"Rich Guys and Reviewers Running Amok in Hi-Fi"

[aslan7]

I just have the simple automatic Villeret Blancpain and a sport model military type, both from the 1990s. So far they work great. But you are right--they can be temperamental. For Lange I like the simple Saxonia.

 

[dtaylo1066]

Rolex. I don't know what an Oyster or oyster steel is is but it sure has a time-honored cache.

 

[dtaylo1066]

Absolutely true. Matsushita were amazing, their sheer scale of investment dollars was apparently limitless. Much bigger than Sony and way more diversified. The stuff they poured money into was just crazy. They built entire resorts here (in Queensland, Gold Coast Australia) with arguably some of the finest golf courses in our country, in the late 1980s.

For me however, their HiFi was so incredibly efficient and mass produced that it had no bespoke, over the top, personal attraction. I can't think of a single Technics product I really coveted. Sure, their continued committment to turntables in the face of digital was incredible. Their turntable legacy will never be surpassed IMO. Nobody produced a better line of quality TTs than Matsushita. (now Panasonic)

My favourite Japanese turntables are Technics, followed by Sony. The one that will outlive me of course is the venerable SL-1200mk2. As a very wise engineer and audio salesman once told my father in the 1960s "It's the moving parts, Doctor." All the clever automatic, motorized stuff dies (I should know, I'm so over fixing auto mechanism issues). My father's Empire 398a is still his favourite TT- totally manual, not even a cueing mech.

I just spent a weekend fixing a gorgeous Denon from the early 1980s that had spun up so fast it shook his desk and threatened to destroy itself. The wonders of early AC motor control...

It is interesting that Technics is trying to make a comeback in high end components, not just turn tables. The new TTs are superb and instantly coveted by many.

 

[DSJR]

Here's me with my daily Lorus quartz day/date (I tend to forget even what day it is sometimes) that I bought practically new in a charity shop twenty years back for a fiver! It has a Seiko movement inside, th ebattery usually lasts a couple of years and *so far* it's been an excellent timekeeper month on month! What shows it's original low cost is the chrome plating is coming off the brass casing - I wonder how a Seiko with similar movement would hold up, as I suspect the case would be stainless steel.

Got to say I'd love to try the humble SL1500C Technics deck at £899 here with phono stage and 2M Red cartridge fitted. Is the build and performance really any worse than the much higher priced models which look to be priced for a market rather than anything else now? The new motor coil arrangement reminds me of my Dual 701 (Pabst made motor) which also had 'infinite acceleration' issues a while back, but I think inmy case it was dry joints around the speed pots and it seems stable again now (the rapid rotation and resulting shaking of the sprung deck plate caused the very delicate auto trip pauls to engage and this broke a tooth on the plastic auto- cam (all Dual cams were plastic of one colour or another). I found a spare (worse than hens teeth) and it may be possible for a horologist to graft and file to shape a new tooth in place as they do this routinely on clock gear wheels.

 

[Frank Dernie]

Rolex. I don't know what an Oyster or oyster steel is is but it sure has a time-honored cache.

Oyster is a way of making the case waterproof.
Of course it has a time-honoured cache, Rolex is a brilliantly successful marketing company.
They are excellent watches sold with a magnificent margin because of the cache.

 

[dtaylo1066]

You confuse early adopters with luxury buyers. You are equating someone who buys a Rolls Royce, to someone who bought the first Tesla.

Early adopter vs. luxury buyer is a most valid point, but I think the early digital/DAC buyers were adopters who also had cash. I think that is often the case in consumer products. In the case of Tesla, most initial buyers were in the upper end of the income brackets, and that is still mostly true today. I bought my first CD player, one of the early cheaper Technics models, for around $300 in the early1980s. The silent background and dynamic range were simply stunning. I was in graduate school and had no money to speak of, but the listening was glorious over my old EPI 100s and HK amplifier. I could not afford to be an early adopter, as CD players were initially quite expensive, but when the price hit mass market levels, I was all over it.

I went to a staged open house in the 1990s on a tour of homes near Boulder, Colorado. It was a massive luxury home. An early plasma TV was on the wall with the brand name, the local store where it was available, it's high tech specs and price tag. It was $18,000 (hard to imagine!) and the picture looked amazing. It was maybe 40 or 42 inches and maybe 480p. A $300 LED today would blow it away. A number of years later I did pop for an on sale 42" HP plasma TV for $1,600 at a Best Buy sale. 720p. What resolution! It was reduced from $2,000. The thing weighed a ton. A chip went bad in about 2 months but was under warranty. I had it for 5 or 6 years until it was a totally obsolete anchor.

 

[aslan7]

Rolex. I don't know what an Oyster or oyster steel is is but it sure has a time-honored cache.

They are sealed, waterproofed with rubber gaskets. I believe all of the Rolex watches are sealed like an oyster except for the Cellini dress series. Possibly we should have waterproof audio components.

 

[Destination: Moon]

My POV is you open up a major can of worms if you wish to exclaim Chinese DAC brands as the "center of healthy competitive innovation."

At this point in digital audio the design of a quality audio DAC is neither a feat of great engineering or innovation. The burgeoning success of the Chinese DAC industry is mainly the result of utilizing chips and engineering that were pioneered or developed by other companies. Their advantage is they can produce in mass, and with quality, at price points that can virtually undercut any free-world produced (or based) product, and receive state sponsored benefits in doing so.

I would not associate the word "healthy" with that. Yes, most certainly, it is a direct, immediate and major boon to the free world consumer, as I indicated in my initial comments. But the indirect consequences can certainly be debated, which I will briefly undertake.

Now that these Chinese DAC companies have secured a major share of the low cost free-world marketplace, and eliminated or avoided the middle man in doing so, their next strategy is to focus on producing higher cost DACs in order to fully capitalize on the $500 to $1,200 market segment. One also cannot neglect the fact the Chinese DAC/Hi-Fi companies also enjoy an ever-expanding consumer class and base within in their nation of 1.3 billion people, all hungry for such consumer goods. Thus their capabilities of scale are unequaled in manufacturing history.

If you are a free-world independent company how do you survive against that? Mainly in three ways: 1) you move your manufacturing to China or another cheap labor market to contain costs; 2) you focus more, if not exclusively, on high-end, expensive products aimed at a smaller but affluent target audience; 3) through M&A you aggregate with one-time rivals as a way to achieve more scale; or 4) you work a combination of 1-4. In the long run you still stand a good chance of loosing.

I happen to see that as the antithesis of healthy competitive innovation.

It seems a little hippocritical to continuously bash china for supposedly stealing the bread from the mouths of corporate America when it was them themselves that raced to move all their production to Asia, the Philippines, Vietnam etc. Because it enabled them to escape paying a living wage and skirt environmental constraints at home.... And, often willing to share production methods as part of the deals they made.

Is china a bad actor? Sometimes. Are they worse than any of the western business that willingly created the situations they now find themselves in?

 

[audio2design]

Early adopter vs. luxury buyer is a most valid point, but I think the early digital/DAC buyers were adopters who also had cash. I think that is often the case in consumer products. In the case of Tesla, most initial buyers were in the upper end of the income brackets, and that is still mostly true today. I bought my first CD player, one of the early cheaper Technics models, for around $300 in the early1980s. The silent background and dynamic range were simply stunning. I was in graduate school and had no money to speak of, but the listening was glorious over my old EPI 100s and HK amplifier. I could not afford to be an early adopter, as CD players were initially quite expensive, but when the price hit mass market levels, I was all over it.

No one is taking issue though with early adopters, at least in audio. No one cares if someone spends $50K on a super esoteric speaker if it delivers the goods. $50K on a cable that behaves like a $25 cable is what people take issue with, and not even that they are spending $50K on the cable, but that they claim it is "better" than the $25 one. People who buy most luxury good don't make such claims though I see ruggedness claims for watches that cost 100x than ones that are just as rugged.

 

[MarkS]

What's amazing about high-priced mechanical watches is that they are all far worse at the their one actual function, measuring time, than any $20 quartz watch from the drug store. Reviews of them (at sites like hodinkee, wornandwound, ablogtowatch, etc etc) don't even bother to check their time-keeping performance. It's all about looks, and only looks.

The audio equivalent would be buying multi-kilobuck amps that sound worse (both sighted and blind) than cheap stereo receivers, but doing so because they look cool.

 

[Frank Dernie]

The audio equivalent would be buying multi-kilobuck amps that sound worse (both sighted and blind) than cheap stereo receivers, but doing so because they look cool.

http://aries-cerat.com

 

[Pennyless Audiophile]

What's amazing about high-priced mechanical watches is that they are all far worse at the their one actual function, measuring time, than any $20 quartz watch from the drug store. Reviews of them (at sites like hodinkee, wornandwound, ablogtowatch, etc etc) don't even bother to check their time-keeping performance. It's all about looks, and only looks.

The audio equivalent would be buying multi-kilobuck amps that sound worse (both sighted and blind) than cheap stereo receivers, but doing so because they look cool.

I do it all the time, don't you?

 

[MarkS]

In audio electronics? No. I currently use a 10-year-old consumer-level Marantz receiver and CD player. Speaker cable is 16-gauge lamp cord.

I do like mechanical watches though, and own ~20 or so, but nothing high end; the most expensive was $800.

 

[Ken1951]

http://aries-cerat.com

Would love to know the pricing on these things - to my eye they don't look cool at all. But i imagine they're crazy expensive.

 

[Wes]

... pass the ASR Purity Test.

We should throw a big party and ask "Can you pass the ASR purity test?" We could invite a band to play...

 

[Ken1951]

We should throw a big party and ask "Can you pass the ASR purity test?" We could invite a band to play...


View attachment 139648

Gotta serve the classic "Electric Kool-Aid"!

 

[aslan7]

What's amazing about high-priced mechanical watches is that they are all far worse at the their one actual function, measuring time, than any $20 quartz watch from the drug store. Reviews of them (at sites like hodinkee, wornandwound, ablogtowatch, etc etc) don't even bother to check their time-keeping performance. It's all about looks, and only looks.

The audio equivalent would be buying multi-kilobuck amps that sound worse (both sighted and blind) than cheap stereo receivers, but doing so because they look cool.

Actually they really do measure the accuracy of elite movements but the whole chronometer thing is meaningless. But you are right that Casios and Timex models outperform mechanical watches, even good ones. This is especially so with chronographs. But the craftsmanship is amazing and we see such handmade products very rarely now.

 

[restorer-john]

John, what was the pre-and-power they did, mid to late 70s, olive green, that looked a bit military? I remember really wanting one of those.

Was it actually olive green or that wierd bronze/orange colour that faded really badly in direct sunlight?

This was their statement amplifier and preamplifier. Hand built to order. Links below.

This gives you an idea of how big the amplifier actually was:

https://audio-database.com/TechnicsPanasonic/amp/se-a1-e.html

https://audio-database.com/TechnicsPanasonic/amp/su-a2-e.html

 

[aslan7]

It seems a little hippocritical to continuously bash china for supposedly stealing the bread from the mouths of corporate America when it was them themselves that raced to move all their production to Asia, the Philippines, Vietnam etc. Because it enabled them to escape paying a living wage and skirt environmental constraints at home.... And, often willing to share production methods as part of the deals they made.

Is china a bad actor? Sometimes. Are they worse than any of the western business that willingly created the situations they now find themselves in?

If you look at traditional Chinese crafts like calligraphy and pottery they are amazing. I worked for a Chinese company for a couple of years and learned much about the way they do business. They have a completely different way of looking at things than we do. Their perspective and many different customs leads to racially different business ethics. It is really something to do business with them on a daily basis. If I had to sum it all up I would say that winning, being successful, and amassing wealth are prized above everything. They have an immense work ethic and dedication. I don't think most Westerners understand that the Chinese are capable of making superbly crafted products when called upon to do so. It is wrong to think they make only cheap shoddy products, and they take considerable pride in their better efforts. They also have great appreciation of high quality products from the West. If the West can't measure up to them we will all be buying Chinese audio equipment soon enough. Incidentally, here in the West we appropriated many Chinese innovations in pottery, namely in 17th century Germany. Now is is just roles reversed.

 

[Semla]

If the West can't measure up to them we will all be buying Chinese audio equipment soon enough. Incidentally, here in the West we appropriated many Chinese innovations in pottery, namely in 17th century Germany. Now is is just roles reversed.

1890s: "made in Germany" is seen as cheap stuff, possibly copied from English manufacturers
1950s: "made in Japan" is seen as cheap, mass produced garbage, often badly copied from western products