Is there any better place to post ideas to the engineers that bring us the best sounding equipment then here. What would you like to tell the ceo's, engineers or designers of high end audio equipment. Do you have any suggestions ideas even your own projects that resulted in great success.
It's already being done. It's called sales success. If we want it we buy it - if not, we don't. Instant feedback to the industry telling them what we want.
I like the way mbl's sound, they seem to be better than other top notch speakers by a margin. To me they make the music sound as though its live. I would like for there to be other speaker brands that approach this level of reproduction. Cannot the mbl's be used as reference speakers.
Snofun3, sales success is a very slow feedback system. It works ultimately but as someone who designs studio gear for a living, I would love to have potential customers tell me about product ideas I'd never considered.
For my two cents, I'd like to see video equipment manufacturers add an HDMI 'through' feature so a switcher would be un-needed.
You see what sells, then incorporate the features others appear to want. I assume you design in features which have proven popular in the past right?
If you ask around about what people want, you'll get a response - what that person wants, which may, or may not reflect what others want, and will typically be specific and unique to that person.
If you could get a large enough response rate - 10's or 100's of thousands, you could get a broad enough picture (customer response cards). Short of that you'll be designing a camel.
As someone who does new product research for a living, I think this can be a useful exercise. I imagine that few if any high-end companies do any serious market research. Most get their feeback informally from the channel and, of course, from their customers, as it should be. But just like this, it's qualitative.
Here are some of my thoughts:
More CDPs should have accomodations for hard-drive based systems, so a digital input to access the DAC. USB is good, but S/PDIF is the first choice I think.
More standardization of spade connector sizes. I keep running into speakers that will not easily accept the spades on my speaker cables.
Some facility on components for "grabbing" the power cord IEC connector and holding it tight.
Better labeling of inputs and outputs and switches on the backs of components: bright lettering that is sufficiently large to read from a angle and in less than ideal light.
More attention to fine gradations of attentuation at the low end of the volume scale. Very frustrating to have a system you can not turn down enough (for very low-level listening) or set to the level you truly want.
Of course we design in features that have proved popular and we even look for ideas in other product lines. Sometimes, in spite of having what we think is a strong list of useful features, a product will fall short of sales expectations and other times, some little feature that we think will be little more than a bullet point catches on and a product will outperform our expectations. What I find useful (when it happens) is feedback from actual users or users of other manufacturers products that tell me what we're missing or explain how something like a user interface might be made more intuitive. This can lead to innovations that no one else has.
"Cannot the mbl's be used as reference speakers" Sure, ok. What else should be the reference for, say cars, beverage to drink, music style, movie genre, what should my house look like, what food should be the reference, what flavor of ice-cream. Just make a list of everything you like so the rest of us will know what it is that we should think is best.
Time and phase accurate speakers. Stop designing speakers around out of phase midrange vs woofers or tweeters to "compensate" for poor electrical and construction.
okay. Let the '70s meet the...next century(?). I want an A/V processor that does it all...or nothing. Let it have the ultimate chip that can put your socks on for you...or not. May it upsample...or not. Let it have all of the imputs...15 pin, component, toslink, DVI, etc. etc., or simple native resolution passthru.
Give me all of the options/possibilities from the '70's. Do it with quality. Give me the choice.
Decided to revive an old thread since the vpi classic is such a good deal. I was reflecting on how a competetive product makes a company successful. Would like to hear what new ideas may have sprung up since the economy is weak and now's the time to make changes to remain in business. I would hate to see another country dominate this industry. Bravo vpi keep up the good work.
I want to license interesting designs for a small fee and build them.
The doesn't constrain me to technically compromised designs which sell well in the market place, gets me more attractive furniture grade construction, can save tens of thousands of dollars over commercial products designed by the same engineer, and lets me do something more productive in my workshop than building jewelry boxes and humidors.
Siegfried Linkwitz's Orion++ may be the best example, where a license to build them for personal use is $230, boards are available for $200, and the rest of the parts are $3-$4k without amplifiers. His former Beethoven Elite which is outperformed in all areas ran $37,500 sold through conventional retail channels in 1998.
I want two things. 1)a under $1000 SSP that does thru an imput on a high quality Preamp that is easily upgradable and/or you can pick 4 processes desired. Who the heck uses stadium mode 2)a $1000 turntable with arm that looks bad ass like a big fat thick 4 inch table. Like a VPI TNT on steroids.
Newly manufactured tubes with the sonics of the best NOS combined with quality assurance testing and consistency, as well as cost efficiency(i.e. value pricing) of the best modern manufacturing.
Drubin's suggestions on better input labeling and spade/post standards are great ideas, too. Cheers,
There is something that occurred to me a while back. When speakers are voiced by the designer they use their ears and analyzers, they place them optimally in the room to get the best possible sound. They tweek the cabinets, crossovers and drivers to get the best possible perfomance. The room is treated optimally, but the floor the speakers sit on plays an important role in the sound produced in that listening room, and every owner of said speaker will not have the same floor. I wonder if the speaker cabinets can be built in such a manner that they are decoupled from the floor? I set mine up this way to not disturb my downstairs neighbor and never compared it to the speaker sitting on the floor, I like the way my system sounds, the floor resonates far less this way, though can't say for certain if this is better. Just a thought.
Its not the gear manufactures that I have the biggest beef with, It's the rechordists: the rechording engineers You know the ones that can't keep their hands in their laps They just gotta ride the knobs and fook it up. Yeah you know who you are You just gotta keep it at minus 3 db. Why don't you just go outside and smoke fag or something.
You will not find that in the above mentioned industries (forgot to mention publishing), I think things are quite a bit better here in audio land, I admit it could be better.
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