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<!-- #thumb --> <p>Paul McGowan, a man far more courageous than he appears to be to the casual observer, is an original thinker too. Though he’s far too modest to admit to his historical contributions to this science, Paul asked this scribe to put in a few kind words for his unbiased blogs on matters hi-end.</p>
<p>Just like the man who was pushed out of the aircraft for his first freefalling experience, holding my nose with one hand and my stomach with the other, I jumped at the opportunity.</p>
<p>What the HELL, I asked myself, am I getting into again after an almost two decades-long absence from this hobby? At least the public and published aspect of it. Look, it took me a long time to make as many enemies as I have among the audiophile community. Don’t think for a moment it was an easy task! Trust me: it not only takes what it might take to get one into Carnegie Hall (practice, practice, practice) to get as many people to hate one as I have, but an extraordinary talent to provocate, agitate, and disturb.</p>
<p>Insofar as regarding what I do professionally, it is this:</p>
<blockquote readability="13"><p>I turn the tables upside down in the middle of the banquet at the most inopportune moment. As the knights draw their swords, maces and lances and rise to take on my challenge, I slaughter each and every one along with the dragons on which they flew in. I don’t tolerate BS lightly. The world of audio which I am about to take head on, is so full of BS, that if all the world’s audio BS were loaded onto a single continent, the entire land mass would sink into the oceans.</p></blockquote>
<p>Accordingly, you can expect oncoming and ongoing BS to be revealed henceforth in all its odorous purity. Expect to be outraged yourselves, and informed as well, as all your audio gods and myths will surely be buried alive right into the mountain of BS they had themselves created. All in time, of course, not at once. Now relax and take a walk into a world where everything is so…</p>
<p>…unless it isn’t.</p>
<h3>NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS</h3>
<p>As in all matters audiophoolish, we see the world from inside our “head rooms. “No matter how we try to divorce ourselves from our heads, our heads rule what we “feel.” What we feel is what we think. What we think (we tend to believe) is what is. What is, is NOT, the meaning of “is.”</p>
<p>What is…</p>
<p>…is.</p>
<p>A meaning is a context around which we wrap terminology and ideas. What IS, is an objective, measurable and quantifiable reality. The bad news everyone: just about everything is measurable and what is measurable is not arguable. Measurable, not necessarily with today’s science, but certainly with tomorrow’s. Incidentally, opinion has nothing to do with what is. Opinion only has to do with what one wants to believe.</p>
<p>As one well-known and despised philosopher – to remain unnamed here – wrote: There are two kinds of knowledge: That which we know; and that which we will discover. She is despised in academe because her words cannot be disproved, and her opponent’s words have been. You see, they will argue about what is not so, a third kind of knowledge.</p>
<p>What exists in our head rooms are those things which we think we know or create.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for all of us, objective facts and knowledge exist outside of our head rooms.</p>
<p>The distance between that which we actually know and that which we will discover may be far more than the distance between that we think we hear and what we ADMIT to hearing.</p>
<p>What we admit to hearing, as in our biases rule all, is not what we actually hear…it is rather, what we want others to believe we hear. And there you have the digital-analog, tube and transistor debate in a nutshell.</p>
<p>From what we admit to hearing illustrates not much about our likes and dislikes, but rather, our agendas: the protecting of the investments, intellectual, emotional, and financial that we had made in our belief systems and in what we are selling to others at the moment.</p>
<h3>ALL THINGS ARE COMMODITIZED</h3>
<p>Business is not the enemy of the people. The people are the enemy of business.</p>
<p>The natural flow of capital into productive enterprise is promptly re-diverted when one enterprise competes successfully against another, mostly because one is more innovative than the other. It is innovation that drives the flow of capital to higher returns on and of the capital. And when larger, better-capitalized enterprise competes against the smaller one.</p>
<p>It is no accident that certain technologies have become the province of the large mega corporations. Smaller firms cannot compete against the power of unrestricted capital inflow. Accordingly, no small companies appear on the map in the manufacture of panel TVs and heavy earth-moving equipment. However, small, innovative companies had discovered and developed vital component parts of what makes today’s high definition TVs possible at lower and lower cost. Relatively small companies and a few brilliant inventors play a significant role in microprocessor and conversion technologies.</p>
<p>What separates the small companies’ capacity to perform in the big leagues is, for them at least, the unavailability of capital to fund R&D and to buy large quantities of supplies at lower prices; to compete in the marketplace with lower priced products their competitors can sell in large volume lots. Even if a smaller firm were able to compete along qualitative lines – making a better product of whatever kind – it could not compete pricewise with the mass-produced spread.</p>
<p>A good example is SEIKO against Patek Phillipe. Audio Research against Panasonic. Ferrari against GM. LEICA against Canon. *The high quality hand-made product cannot compete, yet because it is higher quality and better made, and “special.” there is and will be a market for it. It is the higher quality, higher performance product that brings special joy to the user.</p>
<p>When panel TVs were first introduced their cost were the video equivalent of *ultra-high-end audio. An early state-of-the-art RUNCO video scaler for projection TVs cost $45,000 if I recall correctly; RUNCO, VIDIKRON and other projectors reached easily into the twenties.* These kind of dollars of a decade ago…meaning dollars that were worth significantly more than they are today, would likely translate to $100,000 or more for an entire system.</p>
<p>A decade and half ago the referenced $20,000 panel TV was 42 inches diagonal at best.</p>
<p>Today’s panel TVs can be made far larger, perform far better, brighter, clearer, slimmer and lighter than the aforementioned at LESS than one tenth the retail cost. I won’t go into the many innovations that video technology had realized over the last decade, but they are astounding; and they are remarkable <i>because</i> of the R&D large amounts of capital purchased for the mega corporations – against which small firms could never compete. We ought to remember though that the early technological breakthroughs were accomplished by relatively small and underfunded enterprise.</p>
<p>The purpose of the mega corporations, in fact, any business, is to make money for their stockholders, principals and workers. In that order. Their purpose is to part you from the contents of your wallets; and your purpose is to better understand the principles of value before you and the contents of your wallet separate.</p>
<blockquote readability="18"><p>The mega corporations and one domestic audio corporation, namely BOSE, own the market that is commoditizing everything they manufacture, because what they make happens to be designed, assembled, packaged and transported in large containers by robots that human hands barely touch, at very low cost, and on a mass scale, with reasonable, sometimes enviable margins to keep the process ongoing to the next phase, at which time the process begins again.</p></blockquote>
<p>What the small high end audio firms do on the other hand is to provide the icing on the cake out of which they take a relatively small cut. However, and this is the key, the small firms double, even triple, the amount of enjoyment the consumer gets from his buying the cake.</p>
<p>The sound of the Home Theater Experience (or the music listening experience) can enlarge the video experience to gargantuan proportions, just as IMAX enlarges the home TV experience. It is possible today to obtain 80-90% of the enjoyment at home one might get on a date at the film house – regrettably <i>sans</i> the sex of course. And the cab fare.</p>
<p>It is all made possible because of the small, specialty manufacturer, whose unique and admirable products bring the fantasy of film to a reality in the heart…for a moment. At home.</p>
<p>You are drifting in outer space, hermetically sealed into your space suit, frightened, trembling, wet and cold inside, as the earth is receding behind you; as you are moving away from orbit…the cord that held you tethered to your spacecraft had just ripped apart…and the only thing you hear, VERY LOUDLY, Ba-Bam, Ba-Bam, <b>Ba-Bam</b>!, is your own heartbeat.</p>
<p>The heartbeat that, at this point in time, represents the entire meaning of “is.”</p>
<p>…to be continued….</p>
<p>-* Andrew G. Benjamin (AGB) *©**** All Rights Reserved</p>
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[Source: http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/seeking-good-hitmen/11410/]
<p>Just like the man who was pushed out of the aircraft for his first freefalling experience, holding my nose with one hand and my stomach with the other, I jumped at the opportunity.</p>
<p>What the HELL, I asked myself, am I getting into again after an almost two decades-long absence from this hobby? At least the public and published aspect of it. Look, it took me a long time to make as many enemies as I have among the audiophile community. Don’t think for a moment it was an easy task! Trust me: it not only takes what it might take to get one into Carnegie Hall (practice, practice, practice) to get as many people to hate one as I have, but an extraordinary talent to provocate, agitate, and disturb.</p>
<p>Insofar as regarding what I do professionally, it is this:</p>
<blockquote readability="13"><p>I turn the tables upside down in the middle of the banquet at the most inopportune moment. As the knights draw their swords, maces and lances and rise to take on my challenge, I slaughter each and every one along with the dragons on which they flew in. I don’t tolerate BS lightly. The world of audio which I am about to take head on, is so full of BS, that if all the world’s audio BS were loaded onto a single continent, the entire land mass would sink into the oceans.</p></blockquote>
<p>Accordingly, you can expect oncoming and ongoing BS to be revealed henceforth in all its odorous purity. Expect to be outraged yourselves, and informed as well, as all your audio gods and myths will surely be buried alive right into the mountain of BS they had themselves created. All in time, of course, not at once. Now relax and take a walk into a world where everything is so…</p>
<p>…unless it isn’t.</p>
<h3>NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS</h3>
<p>As in all matters audiophoolish, we see the world from inside our “head rooms. “No matter how we try to divorce ourselves from our heads, our heads rule what we “feel.” What we feel is what we think. What we think (we tend to believe) is what is. What is, is NOT, the meaning of “is.”</p>
<p>What is…</p>
<p>…is.</p>
<p>A meaning is a context around which we wrap terminology and ideas. What IS, is an objective, measurable and quantifiable reality. The bad news everyone: just about everything is measurable and what is measurable is not arguable. Measurable, not necessarily with today’s science, but certainly with tomorrow’s. Incidentally, opinion has nothing to do with what is. Opinion only has to do with what one wants to believe.</p>
<p>As one well-known and despised philosopher – to remain unnamed here – wrote: There are two kinds of knowledge: That which we know; and that which we will discover. She is despised in academe because her words cannot be disproved, and her opponent’s words have been. You see, they will argue about what is not so, a third kind of knowledge.</p>
<p>What exists in our head rooms are those things which we think we know or create.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for all of us, objective facts and knowledge exist outside of our head rooms.</p>
<p>The distance between that which we actually know and that which we will discover may be far more than the distance between that we think we hear and what we ADMIT to hearing.</p>
<p>What we admit to hearing, as in our biases rule all, is not what we actually hear…it is rather, what we want others to believe we hear. And there you have the digital-analog, tube and transistor debate in a nutshell.</p>
<p>From what we admit to hearing illustrates not much about our likes and dislikes, but rather, our agendas: the protecting of the investments, intellectual, emotional, and financial that we had made in our belief systems and in what we are selling to others at the moment.</p>
<h3>ALL THINGS ARE COMMODITIZED</h3>
<p>Business is not the enemy of the people. The people are the enemy of business.</p>
<p>The natural flow of capital into productive enterprise is promptly re-diverted when one enterprise competes successfully against another, mostly because one is more innovative than the other. It is innovation that drives the flow of capital to higher returns on and of the capital. And when larger, better-capitalized enterprise competes against the smaller one.</p>
<p>It is no accident that certain technologies have become the province of the large mega corporations. Smaller firms cannot compete against the power of unrestricted capital inflow. Accordingly, no small companies appear on the map in the manufacture of panel TVs and heavy earth-moving equipment. However, small, innovative companies had discovered and developed vital component parts of what makes today’s high definition TVs possible at lower and lower cost. Relatively small companies and a few brilliant inventors play a significant role in microprocessor and conversion technologies.</p>
<p>What separates the small companies’ capacity to perform in the big leagues is, for them at least, the unavailability of capital to fund R&D and to buy large quantities of supplies at lower prices; to compete in the marketplace with lower priced products their competitors can sell in large volume lots. Even if a smaller firm were able to compete along qualitative lines – making a better product of whatever kind – it could not compete pricewise with the mass-produced spread.</p>
<p>A good example is SEIKO against Patek Phillipe. Audio Research against Panasonic. Ferrari against GM. LEICA against Canon. *The high quality hand-made product cannot compete, yet because it is higher quality and better made, and “special.” there is and will be a market for it. It is the higher quality, higher performance product that brings special joy to the user.</p>
<p>When panel TVs were first introduced their cost were the video equivalent of *ultra-high-end audio. An early state-of-the-art RUNCO video scaler for projection TVs cost $45,000 if I recall correctly; RUNCO, VIDIKRON and other projectors reached easily into the twenties.* These kind of dollars of a decade ago…meaning dollars that were worth significantly more than they are today, would likely translate to $100,000 or more for an entire system.</p>
<p>A decade and half ago the referenced $20,000 panel TV was 42 inches diagonal at best.</p>
<p>Today’s panel TVs can be made far larger, perform far better, brighter, clearer, slimmer and lighter than the aforementioned at LESS than one tenth the retail cost. I won’t go into the many innovations that video technology had realized over the last decade, but they are astounding; and they are remarkable <i>because</i> of the R&D large amounts of capital purchased for the mega corporations – against which small firms could never compete. We ought to remember though that the early technological breakthroughs were accomplished by relatively small and underfunded enterprise.</p>
<p>The purpose of the mega corporations, in fact, any business, is to make money for their stockholders, principals and workers. In that order. Their purpose is to part you from the contents of your wallets; and your purpose is to better understand the principles of value before you and the contents of your wallet separate.</p>
<blockquote readability="18"><p>The mega corporations and one domestic audio corporation, namely BOSE, own the market that is commoditizing everything they manufacture, because what they make happens to be designed, assembled, packaged and transported in large containers by robots that human hands barely touch, at very low cost, and on a mass scale, with reasonable, sometimes enviable margins to keep the process ongoing to the next phase, at which time the process begins again.</p></blockquote>
<p>What the small high end audio firms do on the other hand is to provide the icing on the cake out of which they take a relatively small cut. However, and this is the key, the small firms double, even triple, the amount of enjoyment the consumer gets from his buying the cake.</p>
<p>The sound of the Home Theater Experience (or the music listening experience) can enlarge the video experience to gargantuan proportions, just as IMAX enlarges the home TV experience. It is possible today to obtain 80-90% of the enjoyment at home one might get on a date at the film house – regrettably <i>sans</i> the sex of course. And the cab fare.</p>
<p>It is all made possible because of the small, specialty manufacturer, whose unique and admirable products bring the fantasy of film to a reality in the heart…for a moment. At home.</p>
<p>You are drifting in outer space, hermetically sealed into your space suit, frightened, trembling, wet and cold inside, as the earth is receding behind you; as you are moving away from orbit…the cord that held you tethered to your spacecraft had just ripped apart…and the only thing you hear, VERY LOUDLY, Ba-Bam, Ba-Bam, <b>Ba-Bam</b>!, is your own heartbeat.</p>
<p>The heartbeat that, at this point in time, represents the entire meaning of “is.”</p>
<p>…to be continued….</p>
<p>-* Andrew G. Benjamin (AGB) *©**** All Rights Reserved</p>
<center><a href="http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/seeking-good-hitmen/11410/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow"><img class="WP-EmailIcon" src="http://www.pstracks.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-email/images/email.gif" alt="email Seeking a few good hitmen" title="Seeking a few good hitmen" /></a>*<a href="http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/seeking-good-hitmen/11410/emailpopup/" onclick="email_popup(this.href); return false;" title="Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers" rel="nofollow">Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers</a></center><br /><!-- // MAILCHIMP SUBSCRIBE CODE --><center><a href="http://eepurl.com/eSzBY">Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here </a></center>
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[Source: http://www.pstracks.com/opinions/seeking-good-hitmen/11410/]