Issue 281   March 2018
Pragmatism Versus Idealism
Editorial By Robert Harley

  Many years ago I schlepped a just-delivered 80-pound CD player from my home's foyer to clear a path for an entering visitor. The visitor happened to have a background in electrical engineering (not in audio) and was shocked when he learned that the massive box contained a CD player. I nonchalantly told him that much of the weight was in the power supply. He loudly scoffed at my explanation, suggesting that a power supply of just a few ounces was perfectly sufficient to deliver the small amount of current needed by a CD player's circuits. Even though this was the first time we'd met, the astounded visitor was openly derisive of the very idea of an 80-pound disc player. The product simply offended his sensibilities.

His reaction is typical of engineers in any field; they are indoctrinated as students in the belief that over-engineering is as great a sin as under-engineering. Over-engineering is not only wasteful, but evidence that the designer lacked the insight and skill to create a design that was as ruthlessly efficient as possible.

I faced a the same attitude recently when talking with an electrical contractor about the AC-power requirements for the listening room in the house I'm building. He couldn't understand why I needed three dedicated 20A lines with a dedicated ground, all the same length 10AWG wire from outlets to breaker box, on the same phase, with no splices and no daisy-chaining of the neutral or ground wires, AC outlets designed specifically for audio, and McMaster conductive silver paste applied to all breakers and AC-outlet connections. For a stereo system? I explained the technical rationale behind each requirement, but failed to sway him; my specifications remained the height of absurdity.

Given this general engineering mindset, it's remarkable that high-end audio even exists. High-performance audio, in its purest form, is predicated on the idealistic principle that if a design technique improves the sound, it's worth pursuing. The ruthless efficiency of traditional pragmatic engineering is anathema, replaced by an ethos that pursues performance gains with a messianic zeal. Of course, not every product is designed with a cost-be-damned approach, but every true high-end product prioritizes sound quality over cost-cutting no matter what the design budget. The final phase in the design of many high-end components is to step back, assess the product as a whole, and then to see if there's any way to improve its performance. This step may involve adding a more costly part, even if the product's retail price has already been established. The cost of the better part comes out of the company's margin, but the designer wouldn't have it any other way.

By contrast, the large mass-market electronics manufacturers employ a group of engineers whose sole job is to engineer cost out of a product. That is, after the design engineers have created the product, the cost-cutters look for ways to shave pennies here and nickels there, often without regard to how that cost-cutting affects performance.

There's another factor that distinguishes the high-end designers; they love music and are good listeners. In this issue's Letters column reader Peter D' Castro observes that the honorees in The Absolute Sound's High-End Audio Hall of Fame [Issue 278] are all skilled listeners. Indeed, it is the love of music and pursuit of a deeper listening experience that motivates high-end designers to reject engineering pragmatism and to experiment with design techniques that would be considered crazy, wasteful, and overkill by conventional engineering standards.

Imagine a world in which our audio systems are designed by engineers who consider a music-playback system as simply another home appliance. The product is perfectly reasonable, producing sound when you turn on the power and costing not much more than a toaster. Without the passion and skill of idealistic high-end audio designers, we'd all be listening to appliance-grade stereos rather than to the high-end's myriad glorious creations that bring music to life in our living rooms.

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