Re: [Leica] for sale as a result of our studio going digital

[Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>]

Here is an essay I wrote on what is essentially this topic in 1986

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A long time ago I read a short story, probably a children's story,
about a faraway land in which people competed by stacking blocks atop
one another. This was a national sport, and champions who could pile 40
blocks instead of 38 blocks were made into heros. Schoolchildren
collected pictures of the top players, and the most dextrous dreamed of
becoming competitive stackers some day.

Then one year a young boy started being able to beat the champions, and
by the time he was an adult he could stack 200 blocks. The next closest
competitor could only do perhaps 50. He won every contest. Very
quickly, People lost interest in the sport, and took up baseball
instead.

I think that something quite analogous to this is going on with digital
audio. There are many people whose hobby is outspending their friends
on audio equipment.  There are magazines and societies devoted to those
people. The fundamental premise of this competition is that it is
always possible to get better performance by spending more money, and
that there is a logarithmic curve. Each time you spend twice as much
money, you get a 20% improvement, and since perfection cannot be
achieved, there is no such thing as a perfect system.  Therefore there
will always be people interested in buying more.

The quest is everything. Remember Lancelot and the holy grail? His life
was devoted to the quest, not to the grail. If he'd found the stupid
grail he wouldn't have had any idea what to do with himself. He didn't
really want it, he wanted to look for it. I'm sure he subscribed to
"Absolute Questing" magazine rather than to "Family Grail".

Digital audio ruins the fun, because it eliminates the competition
gradient, and thereby eliminates the quest. It is no longer possible to
achieve a 20% improvement in sound quality by doubling your investment.
There remains a certain argument about whether it is possible to
achieve a 5% improvement in sound quality by spending 7 times as much
money, but the basic premise that you can get a demonstrably more
impressive system by spending twice as much money has gone away. The
competitors are reduced to arguing about whether or not there is a
rainbow, rather than to the nature of the pot of gold at its fabulous
end.

Not only does this eliminate the quest, it also eliminates the need for
questing magazines. Who needs to read a magazine about how to improve
the quality of a CD player when he already has one that is as good as
he can ever possibly afford without winning the lottery? The editors of
the golden-ear magazines certainly know this.

Amplifiers became boring a long time ago because you could spend $1000
and get one that was so perfect that your friends couldn't tell the
difference between it and a $5000 amplifier, and there's only so much
you can do with a $4000 front panel. Other high-technology consumer
goods reached this point a few generations ago. For example, it is no
longer necessary to choose a wristwatch according to how well it keeps
the time; you can choose one according to how well it matches your
shoes or how many diamonds are on the face. They all keep time
perfectly.

Tuners are limited by FM bandwidth restrictions, so the arena of the
quest was limited to components that didn't work very well, that had
electromechanical components: speakers, turntables, and tape decks.

Now turntables have been taken out of the running. That leaves speakers
and tape decks. Tape decks will succumb to the first good user-writable
digital audio medium, e.g. 8mm videotape PCM recorders. That leaves
speakers.

Gentlemen, start your loudspeakers.

	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA