kzoockof Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Certainly a lot of snake oil, but not all snake oil.
There is the crowd that feels bits is bits, watts is watts, etc. . . Where in reality, this is not so black and white. Most people talking "bits is bits" do not even know what digital jitter is, don't understand sampling rates, don't even know that their iTunes songs have all been truncated (basically portions removed from the original recording) to make smaller files (and then if they do know this, they believe the parts that have been removed are inaudible anyway).
Audio is much like photography, both are "arts" tying to replicate reality. Both have progressed from an analog approach to a digital approach. Both suffer similar types of snake oil, confusion and to some degree, ignorance. We have learned a lot more about the digital world than we used to know and the idea that we fully understand it now, in my opinion, is a bit misleading. Both have their high end, bleeding edge fanatics who fund the trickle down of new technology to mid level gear (or even pure consumer products). Both have seen manufacturers go in certain directions - thinking they knew the holy grail, only to reverse course at a later date.
We need to face reality, photography, just like the audiophile hobby, has its hard core followers and proponents discussing the minute differences in various lens sharpness, color, CA, etc. . . When in reality, we present two photographs, each positioned in a different room of the same image, one shot with the best of the best lens and body and the other with a consumer brand body and $200 lens. 98% of the population couldn't tell the two images apart. Yet those of us who could (the extreme minority), the photophile if you will, will claim that we can 100% of the time.
There is no wrong in being either an audiophile or a photography enthusiast, if this is what makes us happy. And in both cases, we probably find it difficult to justify the costs and efforts of our hobby (not addressing this as a career here) to those that think their new iPhone takes equally as good photographs. Some would say even better photographs (my son is always saying this when he and I both take the same shot and his iPhone shot seems perfectly exposed and mine not so much).
But cheers to us all for pursuing what we love, enjoy and want to share with others or just by ourselves. We have our friends and community here at FM - what a great group of enablers we are!
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