High Performance Audio - The End?

Could it be possible that the future of high end audio be totally different in a decade or so? Maybe some day soon, nobody will be spinning discs anymore . All of your music will be either in the cloud or on some hard drive. Your cell phone will have a great DAC built in and your speakers will be hung on your wall, where DSP technology will make it sound great. Our current gears will be collectors’ items and we all will be old men reminiscing about the past on some forum or telling our grand children how our amplifiers could heat up our listening room during the winter. Who knows?

His videos always leave me disappointed, and wondering if he really believes his own BS or is he just okay with selling his audience short. Because every time he gets the chance to tell people the truth he instead panders to their vanity, fear and ignorance.

Revealing is nothing like what he is talking about, which is bias, hype and coloration. He's saying its actually good to make your system sound bad, just as long as it sounds good to you with certain music.

This is exactly the crap you'd feed someone if you want to sell them stuff, but its terrible advice if you're truly intent on helping someone build a satisfying system.

There's no such thing as a satisfying system that works the way he describes. Anything like this is colored, plain and simple. And so whatever it sounds good with is at the expense of making other stuff sound bad. That's literally his advice. 

So what happens is you buy something like that and you're so happy for a while, but only a while, because systems like that are boring, uninteresting, and you inevitably tire of what you once found exciting, and eventually so sick of it you just have to get something, anything else.

This site is chock full of posts every week of people asking that very question, they want to get some speaker, amp or whatever and always it "I listen to this" or "I listen to that" or sometimes even "I listen to this, that and the other thing" but always as if that matters. When what really matters is finding what makes everything sound equally good.

Which he says cannot be done. Which is strange, since I just bought Moabs and practically the first thing I say is everything sounds good on them. Not just good, but fabulous. When everything fabulous is to be had for under $5k by what stretch of the imagination is it impossible?

One thing he got right, sort of, is that with entry level and mid-fi gear, and even to a certain extent high end, when push comes to shove its better to err on the side of smooth vs detailed. But not by much, and its a total judgment call. Which is why he only sort of got it right, because he just said smooth. 

Oh well. I'm sure he knows his audience better than I do.

Coming to expect (pursue) "high resolution" first above other considerations, only to discover that it reveals other flaws in the system has nothing to do with the high end and, in and of itself, can only represent intermediate levels of system building experience or accomplishment. Sooner or later, the rest of the high-end traits will have to be attained if high resolution is not to have its obvious drawbacks.

Was it the way "high resolution", as an industry buzzword, was originally marketed to people just getting started that caused the problem, or were the uninitiated, unconsciously desperate to save money, all-too-willing to delude themselves into thinking it to be the holy-grail shortcut from the start??

Hardly matters, does it.

Exploitation city either way...

Steve Guttenberg worked at Sound By Singer in NYC, touting four and five-figure components. I only visited that store once back in the '80s to buy the latest copy of The Absolute Sound. Since I only wanted the magazine he treated me like a peon. I was the only customer at that moment. I saw and commented on a nice pair of Sound Lab RS-1 ESLs - but no invitation to stay and listen to them!

The more zeros in the price tag, the more orgasmic the feeling upon ownership! Maybe Dr.Freud can comment on this?