

Blu-ray Maker Re-Boxes $500 Player, Charges $3,500 - ilamont
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/blu-ray-maker-re-boxes-500-player-charges-3500/

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jacquesm
I think that is an excellent proof of the maxim that to create value you don't
have to be better you have to appear to be delivering value.

Sports cars, diamonds and lots of other 'conspicuous consumption' items fall
in this category.

Sometimes when you raise the price of an item the sales will go up.

Perception is almost as important as utility.

For high-fi gear you are looking at a mix of both.

Most people do not have the ears (most people over the age of 12, sorry) to
tell an MP3 from a playback directly from the master.

But they'll be able to tell if it doesn't work at all. Most of the time. So
some utility is a minimum, above that it is mostly perception. And I'll bet
you that if you put the two of them side by side in a 'double blind' test but
told the listeners which one cost $3500 that the majority of the people would
find a reason why that one sounded better.

Gold plated RCA connectors anybody ?

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potatolicious
I don't have a link handy, but there was that one audio gear review site that
invited a bunch of self-proclaimed audiophiles to blind-test several cables.

They picked the coat hanger.

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InclinedPlane
That's not surprising, as a wire coat hanger is very thick, and thus has lower
resistance than most speaker wire. In a related vein, instead of buying
expensive speaker wire, buy 16 gauge, 2 conductor (16/2) extension cord wire
for about 1/3 the cost.

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HeyLaughingBoy
But a coat hanger is made of steel which has much higher resistance than
copper that is the standard for most wiring. The wire gage used for coat
hangers is about the same that I use for speaker wiring, so using steel will
definitely result in higher resistance.

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jacquesm
Yep. And the upshot of this listening test is that even that doesn't matter at
all. It just means that your amp will have to work a little harder and you get
some electricity converted to heat. But the sound quality has very little to
do with the resistance of the wire.

Capacitance and induction are a different issue, but don't tell that to the
people with 'golden' ears or they'll go crazy.

Those two definitely affect the 'high' end of the spectrum, around, oh, 500
KHz or something. Which of course everybody can hear clearly.

</sarcasm>

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gamble
I thought this was pretty amusing, but it's not much of a surprise. High-end
audio gear is mostly a marketing business. It doesn't make much financial
sense for these companies to do their own hardware engineering when they can
license it and save their money for buying good reviews in audiophile mags.
Their only mistake in this case is that they didn't claim to cryogenically
treat the faceplate or something, to give audiophiles a reason to claim it has
superior video quality. =)

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kqr2
It happens with other things too, e.g. expensive chocolate.

This is a great investigation about the actual origins of a high end
chocolate.

[http://www.dallasfood.org/modules.php?name=News&file=art...](http://www.dallasfood.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=78)

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ZeroGravitas
I was going to post that too, a really good read.

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kqr2
There's another thread which has a relevant link about veblen goods:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075994>

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robryan
This is why I pretty much always go for the cheapest brands. Electronics get
replaced so often that it's not the end of the world if your Chinese import
bluray player turns out to be sub standard.

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jamesbritt
What gets me about sub-standard equipment is not so much that they can't do
basically the same thing as more pricier stuff (though sometimes that is
true), it's the little annoyances that, over time, make me want to chuck shit
into the garbage.

For example, an MP3 player has only a few core behaviors. But it gets tiresome
if boot time is slow, or it freezes at boo every 20th time, or the screen is
hard to read, or there's a pop or click in between every track, or you can't
resume playing where you left off, and so on.

Often what makes take a long time in picking what brand of device to buy isn't
so much the core qualities but what feature set versus known flaws will make
me happiest over some period of time.

