loose-electron wrote on Jan 2nd, 2010, 10:13am:Ken Kundert wrote on Jan 1st, 2010, 6:45pm:unpleasant side effect of causing the amplifier to go unstable and blow itself up.
Ah, but it sold product and made money...
EE's of all flavors need to remember that usually the market drives the product, and not the technology. 99.9999% of end users don't have a clue what goes on inside the box.
Make that 99.99999999999%
Ken - probably should move this to "tech talk"
jerry
Don't want to bash the audio folk too much but an anecdote comes to my mind. As a student, I had the opportunity to meet a senior executive of a company working on audio products at a conference.
Apparently, the company used to sell cables with a bit of gold in the end connectors but figured out that this wasn't really needed, and so decided to dispense with it and offer the customers much cheaper cables instead. In the end of life notice for the "gold" cables, they even mentioned explicitly that the performance of the old gold and the new cables was identical. However, their audiophile base made such a huge noise that they backed off.
They still sell the old cables with gold at the ends, or rather supposedly. It is the exact same cable, same performance, just carrying the product number of the old gold cable, and there are people paying 10 times the price, willingly, even though the manufacturer is offering a much cheaper replacement!
And let's not talk about CD vs. vinyl. We would really need to move the post to some other forum...