Re: Crest Pro-Lite Questions - Two 3.0 bridged or one 7.5 for a pair of Danley TH118
I will stop arguing with you soon. It is Christmas after all.
I was talking about a number of audio products in general-not a type specifically.
I will stand by my "believe" statement.
free country (so far).
I run into people all the time that quote specs that are COMPLETELY WRONG-sometimes as much as 10-15dB off.
People? We run into mis-informed posters here and around the internet ALL THE TIME.
When I was last in these trenches (a couple decades ago) I would often respond to my sales reps telling me what competitor sales reps were saying about Peavey products to the dealers and their floor sales people. I would call these "whisper" campaigns because they would never put such bogus stuff in writing (trust me I begged my reps for written proof). I would often have to prove to my own reps that these slanders were wrong.
Sales is a high pressure job and not all sales types are as honorable as you and me (and everybody reading this). And to repeat myself some are just misinformed. I recall having some fun at an AES show when I was walking around in disguise (I was carrying some drum sticks). I walked into the booth of a well known and well respected by some here, power amp company where the booth salesman was touting a new amp model that delivered more power than was possible to draw from the line cord. When I asked him to explain how that was possible he was rendered speechless, and stopped talking to me. I suspect he received a sales pitch where that power was qualified as some kind of short term peak power, but he lost those minor details in his presentation. No doubt many people listened to his pitch as being from the horses mouth and carried it home to repeat to others.
Now that may be "close enough" in some peoples books-but not mine. Or maybe not the actual spec (as often the product will produce the particular spec WITHIN a very specific set of test parameters), but it is VERY misleading as to what the customer actually "thinks" it will do.
These are complex topics and the vast majority of customers do not want to have to understand all the aspects to it. they just want to buy a product that will not embarrass them and work like they expect. (another reason I really like powered cabinets).
And customers will quote these misleading numbers as a reason to buy a particular product over another. Even though the later will actually outperform the one with the misleading specs.
amen... I was usually on the losing side of such misinformation. While I found precious few examples of published deception.
All to often the customer either will not look further or is not smart enough to do a little bit of "figuring" to see if the specs make sense.
But that requires a little bit of thought and knowledge-which far eludes many in our industry. They just want to be handed a "simple number" and "believe" that it represents everything about the product. This includes things like SPL output-coverage pattern-freq response etc.
Yup... and worse than that the customers reward the companies that appear to give them more of what they want with increased sales.
As with all other things-you have to look a bit deeper to get the truth. Just look at political ads for example. They don't tell the whole story-just the part they want you to believe.
If you've got the time I could tell you more than you want to hear about political advertising. Humans try to simplify decision making down from evaluating the multiple aspects of two products to one single spec to base their decision on. Marketers stay up at night trying to figure out what the one aspect will be, often trying to convince the customer that some innocuous spec is paramount. In power amps I've seen sales campaigns based on silly high slew rates and when that lost steam, we saw a round of silly high damping factor ads, by the time these specs end up in advertising campaigns they are usually passe. It is the human condition to make the vast majority of purchase decisions irrationally or only semi-conciously. Otherwise why would people buy different brands of gasoline, or toilet paper?
I gave up decades ago trying to educate every customer one at a time. Most purchase decisions are made based on opinions formed in advance from reading hyperbolic advertising or from talking with misinformed floor salespeople (some of whom are spiffed to push a given product).
Unless you have the ad budget of a funny wire company, good luck, and Merry Christmas again..
JR
PS: Ivan you have the good fortune of a (well deserved) exemplary brand reputation that usually earns you the benefit of the doubt. Imagine starting out with two strikes against you........
