“Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by Ma8ee » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #315

Ma8ee wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has never paid any dividends. Further, you are just plain wrong about both of your points. At least as general statements. 1. Of course there are some businesses that are created to be able to pay the owners of the capital dividends (or more common, to be able to sell the business later to someone who hopes to be able to collect dividends). But a lot of businesses are created to for people to just being able t…

Amazon has bought back stocks, which is economically equivalent to paying dividends.

Not in all regards. The owners don't get any cash without selling stock.

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

#332

Post by chadcmulligan » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 10:39 PM UTC

Bakary wrote: post #328

chadcmulligan wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, you're assuming that everyone can just learn electronic engineering and get the optimal solution, things don't work that way. It's an interesting viewpoint though.

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

#333

Post by tonyarkles » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #277

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a naive DIY hobbyist who was outraged by how much more expensive commercial products were compared to the parts cost. But of course what you say is true. Electronic and software design, physical design, productisation, marketing, distribution, packaging, support, business premises, logistics, and backup business services (payroll, accounting) all cost money. Even a nominal markup of 40% may not be enough…

"Why are Fluke meters so expensive?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay9wFQAW19Y Dave Jones breaks it down, as usual, very informative.

Having not watched the video but having read the 8 reasons, I’ll throw #9 on the list: I have reasonably high confidence that if I screw up, it’s not likely to explode in my face. Maybe that’s just marketing, but I’ve seen more than one low cost multimeter get turned into a puddle of melted plastic.

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

#334

Post by eru » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

Ma8ee wrote: post #331

eru wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has bought back stocks, which is economically equivalent to paying dividends.

Not in all regards. The owners don't get any cash without selling stock.

To spell it out, ignoring transaction costs and taxes the following two are economically equivalent:

- You own some stock. The company pays dividends. You reinvest the dividends into buying more stock.

- You own some stock. The company buys back stock.

A different equivalence:

- You own some stock. The company pays dividends.

- You own some stock. The company buys back stock. You sell stock until your percentage share in the company is the same as before.

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

#335

Post by foldingmoney » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 9:51 PM UTC

Ma8ee wrote: post #220

foldingmoney wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Removing any other expense will be detrimental to the business, that is, make it work less well. Nothing will happen to the business if the owners don't get any dividends. I'd say two things. 1. A listed business wouldn't exist in the first place (or in its present form) if owners hadn't been enticed to put up capital in the hope of getting dividends. 2. The purpose of a listed business is to pay the owners, not to…

Amazon has never paid any dividends. Further, you are just plain wrong about both of your points. At least as general statements. 1. Of course there are some businesses that are created to be able to pay the owners of the capital dividends (or more common, to be able to sell the business later to someone who hopes to be able to collect dividends). But a lot of businesses are created to for people to just being able t…

Most of the people criticising my points are glossing over the key word of my post, which is listed. Not every business is listed, and those can be run for all sorts of reasons, but a listed business is a stock first and a business second. The stock is meant to enhance the owners' wealth (whether by going up, paying dividends, or both), and the business is just the means to that end. At least in theory, when that happens in a well regulated society, it turns out that the best way to make the owners richer is to give people what they want, and to allocate capital in the most efficient and productive way. Obviously reality may differ.

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

#336

Post by 323 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #308

323 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With our current technology it's impossible to make a flat frequency response speaker. It's possible for amps, mics, DACs, but not for speakers, unless you talk about million dollar facilities. So you need to pick from different non-flat speakers, which means listening test if you really care. You can't figure out which one you'll like just from looking at the frequency response graph.

Why is it not just picking the flattest response you can afford? Will a less flat response ever sound better than a more flat response?

Flatness is a curve, not a number. If you try to distill it into a number (by integrating the error for example), you can have two speakers with the same "flatness number" which cost about the same, yet sound very different.

This is not theoretical, I've experienced it - two professional speakers (or monitors as they are called) from different manufacturers, which cost the same and the frequency plots look the same to a human eye if you put them side to side, but sound very different.

Which is why it's preferable to listen them if you really care. But there are "safe" recommendations for every price range.

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

#337

Post by NoraCodes » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #135

NoraCodes wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How is profit any less 'productive' than any other expense?

Money that a business spends on salary, or on other products and services, continues to circulate in the economy; either the employees then spend a large portion of it on housing, food, etc, or the service providers use it to pay their employees, pay for their own services, etc.

Some profit is later spent on other things, but most of it goes is comparatively unproductive in the broader economy.

This is one reason that worker co-ops and employee profit sharing are so good for the economy; when profit is shared among workers, that profit is more likely to go back into the economy and circulate among other businesses and workers.

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

#338

Post by jasonwatkinspdx » Sun, Sep 25, 2022, 3:11 AM UTC

archi42 wrote: post #187

JohnBooty wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who want the ultimate TL;DR on Dr. Toole's book, it's something like this: Listeners prefer objectively accurate (ie, the input matches the output) audio reproduction, with some added emphasis on the bass frequencies. Because most of the sound we hear indoors is actually reflected, it is crucial that frequency response of the speakers remains constant as we move off axis. This might seem blindingly obvious,…

The alternative (or an engineering trade off!) can be doing the opposite: Only care for on-axis sound, and while at it put most of the energy on the axis to reduce energy of reflections. Drawback: Works best with one or at most two listeners, plus speakers and listener are constrained in their relative positions. Bad for the living room, not an issue in a study. The bundling is a matter of membrane diameter and frequ…

Late reply so I dunno if you'll notice this, but I think you'd enjoy reading about Keele's Constant Beamwidth Transducer line array design. He passed away some years ago, but archives of his website are around, and his AES papers are still there. The TL;DR is he adapted ideas from sonar beam forming to audio reproduction.