Ah, the other edge of the sword. On one hand you get the benefit of innovation, creativity and hard work in the hopes of making it big, on the other, anything goes as long as there's a buck to be made. Hopefully that effect swings like a pendulum...
That's completely different from GMO. You think I want frog genes in my corn flakes.
jeff
Back then, CD compatible meant, that the speakers were supposedly suitable for the greater dynamic output/power-handling, and deeper bass enabled by the CD format (as compared to that required to playback vinyl LPs). There was no effort to present the speakers themselves as digital devices in their operation.
There was no engineering standard, such as THX is today, which I can recall.
Last edited:
Consumers were misled, and I don't remember any campaign to straighten out their misconceptions. People have all kinds of crazy ideas about how audio equipment works. 6000 watts with a 10 amp fuse is only possible with a 12 volt mobile amplifier, remember? Audio works by magic.
In my opinion, it's all "marketing nonsense" as indicated above.
The European and US definitions of genetically modified foods are very different.
Most of the wheat we eat, and many varieties of rice, are cross bred for higher yield per acre, resistance to infestation and so on. This has been done over many years by plant scientists and seed companies.
There are highly modified cotton varieties, and other examples as well. There ARE genetically modified varieties of cotton, resistant to some kinds of worm....but unless you consume cotton seed oil, not particularly dangerous.
Cotton seed oil apparently has high levels of pesticide residues.
But to call most of those genetically modified would be pedantic, I think.
Most of the wheat we eat, and many varieties of rice, are cross bred for higher yield per acre, resistance to infestation and so on. This has been done over many years by plant scientists and seed companies.
There are highly modified cotton varieties, and other examples as well. There ARE genetically modified varieties of cotton, resistant to some kinds of worm....but unless you consume cotton seed oil, not particularly dangerous.
Cotton seed oil apparently has high levels of pesticide residues.
But to call most of those genetically modified would be pedantic, I think.
Last edited:
It's a fact that a lot of people thought "digital" speakers were fundamentally different than other speakers. I've attempted to explain it to a few people with no success. They prefer dogma. It's the American way.
I was referring to your opinion regarding marketing, and marketers. Unless you currently work as a marketing professional, and so are intimately familiar with their particular challenges, as every profession has it's own challenges, I think it very questionable for you to cast such strong aspersions at that profession. It uncomfortably smacks of 'engineer arrogance'.
Last edited:
Arrogance, I'd believe, makes its appearance in all diciplines.
One time I liked this woman in the marketing group. I went to one of their parties, which had something to do with the new product. When they pulled it into the livingroom from the kitchen by a rope to cheers and reverie, I knew I was a fish out of water. I'm an engineer (who casually snuck out the back door).
Headphones are great at blocking external noise, and letting you turn up the audio to the level you want without disturbing others. (They also let you turn it up until you damage your own hearing, an effect well known since the early 1980s and the arrival of the first Sony Walkman.
My big beef with headphones is that I've never had good stereo imaging from any kind of headphones or earbuds. I think the brain needs reflected and reverberant sound in order to "place" audio sources. Headphones don't provide that, so most of the stereo image collapses into a single jumbled sound that feels like it's inside the back of my skull. It's not a pleasant experience for me.
Headphones do other weird things. Ask anyone who's tried to mix music using headphones. The result usually sounds quite bad when played back on loudspeakers.
And there's the business of exessive SPL. Somehow, headphones remove the cues our brains use to estimate loudness. This means we can quite unknowingly turn up the SPL from our headphones far too much, without realizing it, and that's why literally billions of human beings have permanently damaged their hearing using headphones, most particularly in the last forty years or so (the era ASW, or After Sony Walkman).
I have a couple pairs of headphones, and there are times when I appreciate their qualities (for instance, playing e-guitar through a Fender Mustang Micro and a pair of headphones at midnight, without disturbing anyone else). But the sound from headphones, however good, seems quite unnatural to me, most particularly in regard to stereo imaging. Which is why I'd rather listen to a good pair of speakers any day.
(Emphasis being on good pair of speakers. I do all my home listening using nearfield monitor speakers designed for small studios. Most affordable consumer-grade speakers are very disappointing by comparison.)
-Gnobuddy
No doubt, and those other disciplines should resist it as well. Arrogance, wherever it exists, isn’t merely distasteful, it leads us to overlook our own faults.
Agree entirely, but unfortunately arrogance is built into the brains of our species. Wherever humans exist, so does arrogance. Maybe not in every single individual, but in a sufficient fraction of them.
In recent decades there is the opposite problem: people are encouraged to accept every opinion or viewpoint as having equal value. This makes perfect sense in some fields (music, art, poetry), but it does not apply at all in engineering or in the hard sciences.
The whole point of science is to discover what is right, so we can get rid of what isn't right. This is why NASA uses physics to calculate satellite orbits, rather than, say, sprinkle the sacred blood of a white pigeon sacrificed at noon in the high priest's temple on the launch rocket.
In short, an artist could reasonably argue that Hallmark greeting cards are just as artistic as the works of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, and have produced more emotional impact on a larger number of people.
But one cannot reasonably argue that the earth really is flat, or that 0.0001% THD is audible, or that one can demagnetize audio CDs made of plastic and improve the audio quality by doing so.
When presented with demonstrable nonsense, I don't think it's arrogant to say "That is nonsense". I think it's actually necessary for the good of humanity to do so. Otherwise, others who are young, gullible, or less educated, will be misled by charlatans, con artists, and ignorant fools. Pretty soon, you'll have more than ten million people believing the earth is flat - as has already happened in Brazil.
Without someone to call out nonsense, and others willing to listen, a culture descends towards barbarism. We're seeing this happening on a global scale now.
-Gnobuddy