DIY Stigma.

[Paradise_Ice]

Why is it that most hi-fi company's or hi-fi shop think DIY is all junk? I think the best DIY'ers out there dont show anybody there creations, I always argue the more i spend on making something look good the less i spend on making it sound good, Is there an answer to this hard toffee? Why dont more people DIY these days?

[ThomasW]

Why is it that most hi-fi company's or hi-fi shop think DIY is all junk?

Ya don't suppose it has something to do with them not making a profit on DIY projects, do you?

Why dont more people DIY these days?

It's a lot easier to throw down a credit card and walk away with the goods.

[Ouroboros]

Doing a good DIY job takes knowledge (which there's plenty of in this group) and lots of time!

But I guess mainly it's that most people are fashion victims and prefer the latest looks rather than audio quality. I think that most of our concerns about the finer points of audio quality are irelevant to 99.9% of the population.

[Cal Weldon]

Some people don't own table saws and routers and don't like to getting their fingernails dirty.

Sissies

Cal

[Paradise_Ice]

Originally posted by Ouroboros
Doing a good DIY job takes knowledge (which there's plenty of in this group) and lots of time!

But I guess mainly it's that most people are fashion victims and prefer the latest looks rather than audio quality. I think that most of our concerns about the finer points of audio quality are irelevant to 99.9% of the population.

Abraham Lincoln Quote
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

So how do you explain the state of the hi-fi market, Are spin doctors all to blame or are people easy to mislead?

[tiroth]

Part of the problem is that many people want a "certified" sound quality. That way they can point to THX specs or Stereophile reivews, etc etc, to justify the price/quality of their gear. When you DIY it is much more subjective.

(Let's not start with how subjective things like magazine reviews are -- it's a given that much of the population treats them as gospel.)

[HeatMiser]

Regarding the ignorance of the masses... while crass consumerism is unattractive and it certainly does exist, I think it does a disservice to most of the buying public out there to assert that they don't give a damn about sound as long as they can have stylish looking speakers and lots of flashy buttons on the electronics.

IMHO, people generally want "good sound", it's just that 99% of everybody has never heard anything other than what is sold at Best Buy and Circuit City. (Please pardon my American slant, I have no idea what the popular mass market chains are in the rest of the world.) In other words, they have no idea what they are missing.

Also, through a lifetime of exposure, people's ears are accustomed to lots of boomy bass and lots of high-frequency sizzle and laid-back-to-non-existent mids. So high-end "flat" speakers can actually sound worse on first listen, with a few notable exceptions including people who listen to enough live acoustic music to know what it is supposed to sound like.

I don't think there is a conspiracy to "mislead" people into buying inferior products; it's just that the great majority of people have no opportunity to hear (or reason to seek out) better alternatives in the form of commercial high-end speakers or DIY, and those that stumble across them are apt to be unimpressed.

[Paradise_Ice]

I have a feeling that most good companys try to do the right thing, to make good hi-fi at a reasonable cost but somewhere down the line, all that goes down the tube and things start to slip up, is it the accountants and marketing people that get in the way of sonic progress?
The mass market do not have better quality hi-fi from the last 15 years, just better looking.

[leadbelly]

Originally posted by Paradise_Ice
The mass market do not have better quality hi-fi from the last 15 years, just better looking.

So you think that what's paying for the R&D of the driver manufacturers are their piddly DIY sales and not their OEM sales?

[Rob M]

Originally posted by Paradise_Ice
Why is it that most hi-fi company's or hi-fi shop think DIY is all junk?

Probably because 90% of it is junk, by hi fi standards. Certainly everything I've ever made is. Very few people can homebrew something which, for the money, can compete in looks, safety, and performance with quality commercial gear. And even those of us who can do that must have produced quite a lot of junk on their way to audio gurudom. Of course, that's not to say there's no reason to do it yourself...

BTW, I think I'll call my next speaker project the "DIY Stigmas". It's got a nice ring to it.