1,245 karma · joined May 23, 2018
Also, possible Apple since they haven't gone into deep debt to finance 'AI buildout'.
There's no reason you can't gather statistics about a representative part of the population. It doesn't make sense to make the entire world pay for better audio because some guy somewhere might be a bit more sensitive and he thinks it ruins everything.
I don't know if such a person exists, but especially in the 'magic' audio territory there's a big amount of bullsh*t going on. There's a reason the James Randi price was never claimed.
There's a huge difference between digital 'distortions' caused by sampling at CD quality and things like tape flutter which most people can actually hear. Even then, some people like the imperfections like vinyl or tape artifacts. Some people even prefer MP3 compressed music.
There is one purely objective benchmark: a true blind test. You can believe if something is different or not, but if nobody's capably of hearing the difference, does it matter?
Running a music store means you'll want to sell the most expensive stuff with the higher margins so you have every incentive to convince people cheap stuff is crap. Why should I trust you?
Rental of expensive stuff will always be expensive too due to insurance, maintenance and fraud. It's not really helping to make stuff more accessible, more a convenience for the pro's that need stuff for a gig.
HP fixed a remote exploit a few years back. Theoretically someone could use your local wifi printer to install a persistent backdoor on your network. In practice HP uses updates to patch leaks in their cartridge protection (the most complicated tech in the printers). And accidentally sometimes bricks printers...