their is both stupid and inexperienced.
If you were a true engineer/scientist in function as well as in training, you would find out WHY one of your designs sounds better to you than another and use that knowledge to produce consistantly better product, you wouldn't be flailing around with wild theories such as which components of harmonic distortion are irritating and which aren't when the whole of it taken together is less that 0.1% of the signal.
"It is difficult to make anything perfectly and consistently."
Tell it the ISO standards organization, that's what they are all about, production units remaining within specified deviation of the prototype and the manufacturer's documentation subject to audit to prove it. ANSI is similar, so are military specifications and contracts. That's how big money electronics is made and sold today.
"Also, the quality of the solder will be different, because I just can't tell some manufacturer in Taiwan to use SN62 solder, in their production line."
If you can't write contracts to produce to your own exacting specifications and enforce them because you don't have the resources of strong purchasing and legal departments that hardly comes as a surprise. That's typical of garage operations.
"Well, soldering every board yourself, gets really old, and so you usually hire a solderer or two to help you"
"One was Swiss trained, another worked at cable making at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, a third was NASA trained, etc, etc. They also get tired of soldering and sometimes make mistakes. Then, I have to find their mistakes, (never the same one) to get the unit to work. You can imagine how much fun that is."
More garage type operations. Professional solderers and wirers are carefully trained and tested to verify their skills. Their work is 100% inspected. This is the function of a manufacturing engineering department. This is what I am talking about when I refer to small time operators. I've seen countless examples of their crap...and I don't authorize installation or payment for it until they repair it and get it right. This is testimony that I will never buy one of your products no matter what is claimed for it. By your own admission, I would not be satisfied with it."Automated production with pick and place machines also involves wave soldering, that looks good to the eye. However, polystyrene caps are mostly out, because the final cleaning will probably destroy them, if not the soldering process itself"
Do you think IBM and other large elecronics manufacturers have the same problems? How do you suppose they handle them?
The resources of large companies which buy, make, or sell billions of dollars of electronic hardware every year gives them the resources to make whatever they need to make to whatever standards they choose to make them. Compared to that kind of power, the little guy has two and a half strikes against him before he even starts. If these big guys aren't competing against you, it's only because they don't see enough profit in it. Count yourself lucky, they'd eat your lunch if they did.
Oh boloney!
Not the point he wants to make, but does make one nevertheless.I know when Bryston has to compete against Crown to bid a job, all the bullcrap they shovel at consumers goes out the window, prices become very competitive, and there's no room for games.
This is standard audiophile bashing rant #304 which he has used before. He is absolutely correct. Prices dominate the equation and pros couldn't care less about the ultimate sound quality. They are far more concerned about watts per dollar, ability to drive a dozen speaker bins without blowing up and getting thrown around by roadies.
I responded to this rant once before. You'll note he didn't counter my comparison. :)
rw
I can't disagree. Chevy vs Ford, Crown vs Bryston, even low cost Parasound vs Advent or many other similar products. The problem is that I prefer to drive a Porsche, because I enjoy driving it, and I prefer not to own a Chevy or a Ford. Why? Refinement.
Can I own the newest, fastest, or coolest Porsche? No! My car is 22 years old, BUT it still drives well, even though I could only get a few thousand dollars for it in the marketplace. It's the same with audio. Most of my audio is used equipment or products that I have designed. Hi end audio doesn't have to be ourageously expensive, but you have to want what it gives you, over mid-fi. Refinement.
"Chevy vs Ford, Crown vs Bryston, even low cost Parasound vs Advent"
What do you expect in an amplifier for only $4000. For that kind of money you're lucky if it works at all."Can I own the newest, fastest, or coolest Porsche?"
Yes! If I wanted one. My next door neighbor owned a 911 Targa. He washed it every day. He stroked that car more than he stroked his girlfriends. One day it almost became his coffin. What a piece of shit...in an accident. Me, I drive a 96 Mark VIII LSC. It's plenty fast....I've got the speeding tickets to prove it. I was in an accident in a Mark VII LSC which was totaled. It was sent spinning on an interstate on wet pavement by a guy who fell asleep at the wheel of his Dodge Daytona. My car was completely out of control hydroplaning, unable to recover from the skid and unable to slow down even with antilock brakes. It hit the concrete center divider head on at 50 miles per hour. I walked away. In a Porche, I'd have been killed for sure. Drive your Porche...if your back can stand being scrunched up in it.
Soundmind, the more I interact with you, the more I find you to be a clueless mean-spirited guy. AR-2's? They sucked then, and they suck now! Does this help you? I doubt it, but then you may have fallen in with Big B's (you know the guy you love in acoustics) law which states: " If you have chosen a speaker and have even modified it, then it is the speaker that you will like most." I would rather have a Wilson, thank you.
Your choice is cars is OK for YOU, but you would never see me driving one. What a dog to drive! Parking? Gas mileage? Real response to local situations? Please give us a break!
However, I bet it is really nice on the freeway at normal speeds, and that it has a great back seat for your other passengers.
Do you know what his "reference" performance car is? Hint: think AARP.Yeah baby!
rw
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