[bigallen]

"maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have."

But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it.

"The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else."

This is exactly correct

[pclmulqdq]

> But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it.

Trust me, as a former piano/harpsichord tuner, that the audience absolutely can tell the difference between a perfectly tuned instrument and one that is badly tuned. They just can't put their finger on what that difference is.

It's the same as when the viola section of an orchestra is out of tune or the horns drag (both very common problems for amateur symphonies). The overall effect is "muddier" and less "brilliant" than other performances, and you can tell as a listener, but very few people in the audience can say "the violas were flat in the adagio section."

[AnthonyMouse]

It's worse than that. In many cases the consumer can't tell, but it still matters.

Take food, for example. If the tomato on your sandwich has fewer micronutrients than a different one, you may not be able to taste it, especially after the restaurant (or you) have slathered the sandwich with sauces full of salt and sugar and fat. So you want a chef you can trust who knows how to choose a tomato (and a farmer who knows how to grow one), whether you can taste the difference or not, or the result at scale is you end up deficient in various vitamins and minerals and can't figure out why you're tired all the time.

[pixl97]

Another analogy would be a tomato grown in contaminated soil may taste the same, you just pay for it in cancer 20 years later.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's not quite the same thing, because if the tomato is full of cadmium, whether or not you can taste it the 0.01% of the customers who are chemists and personally test all of their food for safety themselves are going to figure it out. Then every store will refuse shipment of any of those tomatoes and the cops will come to shoot the farmer's dog and run over the tomato field with their ludicrous panzer.

Whereas if they find that the tomato has 10% as much β-carotene as a tomato should or what have you, somebody will write an article about it that six in a thousand customers read and people will keep buying those tomatoes because they're cheaper and not even required to be labeled differently.

It's the difference between "so bad that people won't stand for it" and "worse, but people tolerate it", and the second one can be more of a problem specifically because people don't get mad enough about it to fix it.

[thatcat]

I doubt there are chemists sitting at home with an ICP testing heavy metal levels of all their produce. That would be a lot of work and expensive to maintain. In reality no one would even notice the toxicity unless FDA happened to check or someone got sick and traced it back.

[AndrewKemendo]

I follow a guy on Instagram who runs basically everything through a mass spectrometer:

https://www.instagram.com/massspeceverything

Here’s the Taco Bell hot sauce: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-A3FfOueRm/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWF...

[AnthonyMouse]

> I doubt there are chemists sitting at home with an ICP testing heavy metal levels of all their produce.

It only takes one. Also, who says they're doing it at home? One hypochondriac willing to stay after work to use the equipment to quell their fears (or substantiate them) is all it takes.

[amy-petrik-214]

Okay, guys, come on now. back off here. Beta carotene. Vitamins. Shortage in food. The thesis is along the lines of "near-perfection but non-perfection flaws that people miss are important, OH NO, they're not important because everything was fine when they weren't perfect" -- but AHA! what about tomatoes with suboptimal vitamin levels! you couldn't even taste that! Honestly this is ridiculous, tomatoes, seriously?

Guess what. There's a lot of ADEK vitamines (fat soluble) out there. There's a lot stored up in our bodies. So much so that you can get a disease by pumping up the stores too much! Typically: TWO YEARS worth. And if that didn't set off a flag in your mind "oh, you mean vitamin A, of which two units are metabolically extracted from beta carotene" than you need to shut up right now throwing around beta carotene as an essential nutrient because you don't even know fundamental human metabolism!

Long story short, you know what else is really good at handling sloppy near-perfection-but-not-perfect differences -- -- -- biology. We've got 30% or so of our genome made of self-replicating viruses that snuck into a germ cell a billion years ago, yet somehow it all works, we've got 10 gorillion cells made from a single cellular machine at one point, building a functional reproductive-worthy body, and somehow that all works. People understand gusts and ideas as to what it's all doing, but do we know all of it, maybe not even most of it? No, we don't even know. It's like how magnets work, nobody knows. But big picture, the body has some capacity of adaptation and ranges of acceptable conditions, yet this TOMATO HYPOTHESIS seems to view the body as some sort of formula one engine that requires micrometers level clearances so it can go 20,000 RPM instead of the typical 6,000, and oh the medical castastrophe that should happen should someone eat a tomato of diminished nutritive content.

Now, I don't know what kind of world we live in here. Do we live in TOMATOLAND where people eat with every meal ketchup and marina sauce as the main dish? Are we worried that in TOMATOLAND that a 90% drop in essential amino acids of our favored cuisine will cause problems in population health? Because I'm pretty sure if a damned tomato comes up 90% short on beta carotene, that said food eater has TWO WHOLE YEARS to eat NON TOMATO FOODS such as CARROTS or FORTIFIED FOODS WHICH IS MOST FOODS which will easily replenish their vitamin A levels.

[diob]

In many cases, we know the quality is substandard but don't have a choice either, depending on monopolies in the area.

[rafaelmn]

This is a bad analogy because food is dual purpose - nutrition and enjoying the taste.

Music is just about subjective enjoyment - you will not get cancer if the piano was not in tune - and if you can't tell the difference then it is irrelevant to your experience.

[AnthonyMouse]

Have a look at the research as to the effect of music on mood and mental health.

[rafaelmn]

I wonder how fragile you must be to have a breakdown because a piano was out of tune, at a degree where it's not perceptible to anyone but experts.

[1propionyl]

Not to mention that food and music both have a third (set of) purpose(s)/value(s): culture.

[deanCommie]

There is a second-order effect to this too, which connects to the original article.

If the piano is slightly out of tune, and the orchestra is slightly worse, people stop appreciating it (not realizing how much better it COULD be), and the art dies out, not because it's moved past it's time, or the culture moved on, or people don't want it, but because THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY CAN HAVE.

That is 100% the case with Tomatoes. Most people I know (including myself) think tomatoes are bland boring filler. Annoying to cut. Barely add any flavour. Need salt + fat (cheese, bacon, etc) to really bring out their flavour.

And then one day we have a farmer's market heirloom tomato, and it's like our world gets shattered.

"I COULD be eating tomatoes like this on the regular? And I'm not? Whatever happened as a society to get me to this point was a crime, and needs to be undone."

But most people never even get to experience that, I think.

[SirLordBoss]

To follow this analogy, isn't it possible then for someone to study precisely what the difference is, and become an expert, thus bringing us back into the level of expertise we were at at the start of the analogy?

Surely the experts didn't all learn from each other; who was the first expert? That expert surely learned in some other way, so the only thing lost at the start of the analogy is the time required for someone interested to (re)achieve mastery.

[pclmulqdq]

Sure, related to tuning because it's a pretty closed problem. The expertise in terms of tuning was developed over about ~800 years, but the math for modern tuning was known 500 years ago. It's conceivable that one could re-invent equal temperament and then quickly re-invent the modern tuner given everything we know about electronics and audio processing. However, that knowledge all builds on itself. If we decide that all audio processing is done with RNNs/ML instead of objective ("old") mathematics, then we're going to lose the ability to make a tuner, too, and eventually we'll need a new Fourier to come back up with the Fourier transform.

About the tomatoes in the other comment chain? Your guess is as good as mine whether we can recover that knowledge.

[nyanpasu64]

I heard that pianos have stretched harmonic series due to string tension/weight/something, so piano tuners actually have to tune upper notes higher and lower notes lower, while ensuring various harmonics interact well. There's quite a bit of art to it rather than pure numeric ratios (which may or may not be possible to encapsulate in ML).

[pclmulqdq]

Yes, this is correct for pianos. I believe it is actually due to the thickness of the strings varying a lot across the instrument.

Most piano tuners today use a tuner for a middle octave and then tune the outer octaves by ear.

[Miraste]

The internet has worsened this phenomenon. I, like many other people, have gotten into the habit of appending site:reddit.com to Google searches as search quality declines. This gives better results from actual humans (usually), but it also skews toward people who are invested enough in the topic to post about it on niche subreddits. This leads to, for example, product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need, even if the information about them is true.

[MrLeap]

"product recommendations that are way out of alignment with what most people need"

I have to disagree. When i dont do the reddit thing, the average quality of material products has been.. very bad. Amazon reviews don't seem to be enough to choose anything with an electric motor or a hinge that won't fall apart in a month of light use.

[Miraste]

Let me give an example: soundbars for TVs. Reddit will tell you to never buy one, because a dedicated speaker system sounds better at the same price. This is true-ish. However, a speaker system requires a large, heavy A/V unit, lots of wires, lots of space, and highly noticeable, if not outright ugly, speakers. A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers. They're the right choice for most people, but it takes reading between the lines to parse that from reddit posts.

[MrLeap]

I trust people to be able to generally decide if they have the space, tolerance for cords and aesthetics to make a purchase decision like that. I'm struggling to visualize the peril in accidentally buying speakers.

Personally, I'll happily pay for something with some features I don't need if it's got good build quality. Finding versions of MANY THINGS that aren't egregiously poorly made seems like it's getting harder?

Maybe this is just the temporal warp of getting older. As subjective time passes by more quickly, entropy is getting more of my attention than when I was younger and a day felt long. It's possible my perception that tools are engineered to the brink of functioning by a thread is survivorship bias. All the old tools that are still trucking are just the ones that survived. No way to know for sure, but if some convincingly thrice burned carpenter on reddit makes me think I oughta buy mikita I probably will.

[Miraste]

The recommendations aren't bad, they're just overkill. Makita makes great tools, but depending on the tool, cheaper ones are fine for most purposes (cheaper, not cheapest, I've seen too many Ryobi contraptions start smoking for that). Guitars and bicycles are two more I've run into where reddit advice will have you paying much more than you need to. Sometimes it's okay to get the no-brand Amazon version, and sometimes it's very much not. It's a skill to determine which is which.

I do think you're right that average quality has gone down. The MBAs of the world work hard to make their products function till the last day of the warranty and not a second longer, and that's a relatively recent business philosophy.

[lupire]

I learned on HN years ago:

Buy a cheap tool. If it breaks, buy one for twice the price. If you lose it before it breaks, buy one for half the price.

[forgetfreeman]

That is some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason.

[bsder]

> A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers.

The specific problem here seems to be that soundbars have gone actively backward over time.

I had an old JBL soundbar whose only issue was that it had no Bluetooth security. This meant that someone in the apartment complex would randomly connect to it and blast us with 900 decibels of whatever they were watching--generally at 7:30AM.

So, we went searching for a replacement. We must have listened to every soundbar available at retail.

They were all expensive and all sucked--none of them were better than that 10 year old JBL.

Eventually we opted for a sound system that was not particularly cheap. And my wife still complains that it doesn't sound any better than the old soundbar we replaced. And she is correct.

[nyanpasu64]

Could you disable Bluetooth and buy an external Bluetooth receiver that outputs analog audio?

[bsder]

Alas, no. You couldn't disable Bluetooth completely. As soon as it "woke up" from any "sleep", Bluetooth would always reenable itself even though I always had the optic fibre cable plugged in.

Probably the only thing I could have done was cover it in aluminum foil. I thought about just opening it up and tearing out the antenna, but the casing was an injection molded piece with integrated clips. It would break on opening and not be possible to put back together.

[Zak]

A friend recently asked for budget speaker recommendations and was leaning toward a soundbar. I helped research; I'm a big fan of checking enthusiast communities for product guides, perhaps in part because I maintain one for flashlights. I came across the same advice to avoid soundbars and ended up with a list of powered speakers instead. That's no more complicated to hook up than a soundbar, and my friend was extremely satisfied with the speakers.

I think they probably wouldn't have been as satisfied with a similarly priced soundbar. It's not because the soundbar couldn't be as good, but in practice usually wouldn't be. The intended audience isn't as discerning, so products don't have to be as good to sell well.

The trick with enthusiast recommendations is to limit scope creep if you're not trying to become a hobbyist yourself. Don't get talked into a complex audio system or a flashlight with fan cooling and 80000 lumens when your needs are basic, but do get the $80 powered speakers and the 18650-powered flashlight with USB charging.

[recursive]

> requires a large, heavy A/V unit

Not really. You can use powered bookshelf speakers or studio monitors just fine. That's what I do.

[wiredfool]

Small amps have gotten remarkably good in the last few years.

[lupire]

Top google result for [tv soundbar reddit] https://www.reddit.com/r/Soundbars/comments/137ukxi/are_soun...

is this exact debate.

[Miraste]

That's in r/Soundbars, which is naturally rather favorable. The outright dismissals I've run into come from the much larger r/hometheater, which is also the source of most TV audio buying guides.

[pokerface_86]

it absolutely doesn’t, the common reddit recommendation is to just get edifier r1280dbs and a sub, and you’ll outperform most soundbar systems that cost even 2x as much.

[bluGill]

It also leads to bots posting ads disguised as posts to reddit. Often they are posting in communities that nobody subscribes to but google indexes.

[bluGill]

But can you tell? I cannot tell many of these when I hear them in the piano tuning context (I've tried and given up). But I can hear how much better the piano sounds after all that is done.

Then again, pianos are a bad compromise. There is no way to have octaves and fifths on the same piano, much less thirds (both major and minor). We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better - but if you get much more complex than "mary had a little lamb" you run into a conflict and some key will need to be two different notes.

[epicide]

> We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better

"Better" is always relative, so it's often more correct to say it is/sounds "different".

For example, a true temperament guitar can sound weird/"wrong" to some people. A lot of folks are used to those compromises just being part of the sound. Similar to a "honky tonk" piano: if you tuned it differently, it would come across as a timbre change more than simply "better" tuning.

In the grand scheme of things, there are professions and arts that were once considered essential to everyday life and in ways that we today don't even consider. The profession is lost to time, but so is the need. It's the in-between transitional state, where the profession is in the process of dying, that is the most painful period.

Some day, the last note played on a piano will be played and lament for the piano tuner will die with it.

[card_zero]

I don't know, I guess everything ends eventually, but people still play the crumhorn, the carnyx, and the eunuch flute.

[Miraste]

The compromise in question is called equal temperament, and it's quite interesting if anyone is curious.

[InitialLastName]

In the case of stringed instruments, equal temperament isn't the only compromise; there is also stretched tuning, which seeks to match the harmonics (rather than the fundamentals) of harmonically related strings to one another (in a mechanical system where the harmonics are neither perfect integer ratios of the fundamental nor constant ratios across all of the strings).

[adgjlsfhk1]

and wind instruments can and do bend their notes with their mouths to fit better in the chord than equal temperament

[mlyle]

There's stuff on the edge, though-- like there was a post here a few days ago, where the commenter was talking about deploying monitoring and measurement into workplaces and finding lots of stuff wrong, and everyone panicking.

On the one hand, panicking is unproductive: nothing is worse than it was last week.

On the other hand, finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant. If your e-mail campaigns weren't clickable, and you lost a bunch of business but never noticed, you still lost a bunch of business. It still required uncommon discernment to even notice, but the impact was unquestionable.

[mrandish]

> finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant.

Yes, in many contexts discernment matters. More broadly, being able to tell the difference in quality or performance is relevant when you've spent more time/money/effort to have a better result. Even if "no one could tell and it was fine anyway", then you could have saved that time/money/effort and put those resources to better use.

[aqfamnzc]

I think about this when cooking. There are 1000 variables like ingredient choice, prep methods, spices used, cook time. Changing one produces an effect too small for me to discern. But when I make suboptimal choices on 20 different variables, they stack up to produce a dish that's noticeably worse. :( How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?

[josephg]

> How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?

The classic answer to this is you need to improve your capacity to measure. Ie, taste ingredients and things constantly and learn with your mouth how the taste of your tomato will translate into the taste of your curry.

Just like the soloist and piano tuner in this story, subtle discernment is a huge part of expertise.

[kazinator]

Even if you can tell the difference between the way two objects sound, there is a leap between that and deciding that one is worse than the other.

[HPsquared]

"You might not have noticed it, but your brain did" - H. Plinkett