Zildjian just make really, really good cymbals. It's a lot harder than it looks. A good cymbal is a surprisingly sophisticated piece of metalwork. It's a precisely shaped piece of very thin copper alloy that the user will hit many thousands of times. Cheap cymbals don't sound as good, but they also don't last as long - they're much more prone to cracking, denting and warping.
Zildjian's brand is only worth anything because they produce consistently good products. Musicians are prone to superstition and conservatism, but they're not idiots. If you trash the core values of your brand, they'll stop buying your products.
Gibson has been charging boutique money for crappy assembly line guitars for well-over 30 years now. Gibson hasn't been about "brand values" since Orville died.
Also musicians will often deride something that's new. Just look at transistor amplifiers. They're technically better, but won't excite most guitarists.
A lot of the "better" for musicians is imperfection.
>Just look at transistor amplifiers. They're technically better, but won't excite most guitarists.
If you think that they're technically better, you've fundamentally misunderstood the user requirements. Tube amps sound better than purely analog transistor amps, which outweighs all other factors for most guitarists. They sound obviously better, even to a non-musician.
You can make a transistor amp sound pretty much indistinguishable from a tube amp through digital modelling, but it requires some very sophisticated DSP techniques that have only become practical in the last few years.
If you mean solid state transistors, yes musicians don't like them, but there is good reason - tube amps absolutely sound better than solid state, there's really no debate there. But they are a huge pain in the rear and if solid state sounded identical, musicians would have no problem. Also, they're not that new :).
But yes, a lot of musicians don't like new, which is funny :)
> But yes, a lot of musicians don't like new, which is funny :)
A lot of musicians are also highly technical artists who need and expect things to work a certain way and have practiced hours and hours within that certain way. And that's taken to the hundredth degree when you're talking about a working musician who performs for a living.
Just think of Spinal Tap and the wireless guitar system as an example of the exact type of situation a musician doesn't want.
A recent example are the automated tuners Gibson started putting on some of their guitars. That sounds amazing in practice -- I can hit my strings and bend them as hard as I want to and they'll just magically get back in tune! The reality (I didn't personally own one, so I can't share my experiences), was much worse, with many accounts of musicians playing on stage, only to have their Gibson manage to automatically detune itself.
In regards to amps, guitarists are also notably attached to whatever tone they spent years dialing in. There is a tremendous difference in sound between any two amp models, especially with tube amps.
Yes I know, that's why I wrote technically better. The distortions and coloring your tube amplifier produce might sound good to you, but they're imperfections.
BTW I did blind tests with a lot of the never-transistor crowd, and with the right simulated effects a rough 95% of them couldn't tell which one was the tube and which one was the transistor amplifier with simulated tube. So I'd say it's also a bit of nostalgia.
The results were even worse for vinyl vs MP3. Recording some vinyls as high quality MP3 (to preserve the defects) let no one tell the difference. Even though they were adamant that MP3's make music so harsh that they can't listen to it without getting a brain aneurysm.
So it's not the MP3 that makes the music unlistenable to them, it's actually the fidelity of the recording that vinyl's just don't have.
Although with vinyl I must admit there's a certain romantic aspect to putting one on, even though I don't have a player.
PS: I know there are better formats than MP3, but in this case people were talking about MP3 I didn't want to give them FLAC.
>Yes I know, that's why I wrote technically better. The distortions and coloring your tube amplifier produce might sound good to you, but they're imperfections.
Well, so is human timing errors in playing. But most people would still rather hear a human play the piano that a MIDI file (and even electronic music done in DAWs is "humanized" in all sorts of ways).
>Although with vinyl I must admit there's a certain romantic aspect to putting one on, even though I don't have a player.
With vinyl the tactility and patina and process (that makes "skipping" more effort) are even more important to me than the playback fidelity.
> Yes I know, that's why I wrote technically better.
I would still disagree with your use of the word "better."
> The distortions and coloring your tube amplifier produce might sound good to you, but they're imperfections.
"Sounding good to the listener" is the criteria by which this kind of musical equipment is evaluated. According to this standard, tube amps are "better."
As a tech-head I totally get where you are coming from. The more accurate reproduction of the sound does create a lot of value as it enables new sounds and techniques. But as a musician, I don't really care about optimizing the electrical and acoustic properties of the physical system. I only really care about the sound I get out of it at the end.
Distortion is, by the exact same measure of sonic clarity and reproductive accuracy, horribly broken from a technical point of view. Yet that effect underpins whole genres of music. In many situations it is "better" than the "technically accurate" reproduction.
There's actually a technical difference between tube and transistor amplifiers in the way they overload, which is probably the primary reason why musicians might "prefer" tubes, actually. (I wouldn't call it necessarily "better" all the time, every musician is different, but the tube distortion is often seen as "more musical" to many musicians.)
I feel like most guitarists are so extra about equipment. Most good guitarists I know will sound fine playing mediocre guitars through cheap amps, while a bad guitarist is just not going to sound good on anything
