Opinions — 10 July 2011
By Paul McGowan
The term “high-end” is bandied about a great deal – sometimes accurately, many times not. It has been over-used and under-used, exploited and neglected; certainly misunderstood. PSTracks focuses on the high-end and, true to form, you’ll see it peppered throughout the publication. But what does it mean?
As this essay will point out, it’s really an empty descriptor that can be applied to almost any endeavor. Consider: high-end photography, cars, foods, audio, video, clothing, mountaineering equipment and so on. In fact, the term describes an end point on an imaginary relative scale. The low-end, the middle and the high-end.
If the low-end for bread is Wonder Bread, then the middle might be Oroweat and the high-end would be a beautifully hand-crafted loaf of artisan baked craft.
In many cases, the high-end is the more expensive product in a line of goods categorized by manufacturers as the “good, better, best”. But the true definition of “high-end” doesn’t necessarily mean higher cost; certainly it is not a prerequisite. Higher prices are often a natural outcome because the size of the applicable group must be reduced in order to focus the appeal – and this typically means a smaller company is producing it – and economies of scale don’t enter into the equation.
The term “high-end” refers to products or services that are narrowly tailored to appeal to a target audience with a unique interest in those products or services.
Don’t we all want the very best?
It can be suggested that every person wants the better product – but that’s misleading because what is better? Better is in the eye of the beholder and common markers such as low, middle, high are arbitrary and completely relative to the person setting the standard and the category under discussion.
Take food for example. A high-end meal might be something at a fancy restaurant while a low-end meal would be consumed at a fast food establishment. But that’s a relative assessment based strictly on the end product and it can easily be argued that there exists the same scale within each category. When it comes strictly to the end product there are high-end fast food restaurants as exemplified by Chipotle Mexican Grills on the high-end and Taco Bell on the low-end. In and Out burgers on the high-end and McDonald’s on the low-end.
The same logic can be applied to audio and home entertainment products. Bose loudspeaker system on the low-end relative to a Wilson Audio system on the high-end. Bose is not striving to be high-end over the global market, rather they strive to be the high-end of the consumer market. So it could easily be argued that Bose is the high-end of the low-end; that is the essence of scalability of these standards.
It really depends on your focus
When we look closer it becomes apparent that it is necessary to understand and appreciate the specific focus and goals of a product or service to accurately evaluate its position relative to the term high-end. Let me give you some examples.
McDonalds is a great example. If you pay attention to their advertising you might believe their goal is to make the world’s best hamburger; but you’d be wrong. Their mission statement gets it closer to the truth “McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.“ Remove the marketing speak and you get the real mission statement when it comes to their product McDonald’s vision it is to be the number one provider of consistent average food that appeals to the broadest number of people possible and to deliver that experience better than anyone else. To that goal, they are the undisputed “high-end” kings and they consistently deliver great value to their shareholders by narrowly focusing on this mission. If they tried to make a “better” burger they would have to start narrowing their product focus and, in so doing, reduce their broad appeal – reducing shareholder value.
In our industry, Harman International is yet another example. If you pay attention to the product advertising of Harman brands such as Mark Levinson, JBL and Infinity you’d think they were focused on building great products and services above all else; but again, you’d be wrong. Even their mission statement “HARMAN is dedicated to global excellence in the branded-audio and infotainment markets. We develop and deliver solutions that embrace innovation, superior value and a highly-satisfying customer experience. We achieve this by fostering a culture of employee empowerment and creativity” delicately dances around the product focus issue (mission statements are typically written by PR and marketing folks and have little to do with products – read Seth Godin’s All marketers are liars). In fact, their goal isn’t to make the world’s best consumer electronic products and services, it’s to maximize shareholder value as a public corporation; two very different goals.
Are either of these examples “high-end”? Sure, but they don’t make high-end products.
McDonald’s delivers the high-end in consistent average food and Harman delivers consistent value to their shareholders – neither of them delivers a high-end end-product.
The “soul” or essence of these company’s product offerings have been either reduced to the lowest common denominator and thereby appealing to the broadest possible audience (McDonalds), or stripped and removed from their original goal of great products (Harman brands such as JBL, Infinity, Mark Levinson) to maximize corporate profits. Both have succeeded wildly.
The soul and art of a an end-product
All products and services have a “soul” (essence) and embody some form of art to build that essence. The clarity of that soul depends on the width of the product focus on the end user.
If we think about common examples such as writing implements, a $0.10 wooden pencil has little soul and art to its design because its focus is extremely broad – its success depending on its broad appeal. A Montblanc pen, on the other hand, has a very defined soul embodied by the art of its design and visual aesthetics. Everyone uses a pencil, very few use a Montblanc. A pencil is not high-end, a Montblanc is high-end.
In audio, art is all around us and alive and well. Companies like PS Audio, Ayre, Wilson, Manley, Kimber, Thiel, Linn and many others produce products with art and soul because these are all performance focused products appealing to a rather narrow group of enthusiasts who are willing to give up some of the broad appeal benefits to get better performance.
High-end for audio
This newspaper will refer to high-end audio in many articles. Its meaning is focused on those individuals, groups, services and companies whose narrow focus is on the product and services themselves. It is pointed directly at the companies, be they big or small, interested in getting as close as possible to focusing their product efforts on performance and achieving the sound originally recorded onto the storage medium and reproducing that identical sound in their homes. When narrowed in such a manner, it is relatively easy to distinguish the high from the mid to the low.
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Soundminded
What is the high end? I think by definition it is the best effort at any given time to achieving a specific goal. It’s the best effort regardless of cost, practicality, complexity, reliability, efficiency, or any other consideration. In art beauty is in the eye of the beholder so there is no right answer to the questions who is the best painter, the best composer, the best songwriter, what was the best movie. But in science and technology if anywhere at all the best efforts should be quantifiable, rankable, their shortcomings in achieving a goal sufficiently evident to make a comparison. In science and technology the high end is therefore the current state of the art. Examples are the most effective cancer drug, the fastest jet plane, the highest energy atom smasher.
What is the high end of high fidelity sound recording and reproduction equipment? High fidelity by definition has as its goal accuracy, faithfulness to the original. That is a very nebulous concept, a poorly defined goal. Elsewhere I’ve posted at least two different definitions of accuracy and there may be others. 3000 people sit in an auditorium listening to a musical performance and every one of them hears something different. A recording of it is made with directionally sensitive microphones just a few feet from the musical instruments while the closest the audience gets may be 20 feet or more feet away and for some over 100 feet. What 2 or 3 or 24 microphones hear is entirely different from what anyone in the audience hears. And from this we expect accuracy to what the audience heard? In a different auditorium they’d all hear something different and were they listening to the same musicians in a small room, say a small group performing in a home what they’d hear would be yet very different again.
What does the science tell us? Evidently not much that gives sufficient insight or understanding to explain it to where different elements or systems can be ranked. Those most experienced with what is advertised as the most advanced machinery for sound recording and playback tell us again and again that equipment that measures the same can sound very different and that there’s often little or no correlation between what’s measured and what’s heard. This leaves only three possibilities. One is that the measurement techniques or equipment used are flawed. This may sometimes be true but a very large number of people have gone to great pains to minimize this possibility. The second and third are more troubling, more revealing, more likely, and that is that what we are measuring is not complete, that is there are important measurements we haven’t made or that everything we have measured is irrelevant and we’ve missed the mark of what we should measure instead completely. The truth probably lies somewhere between those two. How can that be? It’s because the basic science of the two related areas of study necessary to understanding, that is the physics of sound and the psychoacoustics of the perception of sound are still relatively primitive, far from complete, enormously inadequate to explain what is happening and how we react to it. There are huge gaps in that knowledge. It’s small wonder then that there is so much argument over what is the best current effort. At the current state of the art I think of this argument as comparable to arguing which alchemist was closest to turning lead into gold. Hundreds of years later with far greater knowledge we of course now know that while it is theoretically possible to do this in a nuclear reactor, with the tools alchemists had available at the time it was an impossibility. However their efforts were not entirely worthless and much was learned by recording their experience gained from trial and error even if it wasn’t understood at the time. That is why alchemy is called a “pre-science” that led to the true science of chemistry. They say it’s impossible to prove a negative so we don’t know if accurate reproduction of performed music that has been recorded is possible or impossible in a home or elsewhere. All most agree is that it hasn’t been done yet at least on a commercial basis or even experimentally to public knowledge. The rest is speculation.
Now for the much tougher question of why it matters. Is more accurate reproduced musical sound better or just different? If it is better then it’s important to know why it is better, what makes it better? That is a very complex question I’ve thought about for a very long time and one whose tentative conclusions I’ve come to, I think I’ll leave for another day. However, I will say that our potential ability to listen is much greater than most of us are aware of and can be further developed. Here’s a link to a story about people who can actually see using the sounds they hear (unfortunately their website is down at the time of this writing but can be easily googled and viewed if and when it comes back up.) This is not a metaphor or exaggeration, the blind people who learned this technique have developed the skill to determine the size, nature, and location of objects by listening to reflections from a sound they make with their tongues. Sighted people can evidently acquire the same skill but possibly not to the same degree. This demonstrates how little we actually know about the sense of hearing.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/09/tech/innovation/daniel-kish-poptech-echolocation/index.html
The importance of sound to our psychology and physiology has been well documented by among others Dr. Oliver Sacks who is a physician, best-selling author, and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in his book “Musicophilia” even if the mechanisms by how it works are not understood at all. Small wonder music and artificial reproduction of music provokes so much emotion. Unfortunately those strong emotions that are often easily provoked can further cloud rational discussions of the technology and the underlying sciences.