Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Tal G in Jerusalem
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.clue

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Monday, June 3, 2002
17:19 - *Oh, good. Now there's* innovation for you.** http://club.aopen.com.tw/News/News_showAnswer_Old.asp?RecNo=713&Language=English	(top)
Whee! Look-- it's a PC motherboard with vacuum-tube sound amplification! AOpen Inc. announced today that it is introducing the world's first vacuum tube motherboard, coinciding with Intel's announcement of the Pentium� 4 845E chipset. The new AX4B-533Tube Motherboard incorporates the novel, modern-day adoption of an idea that was spawned by the invention of the electric light bulb by Thomas A. Edison back in 1879 - the vacuum tube. In taking this bold step towards audio perfection, AOpen's hybrid AX4B-533Tube unquestionably is targeted to a very exclusive niche market - passionate audiophiles and extreme gamers who are interested in building their own ultimate entertaining PCs. The motherboard is also certain to appeal to retailers that desire to cater to these two eccentric groups with custom-built PCs, delivered with matching speaker systems and the latest CD and DVD playback devices. Of course... how silly of us not to recognize the vast untapped market in the extreme gaming demographic. It seems to me that the whole vacuum-tube audiophile market is one of the best examples of a diminishing-returns equilibrium that has ever been in physical evidence. Beyond a certain linear price point, most people can't tell the difference between one high-end amp and the next-- except for a few fanatics, who will pay an exponentially higher price for a tiny, incremental improvement in audio quality. There are $10,000-per-foot speaker cables you can buy which are filled with mercury, for example, not to mention a whole lot of more-or-less snake-oil-based products-- and the companies that sell those aren't anywhere near going out of business. But if you plot all the available devices on a linear price-vs-quality graph, you can generally get 90% of the quality for 10% of the price, and anything higher-priced is the domain of a rarefied few. Gamers are 90th-percentilers. They know they have to be, because PC hardware becomes obsolete in months. They're not going to spend $10,000 on a uber-l33t gaming rig that they know will be a road apple within a year. Technology is still leapfrogging forward in the computer market, still in revolutionary mode, whereas in audio hardware the technology is in a strictly evolutionary phase . You can expect that your ultra-top-end amp that you bought in 1995 will still sound great, and you'll consider that money well spent. Not so with gamers. It's that same law of diminishing returns, by the way, that also tends to hurt Apple. The Mac is priced linearly higher than a comparable PC, for what most users consider to be an insignificant advantage in usability and/or performance and/or quality. Gamers will usually shun Macs because they can get almost all the same functionality (and a lot more games besides) for a materially smaller price. This alone tells me that while yes, you'll probably be able to sell tube-amp-powered PC motherboards to audiophile computer users, it's probably wildly wrong to expect the gamer market to swarm all over these. Especially if they're priced commensurately with the typical high-end tube amp. But maybe they'll find equilibrium. More power to 'em, I guess.