Comment by rdtsc
14 years ago
But then for every 10 people like you there is 1 person who is willing to pay 20x as much so they can get a "higher fidelity" product.
For a producer and manufacturer the rational approach would be to cater to that craziness and extract as much money from it as possible. In other words if you are selling HDMI cables, spend $2/cable to make it, then sell most for $5 and then re-brand some and sell for $500. If only takes 1 out of 100 people to buying that to make the same profit. You know these people are obsessed and irrational so you cater to that. And that's basically how we end up with ridiculously overpriced Monster cables and recordings distributed to customers @ 192kHz.
Agreed, that market exists. My point is, why discuss the subtle difference between 16/44 vs 24/192 when there are far more audible and damaging practices going on in the music industry. For example, aggressive compression and brick limiting which adds distortion to achieve maximum loudness ('loudness wars').