Why Most Hardware Specs Are Total Bullshit [Gimmicks]

To measure is to grasp, said Lord Kelvin . But as marketing departments get progressively more creative with their published specifications, what we’re left measuring-and by extension, knowing-about our gear is increasingly worthless.

With the gadget-buying squarely in season, most of us will soon be turning to those ubiquitous columns of numbers, ratios, and percentages before making our final selections. Frequency responses might be consulted, dynamic contrast ratios compared, and color gamuts critiqued-all so one can gauge performance, determine value, and quickly pit one product against one another. The one problem? In many cases, you’d better off consulting chicken bones and fingernail clippings. Not only are progressively more published specs misleading and/or overinflated, some are getting downright meaningless. And it’s getting worse.

Remember how impressive something like Blast Processing sounded whenever you were 15? Made the Super Nintendo look downright wimpy, right? Well, spec cooking operates on kind of a similar principle. Only rather than inventing empty marketing words manufacturers plop a host of pretend math in our laps.

These lies and fabrications happen for a couple of reasons. First, numbers have tremendous sway over the selections we make. A recent study within the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that quantitative specifications are so powerful that, even when given the flexibility to directly test the attributes of a given product ourselves, we still are inclined to choose the item with the longer list and larger numbers (ahem, megapixels).

Another reason behind the proliferation of BS specs? Rivalry.

” The gadget world is loaded with gimmicks and lies because it’s extremely competitive,” says Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies . Soneira, who penned what many consider the debunking Bible for display specifications over at MaximumPC , says that as technological complexity increases within the gadget world, it gives manufacturers and marketers even more leeway to futz with the numbers. And futz they do.

” Most consumers don’t understand the technologies anyway in order that they are easily misled, fooled and even swindled,” he says.

More than anything though, there’s one simple cause of the upward push of dubious specs: It’s become an industry necessity. The temptation to exaggerate is now so overwhelming that attempting to stay out of the gimmick game is now seen as equivalent to product suicide. Try and anchor your specifications within the real world (with meaningful numbers) and your product will look inferior. Don’t publish them at all, and you’ll seem like you’re seeking to hide something. It’s an insidious Catch-22 for anyone with an oz. of integrity, so manufacturers and marketers simply make the straightforward choice.

David Moulton, a veteran audio engineer, musician and producer characterizes the gadget spec situation like this: ” When engineers make a product they use specific tests to measure the performance. But when sales departments gets a hold of those test measurements, they start using those numbers as describers of value. They become, in essence, sales arguments.”

So which ” sales arguments” must you avoid, dismiss, or at least raise a skeptical eyebrow at? We’ve compiled a brief list of one of the vital more brazen spec gimmicks to be wary of this holiday season.

DISPLAYS

Color Gamut

What it’s: This spec represents the variety of colors a given display can produce, and is generally expressed as a percentage of a specific color standard, like Rec.709 (HDTVs) or sRGB (computers and digital cameras).
Why it’s bullshit: Manufacturers don’t inform you this, but the color gamut you really want on all your displays is an identical person who was used when the content you’re viewing was created. If it’s different, you’ll see different colors than you’re alleged to see. Nevertheless, most companies are happy to milk the average misconception that a much wider color gamut is somehow indicative of a more robust display. So what’s up with those 145 % color gamuts? Nothing special, really. Here’s what a larger gamut will do: make everything look saturated. Indeed displays claiming to have more than 100.00% of any standard color gamut aren’t in a position to show colors that aren’t inside the original source image, says Soneira.

Contrast Ratio

What that’s: Divide the brightness of peak white by the brightness of black on a display (after it’s been properly calibrated) and, voila, you’ll get what’s called the contrast ratio.
Why it’s bullshit: Inside the real world, this measurement typically falls between 1,500:1 and a pair of,000:1. And that’s for one of the best LCDs, says Soneira. But those numbers are something of the past. The allure of bigger ratios has prompted manufacturers to bake this specification into an entire-fledged nonsense soufflé. Today, we get what’s known ” dynamic contrast ratio.” That’s reached by measuring blacks when a display’s video signal is entirely, well, black (when it’s in a standby mode). As you possibly can imagine, that significantly reduces the light output of the unit and is obviously much darker than what’s actually used to choose the normal contrast ratio with an exact picture present. Using this trick you’ll get, now and again, astronomical contrast ratios like 5,000,000:1 or, in Sony’s case, ” infinite.” While still technically true, this spec is utter nonsense and fully unhelpful in gauging real world performance. The only real information that dynamic contrast ratio can relay is how much brighter the whites should be would becould very well be than the blacks.

Response Time

What it really is: Also called latency or response rate, response time is an ordinary industry test that tries to quantify how much LCD motion blur you’ll see in fast-paced scenes. (It doesn’t apply much to plasma displays). It’s determined by measuring the time it takes for one pixel to head from black to peak white and then back to black (rise-and-fall). And it’s not an especially good indicator for real picture blur.
Why it’s bullshit: Consider this. Inside the span of five short years, display response times have gone from 25ms (milliseconds) to, every so often, 1ms. How did this magic happen? Well, it kinda didn’t. The difficulty here, in keeping with Soneira, is that almost all picture transitions involve much smaller, more subtle shades of gray-to-gray transitions, which generally take much longer (3-4 x) to finish. Those response times are rather more important to a display’s ability to deal with motion blur. But consumers often haven’t any way of knowing which response time is being measured (gray-to-gray or rise-and-fall). Because the broadcast specifications may have a considerable impact on sales, it’s always more important for a manufacturer to scale back the black–to–peak-white–to–black response time value as opposed to improving the visually more important gray-to-gray transitions. The end result? The LCD display with the fastest response time specifications would possibly not have the least visual blur.

Viewing Angle

What that’s: Pretty simple stuff: the maximum angle at which a display would be viewed with acceptable visual performance. Yes, there are generalities about viewing angle that everyone should know: A plasma display, for example, will yield a much wider view angle. But relating to the listed angles that manufactures include in spec sheets, you’ll be able to essentially ignore them.
Why it’s bullshit: Today, it’s not uncommon to work out 180-degree + (total) viewing-angle specifications for plenty of displays. This has absolutely no pertaining to the actual acceptable viewing angles, consistent with Soneira. What most consumers don’t realize is that the angular spec relies on where the contrast ratio falls to a level of 10:1, hardly a suitable (or visually pleasing) figure. More realistically, an angle of ±45 degrees may reproduce a suitable contrast ratio, but only with very bright and saturated colors. Pictures that include a variety of intensities, hues and saturations will appear ” significantly degraded” at much smaller viewing angles. Obviously, no person tells you this.

AUDIO

Dynamic Range

What it’s: Within the audio realm, this spec is measured in decibels and describes the ratio of the softest sound to the loudest sound a musical instrument or piece of audio equipment can produce. Audio engineers started worrying about this back inside the days of analog recording when tape noise-the inherent noise embedded in magnetic recording-was a major problem. Today, with digital recording, it’s virtually irrelevant.
Why it’s bullshit: Dynamic ranges are quite often over-represented, says Moulton. The foremost thing that customers should known about dynamic range is that you simply’ll want it sufficiently big so that there aren’t any annoying noise artifacts. And, mostly, inside the realm of music and movie, we’re just fine. Moulton explains: ” Electronically, we will be able to manufacture much greater dynamic range than is on the market within the real world. When somebody claims 120db dynamic range, that’s just silly. We don’t get there. Inside the real acoustic world where we live, our usable range is set half that, or 60db. What that implies is that the really soft stuff can’t be heard as a result of the sounds inside the spaces that we’re in. And the really loud stuff is so loud that if we played it back at that level we’d probably generate complaints and legal action.”

Frequency Response/Bandwidth

What it can be: There are two parts to this spec, really. First, there’s another word for it, that’s bandwidth, or the width of the spectrum we are hearing. Our ears happen to have a really broad bandwidth-ten octaves to be precise (or ten doublings of frequency…or a ratio of 1000/1). The lowest frequency humans hear is ready 20 Hz. The best frequency is ready 20 kHz. And for academic and musical purposes we divide that into 10 octaves. Each octave is a doubling of frequency.
Why it’s bullshit: When manufacturers make and sell audio gear, they cheat. Period. Today, it’s very common to specify 20 Hz – 20 kHz bandwidth, that’s ridiculous. First, very little audio gear will do this in really rigorous way. Second, you speakers definitely won’t-unless they cost you about as much as the house where they’re installed. It’s just beyond the capabilities of all but the most costly equipment. ” Frequency response is something that’s sort of claimed and you have got to take it with a grain of salt,” says Moulton. ” Everybody is going to assert good frequency response and everybody has, roughly, poor frequency response.”

Power Handling/Wattage

What it’s miles: Crank it up! For lots of us, beefy power handling equates to deal with shaking sound. Yet when most of us hearken to music we are actually using very little power-typically about 1 or 2 watts. Still, it’s hard to discount that gorgeous pair of 1,200-watt speakers, right?
Why it’s bullshit: Power is, generally, irrelevant to nearly all people’s music listening experience. Here’s a pleasant rule of thumb to consider power while you’re out purchasing for a new sound system or speakers: Each doubling of power is simply audible (~3db). Put otherwise, ten times the ability will make a woofer or loudspeaker sound almost twice as loud. So the variation between a 300-watt and a 1200 watt system…actually not so big.

So if increasingly more specs are offering less and no more useful information, what’s a gadget geek to do? When possible, it’s always a superb to attempt out gear yourself. The alternative option? Find a domain you trust that reviews and plays with gadgets daily. You happen to be watching one now.

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This post is tagged: complexity increases, displaymate technologies, fingernail clippings, journal of consumer research, marketing departments, ratios and percentages, technological complexity