DIYHiFi.org

Consumer electronics is full of false/misleading claims.
What does a stupid UHF antenna has, that makes it "digital"?
When you see a "1000 Watts PMPO" sticker on a low-fi midi system, you can be sure it has at least... 5 Watts RMS.

FM tuners were FM tuners.
Then came the "digital" tuners. The other ones, were analog.
Then came DAB and oh wait... these are digital, the other ones were just digital tuning.
Then they announced the FM swith off... (oh wait, we need to buy DAB tuners...)
...and years later they switched off DAB (in April 2011, here in Portugal).

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Carlos Filipe

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction." Albert Einstein

May be so, but a dishonest claim to lure people into buying new technology that does not work as stated? This happens mostly in IT and Chris 719 is a prime example of someone who firmly believes that such claims are fine and attack people who find issues with them in the process..

I don't know about Portugese law. In English law, I can return any item which is 'not fit for purpose' except for software and IT items, where vendors appear to be immune.

There can be several explanations for what you have described. One of the biggest problems is simple ignorance of technical details by the marketing team. Many, but not all, marketing staff and technical copy writters have little to no actual technical background. In such cases, the marketing communications effort honestly trips over industry buzz words, such as "digital", without realizing when the usage, or context of usage, is technically incorrect. This is especially true for consumer marketing, but much less so for B2B marketing.

Another problem is market expediency. By that I mean, the practical need to quickly capture a potential customer's attention, especially, non-technical consumers. An ad may have only seconds to gain the attention of a buyer, no matter how superior the actual product may in fact be. Conversely, many inferior products succeed precisely because the marketing effort was superior in grabbing the attention of buyers. The real problem here is the behavior of consumers, whom have busy lives, and far too many distractions demanding their attention. Where this usually goes wrong is, after having successfully grabbed the buyer's attentions, the represented benefits go clearly beyond what the product actually delivers.

Having provided a couple of innocent and common alternatives to dishonesty, there remain those marketing efforts which, indeed, do rely on intentionally misleading suggestions if not outright deception. This can be a slippery-slope of sorts, with gradations of offense. It takes great discipline for the marketing department to not lose it's footing regrading the slope of misleading suggestion. The FTC and consumer protection laws provide protections against outright lying. In the long term, products which do not meet the misleading suggestions of those companies offering them develop that reputation, and will come to be rejected by consumers, often never to be trusted again.

I think the important thing for engineers to keep in mind is that engineering, while a demanding discipline, is a concrete skill. There are exact or optimum answers to a given, well defined, problem. Marketing, on the other hand, in often non-concrete, dealing with issues of buyer psychology. The problems are often not well defined, and the variables too plentiful, and sometimes inscrutable. Much guess work is necessarily involved.

I've been in both the Engineering and the Marketing departments of a large technical product corporation. I know how engineers look down their noses at the marketing staff. I've found that walking a mile in the marketing person's shoes is often quite eye opening for the engineer. The reverse, unfortunately, usually cannot happen, as most marketing people don't have the formal training to walk a mile in the engineers shoes. Marketeers should keep that truth in mind. However, engineers should keep in mind that while they can usually perform the activities of a marketeer, it doesn't mean they can perform them well. Both functions have their role, both require certain skills and talents, and both are essential to a successful product.

You are right, if I buy a TV set, I can go back to the store next day and return it for another model, from another brand or whatever, just because it doesn't work as I expected to, or because I don't like it, or it doesn't go well with the wall colour of my room. (!)
But if I buy Windows 7 64 bits with two Weber dual carbs and turbo injection (!), no returns accepted in any circumstance - even if it doesn't work at all.

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Carlos Filipe

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction." Albert Einstein

You have summed it pretty well, and it would take another writing to put the things on more particular level of (hi end) audio, where the bulk of the marketing is within dishonesty area, using even "intentionally misleading suggestions" very cautiously.

Pedja,

It can be difficult, separating the intentionally misleading claims from the merely unintentionally misleading ones. Granted, while the causes may differ the effect is the same. This is where government regulation can enhance the credibility of a market, benefitting both consumers and competitors. The benefit to consumers should be obvious, but the benefit to competitors is that it places them on a more fair bases of competition. In other words, it helps to limit situations where the vendor of a superior performing product is at a competitive disadvantage simply because the vendor an inferior performing product would otherwise be free to make whatever untrue performance claims they wish to. Unchecked, such behavior compels all competitors to make dishonest claims else they go out of business.

The high-end audio industry presents a particularly interesting case, as the main benefits are presented as being subjective rather than objective. Subjective claims can be as wild as one wishes to make them, while objective claims should be objectively verifiable. These two types of benefits are not inherently in conflict. However, as any experienced audiophile knows, not only do objective specifications not necessarily tell the whole story about a product, but can lead a buyer to draw the wrong conclusions about what constitutes a superior product.


A list of intentionally misleading audio equipment related OBJECTIVE marketing claims might make for amusing reading. Carlos presented a few examples earlier in this thread. Perhaps, someone would care to add to that?

You are right, but the underlying issue is Governments allowing companies to set Standards in their own interests. The rationale was that IT was too fast moving and Standards setting too slow to enable innovation and wealth creation.

This was the policy of the Thatcher government in Britain, under which BSI became a business and invested in selling 'Management' standards of all kinds, and retreating from the 'new' technology field.

This is presumably why a software company can sell you a dud without having to bear much responsibility. However, a company like Toyota can be accused of all kinds of technical negligence without much foundation.

For me, free software is the first port of call since they generally work.

Excuse me intervene with a question that may not be related directly to the matter of this topic, even if indirectly it is.

I am talking about DACs, external DACs. Ready made or kits, whatever.

We will be dealing with jitter when we HAVE a DAC of any kind. That is a matter I am very much interested in.

Should I open a new thread for that?

Please do.
There is no jitter free digital interface and/or converter.
The title of this thread is wrong, but it's a question.

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Carlos Filipe

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction." Albert Einstein

I was reading this thread with much interest, that is until it degenerated into political bellyaching. Maybe we can get back on topic now?

Like Charles and Gordon, I have produced some Async interface hardware. Seems to work just fine at 24/192 and the other lower sample-rates. However, I would like to add my observations and speculations regarding cable SQ differences, which I admit do occur even in my devices. These are not measured differences, so if that's all you care about, just ignore this post. These guys may find this interesting, hopefully not amusing.

I personally dont believe that ideal Async USB interfaces are affected by the host computer or cabling, but there are other non-ideal mechanisms at work. One thing that convinces me of this is the fact that I do multiple levels of reclocking in my devices, and yet these effect still occur. I believe there are phenomenon that can affect the interface to add more jitter indirectly. These effects are split between the computer and the cable.

The first effect that I have validated through experiementation is common-mode noise on the USB cable ground wire. Adding appropriate filtering to this ground wire definitely improves the audio quality. This improvement is not subtle. At the same time, I disconnected the +5V wire since I dont use it. The ground-loop formed by the computer, the power system and the USB cable seems to inject HF noise as a potential across this wire, even if there is no system hum.

The differences one hears in different computers could be related to the USB interface design and implementation and how good the grounding is at the computer end. The differences in cables could be related to differences in the ground wire gauge or the shielding on the cable, or how its connected at both connector ends. All of these could have an impact on the common-mode noise. Also the USB receiver has a specified common-mode noise rejection. Some USB receivers may be better at rejecting than others. The power and ground systems implemented for the receiver can also likely have an effect on the CMNR.

I plan to send such a common-mode filter to JA to try in his system BTW. In the review of my product he experienced different subtle cable effects, which he was not able to measure, or correlate to measurement anyway. The slightly worse measuring more expensive cable actually sounded better and the generic cable sounded worse, but measured slightly better. These measurements were not made in the system, but on an AP tool, so it is questionable if they would exhibit this effect.

Steve N.