"Tell the industry what you want" postingboard

Tube headphone amp with more than one rca imput. At least more of a variety. Dan

I like the way mbl's sound, they seem to be better than other top notch speakers by a margin. To me they make the music sound as though its live. I would like for there to be other speaker brands that approach this level of reproduction. Cannot the mbl's be used as reference speakers.

Snofun3, sales success is a very slow feedback system. It works ultimately but as someone who designs studio gear for a living, I would love to have potential customers tell me about product ideas I'd never considered.

For my two cents, I'd like to see video equipment manufacturers add an HDMI 'through' feature so a switcher would be un-needed.

You see what sells, then incorporate the features others appear to want. I assume you design in features which have proven popular in the past right?

If you ask around about what people want, you'll get a response - what that person wants, which may, or may not reflect what others want, and will typically be specific and unique to that person.

If you could get a large enough response rate - 10's or 100's of thousands, you could get a broad enough picture (customer response cards). Short of that you'll be designing a camel.

As someone who does new product research for a living, I think this can be a useful exercise. I imagine that few if any high-end companies do any serious market research. Most get their feeback informally from the channel and, of course, from their customers, as it should be. But just like this, it's qualitative.

Here are some of my thoughts:

More CDPs should have accomodations for hard-drive based systems, so a digital input to access the DAC. USB is good, but S/PDIF is the first choice I think.

More standardization of spade connector sizes. I keep running into speakers that will not easily accept the spades on my speaker cables.

Some facility on components for "grabbing" the power cord IEC connector and holding it tight.

Better labeling of inputs and outputs and switches on the backs of components: bright lettering that is sufficiently large to read from a angle and in less than ideal light.

More attention to fine gradations of attentuation at the low end of the volume scale. Very frustrating to have a system you can not turn down enough (for very low-level listening) or set to the level you truly want.