I have been in audio for a very long time, and I have seen a 'dumbing down' in quality which I think started about the time home theatre came into being. You may or may not have heard of or had experience with names like Mcintosh, Marantz, Fisher, Scott etc, when they were quality companies, before they were bought up by Enron Anyway, it used to be that conponents routinely _exceeded_ their published specifications, and the name badge on the front of the unit was the name of the man who founded the company.

Things have changed.

Blame it on the computer business. Obsolenence is expected in mere months. Product problems are 'fixed' by "updates", sometimes at user cost. Marketers play fast and loose with specification claims. NOTHING is meant to last long enough to hand down to your kids.

More to the point of your original question, I think that it is a combination of marketers wanting to make things inexpensive enough to sell to the 'masses', lack of knowledge on the part of the current generation of designers as to what consitiutes solid performance, and a mentality of lack of personal responsibility for a product. Mix these with buzz words like 24 bit/96Khz "perfect sound forever" etc, and you end up with what you see today.

The 950, or ANY other digital component should NOT hiss from more than inches from the speaker at normal listening levels. It CAN be done. My digital audio workstation (24 bit) IS dead quiet even with my ear at the tweeter, when playing a track which only has dither at the 24th bit level, and that's with _any_ amount of DSP thrown in the loop. As to why the current generation of home theatre equipment can't do this, apparently at ANY cost is a mystery.

Maybe it's just that there aren't enough people out there who EXPECT solid performance, maybe they've all died off. Who knows?

[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited November 06, 2002).]