Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

This used to worry me quite a bit. Still does. But I now wonder if it should. [this goes for distributors, and to some extent dealers as well]

A prime example is we go to a show, and go into the manufacturer’s (or distributor’s) room, and their product is shown in a bad light, usually because the associated equipment is a poor, often VERY poor, choice. But the manufacturer acts like everything is fine sounding -that this is the way that their product usually sounds. But… we know better. Their product can sound wonderful.

Another prime example is the systems that a manufacturer uses in their factory to test. Is it another poor system? What about the system the manufacturer has at home? If they have one.

My concern has always been, if the manufacturer doesn’t have a top notch system to test their product on, how will they know how to make it sound its best? They are just designing in the dark, with no clue about just how good their equipment can sound and what their designs are requiring of us to make it sound its best.

[As an aside, Peter Qvortrup of Audio Note usually seems to have a level 5 (or better :-)) system in his office that he can hear things on [we all could hope and pray for such a system in our listening rooms] and Nordost, from what I understand, has everybody there take prototypes home and do a lot of listening – so they can get a real sense of the product on many different systems. I know most Software companies also use one or both of these approaches as well when developing new software.]

But… another perspective on all this is cars. Or musical instruments. You can’t just fly Van Halen in, or an Unser, and have them drive each one of your prototypes. In some sense they build the best thing that they can, and then expect that they will be used in ways, once they get into the field, that will take their products to the limit… and beyond.

So [when I feel like I need to stop worrying quite so much :-)] perhaps there is a nice balance here somewhere, between developing high end audio equipment with more or less a deaf ear – only looking at it from the technological point of view, and getting lots of feedback at each step of the development from people who like to push the boundaries of their product’s performance envelope.

We posted this cautionary blurb, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, about how people should perhaps scrutinize what they read a little more carefully. That, essentially, a person or publication having a history of known erroneous reports, that a reader knows for a fact are in error, should really cause the reader to discount much of the other reports by that person or publication.

But the reverse is also true to some degree.

I was watching a talk on how the Venture Capital marketplace is being revolutionized, and realized that several of the bold statements he was making I knew to be true. This allowed me to raise the estimation I had that other statements he made, that I had no firm personal knowledge of, might also be true. [yes, of course this can, and is, abused all of the time by salespeople – but still, it is better than them saying things you know to be flat out wrong]

Similarly, with Mike Fremer and JV, they have made several bold [and not so bold] statements over the years that I knew to be true, and this raised, and continues to raise, my estimation that what they say [still, with very large grains of salt] about things I have not yet heard might also be true. In fact, one builds a mental model of people in general [including their motivations, which can be sticky :-)], ending up with a weighted probability that anything they say in a very narrow qualitative region may be true or not for oneself as well. This is diametrically opposed to many, many of the other reviewers who say things I know to be false, or say things that are completely nonsensical, or even more often, information-free [i.e. they are not really saying anything at all, when you get right down to it].

—————– OK. The previous post is copied here, so that you can read the above in the correct context, without having to scroll down ———–

[Hopefully people can abstract this somewhat humorously described concept below to understand that this quote is a reminder that we also have to take all high-end audio reviews with a grain of salt, to view them with trepidation and suspicion, to look askance when they are in our presence, to… 🙂 – in particular those reviews by reviewers who have shown that they will sometimes pound the table and insist that ‘wet streets cause rain’].

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
—————————————————— Michael Crichton