Whenever I think of audiophiles, I imagine a couple of wealthy successful older men hanging out on a weekend. While the wives are elsewhere talking about the latest vacation or whatever, they need something to talk about.
Because they're the kind of men who love maximizing making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive.
Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.
The actual problem is self is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.
Ugh car tuning. I'm hoping someone on here can help my understanding because I feel like this situation makes me raise eyebrows similar to the audiophile community.
In the Subaru tuning community, there's a company called Cobb that sells a product called AccessPort that you plug into your car and change its performance using a map file. Cobb themselves include off-the-shelf maps designed to fit vehicles with varying parts and varying conditions, and you can also pay a professional tuner to build a custom map for your car, which you would want to do if you have custom parts that an off-the-shelf map would not account for or if you have a very specific tuning goal.
Here's the issue that I've been confused with: the community tends to advocate for using a pro-tuner over an off-the-shelf map whenever possible - even if your car has the same exact parts specified in the map notes, and even if your climate and elevation are the same as specified in the map notes - because "every car is different".
If I don't have exotic performance goals + I have the parts supported by a given OTS map + I drive in the supported climate, why should I trust some rando in his garage to make a map for me, over Cobb who sees way more vehicles and configurations than any single shop ever could? A lot of the time reading these forum post endorsements sound like "the tune is so good this guy is totally a scientist yo".
Anyway, partially a rant but since we're talking about enthusiast communities thought I'd share and I really am interested to learn!
>If I don't have exotic performance goals + I have the parts supported by a given OTS map + I drive in the supported climate, why should I trust some rando in his garage to make a map for me, over Cobb who sees way more vehicles and configurations than any single shop ever could? A lot of the time reading these forum post endorsements sound like "the tune is so good this guy is totally a scientist yo".
I assume because Cobb, because of the reasons you stated, has to be more conservative than the guy in the garage can be.
Whether or not that's a good thing is according to your risk tolerance/wallet size.
Because they're the kind of men who love maximizing making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive.
Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.
The actual problem is self is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.
See also:
* Car tuning
* JavaScript front-end frameworks
* Barbeque
* Linux distros
* Cycling
* Optimizing passenger flying experience