IVAN BERGER E LE 7/06
(HFD
- Retailing Home Furnishings. February 7, 1983
All'ormai famoso (almeno per me) Consumer Electronics Show di gennaio 1983, a Las Vegas
all'hotel Riviera non è passato solo Doug Sax, nella saletta della ESB USA. Ecco un'altra prova di quanto in quell'occasione le "mie" 7/06 DSR possono avere "colpito al cuore" parecchie persone, anche fra le "ben navigate"...
CROSSTALK
by
Ivan Berger
Love at the Circus
WE
OF THE PRESS
may moan
about the extra work at the Consumer Electronics Show and rightly. But secretly,
we grin: We’re going to the circus.
Going
to the circus is only part of the American dream - it’s also running away with
the circus, and falling in love with a beautiful (or handsome) acrobat. I
couldn’t run away with this circus; CES goes into mothballs till June. But
I did fall in love, there. And thereby hangs a tale.
The
object of my new love is a speaker. Not that it matters here which speaker (it’s
by ESB; but at $3,000 a pair, it won’t be a mass seller),
What does matter is that it illustrates two parallel points, one that I’ve
been making for a few years, now, and one that I heard recently from Dr. Amar
Bose.
What
I’ve been saying is that if high fidelity had a theme song, it should be
“What I Did for Love.” What Dr. Bose says is that there is a level of sound
quality beyond which music becomes important to the listener even if that was
not so before.
What
I mean by “love,” is that no one (except audio professionals and musicians)
ever bought hi-fi out of real necessity. They buy from love of music, or love of
technology, or (as in my case) both. That actually makes the first sale easy,
because there is some love of music in nearly everyone. It may not come to much
(Lord knows there are radios and phonographs that sound no more like music
than a buzz-saw does), but it does come to something: nearly everyone has some
kind of sound machine these days.
But the subsequent sales come harder. When the customer already has something, it takes not just a touch of the new-and-improved but a positive jolt of it to make him take out his wallet and buy. It’s not enough to like the product; he must love it. The better the system he already has, the more the next jolt of loveworthy improvement will cost. It’s been years, in fact, since I’ve gotten it out of equipment that I could afford. If I get those speakers, its no sign I can afford them, but just a sign that one can sacrifice for love.
MY
CASE ONLY illustrates my own dictum, not Dr. Bose’s. Music already means a lot
to me. My illustration for that is a friend who went around the Riviera’s
sound suites with me - no audiophile, and not much of a music-lover, either.
Walking around the Riviera, though, listening only to good, clean (and
expensive) equipment, she found herself rnarvelling that she liked classical
music, at least then and there, though she had never liked it much before. The
music was something she could get on her FM or phonograph; but the sound was
totally different - above Dr. Bose’s threshold, and therefore, suddenly,
important to her.
This
squares, in a way, with my own test for great vs. merely good sound. When the
sound is good, I ask “What system is that?” But when it’s great I ignore
the system altogether, and ask for the name and number of the record. The
system, in other words, is “good enough’ as soon as we cease being conscious
of it, and listen through it, to hear only the music beyond.
That
rarely happens, of course. The more familiar we become with how a system sounds,
the more its warts and failings become noticeable. No man but a newlywed ever
had a perfect wife, content as he may be with the woman he’s married to. The
wife of the happily-long-married man is appreciated without having to be perfect,
and is all the more comfortable for that.
As
we become familiar with our sound systems, we learn to live with their
imperfections, too. The differences are there is no moral onus on the listener
who trades in a hi-ti system for a better one, and there is an entire industry
whose raison d’etre is getting him to do so.
That’s
part of our industry’s problem. Most of our market is with people who
already have something to listen to, and something that seems at least pretty
good to them, or is the best they can bring themselves to afford. The only way
to make them move out of that to something better is to make them fall in
love. The commitment really isn’t to hardware (except for techno-freaks, who
form a small if hard-spending portion of our audience) but to art, to the music
coming out of the eqthpment. And appreciating art is a matter of applying
knowledge and Intelligence to love.
Ivan Berger is technical editor of Audio magazine.
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