8 ms·

There's no doubt that, for a lot of people, there is just a better convenience/quality trade-off. I had a good size Onkyo system for watching movies and I confi

There's no doubt that, for a lot of people, there is just a better convenience/quality trade-off. I had a good size Onkyo system for watching movies and I configured it meticulously. But it's hard to explain to others why there is so much ceremony and bulk, especially when watching habits degenerate from immersive movies to binge watching netflix serieses. Part of the experience with hobbies is some kind of sacrifice along with the reward. The drive towards convenience takes away that sacrifice and makes me appreciate something a little less. It's like takeout and boxed wine, wearing a T-shirt; versus dressing up a bit, making a nice meal, and opening a bottle from a winery you visited. The former is ovjectively good and convenient, and all of the latter ceremony is a hassle that provides little benefit (you probably can't tell the boxed wine apart in a blind test). But... aren't we happier with the latter experience? I'm too lazy to "waste" time on that kind of happiness though. That's the sad part. I think if I'm motivated by others it's different. For instance, stuff like surfing/snowsports requires a significant hassle, and it's a lot easier to find people who will put up with that hassle.

layer8 4y ago
I partly agree. Though once you do have a working setup and know which buttons to press, there isn’t a lot of inconvenience anymore, apart from being bound to the particular room. The problem for the industry is more that an important target group for them are A/V nerds who are never satisfied for long with their setup and are always looking for the next best thing to upgrade to, and which also serve as a multiplicator. And those are becoming fewer and fewer.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > Though once you do have a working setup and know which buttons to press, there isn‘t a lot of inconvenience anymore, apart from being bound the particular room. I was going to comment the same... I've got a quality stereo amp (bought used), great floorstanding loudspeakers, a little DAC. I set up everything once, making sure everything was correctly positioned. There's one input I use on the amp: the DAC. I typically hook a MacBook Air to the DAC. There's zero inconvenience. There's a volume button and that's it. No updates. No wifi. No "smart" anything. Only a totally dumb setup that simply works.
- rob74 4y ago
  That's the problem though - the people who treat "listening to music" as an activity of its own are getting fewer and fewer. I listen to a lot of music, but I mostly do it while commuting, while programming etc., not in the living room. I even have a good old stereo that's served me well for over 20 years now (Sony, not Onkyo), but it mostly only serves as better PC speakers nowadays. I still play a CD on it occasionally though...
  - leokennis 4y ago
    I think “listening to music as an activity” and “buying, tweaking and upgrading expensive audio setups” are two separate activities that often overlap but do not require each other. As an example, I fiercely enjoy sitting on my couch with my eyes closed listening to full albums of the White Stripes or Stars of the Lid or Boards of Canada or Sufjan Stevens on my AirPods Max, streamed via Bluetooth from my iPhone. Every audiophile would laugh in my face because of the poor hifi choices I’m making. But I’m damn sure I’m really attentively listening to the music.
    - christoph 4y ago
      It’s exactly this. “Audiophiles” are a weird bunch. Much of what they claim to hear is scientifically proven as total nonsense. Audio Science Review is a great place where they scientifically analyse audio equipment. The quality of speaker wire for all meaningful measurements is utterly irrelevant for instance. Realistically, as long as you are enjoying the art, how you are enjoying it should be irrelevant. I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie. The same with music, and inversely - a great song will still sound great and enjoyable on a really crappy car stereo.
      - itsoktocry 4y ago
        On one had, totally agree. The audiophile world is full of so much nonsense. On the other, a decent home theatre amplifier and set of speakers is going to blow away a sound bar. I think people who think "it all sounds the same" have never heard a really good stereo. I have an alright, but far from high end, stereo set up in a listening environment in my basement, and everyone I've ever listened to music with down there is blown away.
- chmod600 4y ago
  "Though once you do have a working setup ..." Yeah, I kept telling myself that, and it was true most of the time. But any time you need to add something (video game system brought by a friend, whatever), or some new tech comes along, it throws everything off. And sometimes you have to move, and it doesn't really work out as well in the new place. "And [AV nerds] are becoming fewer and fewer." Isn't that related to my point though? When convenient products get good enough to take the magic out of a hobby, where do the new recruits come from? A big driver for a hobby is being able to say (to yourself at least) that what you're doing is somehow better than what a layperson with a big wallet can do. That you're "the guy/gal" when it comes to this topic, perhaps surpassed by others who've also invested time. Thinking out loud... This is probably some kind of deep rooted social need for specialization/role in a tribe that gives a sense of importance. We have jobs, which are highly specialized, but nobody in our social circle really cares unless they have a very similar job.
colordrops 4y ago
The problem is that there is no choice. There are no good receivers that have modern UIs with sane defaults. They just hacked on wifi and phone apps that do a horrible job papering over the complexity. Sonos tried to fix this but their hardware is woefully inadequate for theater quality setups.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  Related, my Yamaha thinks that the most important status display it can have is that the input is, indeed, not mono. No mention of 5.1 etc, just "stereo".
christoph 4y ago
Weirdly in the last couple of weeks we’ve been clearing out our house and I found three(!) Onkyo home cinema amp boxes in the attic. I don’t own a single Onkyo amplifier anymore. Every single one got returned due to a serious fault (from suddenly producing no sound, to literal smoke coming out of it) within a year or 18 months, and typically swapped for another, slightly newer model Onkyo amp - rinse & repeat yearly. Their hardware from my experience was utter garbage. It had great features and UI, but literally went up in a puff of smoke on an annual basis. After three or four cycles I got fed up and changed to Yamaha. Unplugging a load of HDMI cables, speaker cables, re-running audio calibration, etc. is not something you enjoy repeating on an annual basis. I was always glad Richer Sounds (in the UK) have an unbelievably good returns policy. Even loaning me another amp FOC for a couple of months while Onkyo tried to repair one of them for me, before they gave up and just sent me a whole new higher end amp, free of charge. I’ve got two Yamaha amps, both at least 3+ years old which have never had a single fault. I’ve also got a Denon home cinema amp, just over two years old which has never had an issue. To be honest I’m surprised they were still in business, as it never seemed from home cinema forums that my story was that unique.
- movetheworld 4y ago
  And here I am: still using my first receiver ever, an Onkyo. It's still runs great after being in use for over twenty(!) years. My Philips CD player won't open the tray and my Aiwa Cassette deck won't play any cassette, but my Onkyo is still kicking. Maybe the models from the recent years don't have the quality as it used to be. By the way, I just checked the backplate and it's an Onkyo TX-9031 RDS receiver from 1993 - time just flies ...
  - christoph 4y ago
    Isn’t it lovely when you realise you have electronics that have lasted nearly three decades and are still useful? Onkyo were always well known for packing cutting edge features into home cinema amps. They always had way more features and codec support than anyone else. Nobody else came close for “bang for buck”, but they definitely had serious reliability issues. Thinking about it tonight, just having some slow spinning fans probably would have alleviated 90%+ of their issues. But I guess the “audiophiles” would have complained about that…
thaway2839 4y ago
I think this is increasingly true of us as a society. We have been consistently elevating "ease of use" over every other objective and/or subjective quality. We've reached the point where easier is better, even if it is objectively worse. We are all settling for local maximum that are significantly lower than several other maxima because apparently making the effort to move further along the x-axis is now almost considered the worst thing one can do.
- cseleborg 4y ago
  One might argue that our strive for convenience, especially around transportation and throwaway plastics, is about to ruin the whole planet.
- aembleton 4y ago
  > We've reached the point where easier is better, even if it is objectively worse. Maybe other peoples metrics place greater weighting on ease of use.
madengr 4y ago
FpUser 4y ago
>"when watching habits degenerate from immersive movies" Excellent movie does not have to be "immersive". I think your statement sounds rather snobbish.
- chmod600 4y ago
  I was talking about myself. My attention to anything I watch or listen to has degenerated. I believe it's related to the hyper-convenience of netflix and series with autoplay. I guess you can call that snobbish, as well as my comment about boxed wine. But if so, I guess I'm making a case for snobbery?
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
>It's like takeout and boxed wine, wearing a T-shirt; versus dressing up a bit, making a nice meal, and opening a bottle from a winery you visited. The former is ovjectively good and convenient, and all of the latter ceremony is a hassle that provides little benefit (you probably can't tell the boxed wine apart in a blind test). >But... aren't we happier with the latter experience? No?
- samplatt 4y ago
  "We" might not be, but I certainly am. Though I'm well entrenched in Camp Yamaha.
headsoup 4y ago
I think what should also be highlighted is not that we necessarily just prefer convenience, it's that we don't value effort and craftsmanship so much anymore because the 'cheap' systems produce 'good enough' products. Suits can be quality enough without being hand tailored. Home order meals are not the cardboard horrors of the past, they're ok enough to outweigh the effort of creating a meal from scratch, etc. I think it's terribly sad honestly. I think the major, major downside is the gradual migration to a complete lack of knowledge of how to make things, except for the centralised, large, automated product makers. We sacrifice our autonomy without realising it, while at the same time losing our ability to even discern and appreciate hand crafted skill and the value it provides.

layer8 4y ago

I partly agree. Though once you do have a working setup and know which buttons to press, there isn’t a lot of inconvenience anymore, apart from being bound to the particular room. The problem for the industry is more that an important target group for them are A/V nerds who are never satisfied for long with their setup and are always looking for the next best thing to upgrade to, and which also serve as a multiplicator. And those are becoming fewer and fewer.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Though once you do have a working setup and know which buttons to press, there isn‘t a lot of inconvenience anymore, apart from being bound the particular room. I was going to comment the same... I've got a quality stereo amp (bought used), great floorstanding loudspeakers, a little DAC. I set up everything once, making sure everything was correctly positioned. There's one input I use on the amp: the DAC. I typically hook a MacBook Air to the DAC. There's zero inconvenience. There's a volume button and that's it. No updates. No wifi. No "smart" anything. Only a totally dumb setup that simply works.
rob74 4y ago
That's the problem though - the people who treat "listening to music" as an activity of its own are getting fewer and fewer. I listen to a lot of music, but I mostly do it while commuting, while programming etc., not in the living room. I even have a good old stereo that's served me well for over 20 years now (Sony, not Onkyo), but it mostly only serves as better PC speakers nowadays. I still play a CD on it occasionally though...
- leokennis 4y ago
  I think “listening to music as an activity” and “buying, tweaking and upgrading expensive audio setups” are two separate activities that often overlap but do not require each other. As an example, I fiercely enjoy sitting on my couch with my eyes closed listening to full albums of the White Stripes or Stars of the Lid or Boards of Canada or Sufjan Stevens on my AirPods Max, streamed via Bluetooth from my iPhone. Every audiophile would laugh in my face because of the poor hifi choices I’m making. But I’m damn sure I’m really attentively listening to the music.
  - christoph 4y ago
    It’s exactly this. “Audiophiles” are a weird bunch. Much of what they claim to hear is scientifically proven as total nonsense. Audio Science Review is a great place where they scientifically analyse audio equipment. The quality of speaker wire for all meaningful measurements is utterly irrelevant for instance. Realistically, as long as you are enjoying the art, how you are enjoying it should be irrelevant. I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie. The same with music, and inversely - a great song will still sound great and enjoyable on a really crappy car stereo.
    - itsoktocry 4y ago
      On one had, totally agree. The audiophile world is full of so much nonsense. On the other, a decent home theatre amplifier and set of speakers is going to blow away a sound bar. I think people who think "it all sounds the same" have never heard a really good stereo. I have an alright, but far from high end, stereo set up in a listening environment in my basement, and everyone I've ever listened to music with down there is blown away.
chmod600 4y ago
"Though once you do have a working setup ..." Yeah, I kept telling myself that, and it was true most of the time. But any time you need to add something (video game system brought by a friend, whatever), or some new tech comes along, it throws everything off. And sometimes you have to move, and it doesn't really work out as well in the new place. "And [AV nerds] are becoming fewer and fewer." Isn't that related to my point though? When convenient products get good enough to take the magic out of a hobby, where do the new recruits come from? A big driver for a hobby is being able to say (to yourself at least) that what you're doing is somehow better than what a layperson with a big wallet can do. That you're "the guy/gal" when it comes to this topic, perhaps surpassed by others who've also invested time. Thinking out loud... This is probably some kind of deep rooted social need for specialization/role in a tribe that gives a sense of importance. We have jobs, which are highly specialized, but nobody in our social circle really cares unless they have a very similar job.

colordrops 4y ago

The problem is that there is no choice. There are no good receivers that have modern UIs with sane defaults. They just hacked on wifi and phone apps that do a horrible job papering over the complexity. Sonos tried to fix this but their hardware is woefully inadequate for theater quality setups.

yencabulator 4y ago
Related, my Yamaha thinks that the most important status display it can have is that the input is, indeed, not mono. No mention of 5.1 etc, just "stereo".

christoph 4y ago

Weirdly in the last couple of weeks we’ve been clearing out our house and I found three(!) Onkyo home cinema amp boxes in the attic. I don’t own a single Onkyo amplifier anymore. Every single one got returned due to a serious fault (from suddenly producing no sound, to literal smoke coming out of it) within a year or 18 months, and typically swapped for another, slightly newer model Onkyo amp - rinse & repeat yearly. Their hardware from my experience was utter garbage. It had great features and UI, but literally went up in a puff of smoke on an annual basis. After three or four cycles I got fed up and changed to Yamaha. Unplugging a load of HDMI cables, speaker cables, re-running audio calibration, etc. is not something you enjoy repeating on an annual basis. I was always glad Richer Sounds (in the UK) have an unbelievably good returns policy. Even loaning me another amp FOC for a couple of months while Onkyo tried to repair one of them for me, before they gave up and just sent me a whole new higher end amp, free of charge. I’ve got two Yamaha amps, both at least 3+ years old which have never had a single fault. I’ve also got a Denon home cinema amp, just over two years old which has never had an issue. To be honest I’m surprised they were still in business, as it never seemed from home cinema forums that my story was that unique.

movetheworld 4y ago
And here I am: still using my first receiver ever, an Onkyo. It's still runs great after being in use for over twenty(!) years. My Philips CD player won't open the tray and my Aiwa Cassette deck won't play any cassette, but my Onkyo is still kicking. Maybe the models from the recent years don't have the quality as it used to be. By the way, I just checked the backplate and it's an Onkyo TX-9031 RDS receiver from 1993 - time just flies ...
- christoph 4y ago
  Isn’t it lovely when you realise you have electronics that have lasted nearly three decades and are still useful? Onkyo were always well known for packing cutting edge features into home cinema amps. They always had way more features and codec support than anyone else. Nobody else came close for “bang for buck”, but they definitely had serious reliability issues. Thinking about it tonight, just having some slow spinning fans probably would have alleviated 90%+ of their issues. But I guess the “audiophiles” would have complained about that…

thaway2839 4y ago

I think this is increasingly true of us as a society. We have been consistently elevating "ease of use" over every other objective and/or subjective quality. We've reached the point where easier is better, even if it is objectively worse. We are all settling for local maximum that are significantly lower than several other maxima because apparently making the effort to move further along the x-axis is now almost considered the worst thing one can do.

cseleborg 4y ago
One might argue that our strive for convenience, especially around transportation and throwaway plastics, is about to ruin the whole planet.
aembleton 4y ago
> We've reached the point where easier is better, even if it is objectively worse. Maybe other peoples metrics place greater weighting on ease of use.

madengr 4y ago

FpUser 4y ago

>"when watching habits degenerate from immersive movies" Excellent movie does not have to be "immersive". I think your statement sounds rather snobbish.

chmod600 4y ago
I was talking about myself. My attention to anything I watch or listen to has degenerated. I believe it's related to the hyper-convenience of netflix and series with autoplay. I guess you can call that snobbish, as well as my comment about boxed wine. But if so, I guess I'm making a case for snobbery?

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

>It's like takeout and boxed wine, wearing a T-shirt; versus dressing up a bit, making a nice meal, and opening a bottle from a winery you visited. The former is ovjectively good and convenient, and all of the latter ceremony is a hassle that provides little benefit (you probably can't tell the boxed wine apart in a blind test). >But... aren't we happier with the latter experience? No?

samplatt 4y ago
"We" might not be, but I certainly am. Though I'm well entrenched in Camp Yamaha.

headsoup 4y ago

I think what should also be highlighted is not that we necessarily just prefer convenience, it's that we don't value effort and craftsmanship so much anymore because the 'cheap' systems produce 'good enough' products. Suits can be quality enough without being hand tailored. Home order meals are not the cardboard horrors of the past, they're ok enough to outweigh the effort of creating a meal from scratch, etc. I think it's terribly sad honestly. I think the major, major downside is the gradual migration to a complete lack of knowledge of how to make things, except for the centralised, large, automated product makers. We sacrifice our autonomy without realising it, while at the same time losing our ability to even discern and appreciate hand crafted skill and the value it provides.