It often surprises me to see people with time, money, and knowledge settling for subpar experiences that have night and day differences to me. Even at my brokest (pretty darn broke), speakers, headphones, and glasses were always worth researching and some saving up, and the difference between what I’d end up with and the average always feels like it paid off tenfold.
I’ve got a surprising number of friends/acquaintances who just don’t seem to care, though, and I am trying to understand if they just don’t experience the difference similarly or if they don’t mind. I know musicians who just continue using generation 1 airpods or the headphones included with their phone, birdwatchers who don’t care about their binoculars, people who don’t care if they could easily make their food taste better, and more examples of people who, in my opinion, could get 50% better results/experiences by putting in 1% more thought/effort.
When I’ve asked some friends about it, it sounds as much like they just don’t care as they don’t experience the difference as starkly as I do, but I have a hard time understanding that, as it’s most often an objective sensory difference. Like I experience the difference between different pairs of binoculars and speakers dramatically, and graphical analysis backs up the differences, so how could they sound/look negligibly different to others? Is it just a matter of my priorities not being others’ priorities, or do they actually experience the difference between various levels of quality as smaller than I seem to? What’s your take on both major and, at the high end, diminishing returns on higher quality sensory experiences?
Our car has an awful sound system. I swear there are frequencies simply missing, and that transforms music in ways that are impossible to miss.
Or one would think, but my spouse doesn’t care at all. I offered to go through the trouble of upgrading the entire thing – receiver, dsp, amp, speakers, adding a sub – but they said no, why bother? Almost makes me weep when some of my favorites play on the radio.
Yeah this is pretty similar to my experience. My wife supports upgrades because she knows they make a difference to me and she can actually recognize it often, but it’s clear she’d be pretty indifferent if she was making audio decisions just for her.
That said, we’ve spent about 2 years with a nice Yamaha power amp, Elac floorstanders, and SVS sub, full setup around $5k, and she really appreciates it for our focused listening now. Passive listening might as well be out of phone speakers for her, but when we put a record on over Sunday coffee, she always remarks how grateful she is that we invested in the setup.
It’s not worth it to me to improve on our car’s sound system because the stock one is fully integrated into the dash, and there’s no DIN slot to replace the head unit. It hurts to listen to music in the car, so it’s either podcasts or nothing for me. And usually, it’s nothing…
Besides, for my tastes, you can’t make a car sound good enough for me to invest much in the way of audio improvement. Maybe a head unit, some reasonably priced replacement speakers, and a small sub would be plenty (and maybe overkill) for me in a car
