Paul's Posts — 20 December 2011
By Paul McGowan
I was leafing through one of the magazines recently and came across an ad for a preamplifier whose claim to fame was it hadn’t changed in 10 years. Interesting.
It reminded me about a division in philosophy that exists in almost every industry: new and innovative vs. old and trusted. Both have extreme value to the right person.
New and innovative appeals to people who want the latest greatest and enjoy pushing the envelope to extend the frontier of what’s possible. Old and trusted appeals to a much more conservative crowd who prefer to let the innovators hash through the good and bad of new directions and then accept what works into their own spheres.
I think one approach cannot exist without the other and therefore both are equally valid.
The challenge is to figure out which camp you’re in and then follow those like-minded people and companies.
There’s no doubt in my mind that new and innovative is what floats my boat.
How about you?
Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers
Related Articles
Share
About Author
(12) Readers Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
demeter
I’ m owning my stereo since 2000, within only a few small changces.
You know, there is an effect called “burn in” for the components of a hifi system. For some commponents like loudspeakers this effect may take a long time, some like 800 hours.
If you own your system over 10 years like me, there is an additional effect comes in: I call it: The “burn in together” effect, which multiplies the single burn in effect of an particular component. To say so, they are getting used to live together like members of a family in much more harmony.
Soundminded
When I was very young we used to wait for advertisements with photos or artists sketches announcing each new year’s model car.What would the 1958 Plymouth Fury look like? A 59 Chevy Malibu? Often they were just last years products repackaged with minor variations if that, and advertised as the latest and greatest. Did the order of styling changes matter? That a 1960 Caddy had round tail lights arranged vertically and the 61 had them horizontally mean anything? Who knew then that it would be the 59 convertable that would one day become a very highly prized icon of an era and the others wouldn’t? In the 1980s some Oldsmobile owners were furious to learn that their Rocket 88 engines were manufactured in a Chevy plant, in fact they were the same Chevy engines with a different brand name, different part numbers, and a higher price. But it came as no news to auto mechanics. An engineer for Bose wrote an articale when Bose first began designing sound systems for high end GM cars saying; I defy anyone to sit in the cabin of a Caddillac Eldorado, an Olds Toronado, or a Buick Riviera and know which one of the three they were in. (One had a piece of trim the others didn’t that altered its acoustics.) Yet clearly there have been substantial advances in automotive engineering over the years.
Do brand names matter? Are the same products sold under different names at different prices? Are newer and different necessarily better? If something is gained in the new model, is it valuable enough to make it worth replacing the old? Is it of actual benefit to the user or just better on paper? And what has been lost at the expense of what was gained? At what point has the execution of designs within a given paradigm been perfected to the degree where the point of diminishing returns has been exceeded? At what point are there no real returns at all? At what point do different executions of the same basic idea arrive at equivalent results? Will a 10,000 watt amplifier result in better sound than a 50 watt amplifier that is identical in every other respect? Under what conditions? How are our buying choices influenced by advertising psychology rather than by substantive facts? And where changes are an improvement, are there cheaper better ways to arrive at them by modifying old technology or building from the ground up yourself if you have the time and skill rather than by buying new? These are decisions consumers and producers battle with in a war for economic survival and profits.
woot
I like innovative products from tried and true companies. Best of both worlds.
Soundminded
“I like innovative products from tried and true companies. Best of both worlds”
In 1958 the Ford Motor Company was tried and true. The Edsel was a very innovative product, in many ways well ahead of its time. It was named for Henry Ford’s son. It was designed to fill a market niche between Mercury and Lincoln. My father bought a Corsair, the larger of two variants with less trim and chrome than the more flashy Citation. It was a remarkable car…until it began to fall apart. The cause, disasterous manufacturing execution. Edsel is also an icon but not one you’d want associated with your own business. In the end it had to be traded in for a different car. It was impossible to keep it on the road. Edsels today are rare but don’t command a very high price on the used market.
Many cruisers can’t wait for a new ship to be launched or an old one to be refitted, they must sail on its maiden voyage. Experience shows that this is often the worst idea, the ship delivered with many “bugs” still unresolved and the crew not sufficiently experienced to know how to get its best performance out of it. If something is new, better to give a manufacturer time to move up his learning curve with field experience using actual customers as guinea pigs. I rarely if ever risk becoming one of those guinea pigs. I’m grateful to others who do though. They are the ones who help the manufacturer make improvements by finding his blunders first.
jahidnh
Considering that (at least in my case) it can take months to determine whether a change made to my system is good or bad (I’ve found over the years that if I find myself not listening much over time, it means the change I made was bad), I tend to prefer incremental improvements to a tried-and-true design rather than a radical departure.
Also, if my ear is similar to the ear of the designer, I find that new designs from that designer (radical departure or not), will likely agree with my sensibilities.
hahax
New and innovative is really cool, but how much new gear is really innovative and not just the hype in the ad. Most new gear that is actually better is mainly refined knowledge( probably 99% or even more) applied to good basic design gained over time. Why is the ancient Kellog driver still the basis of the overall best speakers?
hahax
Sorry but I have to comment on the Edsel being ahead of its time. The Edsel was really a product of Ford advertising and their thinking there were market niches they should fill. The smaller Edsel models were rebodied Fords with some other minor changes and the larger models were rebodied Mercurys(which were only stretched rebodied Fords). Edsel failed because they tried to solve a problem that didn’t exist and because most buyers found the funny vertical grill, that made the car stand out, ugly.
Soundminded
hahax, I don’t know what your experience with Edsel was but we had one. The smaller models were Pacer and Ranger, the larger were Corsair and Citation. Our car suffered multiple major failures including a at least one seriious engine failure. The car failed the first time because the camshaft had never been hardened and the engine could not hold timing, it quit running. Seemingly endless quality control failures were extensive throughout the entire car. You’d hardly know the people who built this model weren’t out to deliberately sabotage it. The first model, the one my father bought appeared in 1958. The last model year to appear was 1960. This failure was not the result of a marketing issue it was the result of thoroughly incompetent manufacturing. Lesson learned; go with proven winners, let other people take the risks on new untried ideas with their money first. If you like to gamble, my gratitude is in order. People like you are my filter.
It’s hardly unique to the car industry. My early KLH Model 6s have a major manufacturing engineering flaw. As good a speaker engineer as Henry Kloss was, as a manufacturing engineer he was a walking disaster. When my speakers needed replacement capacitors they had to go back to the factory where the woofer cone was removed and the caps replaced through the basket. Then the woofer was reconed. This is because the woofer was epoxied to the front baffleboard which is not removable, nor is the back or sides. This happened more than once but to KLH’s credit they fixed it for free every time and paid for shipping. I didn’t even buy them new. Later versions used a conventional full frame woofers that were screwed in like other speakers. I’ve always felt that crossover networks should be mounted outboard of the speakers for easy service, especially where the cabinets must be air tight. Kloss set the industry standard for internal crossovers in sealed speakers with AR1W and it’s done that way to this day. A very poor design choice IMO.
hahax
I recall the early KLH 6 woofer design and thought it was a cool idea, no woofer frame, no acoustic frame reflection and economy. I didn’t think about the problems when parts needed replacing. Another great concept that missed big flaws when 1st designed. Time is always a good test.
As per the Edsel, I never drove one, just was a crazy car nut who read everything in those days. They really were slightly modded, re-bodied Fords and Mercs. So I suspect if they had problems so did the other older siblings. I bet the Ford and Merc survived just because they were long established names.
Soundminded
hahax, restoration or even just repair of Edsels usually involved replacement with Mercury parts. Is a Lincoln Town Car the same as a Mercury Grand Marquis is the same as a Ford Crown Victoria? Is a Caddillac Sedan deVille the same as a Chevy Caprice, etc.? They have far more in common than they have different. I think GM had about 5 platforms at a time. One difference besides price was that what was standard in the more expensive product brands was optional extras in the cheaper ones.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the first meeting Sidney Harman had when he brought engineers from Mark Levinson and Crown face to face and asked them if the amplifiers under the Levinson brand were five to ten times better than those under the Crown brand seeing the difference in price. What a war that might have been. You can be sure that in a commercial installation for anyone but an audiophile AV contractors will invariably bid to Crown, never to Levinson. And when Bryston is invited to bid, they throw the audiophile playbook and price list away and take out a very sharp pencil. They know they won’t be kidding anyone.
Lafayette Radio in the early 1980s offered exactly the same 3 receivers made in the then new automated Fisher plant in Japan as Setton of France but at 1/3 the price. Many “store brands” like EJ Korvette’s XAM were rebranded equipment made by well known manufacturers. Commoditization of product is hardly anything new. Objectively many similar products from different manufacturers are interchangeable. Walk into a room and listen to a recording and you’d be hard pressed to say what amplifier you were listening to without being told or seeing it.
oliver T. Finch
Every month there is a second coming. This represents new and innovative.Almost all are reinvention of the wheel more colourfully packaged and of course with the price through the roof.. Recently a well known reviewer in England heard a recreation of an eighty years old loud speaker. He was left wondering how little progress had been made in all these years. certainly progress has been made but for most part it is not night and day as people would have you believe. There are some really innovative products. PS audio P10 andP5 are true innovations in a sea of me too power conditioners. Every category has something like this.But most of it appears to be based on the philosophy that a sucker is born every minute.
omniclassic
Since I’m a recording professional/music lover.., I fault to realistic, and therefore prefer to let “new and innovative” hash it out until the best floats to the surface. As a recording engineer I am also a “gear user” which means I must plan on using my stuff as a reference for a while.., or at least as long as it proves to be reliable and can earn its keep. If I chose to change up everytime someone came up with a new dingus, my claim to consistantly good results would cease to exist, as I would have no reliable reference.
That being said I tend to thoroughly learn the pros and cons of each piece of gear and work with it, both in the studio and at home, until something truly better comes along. My experience has been that, more often than not, Improvements in audio gear are usually small at disproportionate expence. Many beautiful pieces of equipment are old by today’s standards, but perform exceptionally well, a trubute to their original design. Some of us can’t afford to constantly buy the latest and “allegedly” greatest, so I’ll leave that to those who can. And in my case my recording gear has to pay for itself.., not that I haven’t been bitten in the behind by something I bought in haste, thinking it was a brilliant idea, only to have it become obsolete in a matter of month or at best a few short years. As for my home listening situation, I’ve found that improved recording and delivery techology, often shows what an older, for example, amplifier design, or speaker, can really do. I have to say If I dumped each piece as soon as a new one appeared, on the market, I’d never have this experience. So I am of the philosophy “wait and see, but use what you have to the max”.