thefsb
Addicted to Fun and Learning
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2019
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An Audio Advisor catalog arrived in the mail yesterday for my wife. While browsing through for chuckles I had an idea about the overall shape of audiophile innovation.
First, solutionism is evident in many of the advised products in that catalog. It's not fair to say that solutionism defines the market it but its clear from the nature of many products that the problem was invented or exaggerated in order to justify the solution, i.e. consumer product.
Second, it struck me that the solutionist innovations had something else in common: small R&D and production operations. The R&D for power and interconnect cables, turntables tube amps, etc. is within the reach of small engineering operations, even of some hobbyists. Production for many of the products in audio advisor is also not especially capital intensive.
For example, don't you think the true audiophile needs an audiophile NAS server (joke!) with a microprocessor, memory, mass storage and network interfaces optimized for sound quality and with an operating system and device drivers rewritten from the ground up to [insert solutionist technobabble]? Or look at it another way without joking, what about room EQ in a dynamic environment for non-technical consumers. Let's use machine vision and AI (in addition to IoT mics) in order to give the acoustic models some information about the room to work with, or even to understand where the listeners are. Maybe the system could also advise you on selection and placement of equipment, furniture and treatments. It could automatically adjust to dinner parties or movie viewing. It's all doable with available consumer electronics but it would take a big R&D project.
So, anyway, I haven't developed the idea much and it may not stand up at all but browsing that Audio Advisor catalog gave me a sense of some kind of sameness among the funnies and maybe that regularity has a shape that comes from something: small-scale solutionism.
First, solutionism is evident in many of the advised products in that catalog. It's not fair to say that solutionism defines the market it but its clear from the nature of many products that the problem was invented or exaggerated in order to justify the solution, i.e. consumer product.
Second, it struck me that the solutionist innovations had something else in common: small R&D and production operations. The R&D for power and interconnect cables, turntables tube amps, etc. is within the reach of small engineering operations, even of some hobbyists. Production for many of the products in audio advisor is also not especially capital intensive.
For example, don't you think the true audiophile needs an audiophile NAS server (joke!) with a microprocessor, memory, mass storage and network interfaces optimized for sound quality and with an operating system and device drivers rewritten from the ground up to [insert solutionist technobabble]? Or look at it another way without joking, what about room EQ in a dynamic environment for non-technical consumers. Let's use machine vision and AI (in addition to IoT mics) in order to give the acoustic models some information about the room to work with, or even to understand where the listeners are. Maybe the system could also advise you on selection and placement of equipment, furniture and treatments. It could automatically adjust to dinner parties or movie viewing. It's all doable with available consumer electronics but it would take a big R&D project.
So, anyway, I haven't developed the idea much and it may not stand up at all but browsing that Audio Advisor catalog gave me a sense of some kind of sameness among the funnies and maybe that regularity has a shape that comes from something: small-scale solutionism.
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