Since people love the look of tubes glowing, I wonder if one created a (bogus) case with 4 glowing tubes that does nothing other than glow, and then hide a JDS Atom inside, audio output purely from the Atom.
Well, I think it's kind of like how some people like to romanticize internal combustion engine cars; if in the future battery tech advances and electric vehicles become super cheap as a result, and thus the ICE cars become yesterday's news, I can imagine some people would still say they'd like to drive an old ICE car just for the nostalgia occasionally, maybe not as your daily driver, but as a secondary leisure car.
I could suggest exactly what you did to these people, that I could build an EV that looks like an ICE car, and when you open the hood, there's a fake engine block in there, with an electric motor to make it vibrate a bit and look like it's actually running for real, I could also hide a loudspeaker in there to make loud engine noises when you press the gas, and perfectly emulate everything. The issue is, at the end of the day, just "
knowing" that it's not real, sort of ruins the retro feel of it.
The way I feel about retro stuff is it's fine to appreciate it just for the retro aesthetic as well as just appreciating like how things "used" to be built, etc. But obviously a lot of the claims about it sounding "better" are silly, and even if there
was some sort of audible difference, you'd probably just be able to write a plugin for a software media player to emulate that very sound. So personally, the only reason I'd like the Little Dot is just the aesthetics, but my interest in it
would indeed be diminished if I knew it was a fake, not because I could hear the difference, but because it's not authentic retro tech, so I'd feel cheated since it's not what I was paying for.
Speaking of fake engine noise, it's worth noting that it's already a thing in many modern cars due to improvements in design that've made the car more quiet even during acceleration:
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...b09a10-a0ba-11e4-b146-577832eafcb4_story.html
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https://www.core77.com/posts/79755/...turers-Pipe-In-Fake-Engine-Sounds-Listen-Here
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https://theoutline.com/post/6158/your-car-is-pumping-fake-engine-noises-into-your-ears