As our company grows, and becomes talked about more, I am brought back to remember how I started and what motivated me to bring my product to market.
These days we're trying pretty hard to get our message out, and I'd like to think we are doing an okay job at that, but the reality is we haven't been telling a message publicly loud and clear for way too long. So, what is our message? Well, that's why I titled this thread "Fighting for consumers." For the first 10 or 15 years of being an audiophile I struggled to know really anything at all about audio. I missed the fact that it was an electronic device just like a computer, and either you knew how they operated or you didn't.
I bought parts for mine on a regular basis. For me it was a true addiction. One of those types of addictions that you put before everything else. I so desperately wanted to know how things worked. I find myself in my advertising, this blog, and everywhere else, hoping to communicate to people, and show them, and tell them, what I ended up finally learning. What did I learn? Well, audio does come at a price, it is just not the price that i thought it would be. It is not monetary, you can't buy it.
The only way that you can truly get to know how audio works is to learn the science behind how the machines themselves operate. If an electric motor is a machine, then so is your amplifier. They are too closely related of brothers to not fall into the same category. In fact, your audio system is not so unlike your microwave, your coffee pot, your computer... you get it, electronics.
For six years I have been answering questions and the question I think I get most often is "What would sound best?" I think it sums up what everybody really wants, well, let me share just a small story with you, I'll keep it brief. I recently set together a system, maybe not so recent, it's been gone for about a year now, but this system was something that you couldn't buy. I mean it wasn't about the fact that nobody has enough money it's just there was only one like this.
It had been taken from the very best equipment that I could find and everything was torn down and rebuilt using everything that I had come to know for high end upgraded caps, to technologies like dynamics filtering and our speed of light built right inside.
It represented hundreds and hundreds of hours of my personal man hours of labor, and I would guess close to 300,000 dollars of cash investment, and I realize that that was all "at cost". I say one night after getting to the point that I knew what to do well enough that I could get up anytime that I wanted to and make my audio system significantly better with a few minutes, usually with a soldering iron in hand and a couple of inventions that I learned that I could rely on. My amps at this point were a special design, one only, and the circuit was from Steve Keiser. Each amp was fed by a farad of capacitance. I had custom built stands for my speakers and every driver was customized by myself. Machine shop time stopped being calculated pretty soon after I started, and I seemed to live there for a while. With all of this time and all of this investment here's the one thing that I have learned. It will always get better.
I mean that. You cannot hit utopia.
If you think you have, and you don't believe what I'm saying contact me and with a few minutes and soldering iron, I will ruin it for you. So why is there no pinnacle? Well, because gents, ladies, it's a moving bar. Recently, I have been trying pretty hard to explain some fairly basic stuff. I remember one conversation with a very intelligent and kind I person who was almost hurt as I started to explain the basics. He had an engineering background, and in part, I think a little distraught that a guy like myself, with no secondary education or real electronics background could provide such explanations and experimentations that he could do for himself that challenged what he had been taught to believe.
It was almost a "Who are you to be challenging me?" type of feel. I would explain how something worked , like how no two conductors would be the same , and then he would argue that they could be, so we broke it down, and we looked at the likelihood of "could they be?" and the answer from he, himself was , no, I guess not. If no two particles are the same, then no two conductors can be the same. He went from believing as an educated person that they had to be, to knowing, from simple understanding, that they couldn't be.
See, my problem is, I want to help consumers, but even the most basic or arguments that should be so easily won, to help consumers understand better, are taking such a tremendous fight. I have been asked, "why don't we do more testing?" and, we are, but I guess this is the point, isn't it? For the basic design of a conductor, what makes it special, and what cables really do, we seem to have no collective clue, as an industry.
What I have seen, learned, and come to understand that, just like I had to go through it, the only hope I have of helping you, as a consumer, is to encourage you, hope for you, help you, do the best you can to understand what it is you are buying, how and why it works, and how much impact it will make on your system for the amount of dollars you have to put towards it. My hope is that prestige in High-End audio shifts from what is most expensive to what can be explained by simple, easy to understand science the best.
It's not to say that cool inventions should be excluded, even if they are not easy to explain, but without the basics most audiophiles will never assemble a system like the one they dream of having.
