When someone spends money on something in a silly way, do you consider them to be an idiot? Would you make the same statement about someone who spends 200$ on a bottle of scotch versus buying a 35$ bottle?
Let the 'idiots' spend their money driving an industry that is combining the creation of electronics with functional art. I'm not sad to see a $40,000 DAC. I don't have to buy it, and it's cool to know someone built something of silly 'value'.
For example, look at this thing: https://www.naimaudio.com/statement It's absolutely silly, and the cost is outrageous. I'm happy that they built it though. It was actually built as part of the acquisition that Focal made of Naim. It seems that they allowed the engineers at Naim to go nuts once the company was acquired.
I like seeing silly things that people build. It doesn't make me sad that someone spends thousands on ridiculous items that from an engineering perspective don't make a difference.
You are mixing two things.
There is a difference between Intel charging you >$1K for a CPU that is 5% faster (in games) than overclocked $300 one versus scammer selling magical power cables (made by gypsy virgins in Romanian monastery on top of the highest mountain, in full moon) to some rich retards.
$40,000 DAC? someone really went ahead and fabbed their own silicon (~$1mil for low volume run)? or did they maybe picked up $100 (at most) part, put it in a shiny box and started looking for suckers?
Do you even realize what $40K gets you? we are talking military grade Agile^^key'hole/RohdeShwartz multi gigahertz arbitrary waveform generators here, not some pityfull audio stuff.
HP was known for building generally good test equipment, including arbitrary waveform generators. Op is humorously referring to the fact that the test and measurement division was spun off first as Agilent, then Keysight (seriously?), and probably something else by tomorrow (marketing is furiously brainstorming new meaningless names. They only need to merge with Danaheer and rename themselves Flukeronix for the circle of life to be complete.
It's one thing when you plop down a ton of cash for something where you embrace the "silliness" or whatever makes it special (e.g. buying exotic cars with monstruous engines to drive them into traffic). It's another, however, believing something is objectively "better" because it cost more; e.g. spending money on Monster Cables thinking you can hear a difference.
In audio, you have people who love vinyl because they enjoy the distortion it makes, and that's perfectly fine; but you have others who somehow believe it sounds closer to the original, which is demonstrably ridiculous.
I completely get that as I personally prefer to collect Old Stock vacuum tubes for my listening purposes (http://imgur.com/a/INXVX). I just think folks should be left to their own devices to enjoy an avocation as they please.
Trying to defend something through completely subjective argument is silly, I've a hard time discussing 'objectively better' technology with audiophole folks, but if someone said 'I like this more' I really can't hope to debunk that through any sort of mathematical characterization of performance.
>I just think folks should be left to their own devices to enjoy an avocation as they please.
Only if they shut up and never tell other people that should be listening at 24/192. However, the people being complained about here spout nonsense like that all of the time.
I think you find you have it backwards. I don't hear anyone here telling you that you should be listening at 24/192. Go look at all the comments and count them up. All I hear is people saying that you should be listening at 16/44, because it sounds exactly the same, or even sounds better, and if you think otherwise you're obviously an idiot, stupid, audiophool who spends $5000 on a power cable.
I sure know who I think should shut up. It's all those arm-chair-experts who don't even own any decent hifi gear. Why would they? It's all crap and my second hand ipod headphones beat it all hands down anyway. Right?
If you enjoy music (who doesnt) and are bending toward learning electronics I highly recommend projects like Twisted Pear kits and build yourself a DAC.
http://www.twistedpearaudio.com/landing.aspx
The other fun stuff is building your own Speaker kits, hook all this up with a Pi Music Box and you have yourself a kind of home made Sonos.
http://www.woutervanwijk.nl/pimusicbox/
I would make the argument that if some of the silliness was stated for what it was, gullible rich people would spend their money on something equally frivolous that did more to drive innovation
Let the 'idiots' spend their money driving an industry that is combining the creation of electronics with functional art. I'm not sad to see a $40,000 DAC. I don't have to buy it, and it's cool to know someone built something of silly 'value'.
For example, look at this thing: https://www.naimaudio.com/statement It's absolutely silly, and the cost is outrageous. I'm happy that they built it though. It was actually built as part of the acquisition that Focal made of Naim. It seems that they allowed the engineers at Naim to go nuts once the company was acquired.
I like seeing silly things that people build. It doesn't make me sad that someone spends thousands on ridiculous items that from an engineering perspective don't make a difference.