A personal goal of mine since the 1990’s has been developing the skillset of identifying an end game loudspeaker, the last speaker anyone could buy and be reasonably certain you couldn’t do better performance-wise. But I didn’t know how to reach that goal quantitatively until recently.
I consider myself a consumerist-oriented data aggregator, sifting through a sea of noise and misinformation to find the best practices. I’ve used this forum to share my findings, in as succinct and concise manner as possible, so that an average consumer could make informed purchasing decisions based on performance. Once you determine a minimum acceptable performance, you can move onto other specifics such as aesthetics, form factor, branding, or country of origin.
https://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/ubbthreads.php/topics/445486/two-curves-is-enough#Post445486https://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/u...ce-drop-on-floyd-tooles-ebook#Post447012https://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/u...nds-in-spinorama-measurements#Post447264It took a lot of great minds and decades of research and development to reach these consumer-friendly conclusions. If these are the best practices as of 2023, then anything otherwise must be suboptimal (feel free to call me out with evidence-based counterpoints). So how have our traditional consumer-faced sources of audio wisdom done recently?
Without external sources of legitimacy, intuition would be our only recourse, with all its accompanying cognitive errors.
- Veblen goods: The belief that quality, performance, and/or prestige increases with price. If a $$$ iPhone is better than a $ iPhone, then a $$$ external DAC must be better than the cheap DAC built into your phone, right?
- Conspicuous waste: Bigger is better, more is more, beat this. Because who doesn’t want sperm whale foreskin leather to line the cups of your diamond encrusted headphones?
- FOMO: You stream from your phone’s music app, but $$$ streaming network players are a thing, so maybe “they” know something you don’t?
- Anachronism: Life is too complex nowadays, so I’ll just simplify by getting a record player, granite stand, isolation pucks, carbon fiber tone arm, carbon fiber anti-static record cleaner, ….
- Newest = desirability: Trade in your old merch for new merch, because new is always better than old, right? And why do you have your appliance and HVAC repairman on speed dial?
- Individuality = desirability: Yes, you’re an individual, just like the rest of us. But does everything you own have to be bespoke? And your tastes are so…interesting.
- Snobbery/condescension: There’s a pecking order in audio. You just have to decipher it so you can learn the secret handshake to be acknowledged as an equal …for once.
- Hedonic treadmill: Churn your audio gear until it feels right. And it never feels right for long…
(There’s another 32 cognitive errors that lead us astray, I wonder who wrote a cultural pop-sci book that listed all of them?)
So if we can’t always trust ourselves, we must rely on external sources to help guide our purchasing decisions. And that means seeking the cultural capital of others.
1. Manufacturer websites, brochures, and displays (The artist)
A great source of information and buzz, particularly when you’re only a purchase away from happiness. Unfortunately, it’s more profitable to promise performance than it is to actually deliver on performance, which incentivizes selling the sizzle rather than the steak. Just throw in pseudoscientific sounding buzz words, exotic materials, breakthrough technology, or celebrity endorsement for perceived legitimacy.
2. The audio press (Trickle-down)
A dying category for a dying demographic cohort, there’s fewer and fewer viable magazines, online websites, and consumer electronic journalists every passing year. Based on the premise that there’s a value gradient between the reader and an authority figure with preferential access to resources (information, connections, press junkets, etc), authority asks you to “trust me”, and nothing undermines trust in authority like the corruption that comes from a lack of transparency.
Economists know this as an agency problem, “a conflict of interest inherent in any relationship where one party is expected to act in another's best interests.” (Investopedia) When you’re not interested in biting the hand that feeds you, the audio press exists more for entertainment and commercial reach than educational value. And that means no education (unless it takes your dollar and makes it their dollar), comparison tests, meaningful measurements, or industry news.
3. Social media (Trickle-up)
Influencers, superspreaders of cultural capital, have been around forever. What’s changed is the rise of the trickle-up dispersion of cultural capital and the democratization of reach. With nothing more than a smartphone and some basic video editing acumen, if you find the right niche and have an ability to hold the attention of a fickle audience, a plebeian like you and I can become the next social media darling.
4. The celebrity critic (Critic + celebrity)
If you become popular enough, your audio press or social media gig can launch you into the role of the celebrity critic. Endorsement-seeking criticism usually only works through the wisdom of crowds. One critic who hates a movie tells you something about the critic. One hundred critics who hate a movie tells you something about the movie. This phenomenon has brought the rise of aggregate critic review sites, ones that can’t be easily gamed through bots and review-bombing.
But an unfortunate trend has developed where measurement oriented websites run by celebrity critics are ignoring the science of psychoacoustics. When you factor in how humans actually hear, you realize their content is mostly fluff: full of measurements that don’t matter in product categories that don’t matter. This creates a dangerously misinformed audience with a distorted view of reality. An objectivist who criticizes performances below the threshold of real world audibility is just as bad as a subjectivist who criticizes performances below the threshold of credibility.
The fake problem of center channel comb filtering:
https://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/u...center-channel-comb-filtering#Post444784Psychoacoustics is the next frontier:
https://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/u...ce-and-mass-market-headphones#Post447246Science is repeatable and statistically significant once the biases are removed:
https://www.axiomaudio.com/nrcThis will be my last article on the Axiom forum for a while. I don’t have anything more to add to the audio conversation without selling my soul, and I’ve moved onto other things such as listening to and finding great music. Hopefully a “trust but verify” approach is more useful than one asking you to “trust me”.
I’m off to create a YouTube channel on status-driven consumer behavior so I can sell more books, create a brand that I can shill to the highest bidder, and monetize any future followers. It’ll be great. Trust me.
- Daniel
