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2c I feel that with the influx of so much new people the majority of forum members does not actually understand what the forum stands for ?
I was so relieved when I found this fora , where I could get away from the nonsense of regular audiophile forums and actually chat with senior members here that actually knows how the sausage is made thankyou all of you.
But lately I feel that the forum is overruned by “them” ? Heck some even create accounts to rant when they feel provoked by something discussed here.
Thought provoking idea . There was a great tread that I thought should be a sticky about “ why do people think DAC’s have a sound signature “ . Thinking about it.
I wonder what a poll about that very question would yield ? “Do you think that competently designed DAC’s have a sound signature “ . ( in current climate here I would not dare ).
Then we would know if we are at a Astronomy conference sieged by astrology believers ?
My personal pet hypothesis is that some kind of tragedy befell our hobby in late 70’s to early 80’s there was a paradigm shift for the worse . When all this cable nonsense and subjective sighted reviews started to appear and all kinds of cargo cult beliefs condensed out of the aether. This coincides with the thing that at the same time electronics used in audio if reasonably well made started to be transparent to humans listeners . So then the bias become the base for our hobby?
I was swept away by the nonsense for a long time and have wasted time and money ( I was a believer ).
I was pleasantly surprised when I found this forum and with it a return to some rational discourse in hifi
I think you are right that something did indeed change, probably in the early to mid-1980s. I would be very curious to know what caused the change.
The only things I have ever been able to come up with as possible factors were that the early to mid-1980s saw two changes in the audio industry:
1. The end of the Receiver Wars - the end of the line for the beefy, super-robust Japanese amps and receivers (and the Marantz gear that, along with McIntosh, had inspired them) that dominated the 1970s, and their replacement with cheaper, lower-power models marketed more on new touch-controls and digital readouts than on specs, performance, and build quality.
2. The advent of the CD and with it the beginning of the "digital sounds bad" narrative among some audiophile reviewers who found fault with the sound quality of some of the early CD players.
I've often wondered if these twin developments helped create - or at least widen - a rift between the mass market and the boutique high-end market. I'm sure there was super-expensive high-end stuff before the 1980s, but it seems to me that in the 1960s and '70s there was more of a continuum, where the mass-market manufacturers were also making truly impressive, high-end, ultra-engineered gear as well.
Finally, I also wonder if rising income and wealth inequality - which in the U.S. at least began in the mid-1970s and really took off in the 1980s - also contributed to the split of the hi-fi market into a cheaper mass market and an ever more expensive and esoteric high end.
My point with regard to the ASR ethos is that both ends of this more polarized market had reasons - albeit different reasons - for retreating from specs and measurements. (The lower end because they were not interested in highlighting the decline in quality, and the high end because the prices and caché dictated something more/other than tech-oriented marketing.)