The Narrow Minded Age!

[gns]

The Narrow Minded Age!

Some of the comments I read are indicative of what I term "a narrow minded age"

Mankind is much more sexually aware and more aware in a number of other things but when it comes to high fidelity audio it seems caught in some form of secretive pagan ritual.

"We" seem so easily receptive to the "sound-bite" needing no other proof, "we" instantly believe. And we usually instantly believe in complete trash.

What about the number of headphone amp fans who believe that an amps quality hinges solely or mainly on its active devices performance? (valves, op-amps, transistors, FETs) Don't tell me they don't cos I'm drowning in their "intelectual codswallop".

They ought to try reading this section of an Analog Devices handbook. However, as it isn't neatly summed-up in a simpletons sound bite, they will probably see it as engineering bullsh*t, prefering their regular daily portion of make believe!

Back in the 1960's/1970's most everyday folk knew more about electronics than people do today - for example, most people could successfully use a record player! Not so these days! They could do this because they had a greater attention span than today's supermen and superwomen. They were capable of reading and understanding quite a few pages of non-fictional text. Thanks to TV, Radio and the printed media, today's people seem to me to have the attention span of an amoeba.

Ah well, happy but poor.....

[Deleted]

Graham
I think some of the blame for "The Narrow Minded Age", at least as far as some people's perception of "Engineering Bullshiit"in sound reproduction, must go back to many of those Sony and Philips engineers who claimed that CD was perfect, despite bandwidth limitations, and using "Brickwall" filters etc. All they saw was a perfect stream of 1s and 0s. Jitter wasn't even achknowledged. It is still far from perfect almost 30 years later, although the higher resolution formats are much better. However they have been almost made irrelevant by the inability of the engineering departments of major manufactures to produce playback machines that did the formats justice. Many people would be hard pressed to notice the difference between CD, and SACD/DVD-A on a typical mass production machine. Luckily, we have a few talented engineers around that use good design to get their products into an area of excellence, where they can then fine tune them using the test instruments that God gave them, and their many years of experience to refine the product, so that it also came close to replicating the performance of real music. Anyway, their failure helps GSP Audio's Phono preamps to not only survive, but lead the pack.

Alex

P.S. Thank God for more enlightened engineers like Bob Pease,John Linsley Hood, and Walt Jung. Also Douglas Self, who could be so much more, if he only used his ears more, in conjunction with his test instruments !

[canjunkie]

Even more worrying is the tendency to educate the next generation in a manner that panders to the 'sound' bite. What is touted as scientific fact beggars belief. Our syllabuses for up to 16 year olds appear devoid of any attempt to teach any true understanding of a subject - maths and sciences being particularly bad in this regard.

Hence I meet students with GCSE's in electronics who can boor you silly in logic gates but barely understand how basic components function, let alone interact with each other in desirable and undesirable ways.

What really irritates me is when you do explain this stuff the kids are absolutely fascinated and often tell me that the stuff I show them was what they were hoping to learn about anyway

I think it was Wilde who said 'A smattering of knowledge is a dangerous thing!". Boy are we finding out how