Audiophiles: Where Does It End?

I'm an audiophile, although I often resist the label. Part of the reason is the tendency of the breed towards excess.

Upscale retailer Hammacher Schlemmer, who can always be counted on to go too far, has debuted this sassy little number, the Acoustic Immersion Pod.

According to the website:

This is the pod that immerses a listener in an acoustically optimized chamber, providing an enveloping audio experience with its robust six-speaker surround sound system (Play Video). Its interior is lined with open-cell acoustic foam--the same used in recording studios--that deflects, disperses, and absorbs sound waves, creating a personal sound environment that will not disturb those nearby. Providing a frequency response of 20 Hz-20 kHz for a full range of sound ideal for movies, sporting events, music, or games, the system is comprised of five 5 1/4" 40-watt mid- to high-range speakers built into the pod's ceiling (providing 80 watts peak output) and one 10" 250-watt subwoofer speaker under the seat. The system meets the 5.1 standard (the same used in commercial and home theater systems), and the subwoofer's 500-watt peak output makes the padded 17" wide seat resonate, placing a listener in the immediate vicinity of on-screen explosions, orchestral chords, or World Cup matches. Both a 5.1 and 2.1 sub-amplifier component are included to drive the speakers. High-density plastic construction. Red shell with red foam or Black with gray foam. 58" H x 34" W x 36" D. (120 lbs.)

At US$3000 it's not cheap, but few things in audiophile land are. Stylewise, it looks like something from a 1960's movie about what the future will look like. As far as how it sounds, well, I imagine that is very much in the ear of the beholder.

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Everybody In Business Media Please Get A Grip Over BP

I'm a little tired of the talking heads on CNBC and elsewhere chattering about how BP's stock is permanently damaged. Look at XOM's chart from the Exxon Valdez disaster in '89 to the present day. Exxon's stock was flat, not down, but flat for around six years after, and it's split at 2:1 twice in that interval. Unless you've got the investment window of a hummingbird it's hard to make a case that once down is forever down.

The only thing that's going to sink an oil company is alt-energy, and then only with a revolutionary breakthrough, and they're not invested in it.

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Best Custom Installation Ever

Courtesy of the fine folks at ThereIFixedit.com

Remember: Measure twice, cut once.

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Some Bloggy Backscratching

I'd like to welcome Aaron Mielke's HomeTheaterLab to the What I'm Reading sidebar at Lee Distad's Professional Opinion. Mr. Mielke seems like a good guy, and his blog is devoted to common sense talk about getting the most out of your home theater experience.

Enjoy!

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A Little Cross-Border Bloggotage

Keen readers of Lee Distad's Professional Opinion (both of you) might be interested to know that we've been referenced in the blog of Harald Steindl of Austrian rep agency MOCOM Communication System GmbH. Harald was kind enough to agree to an interview that I used in my March 2010 Marketnews feature Contracting Out.

Steindl's AV Blog (Auf Deutsche)

Big thanks to Harald for his kind words for both my work and Marketnews magazine!

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Primerica Getting An IPO, But Are Investors As Easily Duped As Their Recruits?

Clearly we're seeing the light at the end of the economic tunnel when the banks start offering ludicrous Initial Public Offerings again.

Primerica, Citigroup's red-headed MLM stepchild is being spun off and taken public.

Clusterstock: Meet Primerica, The New Wall Street IPO That's Really A Multi-Level Marketing Scheme

Citigroup (C) has officially priced the IPO of its spinoff of Primerica.
At $15 per share, the pricing went strong.
Warburg Pincus will pick up 22% to 33% of shares and Citigroup will retain 32% to 46% of equity, which it will divest after Primerica begins trading.
But will investors buy Primerica's stock?
That depends if they can figure out what Primerica actually does first.

For pretty much as long as Primerica has existed, it's been a flash-point for controversy over it's shady recruiting practices. All you have to do is Google them, and you'll see for yourself. Expert Fraud Investigator Tracey Coenen has pilloried them on several occasions, and she's not alone.

When I worked in retail sales, I averaged one or two contacts a week with Primerica "reps" who would waste my valuable on-commission time, only to offer me their so-called opportunity. When I was still young, I would be civil, thinking I still might be able to get a sale out of them. Eventually, I realized that, if they had any money to buy the luxury goods I sold, they wouldn't have become Primerica reps in the first place.

Fact: Real financial advisers are too busy either advising their clients on financial matters, or looking for more clients to advise. What they aren't doing is cruising shopping malls looking to recruit new sales reps: real financial planning companies have HR departments for that.

Whatever Primerica is good for, it isn't making their sales reps rich, since the average Primerica rep makes $5,156 a year. Bike messengers make more than that, and hardly anyone spits on them in public.

About the only value Primerica generates aside from the half a billion dollars it funnels up to the top of the pyramid is the click-through ad revenue that it generates for blogs and websites that criticize them. Apparently their 100,000 rep workforce has so much time on their hands that they constantly surf for sites critical of Primerica and leave thousands of flaming spam comments defending the company.

Wouldn't their time be better spent trying to make money? One would think so.

Back on track, the big question this IPO raises is: is there enough dumb money to buy this stock? Certainly, the average Primerica rep is priced out of becoming a shareholder.

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New At Automatic Finances: The Upside Of Celebrity Financial Advice

Spurred on by Jason Unger's excellent post Please Don't Listen To Celebrities For Financial Advice, I was inspired to come at the topic from another perspective.

Automatic Finances: The Upside Of Celebrity Financial Advice

I'm also thrilled to tears to contribute to Automatic Finances, one of the finest personal finance blogs out there. Now that I've cleared a backlog of other projects, I hope to post there more often.

*pictured: Soon to be destitute Nicolas Cage is a celebrity whose financial decisions you definitely don't want to emulate.

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Field-Terminable HDMI: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Or Past?

There's a post today on CE Pro talking about vendor BTX Technologies, and their new field-terminable bulk HDMI cables, that allow installers to make custom-length HDMI cables, something that had previously not been feasible.

CE Pro: How To Terminate HDMI Cables In The Field

I just have to say that this is an idea that, were it five years ago, I would cheer "Yea!" Now, however, it seems like kind of a "Meh."

The fact is, HDMI is, at the best of times, flaky, unstable, and prone to inexplicable failure. Everybody inside the CE industry knows it. I routinely get email from custom channel dealers sharing their jobsite horror stories with me and asking me to write another story detailing the woes that surround using HDMI.

The trick to executing custom install jobs is, ultimately, to keep it simple. Adding complexity increases the odds of something going wrong. I'm sure that BTX Technologies means well, but in my opinion, installers are better off using stock cable lengths for short distances, and proven extenders using network cables or fiber for longer distances, rather than futz around with terminating custom lengths.

With that in mind, I have trouble envisioning much of a market for field terminable HDMI cables.

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Work Abroad

In order to let faithful readers of Lee Distad's Professional Opinion (both of you) catch up on what's been going, here are a few links to the work I've done elsewhere in recent months:

5 Unsung Tools For Taking Care Of Jobsite Details

Tips And Tricks For HVAC Integration

iPad Integration: The Good & The Bad

HDMI 1.4 And What It Means For Integrators

I could go on, but that should tide you over until the new content starts rolling.

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Someone Worth Reading

New to the somewhat moribund list of blogs that are popular here at the Global Headquarters of Lee Distad's Professional Opinion is Stone Street Advisors, headed by the anonymous, but extremely clever and talented financial blogger known only as Anal-yst.

He (and I'm reasonably sure it's a he) has an impressive portfolio of commentary, including writing for The Atlantic. I've been following his work since 1-2 Knockout, and even way back when he was an anonymous member of the commentariat on the old Dealbreaker site.

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Guest Blog Update

Just catching up on some linkage, here's two of my most recent blog posts for Marketnews.ca:

Marketnews: Wal-Mart Reducing DVDs, Digital Delivery Is Inevitable

Marketnews: Imitation: Is It Flattery, Infringement, Or Just Trend Following?

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Also At Marketnews: Guest Blogging

Marketnews editor Christine Persaud is on holidays, so I'll be guest-blogging for the next two weeks at the Marketnews.ca site.

Marketnews: Blogging Is Hard

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Junger Media Launches

Head on over to the new site of Junger Media, run by my good friend and colleague, Jason Unger. He's sharp as a tack, and knows a lot about online media.

For one thing, he refuses to call himself a Social Media Guru, and that's clearly a sign that he's got something to offer.

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Satire, Or Prescience?

From The Onion:


New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less

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enThrall Promotions Very Good At What They Do

Here at Lee Distad's Professional Opinion, we're not all about Shameless Self-Promotion.

Indeed, we will gladly Shamelessly Promote Other People too!

enThrall Promotions is an Edmonton Alberta-based PR firm owned and operated by veteran publicist Christopher Thrall, and old schoolmate of mine.

He's very smart, and knows what he's doing, so check out his company's website.

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BREAKING: Coffee Is The Best Drink Ever

Longtime readers of Lee Distad's Professional Opinion I love coffee. I really love coffee. I drink Herculean quantities of it. And when I'm not drinking it, I'm reading about it.

Sometimes, I even pull out all the stops and drink it while reading about it.

If you love coffee, I reccomend that you read Joe Wiesenthal's essay over at The Stimulist.

The Stimulist: In Praise Of Black Iced Coffee

Great minds clearly think alike. For years now my morning routine has begun upon waking with a glass of ice cold black coffee from a pitcher I keep in the fridge for this express purpose.

Kickstart My Heart, as Mötley Crüe would say.

*Don't forget to check out CoffeeGeek for all your coffee-related news!

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Tired Of Taleb?

Theodore Sturgeon famously said "80% of everything is crap." I remain convinced that if he had lived to see the Internet, he would have revised his figures substantially upward.

How that quote is relevant is because I was disappointed by this guest column on the normally thoughtful and insightful Infectious Greed blog (which defies the odds by usually being 80% good) by author Pablo Triana:

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Guest Post: Nassim Taleb Got It Right

Unless you're just now tuning into the world financial crisis, I'm struggling to see what insight this essay has to offer, beyond a lot of back patting, which is somewhat redundant given how self-sufficient Taleb is when it comes to very public acts of self-congratulation. That, and telling us, again and repeatedly, what he's already told us many times before.

As a reader of Taleb's work I have to wonder at his self-exemption from his own line of reasoning from Fooled By Randomness.

Take a big enough sample of mathematicians and economists, and like the proverbial monkeys with typewriters, Taleb would argue that just as a large enough sample of investors will produce someone as wealthy as Warren Buffett, it's inevitable that one of them would be right about what was going to happen.

If it was someone else, he'd call them a product of survivor bias, but because it just happened to be him, that make him a genius.

Besides, the fact that this Taleb is correct is a sample size of one, which anyone tell you is meaningless, but of all the possible economic scenarios, what about the average across all possible Talebs? Would the deviation across the Taleb mean be significant? Would all possible Taleb's be mostly-wrong, or mostly-right? If you buy into Fooled By Randomness, this is important!

More than one commentator has begun to think that Taleb is growing tiresome. At the risk of sounding cute, he's gone from being a Cassandra to being a broken record.

I don't begrudge Taleb his passion for appearing on television, but if he's going to keep up his schedule of media appearances, it's time to stop telling us what he began telling us ten years ago.

It's time to pull the self-congratulation train into the station, and tell us what he thinks is going to happen in the next ten years, and start dining out on that, if and when he happens to be right.

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Twitter Spammers Are Suckers

As readers of Lee Distad's Professional Opinion are doubtless aware, I'm a relative newcomer to Twitter.

As a social media tool, Twitter certainly has it's uses. Conversely, the Twitter spammers, who think that accumulating millions of followers will make them rich have no real use at all, except as a cash cow for "Social Media Gurus" to peddle get-rich-quick schemes.

Both anti-fraud blogger Tracey Coenan and Upstart Blogger have good posts on just how ridiculous Twitter Spam marketing programs are. I just want to take the time to address some of the salesmanship used to market one such program, called Brute Force Twitter:

Did you know a 10,000-person reach FM radio station in a town of 200,000 people is worth $3-15 million? Now compare that to the list of 74,000 people on Twitter that I built for FREE in just 2 and ½ months… usually spending no more than 15-25 minutes a day on it.

That's a ludicrous non sequitor, and I'll tell you why:

*That radio station's valuation is arrived at only by selling that much advertising airtime.

*Advertisers will only pay that much if enough listeners are tuned in.

*Listeners will only tune in if the radio station plays something they want to hear.

And that last part is the catch, isn't it?

If you actually have a blog or a website or whatever that offers real goods and services, or even just news and commentary that people might actually be interested in, then you can use Twitter to market yourself.

On the other hand, if you've just paid a hundred bucks for a course that tells you to "start selling a course at $100 a pop on gathering Twitter followers," then you're not really offering anybody much of anything.

Those millions of other Twitter Spammers? They already paid somebody else $100, they're not going to buy it from you!

Do you have something to say? Then maybe other Twitter users will follow you. An endless retread of posts that say "Get rich now, ask me how!" and unoriginal motivational quotes cribbed from BrainyQuote.com aren't the kind of content that will make people not only follow, but listen.

Tell you what, send me $100 via the PayPal link to the left of the page, and I'll tell you how to not be a sucker.

Alternatively, you can go to SocialMediaDouchebag.com and learn how to get eleventy-billion Twitter followers in 3.68 seconds.

You decide.

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Separated At Birth?

TV Pitchman Billy Mays and Ex-Navy Seal and novelist Richard "Dick" Marcinko.

Or is it just me?

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Lee Distad's Professional Opinion: Now On Twitter

I’m not an early adopter. I only usually pick up things once they’re no longer cool.

That’s not entirely true, I was an early adopter with Sony's MiniDisc format, and look how well that turned out!

Regardless, you can follow my CE business-related stream of consciousness ramblings here:

https://twitter.com/LeeDistad

Lately, Lee Distad's Professional Opinion has been little more than a link farm to my work elsewhere. As much as I like hurling snark and invective at bad business decisions, I'm often needed elsewhere.

I've got a sense that Twitter will allow me to dash off swift and obnoxious Professional Opinions at the speed at which they come to my overcaffienated brain, especially when I lack the luxury of time to craft more thoughtful blog posts.

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