If I try the HD800, and trial it against my Stax Omega, am I - and are you - getting caught up in what Barry Schwartz writes about in his book, THE PARADOX of CHOICE: Why More is Less?:
"The result of having pleasure turn into comfort is disappointment, and the disappointment will be especially severe when the goods we are consuming are 'durable' goods, such as cars, houses, stereo systems, elegant clothes, jewelry, and computers. When the brief period of real enthusiasm and pleasure wanes, people still have these things around them - as a constant reminder that consumption isn't all it's cracked up to be, that expectations are not matched by reality. And as a society's affluence grows, consumption shifts increasingly to expensive, durable goods, with the result that disappointment with consumption increases.
Faced with this inevitable disappointment, what do people do? Some simply give up the chase and stop valuing pleasure derived from things. Most are driven instead to pursue novelty, to seek out new commodities and experiences whose pleasure potential has not been dissipated by repeated exposure. In time, these new commodities also will lose their intensity, but people still get caught up in the chase, a process that psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell labeled the hedonic treadmill. No matter how fast you run on this kind of machine, you still don't get anywhere. And because of adaptation, no matter how good your choices and how pleasurable the results, you still end up back where you started in terms of subjective experience."
So is this a fool's game?
