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THX Caught With Pants Down Over Lexicon Blu-ray Player
SchlimpyChicken writes "Lexicon and THX apparently attempted to pull a fast one on the consumer electronics industry, but got caught this week when a couple websites exposed the fact that the high-end electronics company put a nearly-unmodified $500 Oppo Blu-ray player into a new Lexicon chassis and was selling it for $3500. AV Rant broke the story first on its home theater podcast with some pics of the two players' internals. Audioholics.com then posted a full suite of pics and tested the players with an Audio Precision analyzer. Both showed identical analogue audio performance and both failed a couple of basic THX specifications. Audioholics also posted commentary from THX on the matter and noted that both companies appear to be in a mad scramble to hide the fact that the player was ever deemed THX certified."
Sadly it's been a years-long downwards slide with THX. They used to certify only high-end theatres, then added high-end home theatre setups, then the standards for commercial theatres slowly started slipping until basically everyone who wasn't showing films in a tin can got certified, then they started certifying middle-of-the-road home theatre setups, then individual pieces of home-theatre hardware, and recently even some decent but not exactly world-class Logitech computer speakers.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
When I was working for a Bang & Olufsen dealer I we had the case of a broken TV we had to pick up from a client and fix it. The TV in question was a rebadged panasonic with a nice B & O frame. We repaired the tv in the workshop and tested it. After that we put it back in its B&O frame and returned it to the customer only to find it wasn't working. Why? One of us had managed to accidently press the original panasonic powerbutton while putting it back in the B&O frame. Try explaining that to a customer.
Please do the calculation and tell us what the difference in transit times is for, say, 40m of cable.
Clue: do actually believe that a band who's musicians use different length guitar/mic cables cannot possibly play in time?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Given that the maximum cable length under best conditions (I'm not even accounting for cable twisting here) is about 100m, at 0.5c the delay between sender and receiver is about 6.6*10^-9. Not quite 7 nanoseconds, if I am not mistaken. The time it takes your computer to execute about 30 atomic instructions. Considering your reflexes take a billion times longer, I would be amazed if you can hear THAT.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm laughing my ass off. You don't seriously think the jitter caused by that miniscule difference in cable length will fool with anything designed to use twisted pair as an interconnect, do you?
We're not talking about memory busses running at several GHz, we're talking about relatively low-bandwidth interconnects between devices. And this is assuming that you're not encapsulating everything and just using ethernet signaling like everyone else in the pro audio world does.
I have been told (directly, not third party) by one of the highest authorities at Denon Electronics that their cable is a shielded Cat5e cable... They only made it to satisfy custom installers who wanted something ridiculous to sell clients who had more money than sense. Off the record of course...
In this case Denon aren't bad guys, they just aren't stupid. They had enough requests and knew these guys would simply go elsewhere to get what they wanted (another product they could sell people who, if they dropped a $100 bill on the ground, would think it a waste of time to stoop over and pick it up).
In this case, the people at fault are the installers who can't seem to charge for their time and instead want to cultivate an industry where their services are "free" and everything is paid through them buying products at cost and selling them at retail to clients. The really big installers know how to run a business, but the middle and lower tiers are largely fueling customer ignorance of the value of their services.
A few years ago I worked for a famous chip company with only one real competitor. When they came out with a chip that was smaller, faster, and used less juice than ours, we were, ahem, green with envy.
And we raised our prices.
The marketing VP explained to us at a meeting that people will perceive our chips as being better, even when they know the facts prove otherwise, because if it "costs more it must be better."
I'd like to point out that most "audiophiles" are usually scrounging vintage gear at Goodwill, and pretty much tweak their analogue gear with rubber bands and safety pins or whatever words. It's the guys with too much money who are buying the alleged high end gear.