new article
anybody fancy building a $10,000 DIY speaker system that is good for clean 130+ decibels with sound quality of a studio monitor ?
well i used my top 1% IQ and 25 years of experience in DIY audio to design one.
https://dissidentsound.discoursehosting.net/t/baseline-system-my-minimum-driver-design-detailed/1131
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Start a business building these for rich people.
unfortunately a lot of the sound of a modern system comes down to digital sound processing, not the physical / acoustical characteristics of a speaker. when i was starting out in DIY Audio DSP was barely a thing. one of the reasons i went to college was actually to learn about DSP and other electronics ( and i tacked on Computer Engineering as a second major just because everybody was doing it ).
the same thing happened to cars as what happened to speakers. in that it's now software calibration that is the difference between a good car and great car. the mechanical aspects of a car are easy to get right.
and of course rich people want aesthetics first. nobody cares how a car drives if its ugly. the same goes for speakers. rich people choose speakers based on on looks, and the sound of those speakers mainly is determined by processing ( whether digital or analog ).
so i there are 3 pieces to this puzzle: 1 acoustical design ( i am probably 8 on a scale of 10 here ), 2 signal processing ( i could potentially level up to maybe 6 out of 10 here ), 3 beautiful carpentry ( i am 2 at best here ).
so if we consider that carpentry comes first, then processing and then acoustical design then i am like a 4 on average of those scores.
if i could get in touch with people who are good at those other things we could make something work but i keep getting banned from everywhere before i can make frens.
ultimately to be successful selling luxury goods the key is to have a firm grasp on the psychology of your customer.
if you start out making good products expecting somebody to appreciate the quality you will fail.
you must start out with the absurdity of customer's desires and reverse engineer them. the new Bugatti Tourbillon is a perfect example of how to do it right. as a youtube commenter put it " a grotesque car for grotesque people " ... EXACTLY RIGHT !
although i am actually very good at this ( analyzing the psychology of degenerates ) i don't have any desire to cater to them.
so for Bugatti Tourbillon they put in 16 cylinder engine ( that makes no more power than turbo V8 in the new corvette ) just because they wanted to be the only car with 16 cylinders. the customers loved it. the customer is dumb and while i can reverse engineer their stupidity i don't want to.
in Audio if you want to reverse engineer the stupidity of customer you use vinyl turntables, vacuum tube amps, silver cables, alnico magnets and exotic diaphragm materials like Synthetic Diamond. some of these things ( silver cables ) have no effect on sound. others make it worse. Diamond tweeters are good but the difference versus aluminum ones is entirely outside of audible spectrum unless you're a teenager ( which all the 60 year olds buying those speakers think they are ).
the sad reality is the more you learn about Audio the more you understand that what makes for a better speaker and what people actually want are the exact opposite things.
people want something that sounds impressive when they describe it to people who will never actually hear the speakers, for example " my speakers have tweeters made out of diamond ! "
on other hand nobody can explain that digital sound processing in their speakers so it can't be a selling point, even though that's where the sound quality actually comes from.
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fun fact you can buy vinyl flooring made out of diamond. it costs HALF of vinyl flooring i actually put in one of my rooms ( which only is made from quartz ). of course you can never find out HOW MUCH diamond is in that flooring. my guess is maybe a milligram per 1,000 square feet or so. does it make the floor stronger ? of course not. but the flooring is called "Diamond 10" and when you read the marketing material it explains that Diamond is the only material that scores 10 on scale of hardness so therefore this is the best flooring.
now imagine i come to a forum where people brag about their diamond tweeters and tell them this. i will just get banned. they don't like hearing that they are stupid.
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i tried to explain to my real estate agent that the flooring i put in has wear layer thickness TWICE what is considered "best" and has 1/4 century COMMERCIAL warranty, whereas lifetime residential warranty in flooring is roughly equivalent to 5 year commercial warranty, so my flooring basically has 5X lifetime residential warranty. it is the highest performing vinyl ever made and had to be ordered from UK where it is made. my agent listened to this and was like "nobody cares, people only care about style and color"
and that's how it is.
to me it is also the most beautiful flooring as well - it is translucent cream color with large gold flecks embedded at various thicknesses and angles that shimmer when the light falls on them. but according to my real estate agent it's ugly because it looks like commercial vinyl ( which it is ) and people want wood look or at least stone look.
i specifically did not want wood look because it isn't wood and i don't like things that are fake and i didn't want wood because it rots and stone because it cracks.
my floor looks like the optional premium paint on an S class Mercedes but it doesn't look like wood. people literally want fake wood like this:
over state of the art.
dumb animals. fuck them all.
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but probably the biggest reason this won't work as a business is because only poor people listen to music at home
middle class people go to concerts
and rich people hang out with artists in the studio
what i have come to realize is that so-called "high end audio" is just fancy furniture.
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but that's not the disturbing realization
the disturbing realization is you can't make money by studying existing technology
you can only make money by creating new technology
in other words:
“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
i love to learn but it doesn't pay to learn ( unless you're a dentist ).
Audio is a very old field. You can't make money in it because of that. only innovation happening is in software, DSP and high frequency switching amplifiers and to a lesser extent compression drivers and subwoofers. For the most part everything has been studied to death before i was even born.
even Artificial Intelligence is an old field by now, but there is still room for growth in AI at least.
to make money you have to look forward, not study the past.
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Related to this was a quote I heard from some local people who did case studies of entrepreneurs in the area. They described entrepreneurs as "the opposite of Renaissance Men" and "overspecialized". They were obsessed with ideas and often had little outside of their field in which they were innovators. Many began working on their niche at a young age. They are described as "not fun at parties" and always thinking/strategizing on improvement within their specialty. Sometimes they were able to imagine markets that didn't yet exist and then will them into existence through persistent effort.
Interesting perspective and important for people like those in our circle who are both historians and Renaissance Men to think on. I love the quest for knowledge but I agree there's not much money in it, unless the quest updates your salable skills (something I did in a very hit or miss way this past year). I think there is hope for generalists to become entrepreneurial, actually, but it involves fighting one's natural tendencies and developing a more intense focus.
it's possible that obsessive people are simply more common than renaissance men like Elon Musk
