I've eaten at many restaurants and for this post I'll focus in Indian ones because I know these best. In some I'm confronted by what seems to be hundreds of options and in others somewhat fewer. I'm working on impressions here; I have no inclination to count the options!
In my experience the more choices on a menu the less satisfying the food will be. This isn’t always the case, but more often that not it is. The point being that I find this to be true with high-end audio companies. Those that seem to have everything for everyone tend to turn out fairly mediocre products.
This was described as: "A classic case of manufacturers trying to fill holes in the marketplace with products that meet a certain standard but aren’t exceptional. It’s become more apparent in a tough economy."
So what do they care about behind the carefully crated press releases courtesy of the expensive image builders? Are they (a) building products for the marketplace or (b) building products for the people that want to use them. Merely semantics Howard you might say. Not so though.
It isn’t just me than can tell when a product exists because it’s extraordinary and when it’s just there to meet a need. Anyone with an appreciation of proper music can do this. Oddly many chose not to. Could it be that it’s just too tedious to ferret out the extraordinary from the mundane? Probably. For me personally though I believe it’s worth the effort;.
When makers focus on building products thay they want to own and then find a group of like-minded people to sell them to, the world’s a better place. And yes, it happens. However unless I'm being blinkered, and indeed I'm open to that possibly, it happens too infrequently.
So I ask myself; are the makers that focus on building products they want to own doomed to oblivion?
