gregorio
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2008
- Posts
- 6,901
- Likes
- 4,134
Me, this thread and it was explained by others:Context defined by who?
He’s coming from a consumer COST perspective.
And I am happy to give whatever knowledge I may have to those who might find it useful or learn from it. However, if someone claims I’m wrong on the basis of a false/incorrect argument, then of course I’m going explain and try to prove why it’s false/incorrect.Yes, but I am learning more about this snake oil problem concerning DACs and I am happy to learn more from you if you choose to educate me instead of using your energy to prove how wrong I am.
Generally the capitalism we have doesn’t lead to this scenario with DACs. With most products there is usually some available development path of introducing meaningful changes, even if they’re changes in features/functionality that are only useful to some consumers. DACs though are a special case, for two reasons:No, but obviously having DACs with most common functionality without snake oil takes something else than the capitalism we have.
1. DACs were effectively perfected (beyond the thresholds of audibility) over 30 years ago but more importantly, by around 20-25 years ago that level of perfection could be made/bought for peanuts.
2. We have a very specific group of consumers/target demographic. Consumers generally (but not always) figure out when something is snake oil. Someone has a friend who’s a scientist/engineer/doctor who explains it and he/she tells her friends and word spreads, sometimes there’s an article in the media from a scientist/engineer/expert and sometimes they work out from their own perception it’s snake oil. The audiophile community also sometimes figures out that something is snake oil, green marker pens on CDs was an example and it seems to be coming round to the fact that MQA is snake oil but generally it’s an exceptionally poor community at figuring out snake oil. Essentially it’s a community where the marketers have won! Over the course of more than 40 years, they’ve succeeded in discrediting the science and driving out virtually all the scientists/engineers, there’s no one left to counter the snake oil marketing except a few like us who are treated as crazies/trolls hidden away in obscure parts of the internet.
The only logical progression from reason #1 was a race to the bottom, cheaper and cheaper DACs until the market consolidated to just a few companies, as others were either bought out or went bust because they could no longer compete on price. However, reason #2 provides a feasible option, develop snake oil features which the audiophile community can relatively easily be convinced are real features. The only disadvantage of this option is that the marketers are strictly limited to the audiophile community, they can’t market to other audio communities, such as the pro-audio community because at best they’ll just ignore the BS, most will laugh at you and some will take enough offence from the crass attempt to BS them that they’ll go out of their way to discredit you! But even limited to the audiophile community, at least that offers the chance of survival or even quite a decent return, although not the big money from a wider target demographic.
G