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Tech That Flopped!

Every few months someone releases technology that seems to be revolutionary, but goes nowhere a couple of years later. Some tech gets acceptance and even imitation. Some goes wildly successful.

Ideas that are a huge success:
  • Acoustic suspension
  • Bass Reflex
  • Soft dome tweeters
Some ideas, well, it's not so clear:
  • Perfectly time aligned speakers ilke Thiel/Vandersteen
  • ESL
  • Line Arrays
  • Plasma tweeters
  • Transmission line
What tech have you seen come and go, was it worthwhile?

Best,

E
erik_squires
erik_squires OP
15,875 posts
 
The idea of a horse-less carriage is definitely not a flop.

Steam engines for cars however, we can call a complete flop, though we can argue they put us on the road towards the internal combustion engine.

Cars with electric engines are pretty mainstream now. I won’t call a Camry a Tesla, of course, but the general principle of using electric engines in automobiles has gained a large acceptance and created a vigorous marketplace. Whether 100% electric or hybrids, is still being debated.

ESL’s and time-aligned speakers, even if the best speakers ever made, have not exactly caught on mainstream, but continue to participate in the marketplace. Probably as well as horn speakers but better than single-driver models.

ESL's and time-aligned are certainly doing a lot better than Betamax.

The Carver Magnetic Field amplifier - I would _almost_ call it a flop by now but Yamaha, NuForce and NAD seem to be producing models based on a similar ideas.


Best,


E
teo_audio
2,197 posts
 
"Objectivity is a fail" and "subjectivity will rule the roost in all facets" seem to be very objective statements. The assertion that ’everything is so complex that all interactions are too intricate for us to even begin to understand’ only opens the door that nothing we see or hear is real. So everything we think we know is in quicksand; not sure how that helps the discussion

Another quote randomly pulled from a 300+ page fully detailed and researched book) (I’d recently shared with someone else):

There was plenty of research on telepathy. There’d been the highly successful card experiments of Joseph Rhine, used by Mitchell (edgar-astronaut)in outer space. Even more convincing were the studies of the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn in the late 1960s, conducted in its special dream research laboratory. Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner had conducted numerous experiments like the one with the Mexican painting to see if thoughts could be sent and incorporated into dreams. The Maimonides work had been so successful that when analyzed by a University of California statistician who was expert in psychic research, the total series had showed an astonishing accuracy rate of 84per cent. The odds of this happening by chance were a quarter of a million to one.

There’d even been some evidence that people can empathetically feel another’s pain. A psychologist named Charles Tart in Berkeley had
designed a particularly brutal study, administering electric shocks to himself to see if he could ‘send’ his pain and have it register with a receiver, who was hooked up to machines which would measure heart rate, blood volume and other physiological changes.

What Tart found was that his receivers were aware of his pain, but not on a conscious level. Any empathy they might have had was registering physiologically through decreased blood volume or faster beating of the heart – but not consciously. When questioned, the participants hadn’t any idea when Tart was getting the shocks.

Tart also had shown that when two participants hypnotize each other, they experience intense common hallucinations.They also claimed to have shared an extrasensory communication, where they knew each other’s thoughts and feelings.



This bit and a thousand other bits like it, all fully properly researched by accredited scientists and fully peer reviewed and published widely, brings you to that point made recently by Elon Musk..about it being billions to one that you exist in a base reality... and are not in some sort of confined or bubbled simulation, where another set of rules is the underwriter..that the ’facts’ of the physics we have in those tombs of known physics are the unfolding reality in totality and completeness..well..that is shown to be a child’s whining forced dream that cannot ever be. Uncomfortable as it may be, for some.

Quicksand for the mind in the quandary? yes, probably. The other part is animal level denial of what the logic and the data says. Going ’la,la,la..I can’t hear you!!’...actually works. Ain’t that a peach.

Entanglement makes it so. That a reality 'superset' exists and it's not comfortable (at all!) to the 3d animal level bits of the experience.
rotarius
431 posts
 
I don't quite follow your logic.  Are you suggesting Randy should not question your "liquid metal" because of quantum entanglement?  Maybe you are suggesting us mere mortals could never understand the physics behind your cables like you do?
Help me understand.....
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
You don’t know what you don’t know. Audio kind of mirrors the technical developments in the tennis racket game. What were once brilliant innovations are now forgotten blunders or at least not so brilliant. The whole tennis racquet thing is quite similar in many respects to the game of audio. Is it the strings? Is it the frame? Is it the tension of the strings? Is it the damper? Is it the string-a-lings Federer favors in his racquets? Or a combination of everything? How important is the skill of the player? As far as materials for tennis rackets go they started out with wood, various hardwoods. Then moved up to the harder stuff, aluminum, titanium, tungsten, copper, all with the desirable qualities of stiffness, lightness and strength. There was graphite, and boron and Kevlar too, and carbon. Even liquid metal, in quotes. Now they’ve even got Graphene. Whoa!

Are the latest racquets, the ones with presumably more technically advanced materials and design really better than racquets from 20 years ago? That’s the $64K question. They are definitely better than the racquets from 30 years ago. And guess what, they’re all made in China. Have been for a very long time. A sponsor would most likely withdraw the big bucks if the player demanded to play big tournaments like Wimbledon with a twenty year old racquet rather than the latest model, no?

The audio industry suffers the same problem that the tennis racquet industry and the car industry face: they MUST come up with something that either IS new or appears to be new in the eyes of the customer. And they must do it once every year or two. It’s called planned obsolescence.

jetter
2,968 posts
 

 🐑 🐑 🐑 🐑 🚶 🚶 🚶 Do the little blind naysayer people following the little blind nonbeliever sheep all play tennis? 

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