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“Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

audiosciencereview.com

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Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#321

Post by badpun »

Bakary wrote: post #312
badpun wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt any kind of ignorance is beneficial. Ignorance and stupidity are one of humanity's biggest blights, so the less we have them, the better.

Many of the systemic problems we have today are the direct result of greedy and intelligent people. A hypothetical world where all people are one deviation smarter would probably be way more dangerous and stressful. The number of highly intelligent sociopaths would explode, leading to exponential damage.

Perhaps, but also tons of issues come from people's stupidity and shortsightedness. People become greedy and callous in large part due to bad childhood experiences, and bad childhood stems from parents being stupid or making bad decisions (like having children while 17 years old). The only way to stop the perpetual vicious circle of bad parents raising another generation of shitty parents (and shitty people in general) is to improve people, not by keeping them ignorant.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#322

Post by aljgz »

JohnBooty wrote: post #152
aljgz wrote: post #147

Years ago I visited a friend in emmm..., "Europe". He was not home and the neighbour let us in. He asked us to entertain ourselves until he gets back. It took little time to notice the pair of speakers: 50cm cubes, almost. I managed to turn them on and connect them to the TV. There I heard the most lifelike sound I ever heard from any speakers. I wondered: these should be some crazy European brand... no brand names a…

they tune it so that you would not be able to distinguish a person talking behind you, from the recording of them being played with these speakers That's interesting! I'd love to know more about how your friend did it. It's trivial to get perfect on-axis sound (ie, the tweeters are pointed at your ears) even with cheap speaker components if you add some active DSP to compensate for the speaker's imperfections. In pro…

As @Jolter noticed, I'm unwilling to share information that can reveal the company the friend of my friend worked at. I'm also, not aware of much of the technical aspects of what they did, as my friend was a scientist and the other guy had done much of the hard work, so he did not know most of the details. Hopefully, in another visit there I can see him and find a way to meet the engineer, maybe I can encourage him to share his designs, tuning method, and other insights he has.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#323

Post by aljgz »

kthartic wrote: post #195
aljgz wrote: post #147

Years ago I visited a friend in emmm..., "Europe". He was not home and the neighbour let us in. He asked us to entertain ourselves until he gets back. It took little time to notice the pair of speakers: 50cm cubes, almost. I managed to turn them on and connect them to the TV. There I heard the most lifelike sound I ever heard from any speakers. I wondered: these should be some crazy European brand... no brand names a…

I'm confused. So were they actually good speakers to begin with, or was it the measurement device + tuning that made bad speakers sound good? Mind sharing the brand of speaker?

They used top of the line parts, not parts from his company.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#324

Post by Ma8ee »

eru wrote: post #314
Ma8ee wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the two things that the comment I answered too claimed are wrong: 1. Not paying dividends is communistic. Few people would accuse Jeff Bezos of being a communist. 2. Bad things will happen if no dividends are paid. No, nothing bad has happened to Amazon because they didn't pay dividends. Another example is Apple that didn't pay any dividends between 1995 and 2012.

I'm afraid you are arguing against a strawman. Obviously, the commenter meant any returns to shareholders, whether that be dividends or stock buybacks or anything else. Second, the commenter was obviously also talking about the economy in general. Individual companies being run in peculiar ways won't bring down the economy. As an analogy: some companies give away some products for free. But it wouldn't be a good idea…

You are the one that taking liberties with interpretation. The exact quote thaumasiotes argued against was "Nothing will happen to the business if the owners don't get any dividends." My italics. So, they was clearly not talking about the economy in general.

And if you go back in the thread, it was not a general argument about society. If thaumasiotes wanted to do it about that, that would be the straw man, because no one argued for prohibiting companies for paying dividends, and no one argued that society would be fine if no company ever were allowed to pay dividends.

Finally, if I show some lack of patience with thaumasiotes, it is because they are shouting "Communism!" instead of actually presenting any coherent argument. And that in discussions about economy is the reminiscence of Godwin's law.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#325

Post by alex3305 »

andybak wrote: post #227
alex3305 wrote: post #211

This doesn't at all surprise me. I consider myself a enthousiast with a limited budget. For instance I have a pair of Sennheiser HD 25-1 II for maybe 15 years now and I still enjoy them. Same goes for my KRK Rokit monitors. But recently I wanted to buy some Bluetooth headphones, since you know, the 3.5mm is absent from my new phone. For those headphones I just went to the local MediaMarkt. First looked at crazy expen…

My gut feeling for headphones is that the $40-$80 price point is optimal and everything above that is smoke and mirrors. (or more charitably "a difference without a difference" - something that is perceptible but which doesn't improve the pleasure derived in any meaningful way)

I think that $40-$80 is ideal for most. However like I said my Sennheiser HD 25-1 II was about $120 when it was new, so a bit over. But everything on it is repairable. So when I replaced the foam bits last year, it felt like a new pair of headphones.

And of course $300 or $600 or even more expensive headphones probably sound better. But IMHO the difference doesn't justify the cost.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#326

Post by mc32 »

Smoosh wrote: post #307
mc32 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree. People who rail against this don't understand economics much further than my mom sold yard bird eggs for less than the corner store --corner stores are opportunist capitalists with no heart who take advantage of people. If they had to sustain a business I'm afraid they could not. Every wannabe post-capital economist should try to run a restaurant (profitably).

Can I ask what a "yard bird" is in this context? Does it mean home kept chickens?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yardbird (3rd one on the list).

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#327

Post by lukas099 »

NoraCodes wrote: post #125
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #65

> The cost of building a consumer audio product is generally no more than 30% of retail. 30% COGS (cost of goods sold) is virtually a maximum for items sold at mainstream retailers. There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. The cost of goods sold is only a fraction of the costs that go into getting products all the way into the customers’ hands and supporting them (customer su…

> If this seems shocking, consider that the COGS of software as a service products are much lower by comparison. Doesn’t matter, though, because you have to pay all of those expensive salaries to make it happen. By definition, in a successful business, a significant amount of that markup goes to profit, not anything that's actually productive like salary.

Some businesses have very little profit margin; their strategy is to make up for it in volume. In fact, some of the most successful businesses (walmart) work this way.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#328

Post by Bakary »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #301
Bakary wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually beneficial ignorance. Money is transferred from those who don't know what to do with it into the broader economy.

I can see your point, but it makes it very hard for new comers. I was talking to someone the other day who had bought 3 DACs for different purposes to listen to YouTube sound on their edifier speakers and headphones. Its difficult to tell them they could probably not bother with the dacs, but there's a whole echo chamber about these things that confuses the new comers.

Think of it this way: on a purely logical basis, it's better for society if money is in the hands of people who understand its value and hope to do useful things with it. I'm not claiming to be one of those people; I would definitely waste it all myself.

Of course, we can't easily transfer money like this from the frivolous to the useful for a ton a reasons. Life isn't a fairytale. But the next best thing is to have them spend their money so that at least it can power some form of growth.

It's not that these newcomers deserve to be mislead by echo chambers, but rather that if they demonstrate so little regard or respect for their money by failing to do much research or understanding what they're buying in detail, especially if they are buying something extraneous to begin with, that I don't see a moral or ethical problem to keep them spending. If anything, the money should be parted from the well-to-do fool, if only to provide macroeconomic support to the rest of the population.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#329

Post by refulgentis »

tomnipotent wrote: post #320
refulgentis wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is broadly correct but specifically incorrect: cost of sales includes ex. salaries and capital investments and cost of goods sold includes the literal cost of the raw materials for a good It's quite jarring to see someone jump in with another misunderstanding, derailing the correction, especially given this is a "hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras" situation. Any argument they're kinda sorta the same thing or i…

Somebody is confidently wrong. There is no standard definition for "cost of sales", or "cost of goods sold". No where in any GAAP or IFRS literate does it say that the term "cost of sales" have specific definitions other than a paragraph or two of ambiguous wording. Indeed, IAS is even careful to say "allocating costs to functions may require arbitrary allocations and involve considerable judgement". The Xiaomi filin…

Like I said, you're broadly correct, and specifically correct.

It is unknowable, but, that's not helpful information.

It's sort of like if there was an accounting message board where they bickered about it's unknowable if memory usage meant RAM or L2 cache because L2 cache is also memory

I'm out, you're free to live in a world where you can't tell basic information about the health of a company because you're obsessive about ensuring anything you don't grok must be modelled as ambiguous by everyone else.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#330

Post by etherealG »

KaiserPro wrote: post #197

The problem with audio in general is that its really difficult to find decent reviews of the product. I used to work as a tech in a recording studio (along with a theatre and TV studio) We have a set of nearfield speakers, and that was about it. However audio reviews are basically: "Its got punchy bass" and "sounds a bit woolly" or "has brilliant clarity in the upper regions" are about as descriptive as review get. N…

I like rtings personally. Understandable for mere mortals like me, but clear about their test methods which seem scientific enough.
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