I attended a local meeting of a few ISF/Cedia trained installers last night and walked away with a very interesting perspective regarding quality when it comes to both audio and video presentations.

One of the first trends most of us began to notice was this move towards cheap components. It seems that even those folks who can afford to get better sounding, better built components are instead going for mediocre quality stuff. But they want it to sound like the expensive stuff!

Two of the video guys have complained that once they properly calibrate a projector according to SMPTE standards, the customer wants them to turn up the contrast or brightness to damaging levels. Now why would one purchase a $20,000 projector, and not want it calibrated properly I will never know.

The audio guys have tons of complaints. My pet peeve is this, once you tweak the response of the system(get a reasonably flat house curve) the customer wants the sub turned up 10db more!!!!. That results in a flattened soundstage, and tipped system balance. Yeck!

The customer wants X speaker because it looks so cool. One problem, it SOUNDS like cow plop.

The customer wants the speakers placed behind the screen. He tells me that after purchasing a NON preforated screen. When you tell them it will sound horrible, eh do it anyway. Can anyone tell me a better way to waste my time.

You are asked to design and put together a sound system for X size room. It requires that more than one sub is required for that size room. The customer says it cost too much, but the want the same performance you get from two out of one. Riiiight!!

Here is my best one. I was putting toether a install for a un-named director. His screening room is pretty large, and probably would require some large efficient speakers to fill the room with sound. I get this call from him shouting he wants a M&K speaker package that he saw in a small mixing suite at his studio. I tell him those speakers are way to small to work in his setup. He insist, I purchase them knowing he will melt them in a week. Guess what, I get a call a week later with him complaining that two of the speakers sounded distorted. He melted them while trying to overdrive them.

I read a recent poll in a RIAA sponsered mag that said most people would prefer low resolution downloads off the net, rather than either of the high resolution formats. I found that rather alarming in that it tells me that we prefer convience over quality. When asked if these people had hometheaters, more than half said they did, but still preferred downloading lossy data with a low bit rate rather than purchasing a high resolution disc.

We now see that all of the cries for affordability has lead to many quality control issues. I have heard many stories here at audioreview, and on other online forums of people buying electronics and having them fail within weeks. Hometheater mag even tested both the audio and video quality of a $45 DVD from a unheard of manufacturer and found that it couldn't even downcovert a anamorphic encoded DVD to 4:3 analog television cleanly, and the audio DAC's were so cheap that aliasing was evident with CD playback.

Were have we gone wrong here? What happen to pride of ownership of good quality equipment? What happen to audio as a long term investment?

Okay, off my soapbox now. You all can return back to your rrrrregularrrly scheduled program.

What are your comments?