If you ever spend time renovating a house then there comes a point in the journey when paint needs to be chosen. As you can imagine there’s a huge variety of paints on the market and the colour choice limitless.
My wife is a fan of a brand called Farrow and Ball, a British company who specialise in vintage paint, based on authentic historial colours. They are the paint equivalant of Pultec EQs or 1176 compressors.
Choosing paint is not simply a case of red or white, blue or green. There are various shades of each colour, all with imaginative names luke Fridge Blue or Scum Green, I jest of course, but the people naming them sure let their imagination run wild.
ILok is just one of several protection systems on my studio computer, it contains some 863 plugin licences. Granted I’m somewhat of a unique case, I’m a beta tester, reviewer and blogger, so a significant number of those licences were acquired without payment. With that said, I’m guessing I’ve bought over 100 plugins in the last few decades.
How do we choose an audio product? I’m guessing there’s a number of criteria, the top one being the sound, then of course there’s workflow and other factors that determine our choice.
However, I do wonder how often we end up duplicating gear in our studios by buying something that is no different from something we already own. Back to Farrow and Ball paint, what happens when you just need some white paint? You’d think that would be an easy choice, but no. In the main Farrow and Ball collection there are nearly 30 shades of white! Sounds like a rip-off of a bad porn novel doesn’t it?
But, 30 shades of white? I remember when my wife told me this, that after some consideration we were going to use Strong White, and heaven forbid I came home with any other shade! Here’s the thing, when you have the paint card in front of you, then you can see the obvious shade difference between them. However, I defy anyone to be able to identify two shades apart once they end up on the wall.
There’s a handy little plugin made by HOFA called 4U+ BlindTest. It allows you to load different plugins and then blind test them. I’ve spent enough time in forums and on YouTube to see people doing Null tests on different gear to see how different they are. We’ve done plenty of tests over the years on this blog between different versions of the same kind of plugin, often with no decisive winner.
One has to ask themselves, if we are getting to the point of blind listening plugins and null tests, is there really enough of a difference? Perhaps we’ve moved into the realm of shades of white paint?
My wife was out of town this weekend so I took my 7 year old out for lunch. The restaurant we eat at offers a kids’ menu, the drinks offer a selection of kids’ mocktails. From what I can gather it’s a pile of crushed ice with a fruit syrup poured into it… in effect a posh slush drink. My daughter chose a Strawberry Mocktail. Our table was in the window next to the outside tables. As we were sat eating and drinking another family arrived, they had a boy around my daughters age. As he took his seat, his eyes were fixated on my daughter’s mocktail. Some minutes later what should arrive for the boy? A Strawberry mocktail.
Often the reason we end up with so many plugins or new hardware is as simple as a Strawberry Mocktail. FOMO (The Fear of Missing Out) comes into play and before we know it we’ve added another EQ plugin to the 30 or more we already have. When push comes to shove we couldn’t tell the difference between two of them, other than a sexy GUI or a fashionable choice. The attraction of something we don’t own comes into play.
If we can’t tell the difference between two pieces of gear then our client can’t, and even more telling, the listening public certainly can’t. So why do we get so bent out of shape trying to justify our purchasing decisions? Perhaps we just need to settle into the gear we already have?
In the world of business there’s a term called the law of deminishing return. This means it costs more to do something than the addtional value gained. Or in statistics there are numbers that are so small that they are referred to as “meaningless.”
There’s an old joke that a classic pair of shoes is a pair you wear more than once. I think that could be applied to gear too!
Strong White my ass!