Wiardgroup

Hi Harry

--- In wiardgroup@yahoogroups.com, HDibrell@... wrote:

> I was in the car stereo business back in the '80's and some of the 
power 
> ratings were so ridiculous, but the customers insisted on using them
 so they 
> could compare their amp with their buddies'. We started making up
our on  just 
> for fun. My favorites were : " Yeah, it's 100 watts ILS ( If
Lightning  Strikes 
> ) or 100 watts BICF ( Before It Catches  Fire)."        Harry  D
>

LOL!!!
mobile sound!
if ever there was a racket !!!! surpassed only in it's Chicanery by
carnival gaming and software design! (my own chosen line of grift!)
My local parish offers convenient in-home confessionals for folks in
my profession... saves time! 
(I hope you have (as it seems from your comment)  repented of your
brush with such a dark past)
;'> 

i realize that i rant in black and white terms but you raise a good
point. CUSTOMERS are eager participants in the tango-macarbre of
specsmanship. They are just as culpable for the hysteria as the
manufacturers who feed them this malarky. Psychoacoustic research ***
shows that the amount of mucus in the listeners ear canal at the time
of perception makes a much larger impact on perceived spectrum than
any change that can be made in the transmitting hardware.

The overwhelming  majority of the laws that govern this field were
written by PT Barnum, not Hermann von Helmholtz. Any huckster with the
brass to don a white lab coat and scribble on a piece of graph paper
can claim that he , and only he, can hear the music of the spheres. 
And by PT Barnum's first law of commercial demographics, a remarkable
percentage of  rodents (some surprisingly educated among them)  will
fall in joyous procession behind his pied piping.

One of the things that attracted me most to Grant, early on, was that
even though he demonstrated one of the clearest and most thorough
understandings of audio test procedures i'd ever encountered. He was
openly scornful of their applicability to the process of making music.
 He understood that such subjective and dynamic phenomena could not be
quantified in any way that would do justice to the actual experience.
The maps is not the territory (eh Mike?)… A man after my own heart; a
heart that I must confess has been indelibly blackened by years of
complicity in the design and sale of business software and hardware
`solutions'.

"B.I.C.F."!!!!!
ROTFLMFAO!!!!!
=)
-doc

***(the HONEST academic stuff, not the 'research'  subsidized by
Harmon International) 
(hell… guys! even a deaf old boomer like me  can hear  that mp3's
sound like a cassette that's been pulled from the glove compartment of
a long submerged car!)