The sweatshirt put you over the top. Definitely biased.
Every fanbase has a certain amount of zealousness ( wait, you don’t like the Zen? What’s wrong with you?!?! ) but still, some brands get this glow about them, deserved or otherwise. Apple is famous for its reality distortion field. It’s the same thing.
I think that creates an environment where a fair number of people that buy more by reputation and haven’t explored much simply stick with the first thing they hear because it’s better than anything they have heard (not a lot). Or they end up so used to the sound they kind of train themselves to like it.
I don’t know why but their are a few brands for me that end up constantly taking the backseat. Sennheiser and Focal are definitely two of them. I have literally ordered and cancelled 3 focal headphones and had Sennheiser be choice two several times (where choice 1 was ordered). Something keeps me out of these brands. This time it was the XC.
The thing about phrases like “reality distortion field” is that it is an attempt to force your value structure over another persons choices, and tries to invalidate their decisions, needs, desires and opinions.
You are claiming rational superiority, which if unintentional makes you sounds foolish and thoughtless, and if it is done intentionally means that you are displaying the characteristics of an egocentric jerk.
It certainly does not help anyone take any of your other points seriously.
To use a less semantically loaded term, the “reality distortion field” you describe is simply “brand reputation.”
My brain accumulates a brand reputation based on my direct experiences with that company’s products, and merges those with whatever comments etc from other people get onto my radar screen and pass through my perceptual filters. If the net result is strongly positive or negative, that creates a bias that is helpful to me in making decisions about products from that brand. Helpful, in the sense of allowing me to efficiently screen out candidates when I’m choosing products to buy/try, and/or give the “benefit of the doubt” to a new product for which there is little “evidence” yet to process.
Your brain does the same. Your sample of inputs will be different than mine, and your synthesis of those may be different than mine.
And in fact, everybody’s brain does the same thing. It’s the human condition.
When a large preponderance of people have very strong positive sentiments … e.g. Apple fan-boys … that happens because the brand has built a history of pleasing its users.
It’s not distortion … it’s a form of hard-earned trust.
Any of us may, for any number of reasons, not agree with the popular consensus. For example, I don’t care much for Apple products, they tend to annoy and confuse me, I don’t find them intuitive, and especially in the audio area, I value SQ a lot more than I value convenience & mobility. But if a new Schiit product fit a need, I’d have no hesitations in being an early adapter.
We’re funny animals. Funny peculiar and funny amusing.
I stumpled upon the Spirit Torino HP’s and wondered why they were not discussed that much. They for sure look very different and have a high-end price, so could they have a distinct high-end sound?
Please post your thoughts as it will be interesting to learn more.
This has been a reference within apple culture for decades. Steve jobs could make you excited about the new slot-in cd player of an iMac. Not my words. It’s a way people talk about apple and Steve Jobs. I am sorry it offends you.
Yes, brands build trust. And I say this as an apple fanboy: What do you call it when a purchase decision is made by following a crowd instead of comparing the products?
I don’t know about you, but I see a lot of that, particularly in technology. Sometimes the result is a product that can’t actually achieve their stated goals. iPhones are awesome for a lot of people but there are things they don’t do well. If you need those things and still buy an iPhone… what is that?
There is a version of that happening in the Audio industry. And I think Focal and ZMF are more like Apple in that regard. That doesn’t make their products bad, probably on the contrary, they work for a lot of people. But it may mean the hype around them causes purchases by people that aren’t well matched to those products.
My interest here is to see how prevalent that is for these brands. I have a pretty good idea how prevalent it is for Apple (because I am the guy people turn to to fix it).
Note on Steve Jobs and Apple: His particular version of the “reality distortion field” had a way of making you crazy excited about things the product can do. It wasn’t so much leading people to think the product was better than it is (which there is plenty of marketing that does that). It was more about selling what it can do really really well.
I have tried so many times. Congratulations on succeeding! It’s been a losing battle for me.
I will happily do so. There are several reviews on YouTube that describe the sound signature.
Spirit Torino say themselves they wanted to recreate a live atmosphere with these headphones including that you can feel the sound. Their models are said to have to most substantial bass in the industry. We’ll see about how they handle the whole range…
What I already like is that they only use materials like real leather and metal. Also you have many options to make your own pair. And : Colors!
I personally know Andrea, the man behind Spirit Torino headphones. He’s started modding Grado headphones and now he does his own headphones. Not my cup of tea but actually very curated and very well built headphones. Enjoy
We need heuristics to keep from becoming crippled by choice. It can lead to funny outcomes though.
20 years ago in Northern California, Honda Civics had a reputation for reliability and safety, such that buying a used Honda Civic as your teenagers’ first car was kind of a meme, to the point that an otherwise equivalent new Honda Civic was actually cheaper due to being less in demand!
I am not sure that it would help. I am actually actively working on headphone ranking site that would try and use machine learning and socialized headphone ranking data to try and make it easier to find headphones and IEMs.
It’s a tough thing to solve. Especially given the subjective meaning of words. My thought was to have people rank headphones they have heard against each other in various categories ranking them from best to worst. Data from a lot of users doing that could be very very interesting. Especially when run through pattern recognition machine learning.
If you’re looking to make the absolute best possible choice (optimizing) then heuristics aren’t much help because you’re going to invest in detailed research.
If you’re satisfising (making a reasonable choice but without investing too much into it, also known as bounded rationality), good heuristics are very helpful because they can quickly guide you to a better than random outcome but without having to spend much effort on getting there.
Edit - to take the Honda Civic example, ending up with a slightly used Honda Civic that costs more than a new one is not an optimum outcome, but it’s still a pretty good outcome compared to ending up with a used Yugo, plus you got to spend the time you would have spent on research on something else, like playing disc golf with your teenager.
Exactly the way the folks at the Team Rankings sports betting site handle their March Madness picks. If you want optimized brackets, they crank all the analysis they can, then have experts pour over it making adjustments based on news, health issues, information from betting odds, and any other research they can get. But the also offer a “saving face” bracket choice for those who don’t care if they win, but just want to be sure they look pretty good. The latter is heuristics only.
Why would one exclude the other? Particularly in audio. See this example:
Let’s say, I am random guy A just looking for a quick satisfied purchase. He has heard X, Y and Z, and know what he likes about them. Just looking for the next step up. For this guy, he would quickly just by the highest confidence recommendation based on his X, Y and Z input.
Now, guy B is picky. He’s looking for a very specific set capabilities from sound stage to frequency response. He plays with the tool and ultimately finds 5 models that might meet his desired criteria. That guy goes and tries every single one of them, not just the highest confidence one. He researches all of them.
To me, it’s simply different uses for the same tool. Guy B (if the tool is any good at all) simply narrowed his search faster to top contenders. Guy A went on blind trust and probably came away pretty happy (unless he’s a guy B disguised as a guy A).
I wouldn’t say heuristics isn’t useful for optimization. I would say it isn’t as useful. And this isn’t generic heuristics either, it’s personalized. It’s the difference between saying “78% of people think sundara has more detail than r70x” and “78% of people who prioritize sound similarly to you think sundara has more detail than r70x”.
I just want to make sure we are on the same page on the technical aspects.
It seems you think that Guy B wouldn’t find value in such a tool? I would love to know more about that. (And I came up with it because I am a Guy B and would like the tool, but I may be by myself in that regard)
Recommendation engines are great, and “what do people with similar tastes to me like?” is a useful heuristic, and even for an incurable optimizer these things provide great starting points for their journey of research. I was still responding about the value of basic heuristics like “ZMF makes good headphones”.
This works for clothes already. On some online shops you enter your measurements (body), enter some for preferences and then select brands that fit well. The recommendation engine suggests the right size. Works quite well for me.
You sure could do the same for headphones!
In case you don’t have reference points, you just describe the preferred sound signature by multiselecting some given attributes.
Let’s do it, Derrek! You program, I do the design for the app!
Broke down and upgraded the old iPhone 6+ today. It had been dropping battery life in past weeks. Don’t want to get to the point where I’m out for a few hours, feel it getting warm for some reason, and know it’s sucked all the juice out of the battery. I talked myself down from the TOTL 12 Pro Max, settling on a 128GB 12. Although the camera is nicer in the 12 Pro, it’s not as nice as my Fuji camera, which I use if I really want to take photos. Wife has the 11 Pro, so she’s got telephoto if we ever get to go to concerts again.
Couldn’t find any cases I liked at the Apple store. They did tell me that the audio dongle supports headphones with mic, which I had trouble verifying online. At $9, even if they lied, well it’s just a little lie. And I have BT5. And possibly even 5G, don’t know if it’ll be anywhere around here. I’m sort of minimalist with cases. Found a thin aramid fiber case online.
