woochifer

B-b-b-b-u-u-u-u-t, OOOOOOOPEN!!!

Do you (or Gatorguy) have a breakdown for that?

As someone who works in automotive, I know that a lot of head units (radios/stereos) in vehicles are made by Harmon. It could very well be that these sales outpace all their other audio sales given the large number of vehicle sales every year.

However, I have never seen anything outside of head units or telematics in vehicles made by Harmon. If you look at other OE suppliers (Valeo, Bosch, Siemens, Continental - yes the tire company) you see instrument clusters, climate controls, airbag computers, stereo/nav systems, heads up displays, suspension control, braking systems, autonomous driving components - the list is endless.

So to say that this purchase "will automatically catapult it into the highest levels of automotive tech suppliers, " is a bit of stretch, since even lesser known companies (like Valeo, for example) have 2x the yearly sales of Harmon while heavyweights like Bosch have 10x while developing systems for the entire vehicle, not just infotainment.

IIRC, Harman's total sales are about double that of the entire North American home audio market. Home audio's a comparatively small market, but it has a lot of different players in it. The OEM automotive audio market is very concentrated into a small handful of companies. But, that market also is evolving very quickly with connected and integrated systems. Samsung is ramping up their development side, and they have considerable manufacturing capacity (except for their higher end and professional products, I believe that Harman outsources much of its manufacturing).

Harman accounts for about half of the automotive audio market (including OEM systems), and the majority of the pro audio market (recording studios, concert audio, movie theaters, etc.). This is what Samsung is buying into. They don't currently have a presence in either market. I can see the big picture with the automotive market, since that's dominated by a small group of companies. But, I wonder how Samsung will handle Harman's range of audio brands. Under the Harman umbrella, they operate fairly autonomously and each focus on specific market niches. Samsung has seemingly taken more of a scattershot approach, where they try to appeal to all market segments at once.

kkerst said:

sumergo said:

What I don't understand is why people have to say that someone describing their opinion of the quality of vinyl playback is asinine, self-righteous and condescending.

As you say, who cares how people listen?  Listen to what you want, when and how you want, and enjoy.  Just don't think that all media are "reproduction-quality-equal" or that your ears are my ears.

Allow me to veer off the path here just a bit. Most people who say this or that is better usually don't understand what they are talking about. The way I see it, 1) two arguments are valid: Digital sampling (let's hope at least 2x, but that's already old school, but let's stick to the fundamental Nyquist) is the most precise way to reproduce sound, neglecting compression and other fancy algorithms. 2) While analog recording technically will capture all frequencies (low "warmenth" overtones mixed in unintentionally by other frequencies) limited by the analog bandwidth of the audio chain, they usually result in horrible distortion off vinyl.

In my opinion (just that, an opinion), 70's deep album tracks were captured very well on vinyl, but EDM and other formats are best left for a digital format.

Digital can be more precise, but mastering practices often negate that advantage by going for maximum loudness. Can't do that with analog, otherwise it will distort. Vinyl can capture a surprisingly high dynamic range and frequency range. The trade off is with how long the mastering engineer intends to make each side (higher dynamic range = shorter playing time), and whether they're willing to risk mistracking on cheap/improperly setup turntables. Common mastering practices with CDs and digital downloads have unintentionally turned LPs into the "dynamic" sounding medium. The theoretical arguments are less relevant when so much digital audio is now aimed at sounding good enough on car audio, Bluetooth speakers, and earbuds.

Kind of a strange article.

I just ran the same search for "Home Audio and Theater" products, and 6 out of the 9 top selling products were cables (the others were the Amazon Fire TV stick, Fire TV remote, and Echo). This seems like a poorly researched article.

As for vinyl, these cheap USB turntables are piss poor representations of what the medium is truly capable of. The cheap needle and cartridge alone won't capture much of the detail that got cut into the groove to begin with. And the resonant plastic, lightweight tonearm, and lack of isolation will result in further mechanical losses from the vinyl. Spend $50 on a USB turntable, and you'll end up crap sound and digital files worse than 128k MP3 downloads.

You want to get the most out of vinyl, you need to pony up for a decent turntable that can at least reduce resonances and external vibrations. And don't skimp on the cartridge. The cartridge will define the sonic character of the playback, and leave it up to the rest of the turntable components to maintain that signal integrity all the way through to the output.

As far as formats go, the sound quality depends more on the mastering and recording than the playback medium. CDs CAN sound better than LPs, and LPs CAN sound better than CDs. It's all contingent on how the original mastering was done. The sad fact is that most music nowadays is mastered with the dynamics crushed into oblivion (look up "loudness wars"). After the early teething pains of the CD, recordings tried to increase the dynamic range over what was possible with LPs. But, in more recent years, mastering and recording practices have gone into maximum loudness mode. Bump up the average levels, and crush the dynamics in the process.

So much vinyl now sounds better than CDs and digital downloads, because in many cases LPs are now ironically mastered with more of the dynamic range intact (it's telling, because even with LPs, the dynamic range has an upper limit in order to keep the needle from mistracking). It has nothing to do with the medium. More care needs to be taken in the LP mastering, because if the levels get set too high, then it will distort.

If you go strictly by what each format is capable of, digital audio SHOULD capture more of what's on the original recording. The fact that it often doesn't points more to how the music is released, than what the format is capable of.

That said, the quality of playback for CDs and digital audio generally starts with a higher floor than vinyl. Even with a cheap CD or digital audio player, you'll have a much higher baseline of sound quality than you would with a $50 USB turntable. If you want vinyl playback that's competitive with digital audio and can surpass it (depending on how well the LP was mastered and pressed), then it will cost you.

I have a modest LP collection and 25-year old midrange turntable. Always sounded good, but upgrading to a higher end Ortofon cartridge (list price $300, bought on special for half off) a few years ago really made my LPs come to life. And the digital files also sound excellent, because I can keep the levels below clipping and avoid losing dynamic range in the process. Nothing fancy, just run an output from my receiver to my iMac, and capture as uncompressed audio.