Philosophical Notes: The Hedonic Treadmill or Why New Equipment Doesn’t Seem Quite So Amazing

Like JV, my first “OMG”, “WTF”, “mind-bending” audio experience was at Victor’s Stereo, 8 E. Erie Street, Chicago. It was 1972 and Chris Martens and I went into Victor’s to see what was up, expecting variations on a theme. We were used to Advent bookshelf speakers driven by Marantz or Fisher solid-state receivers. Victor had Magneplanar Tympani 1’s driven by Audio Research tube electronics.  Just seeing speakers 6 feet tall and 5 feet wide (each) had our mouths agape. And then the sound, especially the image size and detail, made us forget the look of the equipment. This was music reproduction something like 5 levels removed from our norm.

About a year later, Chris and I were in Boston and we popped into a record store. In the back was an operation called Suffolk Audio. They had IMF Studio II speakers (we’d never heard of them) and they played a direct-to-disc record of Lincoln Mayorga and Friends (also completely new to us). Bass! Bass with power and detail and “shuddering columns of air”.

Since then I’ve heard hundreds if not thousands of hi-fi systems. I don’t recall any of them replicating the amazing step-function improvements I heard with those first two systems. And yet, there is no way I would want either of those 1970s systems today. We’ve come a long way in the last 50 years.

One can at times wonder if we’ve lost something when you reflect that these quantum leaps don’t seem to occur any more. Part of the issue, of course, is that you can only go from a reference of bad stereo to good stereo a few times. Then you know what is up at some basic macro level.

You don’t, however, know “how high is high?”. That’s what engineers and audiophiles keep working on. But they do it mostly incrementally, so the mind-bending experience goes away. That is, progress is still being made, but you have to look a little harder to see it.

There is also the issue of emotions. Something called hedonic adaptation, a term of art in psychology, suggests that our happiness adapts to what we know and thus stays at a pretty constant level. This seems right in my experience.

And yet it somehow overlooks the joy that comes from searching for and anticipating better. You get enjoyment from the search and then a rush at its realization, and then you hedonically adapt, and then you continue the search. I admit, I rather enjoy this “the journey is the destination” sort of thing. And I note that while working on my system, I am very happy with the music played via the systems I have built.

Here are some additional thoughts from Scott Sumner on the hedonic treadmill and art, personality and technology. If Sumner and I are right, we’d better adapt to hedonic adaptation.