That’s correct. I am godlike in my perfection.
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In my experience Mana stands (under cds, active SBLs) worked exceptionally well on suspended wooden floors, but not so well on solid flagstones. I moved around a lot and setting up was not a problem, just bemusing for my other half at the time. Back home the Naim fraim was superior.
Back when I first had the mana I worked with a well known retailer to conduct realtime frequency analysis of the stands. I don’t have access to the results now but they were impressive if you liked a flat line response.
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I think that hi-fi has always been very much a minority interest. Maybe it is more so nowadays, though it is easy to get that impression if one thinks in terms of decades old market habits - fewer high street stores and fewer physical magazines in newsagents might be giving a false impression. Certainly the resurgence of vinyl suggests there are lots of people buying, players as well as disks, though of course not all hifi, while the proliferation of people making money doing countless “reviews” of hifi on the likes of YouTube also indicates a strong interest somewhere, with I suspect much of the audience being from younger generations happy to be followers of self-styled experts and other “influencers”. Also bear in mind that back in the day the same shops that sold hi-fi very often sold a range of other music playing systems at much lower prices which may well have made up a large proportion of their profit (albeit speculation), and it seems to me that the difference these days is partly that the non-hi-fi music listening market has shifted a lot to small boxes linked to phones or internet-connected wifi speakers etc, and sold in a multitude of places from apple shops to department stores, no longer needing the display space of hi-fi shops, no longer in people’s minds being associated with hi-fi. At the same time shopping has very much shifted to more online for these mainstream products. The result inevitably is a thinning of hifi shops.
Music listening in some form or other shows no sign of dwindling, but where once the only way was via a radio or some sort of “stereo” at home or in the car, nowadays you can listen on a miniaturised, highly portable, always connected device, which satisfies those same types of people who once would have bought a nominal hifi in the form of a “music system” in the 1980s (the one box systems, just styled to look like a (small) stack, with small and very basic speakers, all very cheap compared to hifi. Whilst all my friends had record players of some sort, then proudly moved on to “stereos”, not a single one was pursuing high quality and none got into upgrading. Yes, as I see it those who thought it was worth their hard-earned to fuss about with multiple boxes seeking highest sound quality always were a small minority, and I’m not convinced there has been any major change.
My understanding was that it requires the same care and attention as full Fraim, ie. initial set up, followed by two rebuilds after three and six months, and then yearly.
Apart from the obvious shift to listening to music on 'phones etc. rather than on a half decent music centre as commonly sold in the 70’s/80’s, the biggest change as I perceive it is that a whole area of the market has largely disappeared. The type of person who would buy a separates system from somewhere like Tandy or Laskys does not seem to exist anymore. These were not serious enthusiasts as found on this forum, but people who just wanted something a little more impressive than a music centre.
I assume they are the purchasers of Sonos et al
This Hi Fi hobby gets really absurd at times.
Exactly. There has been shift from buying budget type separates to ‘convenience’ systems like Sonos. Budget separates still exist for purchase but no longer have a strong presence in the high street. Instead you will find Sonos type gear at places like John Lewis. Beause this is what most people now want. Convenience over sound quality.
Back in the early 80’s my friend’s parents had a Sanyo separates stack system in their lounge, of the type commonly sold at Laskys or Comet. In a tacky fake wood finish cabinet and with bookshelf type speakers placed on the carpet (no stands) either side of it, so they were no more than around two feet apart, and connected with bell wire. It sounded as you might expect - truly awful. They were not in any way music or audio enthusiasts. But back then such things were ‘the thing to have’ in the lounge. It was about keeping up with the Joneses. I’ve seen quite a few such systems in my time, often with the speakers placed in odd locations such as one on a window ledge and the other on top of a shelving unit across the other side of the room. Clearly the owners had no concept of soundstaging or stereo image. These are the type of people who will now buy Sonos or similar.
That old Sanyo system could have been made to sound half decent with a bit of care over speaker placement. I did try, but there was clearly no interest. Some people who owned such equipment may however have taken a bit more care and may have been inspired to eventually upgrade to something a little better such as a Dual turntable, NAD amp and Videoton Minimax speakers. That in turn may have lead to better things. How many people who own Sonos type gear I wonder will ever own anything better? This route into serious hi-fi just doesn’t exist anymore.
I think you’re wrong. Lots of young people are getting into Vinyl and the highend headphones are a big market. In Asia there’s especially in Japan there’s a very active High End market. Also there is lots of bargain equipment that sounds really good for the cost. I think keeping an open mind is a good place to be
Most people do not care about sound quality, and never did care about sound quality. My wife is happy with Youtube and a pair of crappy ear buds. She is the norm. Most people do not really care about music either.
If you take a look at the Head Fi site and their Canjams, you will see there is a market for high end audio, amongst the younger generation. It is just that the gear is different. The traditional HiFi setup with huge speakers blasting out music at the necessary volume, is out of the question for most people who live in modern houses or flats. The market for high end headphone gear is very healthy. It is the traditional HiFi manufacturers who are shrinking or closing.
The often absurd pricing and vendors pushing snake oil products, is what is killing HiFi. The quackery found on HiFi social media does not help.
We didn’t really rate the Target racks back then.
Should be quite easy to add glass, nuts and balls, if not a cutting board.
Well, some certainly have found a way forward, because from time to time there have been enquiries on here about how to integrate Sonos with Naim gear or what best to replace Sonos. Is it any fewere than might once upon a time have moved on from their budget and/or lifestyle music system purchases?
What I see as different is simply that more convenient music playing systems exist now, and at the budget end perhaps often better sounding than the equivalent 40 or 50 years ago, but the hifi side of music replay, and especially seekers of highest sound quality, may not have changed much, though the above budget level equipment has become relatively more expensive, which presumably is limiting, with also a an extremely expensive high end that never existed back then.
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Do more people live in flats now? And FWIW modern flats, at least in Britain, are required by Buildin Regulations to have far better sound insulation than in the past.
Size of speaker is irrelevant to volume - plenty of ghettoblaster type music players are played just as loud, and just as problematic with neighbours if in poorly insulated adjoining homes, flats or terraces/semis.
But I think you may be right about snake oil products etc and their turn-off effect. Certainly I know one person who abandoned any interest in hifi at the time of Peter Belt: admittedly he would probably never have progressed far up the ladder, but he simply stopped because it was such a turn-off.
What is a ‘snake oil product’ exactly? As far as I can make out it’s a term people give to products that they don’t believe live up to the manufacturer’s claims. So nothing to do objectively with a product and simply a label someone sticks on it to signify their own personal opinion and displeasure of it.
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Nothing new here, I bought a 3 tier table from Sound Supports in 2019 to go with my other Mana gear. Quality is just as good, the only difference was he didn’t have the “ Mana Acoustics “ stickers at that time. I understood he had bought the Franchise from John Watson along with all the tech drawings and specs.
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I did do a re build after six months of use, but I found there was nothing to adjust. Everything was tight and level. I left it at that for three years until I upgraded to full Fraim. Even then, no adjustments were needed, just adding the additional components. Definitely needs more attention and care now though.
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audiophile network switches and cables, earthing boxes full of gravel, expensive fuses filled with beeswax etc etc etc
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His ideas were bizarre and seemed to defy any kind of scientific rationale. To abandon an interest in hi-fi because of one man’s ideas seems to me to be a bit odd though. Surely it would have made more sense to just dismiss and ignore them?
Are you saying that you have factual proof that these products don’t work, proof that you are able to present to us? Or are you saying that it’s your opinion that they don’t work? It’s an important distinction - the two things amount to something completely different.
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It’s not on me to prove they don’t do anything but on the makers to prove that they do.
But yes I/we have tested network switches at work for safety critical voice and different switches do not improve the analogue output signal quality of DACs