Are audiophile products designed to initially impress then fatigue to make you upgrade?

@invalid 

Audio engineer Bob Clearmountain:

One of the other aspects of Atmos mixing on which consensus has yet to be reached concerns the use of the centre speaker. If you want a source such as a lead vocal to appear right in front of the listener, routing it only to the centre speaker will achieve that, but the ‘phantom centre’ effect works in Atmos too, and many people advocate using only the left and right speakers. This is a point on which Clearmountain has strong opinions.

Bob Clearmountain: "One of my favourite things is the centre speaker, because the nice thing is when you anchor stuff to speakers, especially the centre, you can walk around the room and it doesn’t move."

“That’s just silly. I think. One of my favourite things is the centre speaker, because the nice thing is when you anchor stuff to speakers, especially the centre, you can walk around the room and it doesn’t move. If it’s just phantom, you walk over to the right and the phantom centre follows you to the right, just like it does in stereo — which is one of the drawbacks of stereo. I like actually walking around the room, I’ll stand over here on the side between the right side and right rear and the picture still stays the same. I mean, the balances are different, so I’ll be hearing more of whatever’s coming out of those speakers, but everything’s still in the same place, right? The vocal’s still coming from the centre, and I love that.

@kota1  yeah right, I've never heard that with Atmos, maybe with Bacch

Well let’s see.  My ARC SP9 mkll still works perfectly and it’s from 1987. My Acoustat speakers from the eighties still sound great. My Pioneer tuner from the eighties still works and sounds great.  My B&O Beogram 1900 from the seventies needs to be cleaned and lubed.  By your logic,I guess I should toss it and buy a new one. Oh I did toss my Sony professional CD player from the early nineties, but that was because it was from a small run of only a few thousand units and I couldn’t get parts!

Mihorn,

Didn’t they warn you not to take the brown acid??

It's probably the inverse, many audio products are designed to impress in the showroom, bright top end, over blown bass etc.  these soon become fatiguing in real use. The same applies to performance measurements they are stated as xyzzy but often are no where near what they claim (or seem to be claiming), the 1980's watts war being typical. Today we have the THD war, some 'audiophiles' believe that 0.000000001% THD is really good, the problem is you stopped hearing any difference 5 zeros or more ago, the measurements mean nothing whatsoever.