Access to excellent performance as never been cheaper, you are doing it wrong.
I mostly agree, its been great 'fun' playing with relatively cheap great measuring DAC's, Amp's and Speakers (and while I initially thought against it the $100 Umik Mic has been a fantastic purchase) - the only thing I would slightly disagree is its almost impossible to get a decent cheap Sub in Europe - If I spend say Eur300 on speakers, maybe Eur100/150 for a DAC and similar for a reasonable Class D Amp - its a shame that there isn't a good Sub for less than Eur400 in Europe - I believe there are way better options for cheap Sub's in the US and while I can easily sell on a DAC / Amp / Speaker that I might not like for whatever reason (at little or no loss), I am mostly stuck with whatever Sub (usually too heavy to ship)
I mean... there's physics, a la Col. Paul W. Klipsch's bon mot of long ago.
And your point ^here^ is…?
Ah… you are not dong supercomputer or high performance computing… you are a gamer.
He seemed like a smart man. And he was right about horns, in general. But he must have hated his listeners using that silly midrange horn and dubious driverI mean... there's physics, a la Col. Paul W. Klipsch's bon mot of long ago.
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In Ireland, which before Brexit was easy to order from the UK, now I see even BKelec, will charge me the UK price, £28 towards shipping and then I have to pay the Irish import duty (of 23%) and then a Eur5 handling feel. If all that is not bad enough, If I am not satisfied it's very hard to get a refund or the return the item. Amazon.co.uk or Richersounds are some of the best options but have a very limited selection of SUB's
simplywyn,
And worse the Violectric does not really perform very well relatively speaking without even considering the considerable cost. But boy does it ever look cool, and looks like it would feel good to interface with it as an owner.This is my humble theory : In the past if you wanted to make a great DAC, you needed capable engineering teams, spending time (and money) designing and optimizing the circuitry, selecting the right components, binning and matching individually if required etc. to be able to develop a great product. All of these required a lot money of course, and required it upfront. So you'd be investing piles of money on a product which was not sure to deliver any results, probably making you ask for a higher return on your investment. If you had the good product you were aiming for, and given the sales volumes are also low, you will need to operate at very high margins to recover and get return on your R&D cost. And even the R&D work you did last year did not yield any significant results, you still needed to be able to sell the new products, so you would start using a bit of creative licence when introducing the new product. "It uses the latest technology linear transistors" you'd say hoping that it sounded like worth spending the extra to the buyer. A niche market such as this with such high margins always attracts sharks of course, trying to make some good money by bullshitting people who were ready pay top dollar for a new product that has some vague claim for improvement over last year's model, like the other genuine engineering companies are doing. Buyer can not tell the difference anyway, so why not! Outside of snake oil tradering sharks, it is mostly the same marketing that is employed by every industry in my opinion. You have a new dac, you write it sounds great on it and quote a remotely relevant sounding technical spec to sound like you really mean what you say - looks like standard business practice to me. What is different now I think is that all that expensive R&D work is mostly done by the fabless semiconductor manufacturers who has volume to recover the costs. so for Topping and SMSL the only major cost is manufacturing, lack of high and risky R&D makes the products much cheaper, expands the market, making the economies of scale work evern better. I think we should expect nothing but decreasing prices per performance in the coming years, and sadly, but also naturally, majority of the old school engineering houses to go out of business. I just want to get a Violectric before all that happens
They certainly looks good. More than good, they look majestic, like an old steamship, and probably weigh as much as well - it is a pain to get them shipped if you are not living in the EU.
This is an excellent example of how high end audio (since the Lumin is mentioned) is driven by intention rather than cost. And how the Veblen Effect causes people to spend more money than they need to get the same quality.
) and we can get into the hi-fi realm for little money, now. That extra $2K get's you another 2% performance, maybe, where in decades past it would get you a device that maybe sounded twice as good.
Given all other things being equal, I would agree with that statement. Well, not always though . I mean, maybe for a car, or an audio equipment or furniture, but less so for an industrial washer or a lighting pole. I don't think people procure industrial washers or lighting poles on perceived quality alone, but I might be wrong. Also for space equipment as well. I doubt they chose components for Mars Rover based on perceived quality only. But for consumer products, sure. However in order to have a perception of high quality, you should also have a metric of some sort. Does not need to be objective metric of course, doesn't need to be conscious even, but a metric nonetheless is needed to be able to discern high quality from low quality. And no shame if those metrics are "non-technical" as well - I'd imagine that's how majority of people make purchase decisions for, well everything that is not a piece of clothing probably. For more involved consumers however, I think it is also fair not to take the seller on their word but ask questions, demanding the seller to quantify their quality . So overall, I'd say I agree, It is the perceived quality that matters, except when the perception is incorrect, then it does not.
