<Crossposted with arj and Keith>
Professional audio guys, whether it is recording, mixing, mastering, performance or whatever, have different criteria (some) and different reasoning behind buying gear. There is stuff in studios which is never seen or advertised or heard of in hifi shops, magazines, etc.
There is an overlap. There is a growing interest in pro and semi-pro gear amongst us domestic listeners, especially in areas such as DAC, ADC, active speakers, headphone amps, etc etc. Some of the companies in that sphere are also extending their ranges with models designed for the domestic market. I am sure there are speaker manufacturers whose products have always been found in both and always will be.
There is another aspect, which is the need of mastering engineers to listen to the results of their work in different ways: they are mixing for the guy with a clock radio as much as they are for the guy with 12-foot-high electrostatic speakers in a treated room.
There is no point in trying to draw a thin, sharp line between domestic- (I'd rather not say "audiophile") and studio-use equipment let alone taking it as a major argument subject.
However...
the "consumer" in the broadcast world is typically an engineer; whether he has that test bench full of gear for testing cable or not, he knows what it is, what it would measure, and how to use it if he has to. Second, the applications are critical; an engineer patching video from one end of a production or broadcast facility to another doesn't want to plug it in, see whether it works or not, and then spend a few hours debugging it. He needs cable to be dependable; he needs every foot of it to be as good as every other foot of it, and if the manufacturer says it'll carry 1080i HD-SDI signals three hundred feet, he needs to be able to rely on that claim when the rubber hits the road. Third, this is very much a nonsense-free market; our engineer-buyer isn't likely to be excited by specious performance claims that can't be measured or documented. He's likely to know which features of a cable are critical--like impedance tolerance, return loss, attenuation relative to the lengths of cable in use--and which aren't. Fourth, he buys a LOT of cable to wire just one production or broadcast facility, and he will not return to a manufacturer who lets him down where quality is concerned.
"
Broadcast Quality"-- What does it Mean, and Why is it Good?
This is about signal cables, not power cables, but I'd expect more or less the same practice to apply to any gear or cable bought for pro use.
Yes, this
is also from a cable seller. But even if they
are trying to sell em something, when that is done with reasonable, verifiable, common-sense-technology claims, I really don't mind.
Do studios use exotic stuff too? Well, if some say that they do, then I suppose that they do, but I doubt that it is common: they have better things to spend their money on.
Of course, it is not impossible that they need to pander to the whims of
their customers. No disclaimer needed: you guys already know that I'm cynical about marketing men
.
) I not only believe that one must question what one hears, but that that questioning can be the most interesting part of the whole experience: the brain, the most important interconnect of them all.
