Sky TV.
For hobby, a Sony 1080p 240fps camera for $600: NAB 2016: $600 Sony FS5 Raw upgrade to offer continuous external 4K/60fps and 1080/240fps Raw recording
Yankees, let us know when you'll finally decide to put chips in your credit cards and stop signing receipts. It's already 2016.
Yes those are all good points, but also illustrate perfectly why here everything goes around and around and never getting anywhere. Terms like 'I'll do one better', 'best quality', ' best performance' are free floating and don't give a designer a clear goal. Not in engineering terms. It's not the NASA way; it's the high end audio fashion way.
Jan
Are you saying the entire match is shot and broadcast @ 240fps?
I can't find any documentation of that, unless you are talking about slo-mo.
I have friends who run high speed cameras for ESPN and others, they do very fast frame rates. But that's all for slo-mo, not live.
Used to be 3D @120fps (which is effectively 240fps). Now that 3D is dead, not sure if the current live is 240fps, though. They occasionally use a full transponder (30MHz) for one sports channel.
Of course you can. The 'NASA way' in this context is: sit down with a piece of paper and write down in technical terms what you want to design. Then design it.
If your point is that we can not do this because we don't know in technical terms what it is that leads to good audio, I agree, we are reduced to fashion design. Looking at the evidence, that appears what is going on.
Jan
Exactly. If I write down wattage, slew rate, and whatever, it's pointless because I can just find an expired copyright from decades ago that'll fit all of those. But the goal of an audio company isn't to make a bunch of sandpapered-engineer nerds on the interent get their ego stroked. Until we figure out how to quantify all subjective preference and design products to best suit different groupings of them, as well as know how to adjust those parameters electrically, we have no purpose to attempt 'the NASA way'.
This sounds like the mechanics vs driver argument. If we all bought stuff purely on the functional spec only everything would look exactly the same, right? There would be zero need for differentiation. No one decries individuals that buy an Audi TT or an Audio Quatro when a Ford would do the job as well. Or prefers Burger King over MacDonalds etc.
Audio is no different. Humans are programmed to conform only up to a certain level on basic things (eat, sleep, procreate, don't rock the boat in a social setting etc). After that, we are driven to differentiate ourselves and individualism.
So, the real snobs are the people who criticize those that have the money and want to buy something different, even though technically it may not be the best. I mean, my Protrek watch is a marvel of modern engineering, but my Hamilton mechanical watch is waaaay cooler. Ditto audio. I'd rather be spinning vinyl on a big VPI than CD's on my OPPO, even though the measured performance of the latter is manifestly superior.
All this stuff is about basic human psychology and MARKETING. Yes, marketing. Give the people what they want if you can make some money out of it and make them happy. Keep 'em coming back for more.
Audio is no different. Humans are programmed to conform only up to a certain level on basic things (eat, sleep, procreate, don't rock the boat in a social setting etc). After that, we are driven to differentiate ourselves and individualism.
So, the real snobs are the people who criticize those that have the money and want to buy something different, even though technically it may not be the best. I mean, my Protrek watch is a marvel of modern engineering, but my Hamilton mechanical watch is waaaay cooler. Ditto audio. I'd rather be spinning vinyl on a big VPI than CD's on my OPPO, even though the measured performance of the latter is manifestly superior.
All this stuff is about basic human psychology and MARKETING. Yes, marketing. Give the people what they want if you can make some money out of it and make them happy. Keep 'em coming back for more.
Can you point me to the general dislikes of Lampizator? I'm not familiar with why so many on the forum view them so negatively. My personal experience was that I think it's silly that at least one of theirs has such a higher output impedance, as it makes a setup sound bad. Also the DSD was soft like a pillow which wasn't fun... unless you put in a harsh sounding amp.
Then don't tell me XYZ is better, because that's a load of horse pucky without validation and clear delineation of the test, same thing with subjective experience (since mine won't match yours). Just because there are clear holes in our understanding of (general) auditory preferences, do we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and let everything fly.
We didn't know about the Higg's Boson when the Mercury missions flew, but that doesn't mean the (very bright) engineers and scientists of that time just ignored all the understanding they had developed to put the first US astronaut in space (to stay with the NASA analogy). That would be ridiculous. Nor has rocketry stagnated since the late-50's as we've learned more and more about the job at hand. It's an evolving process.
Likewise, there's a lot of good marketing-speak that can come out of engineering fundamentals. I'm a bicycle nerd, which has become the new golf. Just go have a look at Cervelo's rise in the early 2000's...they made the fastest bikes of the time and their ad-copy oozed of just-nerdy enough that it attracted the guys who were fluent in Navier-Stokes and the guy who thinks all that stuff sounds really cool. (yes, it was definitely the guys in the 2000's, getting women on bikes has been much more in the past 5 years)
Lastly, I want to know which engineers you feel are stroking their egos--because I see a major language gap that you're projecting in the wrong way.
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Make the best F1 you can. Make the best camper car/truck you can. Just make it the best you can. Who can make the best audio? Or team which can make the Best audio whatever thing.
What audio has now is talking like we make an F1 level audio product when in fact we are very far from that level.
The use of the word Best in category has a lot more in it than I/O specs. And, it does not mean there is just one approach. There are several brands in many catagories which are created as serious all out efforts... be it watches, TV, cars, or golf clubs.
-RM
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How about the best cheap transistor radio? Or the best single piece of zip cord speaker cable? Those things would seem to meet your criteria the way you are putting it now. Is that really what you mean? If so, I do that all the time.
I saw them in our local B&O centre but declined a listen as had sproglet with me. And not in the market for £50k+ speakers even if I could fit them in the living room. But I see them as one extreme on the current trend in controlled directivity, with JBL M2 and Gedlee at one and Bruno in the middle. And as such a glass should be raised that they had the balls to to this.
No, I don't use current conveyor circuitry, but I am not against someone using it to make a better audio design. I tend to prefer relatively simple series circuits using a resistive load in each stage. The added complexity is making these circuits complementary/push-pull and often using complementary differential first and second stages as well. These are parallel additions, mostly, and tend to cancel the inherent distortion in the active devices.
There is.
But one of the paradox's we face as a a modern technical civilization is that as technology becomes more advanced, it is valued less and less. The half life of public interest in a technology is very short. By the time we got to Apollo 15, it was second page news (Apollo 13 spiced things up a bit of course). No one gives a **** about the latest DAC's. But a turntable! Now there's a thing of beauty.
But one of the paradox's we face as a a modern technical civilization is that as technology becomes more advanced, it is valued less and less. The half life of public interest in a technology is very short. By the time we got to Apollo 15, it was second page news (Apollo 13 spiced things up a bit of course). No one gives a **** about the latest DAC's. But a turntable! Now there's a thing of beauty.
There is.
But one of the paradox's we face as a a modern technical civilization is that as technology becomes more advanced, it is valued less and less. This is nowhere more apparent than in semiconductors where despite huge investment and the fact that it is the most innovative industry (source: The Economist as measured by annual patent filings) prices per unit area silicon keep dropping. And its not just to do with manufacturing scale, because the IP per unit area of silicon is going UP.
The half life of public interest in a technology is very short. By the time we got to Apollo 15, it was second page news (Apollo 13 spiced things up a bit of course). No one gives a **** about the latest DAC's. But a turntable! Now there's a thing of beauty.
Latest tech is Class D, a DAC and Spotify via my laptop. No way - give me a 300B SET + a TT any day.
Ditto the Patek Philippe - doesn't keep time as well as the $20 Casio, but I know which one I'd prefer.
But one of the paradox's we face as a a modern technical civilization is that as technology becomes more advanced, it is valued less and less. This is nowhere more apparent than in semiconductors where despite huge investment and the fact that it is the most innovative industry (source: The Economist as measured by annual patent filings) prices per unit area silicon keep dropping. And its not just to do with manufacturing scale, because the IP per unit area of silicon is going UP.
The half life of public interest in a technology is very short. By the time we got to Apollo 15, it was second page news (Apollo 13 spiced things up a bit of course). No one gives a **** about the latest DAC's. But a turntable! Now there's a thing of beauty.
Latest tech is Class D, a DAC and Spotify via my laptop. No way - give me a 300B SET + a TT any day.
Ditto the Patek Philippe - doesn't keep time as well as the $20 Casio, but I know which one I'd prefer.
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