darrell wrote: > Very amusing, but wine is very different to audio equipment, if only > because wine is an organic material, and not stable. It can get better > (or much worse!) with age, and there are different styles of wine - > different grape varieties/ripeness, leading to different > sugar/alcohol/tannin content, different methods of production (oak > versus stainless steel casks/vats, for example), etc, which can lead to > very different tastes with demonstrably different chemical make up. > > It is certainly possible, through careless manufacture or careless > storage, to produce a truly horrible wine, and there probably is a > minimum production cost, below which corners are cut to the extent that > the wine will not be very nice. But beyond that, it is of course a > matter of taste (and smell, feel and appearance), and there is an awful > lot of bullshit and snobbery involved. > > So wine is probably more comparable to different performance/recording > techniques in music, than the playback technology. A closer analogy with > hifi could be the wine glass - I find myself enjoying wine much more > when served in a nice crystal glass, but the difference I perceive > between this and a thick glass tumbler or a tea cup might be an > illusion, without an obvious way of blind testing! Of course, if the > drinking vessel is dirty, or made of a reactive plastic, which taints > the contents, that is a different matter, and could be compared with > listening to music on a very low quality audio system. > > And I certainly disagree with the final sentence in the link contained > in the OP - the grape every time for me!
Good points. However there are more similarities with audio than you think. For example different grapes could be analogous to different types of amplification, i.e. solid state versus tube, and different vats to different types of speakers, i.e. dynamic versus planar. Also the type of glass used in wine drinking often has a strong influence on way the smell of the wine reaches one's nose, which in turn has a strong influence on the taste of the wine. In any case, I prefer Styrofoam cups. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ralphpnj's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10827 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98740 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
