I recently replaced my squeaky Dunlop SP Sport DSST run-flat tyres with high-performance Michelin Pilot Sport PS2 non-run flat tyres often recommended on E60.net. I am now noticing a 3-5% drop in fuel consumption as a bonus.
For some reason the audiophile electronics market is full of vendors selling wares with dubious claims supported with pseudo-scientific technobabble, in a way other expensive hobbies like photography are spared from. It’s one thing to charge a premium for overbuilt metal chassis that look good in a rack but do little for sound quality, another altogether to claim improvements in sound quality from tweaks that simply can’t make a difference.
“Audiophile” power cables are an example – somehow a $500 IEC power cord blessed with pixie dust will make up for the miles of bog-standard copper or aluminium power lines from the utility. Peter Aczel has made a convenient list of the top frauds perpetrated by the so-called industry. Of course, it would be unfair to tar an entire industry with a monster brush – there are ethical cable manufacturers like Blue Jeans Cables.
Audophiles who buy into those scams also tend to become rabid supporters (cognitive dissonance in action) and will get quite upset if you point out basic high-school science makes those claims unsupportable.
Usually these shady practices are limited to the ghetto of cable manufacturers, but when a supposedly reputable firm like Chord gets into the act with their “Indigo Plus Digital” digital S/PDIF coaxial digital interconnects, the only sane approach is to boycott the company altogether. I had considered their Chordette USB/Bluetooth DAC, but you’ve got to doubt any claim made by a company that will stoop to a transparent fraud like purportedly premium digital cables.
I don’t understand why the media make such a big fuss about computer companies like Apple, Dell, Gateway or now Cisco entering the consumer electronics business. Consumer electronics is a puny industry compared to IT. Just compare the market cap and revenues of Apple, HP or Cisco to that of Sony.
Diversifying into consumer electronics is a no-brainer because entertainment’s migration to digital makes many technologies dual-purpose, but consumer electronics will remain a marginal sideline to IT companies’ business, not a replacement growth engine.
A similar instance of the media industry’s myopia (and indeed narcissism) is how they make a big fuss of telecom and cable companies entering the market for music – the entire content industry’s revenues, music movies et al, does not amount to more than a couple weeks’ revenues for telcos.
Despite my loathing for all things Sony, I purchased a Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-Ray player a few months ago. One of the reasons is specifically because it implements Profile 1.1 and not 2.0.
One thing you can be sure of – BD-Live will be used by the scumbags in Hollywood for tracking and spyware long before it is used to bring anything of value to the customer, just as TiVo was used to snoop on users’ watching habits.
Last week, I helped an aunt of my wife pick a digital camera. She is a community activist, and used a wonderful Olympus OM-1 until it gave up the ghost, then a not-so-wonderful Kodak Advantix APS camera, but it is becoming hard to find film processing labs in India. The mere act of taking a photo tends to deter the kind of misbehavior she fights against. You would think she would be afraid of being assaulted for taking a photo, but this is a person who discusses death threats made against her as matter of fact.
I ended up recommending a Panasonic Lumix LZ8 as that was the model DPReview recommended in its budget camera group test and fit within her 5,000 to 6,000 rupees budget. It is a decent camera, if not particularly sexy, but it has far too many buttons and options, and I can see how a digital photography novice like her might be overwhelmed.
Pure Digital took 13% of the camcorder market with the Flip, a radically minimalist device that is simple to use. There doesn’t seem to be a similar equivalent for still cameras. Such a camera should really have auto-everything, only four buttons (on/off, shoot, play and delete) and a zoom rocker. Interestingly, digital SLRs come closer to this than most compact digicams because they do not have a record/play modal interface, and use shooting priority instead (the better compacts also offer this).