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Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
181–190 of 344 posts
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#182How much do brands mean anymore?
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#183Now there are more avenues for Samsung to shove bloatware down our throats. I have a modestly high-end home theater and it is utterly maddening waiting for devices to “boot” and “handshake”. And after the wait, I’m presented with another “User Agreement” to sign that insists on shoveling ads down my throat and harvesting data. How much do you have to pay for a quick boot, no ads, and a private movie or music experien…
Thorens 166 turntable, Fischer tube amp from a flea market, and homemade speakers. I left that stuff in storage many years ago and have no idea where it is now. Come to think of it, that had a boot delay too (waiting for the tubes to warm up) but it never really bothered me.
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people are basic and have basic needs, and a soundbar suffices in most cases. I was sort of one of those people, with a soundbar, because it was easy and convenient. The soundbar came with a wireless subwoofer, and that solved the problem of running wires across my living room. But, I had a gifted B&W 5.1 system with powered sub collecting dust out in my garage for a long time. I recently made the push to dust i…
Yeah proper sound is something you have to experience to understand, otherwise you’ll keep saying ‘I don’t need it’ or ‘a soundbar is good enough’. If you never cross the -30 level, maybe it is…
IME, a soundbar sounds terribly flat and lifeless compared to some good (B&W in my case) speakers, even at moderate volume. I switched from a 500€ Marantz amp to an 80€ SMSL SA-50 btw, these things sound amazing and I recommend class D amps to everyone.
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#185How much do brands mean anymore?
Quite a bit in audio, consumer or professional. I've had my Bowers & Wilkins MM-1 desktop speakers for nearly a decade. Audio Technica are another trusted brand, especially for monitor headphones.
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#186Now there are more avenues for Samsung to shove bloatware down our throats. I have a modestly high-end home theater and it is utterly maddening waiting for devices to “boot” and “handshake”. And after the wait, I’m presented with another “User Agreement” to sign that insists on shoveling ads down my throat and harvesting data. How much do you have to pay for a quick boot, no ads, and a private movie or music experien…
I'll try to explain this from the point of view of someone who has tried to bring a bloatware-free hifi system to market:
Chinese copies + Amazon = flood of shit
It takes years to design, test, build prototypes, measure, re-design, re-build, calibrate, certify and produce a good hifi audio amp. That means you start your product journey with $500k in debt and unless you can show how you're going to sell enough units to recover this, your project is dead before it ever started. You typically need to sell at 8x of your real costs, because shipping companies, import agents, wholesalers and retailers all want (and need) their margins. If I expect to sell 2,000 units per month (which is A LOT already) for 2 years, then I need to add about $10 to my costs per unit to recover the R&D expenses. And that means as long as Amazon is happy to turn a blind eye on IP-infringing blatantly obvious clones that typically even re-use my product images or slogans or brand names ... then my "original" product will be undercut by $10x8 = $80 in price by Chinese clones. They don't have R&D to recoup because the can just buy my product, x-ray the PCB, and then make duplicates. And trying to get Amazon to follow the law is like playing expensive whack-a-mole with lawyers. It won't help to recover money.
That means as the manufacturer, I have exactly 1 way left to recover R&D expenses:
I lock down the software. And then I either shove ads in your face, or I bully you into a subscription. Or if the ads pay too little, both.
I hate the situation as much as you do, but I also see no better way forward. Nowadays, you need to plan for the flood of shitty clones on Amazon a week after launch. (Or in some cases, even before the original product clears import customs.) And that means you treat hardware as cheap and disposable, because your competitors do that and unless you join them, you're at a huge market disadvantage, because the average customer cannot tell the difference between a low-quality and a high-quality capacitor. (And Amazon doesn't care.)
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/selfie-stick-iphone-case-gets...
(And please note that these guys even had US patents on the product. Didn't help them, though.)
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#187Now there are more avenues for Samsung to shove bloatware down our throats. I have a modestly high-end home theater and it is utterly maddening waiting for devices to “boot” and “handshake”. And after the wait, I’m presented with another “User Agreement” to sign that insists on shoveling ads down my throat and harvesting data. How much do you have to pay for a quick boot, no ads, and a private movie or music experien…
I hate to be that guy but how on earth do you have a "high-end" system (your words) that does all this?
Sure, there is some boot up time to warm everything up, but there are no ads and no user agreements etc on mid to high end systems.
Even my entry level system (denon avr, lg c1 oled, appletv4k and ugoos as media players) does not take more then 10 seconds from totally off to showing the menu / plex interface, and no user agreement popups or ads
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly are you waiting for. I have two Dolby atmos systems, denon receivers, Apple TVs, OSMC boxes on both, and LG Smart TVs disconnected from the internet. Start up time is less than a second.
are you telling me the reason my tv turns on slowly is because it has internet access?
Many devices nowadays use Linux internally and if the development team was too ignorant to change the default, it'll behave like a web server and wait for wifi to connect, then wait for the NTP time synchronization, and only then continue booting to userland.
So yes, you can probably shave off 3 seconds of boot time by never connecting your gadget to the internet.
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Harmony remotes used to solve this problem - I am dreading the day my old Harmony One dies.
Kind of — Harmony remotes still had way too many buttons, you had to keep them pointed at the thing being controlled for the entire duration of a sequence, things could get desynced, and we shall not mention the horrible software, right?
this is true for the IR based harmony remotes.
But they also have hub based systems where the hub blasts the commands (over IR or BT) and the remote talks to the hub using RF or BT. No need to point at things.
Re: Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you are being unnecessarily disingenuous I'm not, honestly. Think of AVR-integrated radio receivers and hi-fi CD players: a typical appliance-grade (non-raster) VFD/LCD display is sufficient for navigating through radio stations and CD tracks; I will admit that Alexa-style voice-control can work quite well for online services like Spotify or Apple Music, but even then I find myself frequently needing to reach for m…
It also introduces a lot of fragility into the ecosystem. If your TV fails (which does happen sometimes), you're suddenly without access to almost all features of the hardware? Unacceptable.
I’ve had many more VFDs and small LCDs displays fail than televisions, and much prefer the separation of functions.