Are We All Parasites? who Need To Get A Life?!!!!! - Page 3

The times, they are a changin' indeed

Exactly!

...and not just about the audio world, but business in general. Sometime when a person has spent so much time inside a certain business, (s)he starts to have strong idea(s) / belief of how that business should run, and often take little to no notice on how things have changed and still continue changing. That is how a business runs out of steam and how an important person's opinion becomes irrelevant to the big picture - when the idea is no longer in check with the reality and belief is held so firmly it chokes any other possibility.

I tend to ignore the stupid and to share with those who are interested, all that remains is my sweet music. Otherwise I give little to no information about my sources of knowledge unless someone really seems interested.

Besides, having a time consuming passion for the sound of music doesn't stop me having a life.

I dare say that such dealers have a vested interest in being the only 'experts' in town. A second opinion threatens their sales pitch. I much prefer the knowledge-base of other users, whose honesty won't be compromised by the fact that they are ultimately interested in selling me something.

nuf said.

concentrated version = We call BS.

Laz, as he often does, hit the nail on the head.

What really upsets this guy is - more than anything - the For Sale Forum. I, and many others, always recommend used gear. I also strongly advocate DIY.

One problem with audio (from his perspective) is that there's an incredible amount of used gear on the market. Much of it is well made and immaculately kept by audiophiles. Buying used really cuts back on dealer profits. Further, DIY is not that difficult (really, it isn't) and also chops at the bottom line.

I wouldn't call the user base here ignorant, either. Most of us who have been through lots of gear and attend meets have a better grasp of things than some vendors.

Sorry you were treated this way, but people get funny when you threaten their income.

Well.... aren't all human beings technically parasites? We feed off natural resources, create waste, move on and rinse wash and repeat, but now that the earth is completely populated we need to go to another planet....

But onto something more serious, that's a pretty harsh comment but looking at it from a "sales person's" perspective, it wouldn't surprise me that they would say that. But just because we all agree that its a horrific comment, doesn't mean that we can just let it go. And I don't mean we grab pitchforks and head over to high priced audiophile shops, rather we look at the forums. While there there is a great deal of info on the forums (here and some more technical ones like head-wize), there are also lots of propagated "reviews" and second hand reviews that get spread around. What I mean by this is that some folks get so convinced of what something sounds like, that they never even bother trying out the gear or make comments that they seriously cannot make. Take for example one of my friends who buys a pair of D5000's with a partial MarkL mod (iirc the original owner did not add dynamat to the front of the drivers). After listening to them for a week he tells me "These are great, I like how they're modded I can still hear the bass." Now a statement like that should make you go... "wait a sec how do you know? You've just given me an impression based, not on your experience, but based on what others have written on the MarkL mods" And information like this gets passed around a lot on these forums. While technical info is very easy to correct, impressions are rather difficult to correct or amend, especially when we read them from prolific posters. We usually get FOTM crazes (and I've gone in with quite a few), but a lot of this comes about from this "parasite" like quality of information. What I mean is it's like a swarm, if you don't stamp out the info when it starts to build up, it will eventually become so powerful and we're all buying Audio gd c2c's. We don't question things as much as we should and usually just rave saying "great review and well done" but very few truly criticize. And one of the worst examples have long been the "appreciation" threads for various products. I'm not saying this is all bad, but rather than just saying "hey that salesman was a scumbag," lets learn something from a comment that may be rooted with how we actually behave. Worse comes to worse, we just spend an extra bit of time evaluating our own behaviors as "forum parasites" before we go into audio stores with pitchforks and torches for such an outrageous comment.

Most members of the audiophile community (dealers and forum members and everyone else) seem like they could care less about the science of sound reproduction. Which is a shame because that's what audio reproduction is, a science. In that sense, the dealer was right, but he was wrong in limiting it to the members of the online audiophile community (and who knows if he himself was actually knowledgeable)