What has all this got to do with audio? Instead of the lugged steel Mercian, think about a vintage, push-pull 300B amplifier, equipped with NOS WE tubes and ceramic valve bases, point-to-point wired and littered with paper-in-oil caps and updated with Vishay bulk-foil resistors. Even on paper, we can assume that it won’t have the speed, transparency, resolution, bandwidth or load-tolerance of a modern solid-state design, but there’s also likely no escaping its musicality or the fact that it has its own performance attributes – attributes that all but the very best solid-state designs are sadly lacking.
These days, it’s hard to buy a semi-serious bicycle that doesn’t have electronic shifting and disc brakes. After all, it’s what all the pros ride! Except that the pros don’t have a choice: what the sponsor says pretty much goes. So the rest of us get stuck with disc brakes that are heavier than rim brakes and risk locking your wheels because the thing that actually controls your braking is the contact patch between the rubber and the road – and that hasn’t changed. Likewise, total failure of electronic shifting is a way too common occurrence – and it ain’t field fixable, unlike good old mechanical systems.
The point here is simple. Just because the market drives us in a particular direction; just because something is new or high-tech; just because everybody’s doing it, new isn’t necessarily better – especially if it distracts from or obscures previously hard won knowledge or experience. CD famously shot itself in the foot by marketing the ‘Pure Perfect Sound Forever’ mantra so effectively that the public assumed that CD – any CD – was de facto perfect and impossible to improve upon. Suddenly, a CD equipped ghetto-blaster was all you really needed, because it offered ‘Pure Perfect…’ CD replay. It’s just one example of an industry taken with tire-squealing enthusiasm and no consideration for consequences. We dumped tubes – only to rehabilitate them 20-years later. We dumped LPs – only to rehabilitate them 20-years later. We dumped CD/SACD only to discover that streaming wasn’t quite the magic carpet ride we were sold. Now we’re rehabilitating optical disc. In some cases its down to formats; in others it’s down to individual products. The Celestion SL6 killed the soft-dome tweeter almost over-night. The B&W Nautilus series just killed the music, with its chronically awkward drive characteristics, low efficiency and ham-fisted crossover designs.
Silver bullets and the power of fashion…
What do you do about a perfectly good speaker, like the excellent Rogers LS7, that is forced to sprout an entirely inappropriate and performance damaging, titanium dome tweeter just to warrant a second glance. Or the supposedly high-end DAC manufacturer who not only clung to op-amp output stages, refusing for years to implement a discrete design, but also insisted that you should connect their DACs directly to your power amp. Audio is rife with similar examples of companies following – or being forced to follow- fashion, or simply exhibiting chronic blind-spots, so focussed are they on their core technology.
