Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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The cost improvements reached you, you just don't see them in the table quality.

You see them in the fact that every single home you'll visit to buy or rent has a fully equipped kitchen including a fridge, oven, likely a microwave, dishwasher and even a washing machine (which alone has a huge economic impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gvsz_vc7B0)

You see it in the fact that your home is safer from fires than it ever has been. That hot water is a cheap passive thing you don't even think about, rather than something you have to plan for. That a TV is a nice add-on to it all, rather than a huge deal to get.

Your grandparents' table was more expensive because they had less things, and the massive wood table that they saved months for was what was kept and stood the test of time for you to see today. Because let's not forget, this is also what furnishing 100 years ago can look like:

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/furnishing-for-h...

The real problem is that today, you rarely can pay more to get better. If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered.

Because that requires manufacturers ready to give up stealth corner cutting as the cornerstone of their earnings in favour of the hard and long task of developing an image of reliability.

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Three cases I know enough about: cars, loudspeakers and computer monitors.

You can still buy some Mazda/Toyota models to really get more thoughtful engineering and QC for your money, but the Germans with a similar image of quality (Mercedes, BMW) have partially or fully shed the underlying quality.

Genelec remains the only (non-PA) loudspeaker manufacturer you can sincerely trust to take reliability, performance and transparency seriously. There was also Klein + Hummel (K+H) but since being bought by Sennheiser and integrated with Neumann, things have been going downhill... to the point where some curious people found CapXon caps (bottom of the barrel) in their KH80s.

Computer monitors? Since Panasonic (Eizo's supplier of yore) exited the panel market and left it as LG vs Samsung, it's been a complete disaster. Oh, you wanna pay 1~2k $currency for a fancy OLED monitor? Get used to appalling panel QC (banding, uniformity), VRR flicker and DSC crap.

The available choice for "pay more to get better" continues to dwindle...

And when you do pay more, you're paying more to someone who has figured out how to make you think you are getting better quality, not to someone who is giving you better quality. This is the "market for lemons" effect.

"If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered."

You do at the bottom of unregulated markets. For dishwashers and ovens, safety regs generally impose a high floor on the market. There is no $40 oven, because it's physically impossible to make a safety-compliant oven for $40. If it weren't for market regulation, $40 death-trap ovens would be a thing for sure.

The very cheapest compliant unit isn't _much_ worse than a mid-market unit, it might be a bit flimsier and wear out sooner; high-end luxury units aren't much better than mid-market units - because there's not much innovation driving progress at the top end. AEG and Bosch are still generally solid engineering, but there's not much point in paying more than that unless you like the aesthetics.

Mercedes and BMW - small-volume performance models aside - are like the big fashion brands, Vuitton etc., they're selling the idea of luxury to people who aren't even nouveau-riche, more like borrowing money to cosplay loudly as nouveau-riche. Compare old 1970s Merc convertibles with today's, the modern ones are just kind of ugly, aggressive and sad.

ADAM Audio loudspeakers are pretty good or were last time I bought a pair. They're designed as studio monitors but great for listening too. Perhaps they've gone downhill since being bought by a listed company a few years ago?

>ADAM Audio loudspeakers are pretty good or were last time I bought a pair. They're designed as studio monitors but great for listening too. Perhaps they've gone downhill since being bought by a listed company a few years ago?

The Focusrite buyout (unless there was another after it) seem to have improved quality and transparency (i.e. publicly available official measurements for their current range). Still, performance remains lacking for the asking price of the A/S models; the A7V has a massive port resonance near 650 Hz, for example.

Interesting post about an old Adam engineer reminiscing about A5X issues: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a...

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