Enthusiast websites and forums can be a gold mine for information but getting unbiased information is almost impossible. You also encounter individuals that seem to have taken their devotion just a bit too far. And this seem to happen in almost any topic. Let me give you a couple of examples:

Shaving. Sounds simple enough, eh? Wet/lubricate your facial hair and either manually move a blade around your face or have a machine vibrate a set of blades for you. But then you find a forum like badgerandblade.com that does give a newbie like me a lot of good advice on traditional wet shaving with a double edged blade – but at the same time it also suggests that having a “shaving den” is a perfectly normal thing to have.

What else .. oh yes, music and hi-fi as a hobby is common enough and those cool basements that are turned into a home theater rooms seem a bit excessive but still completely understandable. Also the debates that you see on hi-fi forums on which cables and “audio stones” give more sonic satisfaction without any scientific evidence seem silly but fairly harmless placebo-effect-at-work. However, when you decide to turn a big hall into a 6 million dollar “home” theater which is just one big mess of cables and equipment racks, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. The justification for that enterprise was that it’s a “demo system” and it’s used to get people to buy more similar systems from him.

I don’t care how rich you are but I’m pretty sure that anyone with an option to drop 6.000.000 $ to the table for a home theater system, will demand a lot more than stacks of really expensive equipment in warehouse in exchange for their hard-earned money.

There are a number of other examples but at least in some cases, the very best are still “reasonably” attainable, though the bang-for-the-buck ratio can be seriously questioned.

For example: a nice bespoken suit can go past 5000£ at Savile Row but at least you’re getting a huge number of man hours put into each of the suits and they are all hand made from scratch to perfection every time. And, as a final example, my quest for the perfect espresso-machine showed me that the top end for home market stops at around 6000€, which I would never spend for a coffee maker but it’s still a reasonable price for a long term hobby.

</rant>
(this post was moved from my old blog to igu.fi)