Vincenzo is the person who found irony in the “Twenty One” quiz show scandal. Everyone was worried about keeping the high ground for a program sponsored by GERITOL tonic for “tired blood.”
I sent the following item from GADGET LAB
to Vincenzo Kolchak:
—
Blu-ray Maker Re-Boxes $500 Player, Charges $3,500
* By Charlie Sorrel Email Author
* January 22, 2010
* 7:14 am
* Categories: Media Players
“Above you see two Blu-ray players. On the bottom is the Oppo BDP-83, a $500 machine. On top is the Lexicon BD-30, which will set you back $3,500. Can you spot the difference, apart from the price?
“It’s a trick question. There is no difference, at least not on the inside. In a daring matryoshka-like move, it appears that Lexicon simply bought a batch of Oppos and put them in new cases. Lest you think we are being picky here, or that Lexicon somehow took the guts of the Oppo and redesigned the surrounding circuitry, let us clarify. If you open up the $3,500 Lexicon, you will find an entire Oppo Blu-ray player inside, intact, with its original chassis.”
***
It must have struck a nerve. His response:
—
This is not uncommon — in the obsessive-compulsive universe of high end audio, price is more often than not the determining factor in a system’s ‘quality’ — that makes selling to such souls something like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s amusing to look at the cost of high end cabling — audio, power and speaker ‘cords’ that sell for the nearly the same prices by the foot as Tiffany gold necklaces. People, mostly all men, fork over the change for these ‘wires’ with great enthusiasm — and of course, they claim that they can ‘hear’ the difference between these astonishingly overpriced cables and just ordinary professional grade cabling. Since most of these men are middle aged, I really wonder if they have ever ‘heard’ of the conductive hearing loss that’s a natural part of aging.
I remember a cartoon by the darkly comic Rodriguez (himself an audio fan) of an audio store with older adults looking in the window bearing a sign that said something like: “Seniors, Why Pay for Frequency Response You Can’t Hear — Trade Down your Speakers and Save!”
It happens in cars too. BMW has always been candid about the differential in the costs in a family of similar engines was often more a matter of its relatively cheap engine control chipset, rather than the more expensive mechanical ‘differences’ between them. In the world of German cars, the price differentials are quite astonishing, although some of the audio systems around now cost enough to buy most of their owners a very nice German sedan. Ironically, the price of these fine sedans usually includes first-rate audio systems. Hmmmm . . . and you can use them to drive to audiophile stores too.
What baseball player said that cocaine habits were God’s way of telling you you made too much money — that bon mot could easily describe the world of high end audio. I would have thought that, in the degraded audio world of the iPod, earbuds and MP3, the market for high end audio has softened — but I doubt it — I think for fussy men of a certain age, it’s the closest thing they have to a quest for the Holy Grail or the Golden Fleece (appropriately named I think). Jason and the Argonauts depart on a journey to find the Platinum Crossover. I wonder if the Oracle spoke in stereo.
Sorry for the little rant — in the world of mavenhood, it’s always ‘opinion before fact.’ But, it’s always nice to know how close we still are to the medicine shows of the 19th century.
***