Bang&Olufsen says it will defy luxury slowdown as 'rich will only become richer' | Hacker News Reader

Bang&Olufsen says it will defy luxury slowdown as 'rich will only become richer'

ft.com

41 pointshhs100 comments

It's a reasonable bet to imagine society entering another aristocratic type period where we have an ultra wealthy class and a servant class like we did until WWI or so. To some extent we're already there with gig workers, but there's still more of a middle than there could be. I mean there are people who are cool paying $30 to have Starbucks delivered by people who probably barely net that in a day after gas and wear on their car.

Your inclusion of the timeline relating to WWI made me wonder how much of that war (and WWII) were about economic disparity. I found this interesting article on the topic: https://www.promarket.org/2018/01/03/inequality-imperialism-...

It seems reasonable to assume that a similar surplus of investable funds with no where left to spend it will create similar conflict both here and in space (given how many of our ultra elite are pushing into outer space for the next great fortune).

> a similar surplus of investable funds with no where left to spend it

Neither the beginning of WWI nor today are characterised with a lack of investment opportunities. If anything, economic disparity increases when investment opportunities are aplenty because that typically characterises a period of change.

The 19th century was a period of intense social change as a result of the mastery of steam and steel. The economies of western European economies changed incredibly fast and national identities began to solidify around the identities of the people living there. The aristocratic tradition prior to the First World War was a result of an already large change from the feudal structure of pre-industrial Europe.

It's interesting to try to draw parallels to the present day, but I think it's most important to remember we are participants of history and to behave as such.

There was enormous opportunity as massive massive industries bad to be discovered bootstrapped and built out.

And it was in an age where so many concentrated natural resources were ripe for taking.

People seem to think of post-war booms as a thing, but the creation of colossal industries and their sprawling supply chains is something we have already done. Might we repeat the feat, double the scale of industry? Maybe. But expanding would bring nowhere near the prosperity & benefit that going from 0->1 brought us. It would (almost) all be owned by existing powers, versus the unplanned uncoordinated development from nothing of heavy industry we had.

> It seems reasonable to assume that a similar surplus of investable funds with no where left to spend it will create similar conflict

Germany started ww2 when it did because it (more or less) ran out of money.

I think a lot of war, both that and more recent comes from the power disparity between the king or dictator running things and the ordinary people, rather than about economic disparity. Then you get situations like that in Russia/Ukraine where Putin may as well use a million Russians as cannon fodder to grab land and become Vlad the great because what are they going to do about it? WW1 was similar. Serious wars between proper democracies where the cannon fodder get to make the decisions pretty much don't happen.

On the other hand if you look at neighbouring countries with unusually high Gini inequality coefficients like SA and Namibia, or the US and Mexico there is little sign of war breaking out.

This is what springs to mind whenever somebody says or implies that there's a threshold wherein people will "rise up" - e.g. pre-French Revolution levels of inequality.

I don't see a middle class as becoming resurgent again until we have something similar to the battle of blair mountain (a labor uprising that presaged a new labor movement, where the brutality of the strikebreakers was off the charts) or elites who are once again living in mortal fear of domestic and foreign communists like they were in the 1950s.

You can still, right now, find shell casings on Blair Mountain (and in other coal towns like Harlan, KY) where they slaughtered the strikers.

Our tax system is broken, we don’t have enough taxes on the top end and too much on the bottom end. Compared to the “golden age” (if you were a white man) of the middle class, the 1950s, the effective tax rate for corporations has dropped massively while income taxes have grown.

Sure, but no tax policy is going to bring back the economic situation of the US in the '50s.

Maybe another war?

I think we're much too deep into globalization for another world war to be anything but economically disastrous even if it's all overseas.

I used to believe that but the same arguments were made about WW1 before it happened. Russia still invaded Ukraine despite the west threatening to make it economically disastrous. I think this economic dependency argument is quite weak. War will happen if those starting it think they can come out better off. For the USA/West that has meant keeping any wars away from their domestic economies, but that might not be true for other players who could spark off a global war.

I'm not saying WWWIII can't happen. I'm saying that if it happened now, it wouldn't be good for the US economy.

You're right, I misread your comment slightly. I'm not sure we can say... if it's a conventional war then it's bound to be bad economically during war time, but there was a massive bounce for the US after WW2, could the same happen again?

How do we know what will happen if we empower the vast majority of the population to have economic access to take risks, like starting businesses? When people are kept at the margin and financially unstable, that certainly has a major chilling effect on the economy.

You should review the tax code, instead of parroting talking points. The top 5% already pay the vast majority of the tax dollars.

because the top 5% have the vast majority of the money... meanwhile their effective tax rate is lower than the bottom 50% (at the least) and they are audited way less than those with less money and have to jump through fewer hoops for their benefits (what the rich refer to as handouts or entitlements when it comes to poor people)

By "dollars" people often mean cash. That which the top 5% has is largely assets, not cash.

The king of my country is an stark example of the difference.

Real estate is more valuable the closer it is to the castle, and the king owns the castle, which is in the very middle of the most valuable area. It's never been sold, so its value can only be estimated. Estimating from its location, it's vastly valuable, from which follows that the king is very rich and should pay a lot in taxes, right? Or you could say that it's not saleable, so what the king has is a leaky old building with high maintenance costs and negligible utility, negative value, and from that follows that the king shouldn't pay anything in taxes (well, disregarding his other property in order to simplify the argument).

Most of the top 5% have this issue, of course not as starkly as in the case of a king.

Taxing assets is tricky. Thinking of assets as though they were cash muddles teh issue, and makes it more difficult to find fair tax rules.

It always weirds me out to think that most of "wealth" nowadays is "virtual".

You have stock valuation, you have property valuation. Which we tell is gone or lost when prices drop, but where did it really come from in first place? Exactly same thing just got value higher... There is some base line there, but property is good example. Value drops for reasons outside damage or wear, was the wealth there in first place then? There is always some bottom like replacement value if there is still desire. But overall it is rather weird situation foten.

It's always been like that. Well, as long as we've had assets.

Money is just a way to assess the value of assets. The assets are real, the assessment is more or less a matter of opinion, and opinion changes.

This argument is weak in that it only compares percentage alone, rather than qualifying that in terms of impact to the individual/family. A family that makes $200,408 gross taxed at 18.38% is still left with $163,573. A family making $12,439 @ 9.78% only has $11,223 where every dollar counts in terms of trying to keep a roof overhead and bellies full. The wealthy have a higher tax burden because they have most of the money and have the most to gain from a smoothly operating society (which whether we like it or not, requires investment). I’m not even going to get into the disruptive nature of ultra wealthy people in a “free” society that is dominated by wealth more than any other attribute.

I’m not saying the rich family’s needs are irrelevant, but I mean… come on; if we’re gonna advance an argument that beats around the bush of being fair, this one is DOA.

I don’t enjoy paying taxes anymore than the next person, especially when so much of it is squandered and misappropriated, but I’ve been on both ends of my example.

> the wealthy have a higher tax burden because they have most of the money

Well duh. This isn't really an argument. This is one of those "facts" that is so obvious, yet people think it should be somehow shocking, like "90% percent of accidents happen 5 miles from the home", well no shit, you have to drive in the 5 mile radius to go anywhere, or to get back home.

> A family that makes $200,408 gross taxed at 18.38% is still left with $163,573. A family making $12,439 @ 9.78% only has $11,223 where every dollar counts in terms of trying to keep a roof overhead and bellies full.

And...what is your point? This is perfectly reasonable. Look generally speaking (of course there are outliers and edge cases), but the more money you make the more responsibility you have. A line cook doesn't have as much responsibly as a franchise manager, a franchisee manager doesn't have much responsibility as corporate district manager, etc. Why would anyone strive to have jobs with more responsibility, if you are just going to tax them to oblivion where a senior VP now takes home the same as line cook? Having the senior VIP take home much more money, is reasonable and fair.

Ideally taxing income is generally immoral, IMO. A much fairer system would be to ditch income tax entirely and just have a VAT. But somehow people are deluded into thinking VAT is "regressive", which its not.

Those people paying to get Starbucks delivered aren't necessarily wealthy, though. I know plenty of people who spend all their money every month and could certainly afford that despite having zero savings. I feel like this kind of behaviour is just trade between the rental class.

Actual wealthy people own the Starbucks.

Trade between the rental class, with a set chunk (fee) of each transaction going out of the rental class to the owners of Starbucks and whatever delivery app was used.

I can see what B&O is getting at. It's well known that "luxury products" are largely bought by those tying to "look rich" rather than the super wealthy. Unlike say Gucci or LV that sell goods directly to consumers, a large part of B&O's business is being a supplier to things that the super rich actually do buy. I hardly ever see a standalone B&O product but where I see them the most is in high end cars. Someone that's middle class and is just trying to "look rich" is going to be buying at $400 Gucci belt or hat but the real rich folks are buying high end cars, something the middle class individual buying stuff from Gucci doesn't have the money to do. I suspect that B&O thinks that while the market for the "$400 luxury product" (ie something the middle class individual could afford) will drop off while demand for high end cars/boats and other places where they are a supplier won't be affected as much because those are inherently different customer segments.

B&O has some home audio setups that are more expensive than those luxury cars with b&o upgraded sound systems (beolab 90 for example). I think they're probably not referring to their entry level b&o smart speakers when they're making this claim.

The purchase of a Rolex or Ferrari - or an incredibly overpriced sound system - is an attempt to buy a signal to others that you have taste. In fact you’re signaling how much your lack of taste is costing you.

Sound gear is an excellent case in point. The studio monitors many albums are mixed on are intentionally mediocre (eg the Yamaha NS-10) to ensure it sounds great across a wide range of equipment.

Even great quality studio gear is modestly priced compared to “hi fi” gear.

Don’t try to buy taste. Learn about the subject and then do the work to buy or build something that is reasonably priced and outshines everything else on fundamentals, not on brand.

>The purchase of a Rolex or Ferrari - or an incredibly overpriced sound system - is an attempt to buy a signal to others that you have taste. In fact you’re signaling how much your lack of taste is costing you.

Pretty much. Which is why some of the biggest growing markets for these dusty luxury brands have been Middle East, Russia and China where a lot of newly minted millionaires (through means of questionable legality) come from, and is why so many brands, like BMW, have made their designs so opulent, ghastly and hideous, because that's what sells in China and the Chinese are buying more BMWs than Germans so their market gets to decide what a luxury car should look like.

China has an actual growing middle class at this point so that’s not that unexpected from there, OTOH the Middle East is basically modern day feudalism

>OTOH the Middle East is basically modern day feudalism

All feudal societies were famous for opulence and wasteful spending of resources, for the pleasures and entertainment of the upper classes, meaning they're perfect markets for luxury goods.

For truly wealthy people their time is incredibly valuable so spending time learning about a field they are not expert in is going to be more costlier than just going out and buying a well established brand. In some cases with Rolex or Ferrari or Porsche these items can even appreciate in value.

I think you think that price is directly proportional to quality. It's not. Luxury goods are made luxury through a process of branding, pricing, and scarcity. Rolex is an excellent case study. They've been sponsoring athletes since the early 20th century when they sponsored Mercedes Gleitze to wear an Oyster around her neck when she swam the channel. You'll continue to notice the brand at F1, premier golfing events, and so on. And when it comes to purchasing, you literally can't walk into a Rolex dealer and buy a Submariner, for example, because they are made artificially scarce.

If you were able to buy a sub, you'd buy it at around $13K and then immediately be able to sell it for around $18K or more. Rolex own the luxury category when it comes to conferring value on the brand and its products.

So if you can't even buy a Submariner, what the hell is the strategy? They have a much larger range of second and third-tier watches that they'll sell you then and there and once you have a "relationship" with them, they might hook you up with something worth far more on the used market the moment you buy it.

It's just a big fat hustle that relies on some specific psychological triggers. It relies on what Cialdini would call "social proof", meaning that others think it's cool so you think it's cool. It also relies on scarcity conferring value on something that would otherwise be valueless. It relies on our innate desire to hero-worship, as a species, which is where sponsorship comes in.

So back to the comment I'm replying to: No, thinking that a luxury brand is simply quality at a high price is far too simplistic a world-view. You can buy great quality at a very reasonable price, and if you don't have time you can employ a professional shopper. But it's not about that. It's about laziness and signaling.

There are knock-off handbags and things like that which require microscopy and an expert eye to detect any differences from the "genuine article" and... that says it all.

None of this is about the product itself.

The part you’re neglecting about home A/V products is that performance is only a part of their function.

They are decor objects in the home. You have to look at them because they exist in your house.

Ferrari's are pretty cool tho

No. They can’t legally go faster than my small car. It’s ridiculous.

You mean top speed, probably. It's very unlikely that your small car can accelerate and decelerate at a similar rate to a high end sport car.

> The purchase of a Rolex or Ferrari - or an incredibly overpriced sound system - is an attempt to buy a signal to others that you have taste. In fact you’re signaling how much your lack of taste is costing you.

This is just a fundamental part of what it means to be human. Most of us are guilty of the same behavior on some scale; for example, you might purchase a MacBook when any laptop will compile and run TypeScript just fine.

We've all learned about the pyschological desire—and it is an actually human need—to appear to have status. Beyond that, you are way overstating your case.

What do you claim is a substitute product that shows "taste" better than a Ferrari? A McLaren? Or are you in the Subaru crowd? And do you think your living room looking like a studio shows taste?

life pro tip: a plastic sleeve pocket protector will keep your clothes looking sharp!

Personally I think something like a mid-to-late-90s Ford Ranger or Chevrolet S10 is the best possible taste in vehicle. Nothing but pure utility.

The NS10 is not in any way mediocre! it's extremely tight, unflattering to music because that's tbe whole point of a monitor: tell it like it is!

Except if you care about the bottom-end of the spectrum.

> “If you go to jewellery, you have a few brands, if you go to fashion, you have a few brands, if you go to cars, you have a few brands,” he said during an interview at the new Bang & Olufsen store in London this week. “In audio luxury, there is nobody else.”

If I was a worker at Bang & Olufsen, the final quote would definitely make me cringe. There is both better and more "value-for-the-money" brands that are still expensive and would be called luxury, but its marketing is aiming for audio professionals rather than "luxury consumers".

When I met my now wife she had a Beosound Ouverture in her flat. I asked her why she would buy something so expensive and she told me it wasn't that much and it was really pretty. I think she paid like 1100£ from John Lewis. As a gearhead this was in line with what I spend for some aftermarket NISMO parts. We moved in together wanted to upgrade the system and found it was incompatible with damn near anything. We literally shelved the Beosound (literally put on a bookshelf, it is quite pretty to look at) and bought a quality hi-fi system.

B&O are weird. I used to live in Cheltenham UK where they had a store.

Was helping a friend install a £40k kitchen island top and a guy from B&O came round at the same time - sharp suit, laptop, briefcase. Turned out he was out to do his 6 monthly retune of the Freeview or whatever channels on the B&O TV. Plugged the laptop into the TV, which must have been 10 years old at the time (it was one of the first fat flat screens I think), pressed some buttons then said goodbye.

Some of their audio stuff was awful, form over function, especially anything with Bluetooth. But they do look nice and again from memory stuff was upgradable, so even if you paid through the arse for a portable speaker, it would support BT5 in the future or whatever.

They build premium speakers with a WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) that's so far off the charts, they're no longer an electronics company.

Their speakers are so beautiful, it's almost better to think of them as a luxury furniture or interior design company.

I think it's absolutely the right business decision for them to lean into this unfair status, and try to make their products Veblan goods like the luxury fashion houses already have.

At the expense of the poorest and least educated, who will desperately but their luxury goods for their status symbol. So depending on their marketing Bang&Olufsen could become the next Luis Vuiton or Gucci in their market niche

How can the poorest buy their luxury goods?

By being bad with their money.

Via the innovation of "credit", which gets used by poor people (including me when I was poor and dumb) to purchase things you in reality can't afford.

On credit, generally. Here's an Investopedia article about "why", which would be the natural followup question.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09111...

That article doesn't reference Veblen goods, which seems like a relevant Wikipedia link. A Veblen good is a product, the perceived value of which is related to its price rather than its utility, in defiance of all common sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

If you have credit, you're not really poor. The comment I responded to said poorest that seems even worse.

I don't know where you got that information, but you were misinformed. It is the case that most credit cards have minimum bank balances, but they aren't high enough to stop people from getting them.

A lot of households with bank accounts are considered 'underbanked', a euphemism meaning they've got enough money for a bank account, but also use services like payday loans, pawn shops, money orders, and so on. These are poor people, unless you arbitrarily choose the cutoff for poverty as "cannot get a credit card", which I don't think anybody does.

And the majority of these household have credit cards. This is from an FDIC survey summary:

> Underbanked households were less likely to have a credit card and were more likely to have both bank and nonbank personal loans than fully banked households in 2021. For example, 62.4 percent of underbanked households had a credit card, compared with 76.6 percent of fully banked households. (https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html)

And here's another source, from the Federal Reserve Bank of NY, saying:

> Credit card debt is the most commonly held debt across all income groups, yet only half of low-income households have access to a credit card. (https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/press/the-stat...)

For context, please read the original comment I was replying to. It's a criticism to luxury brands preying on the poorest. If someone is really poor and buys B&O products instead of using the little credit they can access to cover basic needs, the problem is supposed to be B&O greed?

It's more a problem of banks' policy or maybe mental health. Should B&O refuse to sell to poor people?

When I've seen B&O mentioned, it's usually people bashing them for being mediocre audio quality sold more based on form than substance. That seems to be their business model, maybe a problem for those that have a lot of money to burn. But for the poorest? It's like saying that the problem with Lamborghini is how they squeeze the working class with their prices.

There is people addicted to shopping that spends way too much in cheap stuff. Mountains of useless shiny things. This is not about price.

I'm not so sure B&O brand strategy is going for poor-people-signaling-wealth demographic - think LV or Gucci printed luggage boarding a Spirit flight. You need a mass market brand-recognition and the product has to be pretty ostentatious for that, which doesn't really mesh with with Danish minimalism.

For what it's worth I've got a bunch of late 90s/early 2000s B&O stuff and I've had exactly one person that recognized the speakers.

This is true in reality but a bad model to build a business on especially if it’s an electronics company.

What Apple did is difficult to emulate and brands like Hermes and LV have stuck to craftsmanship and scarcity.

B&O used to be a featured on National Lampoon’s when a piece of debris flew into Margo’s bedroom and wrecked it. I don’t think people care much about their pretty audio pieces anymore.

Audio devices and screens have become accessories to the real device that holds the value: the smartphone. But one day, that will not be the case either as our cloud devices will eventually trump smartphones.

Apple isn’t going anywhere but intangible virtual goods will be more and more commonplace.

It’s much easier in audio equipment where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Premium brands mostly sell things like premium materials which subjectively make things sound “better”. Phones are a thousand times more complicated and the state of the art for chips is constantly changing

B&O will have to build hand carved (wooden) or CNC milled electronics that borders on art. Hopefully the’ll incorporate upgradeable CPUs or microcontrollers then to really make it timeless.

I can possibly see a direction there.

Article mentions a £110,000 speaker line. For that money, I think you'd be better off paying a sound engineer and a woodworker to build a custom speaker set for your space. I struggle to imagine that B&O can do anything at a factory to deliver better sound than what could be achieved with a decent survey of the space and affordable quality components. A custom woodworker can certainly build extremely attractive, one-of-a-kind enclosures that conform to published specifications about speakers.

Such a custom speaker design wouldn't even be full of snake oil, and would have the authenticity to impress any non-bullshit plebeian that a £110k-speaker-buying person invites to their home. :-)

That's incorrect. In the last 30 years (since 1993), we have got class D amplifiers which can be both power-efficient and as flat as human ears can detect, switching power supplies to go along with them, DACs which are both cheap and absolutely transparent, MP3 and other perceptual lossy codecs, FLAC and ALAC, near field scanners to evaluate speaker performance, the Olive scoring method and several preference curves, and extreme improvements in bandwidth and storage.

there were commercial class D amplifiers in the 1970s, Sony iirc.

but back then Philips had a very cool amplifier, not class D, which fed a signal from the loudspeaker cone back into the negative feedback loop to correct any error!

They were invented in 1955, but high quality class D audio amplifiers have only been around since the mid90s, and are only now available as simultaneously good, high-power, and cheap.

Servo-controlled subwoofers are readily available these days; full-range servo systems are comparatively rare, because the end user generally wants room-calibrated equalization anyway.

Audiophools have been convinced that none of that faithfully reproduces a recording. It's tech for the common people who can't afford a real amp fed by oxygen free cabling to a phonorecord player with a 60 dB noise floor.

> where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years.

Really? In the last 30 years, we have highly efficient, essentially perfect class D amplifiers. DACs and ADCs that are essentially perfect are cheap. We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them. We have enough bandwidth to stream lossless and near-lossless audio. We can combine cheap, excellent DSP with cheap, excellent amplifiers to make active speakers with excellent frequency response and appropriate limiting logic to avoid damaging the drivers.

Where are these cheap and excellent amps and speakers?

As far as I was aware a near perfect DSP is cheap as chips but if you wanted a decent subwoofer (for instance) you still needed to pay $$$.

The actual speakers haven’t changed much, although I suspect many are increasingly designed around the availability of good DSP.

But the good amps are all over. Look at any site with actual data. For example, this thing is definitely cheap:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/e...

Some of what’s going on is that TI and others are making very good class D amplifiers on a chip, and they’re fairly easy to integrate. Several companies (IMO sadly mostly Chinese) are selling integrated DSPs and amps that are fantastic and cost a couple hundred dollars. They probably outperform multiple thousands of dollars of gear from 30 years ago, and they are far smaller and generate much much less heat.

>We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them

What audio codecs should we be using?

On your computer? Opus, AAC, MP3 with a good encoder and an appropriate rate? Many choices are widely available and transparent.

It’s the hidden codecs that still degrade audio. HD radio, most Bluetooth protocols, mobile and landline phones and the networks that interconnect them, etc. You don’t get much say in these.

There is a clear advancement. You used to need an amp and large speakers with long cables to have any kind of fidelity. Now you have decent sound with really small speakers. You can even listen to music on a laptop and it doesn't suck too much. We have tiny earbuds with no cable that isolate us from the outside sounds and also have a pretty incredible sound quality compared to what we had even 20 years ago in the same form factor.

Even if we accept your claims about tiny earbuds and speakers (which I don't), the abysmally depressing fact is that we have nothing to listen to on them.

All popular music has been systematically destroyed with dynamic compression since the late '90s.

You occasionally see remasters going against the trend and increasing dynamic range. Earache Records has several high dynamic range versions of classic metal albums on Bandcamp.

That's nice to hear!

You might just want to stop listening to pop music. The way people engineer and mix pop music has traditionally been different from detail-oriented recordings and audiophile trappings. Before overcompression, pop music would trapeze between quiet acoustic sections and "wall of sound" crescendos that sounded awful on radio. Even further before that, fully soundstaged recordings got mixed down to mono to sound good on commodity listening hardware. There's a tenured history of making music worse to make it more widely enjoyable.

The fact that the world's most popular headphones are lower-quality versions of the Earpods should tell you everything about the modern music landscape.

I would be super interested in an artist that would do a multi mastering approach where you could pick the version depending on whether you listen in a car, a single bluetooth speaker, earbuds, high quality headphones and surround install for the same album.

That's not even necessary. Selectable compression was available at least 30 years ago on stock car radios. Mid-'90s Ford CD players had a button on them labeled "Compress," and I'm sure they weren't the only ones.

Today, a selectable compression level would be trivial to offer on every playback device. There was never a reason to destroy the music, which makes the crime of doing so even more despicable. You can't get dynamic range back once the master is destroyed, but you can always get rid of it on demand during playback.

Apple and Spotify should have used their market power to demand properly-mastered recordings (a la the early '90s, which is when many believe mastering quality peaked). Instead we get asinine Atmos bastardizations and "lossless" delivery of ruined songs.

Disagree with that. I'm talking strictly about pop music, which I've been listening to avidly for decades. You could tell the difference between 45s of pop songs and radio playback easily in the '80s. At first I wanted that "fat" radio sound, and even got an equalizer thinking that this was the key. But of course it wasn't; radio stations compressed music to sound "stronger" on the dial. So I don't know why your assertion about "trapezing" would hold true at all.

Over time I realized that the 45s, with their greater dynamic range, sounded better than the radio and were more enjoyable to play loud. I have 45s from the '70s into the 2000s, most of which will sound better than their shitty "remastered" versions streaming right now. Yes, polystyrene 45s. That's pathetic.

The shittiest part of all is that nobody is served by the destruction of pop music; and everyone is hindered. Otherwise catchy songs are quickly tiresome to listen to. Recent songs can't be mixed well with others; there's no room in the wall of noise. Hence the popularity of "mashups" that almost always feature an older song. It's not even pleasant to have recently-mastered music on during parties because you can't talk over the noise; so it's either too soft or too loud.

Are you saying tiny earbuds from the 2000 are equivalent to those we have today?

Also there is plenty of high quality music around, including music with high dynamic range... The one that existed didn't disappear, and there is still some produced today, probably much more in a year than I could listen in a lifetime.

You can only have decent sound with small speakers if you don't care about bass. Intentionally adding bass distortion to trick unsophisticated listeners into thinking there's more bass than there really is won't fool anybody who's familiar with the real thing. As Hofmann's Iron Law of speaker design says: deep bass, small size, high efficiency -- pick at most two. And there's only so much you can compromise efficiency before you melt the voice coils.

Don't you agree that at equal size speakers from the 2000 are worse than those from now? I don't say that they are equivalent to a good quality HiFi system, but things have gotten much better for cheap systems.

True, but I don't really see the point. They're better than before, but the laws of physics dictate they'll never be good. If I can't use good speakers I'd rather use headphones. Sacrificing efficiency doesn't matter when the driver is so close to your ear it doesn't need to be loud.

Which laws of physics are you refering to? To my knowledge, there is no law that says that a tiny driver of arbitrary geometry (could be multiple tiny drivers) couldn't reproduce arbitrary pressure patterns in the audio frequency and intensity range.

KLH audio hosts an article explaining Hofmann's Iron Law:

https://klhaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/loudspeaker-...

Also, even if efficiency was not a concern (maybe you don't pay for your own electricity and you somehow managed to build superconducting voice coils and speaker cables), getting arbitrarily high pressure from an arbitrarily small driver requires arbitrarily large excursion. If you somehow overcame all the mechanical complexities of this, you'll still run into the problem of finite speed of sound. The higher the excursion the faster the cone moves for the same frequency, and at some point it's going to go supersonic, which is certainly not good for distortion.

Thanks

Digital surround sound audio debuted in theaters in 1992, and DTS was released as a competitor to Dolby in 1993.

You couldn’t even get movie audio at home with more than two channels 30 years ago.

Audio equipment got a thousand times better in the last decade, never mind three decades.

I remember small speakers being absolutely tinny and bad in the 90's. Now the speakers in my phone kicks the butt of a medium-sized radio from that era. Hell, my HomePod is on par with the much larger and vastly more expensive B&O hifi system I had then!

They do hundreds of millions of revenue per year. I'm guessing they're comfortable with that.

as our cloud devices will eventually trump smartphones.

Was with you until this. Cloud? That's year 2000 talk. The "cloud" has already happened, and there's a move towards reversing this trend.

With austerity measures at many companies, they're bringing stuff home. Or refusing to migrate. Cloud is stupid expensive, with very questionable value.

Meanwhile, the whole node+composer+npm+etc trend is now eyed with immense wariness by many, many businesses and especially high security businesses. One dev needing a 10 line function, pulling in 2000 packages of "who knows who wrote this" and "what is the actual license here" and "my god was this repo sold to hacker $x yesterday?" and "damn, this is backdoored? how do we even audit all this stuff?" is being replaced with "just write a 100 lines of code, and don't use 1M lines of node instead!"

And with the reversal and soon end of Pii as a profitable method of doing business, all those free frees are going to go away! No Pii, means no profit, means you have nothing worth value to give!

And so many people I talk to, are annoyed that shows they buy, or books, or games, just vanish. People want things they can touch! They're mad at their internet connected TVs showing them ads, and spying on them. They hate online ovens and fridges and washing machines. They hate that their car sells info to the insurance company.

Most people I know have had it.

The cloud will always exist to some extent. But its hayday is over.

> with the reversal and soon end of Pii as a profitable method of doing business

That's wishful thinking. For as much as I resist the modernization of technology, I haven't met any average-Joes with a bone to pick over the cloud. Most people don't even understand the difference between client and server anymore, let alone how much PII they leak or what the difference between browser apps is. At best, you'll get someone who says they detest surveillance but are powerless to stop it.

The people I know wouldn't stop buying smartphones and Disney Plus if you doubled their price and removed every app and show that makes less than $10,000,000 annually. They are not going to meaningfully resist the cloud-ification of their favorite businesses. They admit they are trapped, and couldn't use a meaningful alternative if they tried.

The trends, both legislative and case law, are towards ending this business model. I expect that within 5 years, Pii will be defunct as a legal business model.

B&O has always been sub-par technically.

The depressing thing is that even "high-end" (or at least higher-end) brands now suck. I bought an NAD receiver a while back, thinking it would be a step up from "consumer" brands... and it is an unmitigated piece of shit.

So I went back to the high end of "consumer" (this time a top-of-the-line Pioneer) only to find that despite having 10 amplifiers or so in it, I can't simply have A, B, and C speaker pairs to play music in my house and yard. And incredibly there's no viable workaround.

Design acumen is dead.

Pioneer elite is beyond nad in terms of quality unless you're in the ultra high end.

This is just a (bad) advertisement masquerading as journalism. Bang and Olufson won't "defy" anything or anyone.

Unfortunately, that also means their customer base is shrinking and so will their profits. But unlike brands that are passionate about their craft like say Koenigsegg, expensive trash is still trash. Their value proposition is in providing tokens to reassure the desperately insecure, the ignorant, and the tasteless. While that has economic value, they're painting themselves into a smaller and smaller corner.

Fun fact: B&O CD players were used in every 90's movie as a signal of Yuppie assholes.

As the owner of an old Linn turntable I dispute that B&O are the only player at the high end. Why not a Linn "Klimax System. A complete, integrated package with superlative sonic performance. From £105,000"? https://www.linn.co.uk/uk/full-systems

https://archive.is/PvZsD

millenials are broke; genZ will use earbuds anyway; Id rather something functional than something rpetty and useless

> genZ will use earbuds anyway

Not sure how it is with genZ in particular, but it sometimes feels like people now use speakers even when making calls in public. Which kind of sucks - not only if you need to listen to it as passer by but especially if you are on the other side of the line and someone puts you automatically on loud. I get it that phones are so big now that one can not hold them next to ear but it seems that wearing earbuds is also not popular.

Through a series of unfortunate events I ended up briefly owning seven brand new Beoplay Portal PC/PS headphones in the summer of 2022, and keeping the last one that was purchased in exasperation.

The products were all bought from three different authorized dealers across the EU, and despite the serial numbers and manufacturing dates being spread out, mostly all of the headphones had manufacturing deffects:

- The clamping force of the headbands had considerable variation, some of the headphones were very comfortable, one fell off from your head if you looked down, while two of them caused headaches after wearing them for 20 minutes

- The firmness of the foam inside the earpads and of the lambskin also had variations

- Some of the products made a popping sound if you slightly pressed the cushion on the headband

- The painted white L and R letters inside the earcups had various brown spots

- Three headphones made a squeaking sound when you adjusted the length of the arms, one of them was also squeaking during normal use

- The material of the storage bag was half as thick if the product had a later serial number

- One of the products had a broken BLE module and would not connect

I got some casual use out of the headphones I have kept for about 6 months, and despite treating the product like jewelry, the headband cushion material has started separating from a hidden seam. The product was quickly replaced by Bang & Olufsen.

An app is required to adjust the EQ and access other features that are advertised on the sales page, but the app forces you to sign up for a B&O account and share personal information such as your name and email address, then register the product. You couldn't find any information about the requirement for account setup and product registration anywhere, not on the sales page, and not in the user manual. I believe this is at least a GDPR violation.

The headphones sometimes forget the customized settings, and after a couple of months of use, the app now has a hard time connecting to the paired device.

The headphones all sounded great, but from what I've read and experienced, Bang & Olufsen seems to hide shoddy manufacturing tolerances behind bespokeness, even for their most expensive products, and I doubt this is the user experience the rich are craving.

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