Value, lack there of, and "High End"

[bluesman]

2 hours ago, crenca said:

Has this hobby lost all sense of value?

Let's go back to basics: the traditional business definition of value is "worth divided by cost".  Before we can decide what cost is reasonable, we each have to decide what's worth what to us.  If worth were determined only on the basis of sound quality, I suspect there'd be far fewer 5 and 6 figure products and systems in audio.  The worth of some high end pieces might reasonably be related to the cost of design, creation, manufacture etc - but a lot of it seems to be driven by hype as much as by its actual cost basis.

 

Many buyers of high priced equipment seem to find value in elements of ownership that have nothing at all to do with listening to and enjoying music.  Some are buying (or trying to buy) the adoration of their jealous friends and neighbors or a false sense of accomplishment.  Others think they're buying the appearance of wealth, taste, etc.  And yet others are simply distracting themselves (at least temporarily) from ego-dystonic thoughts and feelings.

 

More than a few owners of high end equipment of all kinds believe that having bought it proves them to have superior knowledge, skill etc.  Of course, driving a McLaren doesn't mean you're a world class driver.

 

Those who hear (or think they hear) a difference and believe it and/or some other perceived benefit to be worth the cost are being true to the above definition of value - they simply have a skewed sense of worth.  As most such determinations are based on subjective observations lacking widespread agreement, many (most?) of us choose not to spend $100k on a pair of speakers because our sense of worth tells us the cost is too high for the benefits we would realize from ownership.

[bluesman]

57 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

unlike driving a high buck exotic car, over-spending on an audio system won't kill you or others

I understand your point. But I have many friends and colleagues who spend so much on frivolity and luxury that they really do compromise their health and safety and that of their families.  For example,  I’ve had many patients from my neighborhood who turned out to have poor or no health insurance despite appearances suggesting they should. One complained to me about having billed him for his $500 deductible. I pointed out that he drove to my office in his new 911 and was wearing an 18k DayDate, so it seemed a bit inconsistent to me.  He did not understand.

 

This behavior is common, in my experience. And it can pose serious risk.

[bluesman]

3 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

OTOH, maybe you then have too many carpentry and car tools...

The good news is that you can't have too many guitars 😎

[bluesman]

4 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

I know of several deaths of exotic car owners from their poor driving skills.  No idea if it's a biased sample due to me being interested in cars...

It's not a biased sample.  In addition to being a competitor for decades, I was the race physician for Philly Region SCCA for about 20 years and for VSCCA and SVRA at multiple events from 1984 to 2000 - and I fished many a wealthy dilettante out of the wrecked exotic he had no business buying let alone driving in competition.  I pulled the same lawyer out of the same ex-Gurney GT-40 at Summit Point in '87 or '88 and the Grand Bahama Vintage grand Prix in '86. We had guys driving Allard J2Xs who couldn't handle a 948 bugeye.  One of my friends wrecked a gorgeous Turner in an end-over-end at Summit Point and his 944 on a local road - so he bought an E-type.  My wife's former dentist totalled his 944S in a "track event" at Watkins Glen.  And so forth and so on.

 

These guys also have great audio systems.......

[bluesman]

12 hours ago, pdvm said:

At a certain point, all those extra thousands of dollars would be better spent on supporting local symphony orchestras and the like. Buy some actual 'life-like' experiences with all that buck. With 12000 dollar, instead of buying 10 foot speaker cables, you could buy the best seats in the house for 50 concerts. Make a few school classes happy. Or you could just donate it and keep one part time orchestra member at work. Whatever.

 

I don't fault your logic or your goals, and I agree that our global society might well distribute its collective resources with more of an eye toward doing good than feeling good.  But a free society empowers each of us to do as we wish with what we have, short of violating generally agreed upon societal taboos (e.g. laws).  It's far easier to define "value" (i.e. worth / cost) than it is to define "good", "better spent", etc.  We have neither the ability nor the right to reallocate the wealth of others, except in specific circumstances and through societal systems and processes.  Sometimes I wish it were otherwise, but I'm generally more laissez faire than utilitarian.

 

I've been taken to task for this analogy, but for me the classic example of resources wasted through maldistribution is the relationship between  hunger and obesity.  One pound of body fat represents about 3500 calories, which is enough to sustain an adult human for 2 days.  There are about 200 million obese+ Americans today, with the average excess poundage being somewhere between 30 and 50 (which represents enough caloric intake to sustain one person for 2 to 3 months).   There are 40+ million Americans today who are starving, many getting less than 1000 calories daily. So just the food that ended up in the belly fat of obese America (i.e. not counting the ongoing daily excess needed to maintain that excess weight) represents enough dietary intake to feed every starving American for a year.  And if all those obese people lost their excess weight, the food they'd leave on the table while dieting plus that they'd no longer need to maintain the fat they lost would go a long way toward feeding the rest of the world's starving  population.  Can and should we impose dietary restriction to reduce the money wasted on excess food and associated societal costs like diabetes and heart disease?  As a physician and a taxpayer, I'd love to be able to do this - but in my heart, I know it's unreasonable.

 

One very dramatic example of societal violation of individual rights in the name of art is the Barnes Foundation.  If you don't know about this, you should - it's the largest private collection of impressionist art in the world, and it's absolutely breathtaking.  But Dr Barnes left a will that mandated his collection be kept intact in its long term location within his home just outside Philadelphia.  The courts eventually broke his will and moved the collection to a wonderful new building in which the collection is better seen, better cared for, better protected, and far better off.  But they violated the man's will to do this - and I have a great deal of difficulty with that.  Check out a movie called The Art of the Steal for more.  This was a long and difficult fight for many people on both sides.

 

Does anybody really need a $1000 speaker cable when that money would keep a child from starving for several months? Sadly, it all depends on whose ox is gored.

[bluesman]

On 5/17/2019 at 4:01 AM, pdvm said:

I just hope some of the folks that buy 12000 dollar speaker cables will support the classical music scene, so it will stay affordable, and thus alive.

(Seriously, what will happen when the current popularity of Mahler/Bruckner/Shostakovich wanes, and even those names won't be sufficient any more to ensure a full house? Where is your audience in 20-30 years, if you don't draw young people to the concert hall now? Off topic, but I think about that stuff a lot)

Actually, it's not at all off topic and it's well worth discussing.  Many of the people who buy high end audio support the arts by buying high end, high quality program material - and many also patronize live music venues of all kinds.  And many of the young 'uns whose systems center around their phones (both mobile and head) are, in fact, attending more and more arts events of all kinds.

 

From US Trends in Arts Attendance, we learn that

 

• "between 2012 and 2017, the share of adults who attended visual or performing arts activities grew by 3.6 percentage points to 132.3 million people, representing nearly 54 percent of the U.S. adult population. Performing arts events range from dance to theater performances while visual arts events include going to art museums, galleries, and craft festivals
• For most art forms on the survey, including musicals and non-musical plays, classical music, jazz, ballet and other dance performances, opera, and Latin/Spanish/salsa music, attendance rates held steady despite a five percent growth in the adult population over the five-year period. Therefore, the number of adults attending those events increased over the time period studied
•  29 percent increase in the rate of attendance at these types of activities is reflected in greater participation by demographic subgroups—specifically, African Americans, Asian Americans, and 25-54-year-olds".

 

Art and culture (like language) evolve through use.  So it may well be that Mahler et al will go the way of Gregorian chants as civilization embraces and supports change in the arts. I suspect few miss Pachelbel's presence in major concert halls.  But those who buy high end audio pieces have to be listening to something!  The average person between 16 and 64 in the 20 largest music markets worldwide listens to music 18 hours a week, and 87% of them use on-demand streaming services.  Local music genres are flourishing:  66% of consumers in Japan listen to J-pop, 69% of consumers in France listen to Variété Française, and 55% in Brazil listen to Música popular brasileira.  Even better, 96% of consumers in China and 96% in India listen to licensed music.  This is all quite positive and reassuring.

 

The 2018 music industry sales stats show that 25% of revenues came from physical media, 12% digital, 47% streaming, 14% performance rights, and 2% synchronization.    The last category is fascinating and important to this discussion - it represents "...investment record companies are making in their offerings to artists, in their people and in their global presence. Record companies are investing more than one-third of their global revenues, or US$5.8 billion, in Artists & Repertoire (or A&R) and marketing each year, to break, develop and support artists".

 

So I'm not worried about the future of the arts because it's strong and growing worldwide. I'm also not concerned that those who buy $1500 headphones would have bought more music programming if they'd spent less on their cans, because I don't think it's true.  I'm not worried about Shostakovich, who replaced Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev in the hearts and minds of many Russians after they fled to the US.  And I'm not worried about the younger generations because they're listening to more music and attending more and more art events every year.  It's not 1950 any more, and it's not going to be 2019 all that long.  If we don't adapt, we'll atrophy.

[bluesman]

3 hours ago, Albrecht said:

1st, - there is no objective measure of value in the paradigm of subjectivity.

 

And that's exactly what the "value formula" is telling you.

value = worth / cost

Value is subjective, i.e. there's no universal unit of reference against which to measure it.  But it's an ordinal (i.e. rankable) measure with categorical objectivity that varies from person to person.  Your ranked list of values for everything in your world is your value scale, and you place everything that comes into your life somewhere on that scale to decide whether and how avidly to pursue it.  Each of us (if not totally insane) devotes our resources to the things we value most highly.  So whether or not to buy something is an objective decision that's based in large part on perceived value measured on your personal value scale.

 

When we buy (or marry or eat or move to....) A rather than B, we're valuing A over B because we perceive it to have greater worth relative to its cost.  Many Americans today (sadly) have to apportion their money between food and medicine. They do so by deciding which is worth more to them, hunger or their symptoms and/or progression of disease.  Do you make your kid go to a state college so you can buy a Benz or spend the money on an Ivy League education for him / her and a Prius for you? It depends on your value scale.

 

3 hours ago, Albrecht said:

The determination of value is based on good sound which for many, - (not all), - is toward the faithful representation of the recording. And that to a large part, - (how faithful), - is based entirely on EXPERIENCE. EXPERIENCE is KNOWLEDGE.  The person who goes to 1000 concerts, and listens to hundreds of different violins, choral arrangements, - (for example), - and then in turn, - listens to 1000s of different playback systems, - is the person who is BEST able to determine the VALUE of any playback system.

 

You need only read competing reviews of the same concert to realize how much the same experience can differ from person to person.  Some highly trained and experienced musicians and acousticians love the same concert hall that others hate.  Some of us prefer the sound of a Steinway to the same size Bosendorfer or Yamaha while others do not.  There are many ways to temper the scale while tuning a piano, e.g. equal tempered vs well tempered.  Players, conductors, and highly schooled listeners may have their own preferences.  But most people (probably including many ASers) do not know that all pianos are not tuned the same.  Further, the same instrument will sound quite different depending on how it was tuned, yet it's "in tune" regardless of the chosen temperament.  Experience alone is not knowledge.

 

The determination of value in audio is (apart from non-sonic considerations) largely based on how you hear things, how you define SQ, and how much of your resource base you're willing to devote to those SQ characteristics you value most highly.  As no audio reproduction is 100% faithful to the source, each of us therefore determines value in SQ by the cost of acceptable compromise.  Our personal preferences shape our audio value scales.  Some will give up extended high end for more dramatic bass.  Others want higher SPL to the exclusion of the most precise sonic image / soundstage.  Quads and KLH 9s are not valued highly by Deadheads, and few Haydn fans buy Cerwin Vega speakers.  But none of us will value a system highly if the cost of ownership exceeds what we're willing to pay for what it will bring us.  And none of us (again, if sane) would pay a lot for a system that lacked a sonic quality we value highly, even if we could well afford it and it's very highly rated.

 

Experience is only knowledge if it results in durable education and retention of factual information gained from that experience.  Discerning but impecunious concertgoers will assign their own values to the characteristics of a playback system, so they can attain the best possible compromise for them and their budgets. No one can determine the value of a playback system for you except you.

[bluesman]

29 minutes ago, Albrecht said:

experience is always knowledge, it is one of the categories of knowledge types

 

I have a bit of training and experience at knowledge management, e.g. GE Lean / 6 Sigma and Change Management training, with certification as a MBB (the highest level), and I've never seen experience categorized as knowledge.  If you have a reference or link to a source for your statement, I'd appreciate your posting it so I can see it in context and become familiar with the author.

 

The classic definition of knowledge is "facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education".  Read Plato's Meno for an excellent and classic discussion of the distinction between knowledge and experience, e.g.  

• "Teaching and knowledge are placed in contrast with practice or experience, emphasizing the distinction between these two operations in both meaning and purpose"
• "At first glance, knowledge and experience look very similar to one another. By definition, knowledge is information and skills acquired through experience or education. Similarly, experience is defined as the knowledge or skill acquired by a period of practical experience of something. Although the two words are used in each other’s definitions and are seemingly very similar, a distinction can be made between knowledge and experience."

[bluesman]

18 hours ago, lucretius said:

On 5/23/2019 at 12:00 PM, crenca said:

High Fidelity has this basis as an endeavour grounded in a real objectivity:  the "perfect" (or approaching perfection as much as possible) reproduction of the original performance and/or recording.  Given this, while granted we all have subjective preferences, the ultimate goal is subjective. 

 

In some cases, what the sound engineer artistically does to the track is the performance. It may be the only way to listen to some modern pop artists (without being disappointed).

 

Au contraire, mes amies!  The two of you are talking about different things.  At the technical level, hifi is and has always been about pushing an exact replica of the source waveform out of the speakers.  But the original program material was performed and captured in a milieu totally different from the one in which we listen to its reproduction, and many (most?) recordings are made with intentional alteration of technical parameters in an effort to make the users happy by making the product sound better to them through their own systems in their own homes.  Many of these "enhancements" are tailored to specific listening systems and environments in widespread use, e.g. portable players (née boomboxes) or mobile phones thru exercise earbuds.  And their effects on fidelity are perceived by most users of the target stuff as better. 

 

Most of us here do not think it sounds better.  The more accurate the system, the more like sonic Spam ( lunch meat, not junk email) sonic Spam sounds.  Some of us would rather have less bass than bloated or harmonically enhanced bass.  One audiophile's clarity is another's stridency.  Etc etc etc.

 

So there is indeed a technical pursuit of objective perfection in audio, manifested and measured as closeness of fit between the source waveform and the reproduced waveform.  But there is also a subjective pursuit of excellence, manifested and measured as listener satisfaction.  Technical perfection and listener satisfaction can be quite disparate - the only thing they have in common is that audio equipment is sought and sold on the basis of both, although each supports a different set of listeners.

[bluesman]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

This is wrong ... technical "perfection" and listener satisfaction go hand in hand - I have never yet come across a rig, or worked on a system where the satisfaction doesn't improve as the technical correctness is increased.

 

For some listeners that’s true - but the “great unwashed” clearly prefer at least a bit of enhancement in their sound. Why do you think there are so many named EQ settings in mass market players? My car’s optional OEM sound system lets me select among multiple EQs that include “feel”.......

 

Look at the huge market for earbuds with “enhanced bass”.  Do you really think this is an effort to achieve pure fidelity to the source?

[bluesman]

8 hours ago, lucretius said:

I have no idea what you're talking about.

 

With all due respect, I agree with you.  You're arguing two viewpoints about unrelated kinds of value, and you're getting nowhere.  By value, Plato meant human values like goodness, beauty, and truth.  His extensive discussions about value are most often responsive to the relativist philosophy of Protagoras, with whom Plato strongly disagreed.  Protagoras believed that those human values all depended on the human observer, including existence itself.  But these discussions and philosophies were all focused on cultural and societal values, not economic value. 

 

Marx, on the other hand, was talking about economic value - he couldn't have cared less about societal, moral, aesthetic, or any other kind of value.  Marx believed (or, at least, claimed to believe - I suspect that he said a lot of these things purely to perpetuate his political and social systems, knowing that they were invalid) that the value of anything was directly and solely related to the amount of labor required to produce it.  He used wages as the sole proxy measure for labor, in order to relate everything to monetary value and to create a value scale.  This approach required control and standardization of both wage rates and worker productivity, to negate the effect of human variability on the concept that anything requiring 2 hours of labor to make had twice as much value as anything requiring one hour of labor to make.  In Marxist terms, every worker was equal to every other worker, and workers were simply a necessary evil.  Specifically, he wrote that "[t]he lowest and the only necessary wage rate is that providing for the subsistence of the worker for the duration of his work and as much more as is necessary for him to support a family and for the race of labourers not to die out".  Further, he did not equate value with price - he used supply and demand as a mechanism to account for changing prices despite what he thought was objective valuation.

 

Crenca's statement that "...[v]alue and beauty is [sic] not in the eye of the beholder" also confuses these two categories.  Beauty is a value - they are not the same kind of entity.  Both objectivists and relativists considered beauty, goodness, truth etc to be values.  Objectivists believed you could quantify them and relativists believed that you could not.  But none of them in either camp discussed economic or other material value.  

 

I have no idea why you ask if lovers of pop music who like enhancements to the "source waveform" are disqualified from being audiophiles.  None of us has suggested anything remotely resembling this.  An audiophile is (by definition) anyone who likes one or more aspects of audio - live music recording and playback, synth pop, sound effects and equipment for equipment's sake are equally valid pursuits.  Philia is Greek for fondness and appreciation.  Each of us has his or her own preferences that define the sound quality we seek from our system and its sources.  You're just as much of an audiophile whether you EQ aggressively or not at all.

 

Maybe those who favor an unaltered signal path from source to speaker are pursuing truth as an objective value. Those who apply heavy EQ to everything could be favoring beauty in their ears and brains as a subjective value.  And those who use DSP etc only to correct the reproduced material to a closer replica of the source might be balancing the values of truth and beauty in a delicate compromise of objectivity for subjective value.  Or maybe not.

[bluesman]

11 hours ago, fas42 said:

This should project the vocals as being very natural

 

Let me help you.....

 

How in the world could anyone know if the vocals sound "natural" without having heard Dusty Hill and Billy Gibbons singing live and unmiked?  They may sound believably real, but there's no way to know how accurately their voices are being reproduced.

[bluesman]

1 hour ago, crenca said:

By "radical subjective" I mean the idea (really, a set of ideas) that value is subjectively determined.  So the pensioner of limited means would say a $1500 HP is not a value because he or she could never afford it.

 

I'm still seeing this as a simple application of the value equation:  the pensioner of limited means determines whether or not food, clothing, medicine, transportation etc and the benefits of same are worth more to him or her than $1500 headphones.  If yes, the cans remain with the vendor.  If no, they go home with the pensioner.

 

Assuming that he or she has $1500, decision support for this is subjective, despite the obvious (at least to me) fact that foregoing medication to have better sound seems like a foolish choice.  Then again, sacrificing meds to buy cigarettes and booze is equally dumb but done every day by millions of people around the world.  It's all a matter of relative worth for a given cost.

[bluesman]

13 minutes ago, christopher3393 said:

What price beauty? 

 

"This article will begin with a sketch of the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature."

 

A man calls the friend who set him up with last night's blind date to complain:

 

"You didn't tell me the truth about her - you told me she looked like a model!"

 

"You said you liked Picasso."

[bluesman]

23 minutes ago, lucretius said:

Whence cometh the radical?

 

You Kant mean that!  

 

Perhaps it's literally "radical", per the definition of the Greek word from which it arose: at, in or from the roots. 

 

There are some inherent aspects of subjectivism that strike me as pretty radical, e.g.

• Suppose subjectivism is correct and there are no objective moral truths.  Then the belief that lying is good, when expressed by a person who genuinely approves of telling lies, would be true. It would only be untrue if that person were knowingly lying about it.
• If moral statements have no objective truth to them, how could we say that murder is wrong?

And then there's the practical subjectivism of John Steinbeck, who wrote in the Grapes of Wrath that "[t]here ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do."  

 

Although it's fun to stretch the mental muscles,, this thread mixes (and perhaps confuses) a bunch of loosely related concepts and facts that don't really belong together.  There are subjectivist theories of economics, e.g. Keynes' and Hayec's, but they're not the same as the philosophical subjectivist theories of Kant, Descartes, et al.  To philosophers, the subjectivist says simply enough that perception is reality.  The subjectivist economist, OTOH, is concerned with subjective perceptions of value.  Subjectivist economists (e.g. Bastiat, Menger et al) believe that for trade to occur between two people, each must assess the items traded differently - and each must prefer what he hopes to receive over what he is giving up for it.

 

Both appear to me to be reasonable models for the acquisition of audio equipment.