Quote:
Originally Posted by
hifi shock 
I know that viewing inside them can seems a bit useless,but this is a common error that many people do.You know that you can listen music through your system,because somebody had created some circuits.To achieve the maximum results the engeneer must create a good project,must use top quality components,must add huge power section.REAL hiend manufactures do their electronics in this way,because this is the only way to achieve the best.Try to view many images of many different brands,search their prices...compare every brand with the most serious brands like Mark Levinson,Sony,Accuphase,Pioneer,etc...
...and your face will have this kind of look
.Why?Because there are many many many brands(many also with huge expensive prices)that cares so much the aesthetics,and that internally seems like a boombox or have the components of the same quality of a sat receiver!Rightly you are thinking:but if it sounds good for me,why I should that care of the inside?Like I had just written,real hi-end sound can be achieved only through top quality.For 30.000dollars that it costs,XXX(the name of a brand),why they didn't used real quality components and a serious project?It could sounds much much better!I pay a huge amount of money for a beutiful box,and for 50$ shit-like electronics?So sell them for 300$,not 30.000$!!!And it isn't only a question of sound,because cheap components=poor reliability!
Have you ever heard of somebody with a broken expensive electronic?
And I don't want to remember that shame of Goldmund 6.000& dvd player with a 100$ pioneer inside,or the huge acclaimed top CEC transport with...(search the photos on my site)...
I'm not saying that you should buy you system judging every component on "how much its inside is shocking you",but you should know that you'll never get top quality form poor project,top dynamics from poor power section,top refinement from cheap chinese components.Before buying,search for the inside on my site.
I've uploaded 1738 images last month,and I have yet another 270 in my computer.Just wait and other many thousands will be uploaded soon.
My site is only for hifi and home cinema components,not speakers,because it's very difficult for me to find their inside.But I want to remember you that 80% of speakers mount the usually third part components like scan speak etc,so them maybe only make cabinets like carpenters...
I've bought a pro account for a year on photobucket because I didn't found a way to dowloand alla the images mantaining theri names,that could be lost.And renaming 3-5000 images is a bit difficult!But maybe next year a will create a new site without photobucket support.
Regardless of what is put inside them, if it measures that it can put out tons of current, extremely low in distortion, extremely flat in frequency response, high slew rate, is reliable (certainly somewhat part-dependent - but tell me, do you inspect the internals [resistors, caps, and so on] before buying a $1000 PC to make sure they're high quality and reliable?), and so on - and it sounds good in tests - it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if 1% or 5% resistors/caps are used, if there's no audible difference. It doesn't matter if it has a huge power supply, if it has an alternative trick power supply that can put out the same level of power (and is reliable). All that matters is performance.
I'm not trying to say that, for example, Carvers are the best amplifiers ever. The definitely have their own problems.
You can't judge a design only by the quality of components in it - the engineering and design behind it is far and away the most important aspect. Looking inside isn't going to tell you a whole lot about that (except basic design) unless you start looking at circuit diagrams. You also have no idea for the reasoning behind the engineers' design decisions. Plastic is cheap and inferior since it's not as strong as metal, right? No, not at all. There's plenty of applications where it will outperform metal parts in performance - often due to manufacturing limitations of metal (you can mold the plastic into shapes that you can't form the metal into), chemical properties (see Breaking Bad) or physical advantages like high elasticity and the ability to put fibers in the plastic to create directionally dependent properties.
For the same reason, you can't make assumptions about the designer's decision to put specific components in a player. Sure, if they just take a cheap DVD player, put it in a fancy box, and charge ten times more for it, there's something wrong. But there's a reason Sony/Phillips/Pioneer transports are used in nearly every single high-end player - they're reliable and do exactly what they need to do, regardless of their price.
But I agree that much of the "high end" industry is as much a fashion industry as anything else. Time and time again, when blind tested people have been entirely unable to discern any difference between level-matched amplifiers, pre-amps, CD players, and cables when the components measure reasonably well (flat frequency response, appropriate input/output impedances, reasonably low THD and IMD, etc.) and used within specifications regarding power output.
Oh, and for the record, I have had "high end" components fail on me. No matter how good the electrolytic capacitors are in your amp, they'll eventually go bad, even in a McIntosh - my father's MA 6100 had to be recapped a few years ago. My half-year-old ThinkPad - the kind NASA trusts 100 of on the ISS - already has a USB port that's gone bad. It actually corrupts memory cards I plug into it. Sometimes. Right now it happens to be working fine. I paid $1600 for the computer - stupid things like that shouldn't happen to a high-end business notebook that definitely has higher quality parts and superior design to other computers. But they do - and things like this will always happen to some degree.
Re: Uploading photos while maintaining file names - both Flickr and SmugMug give you the choice to do that. And like I said, they're both far better photo hosting sites. They have powerful uploading tools too, that give you tons of batch loading options.
Edited by BlackbeardBen - 3/2/11 at 5:25am
