It often surprises me to see people with time, money, and knowledge settling for subpar experiences that have night and day differences to me. Even at my brokest (pretty darn broke), speakers, headphones, and glasses were always worth researching and some saving up, and the difference between what I’d end up with and the average always feels like it paid off tenfold.
I’ve got a surprising number of friends/acquaintances who just don’t seem to care, though, and I am trying to understand if they just don’t experience the difference similarly or if they don’t mind. I know musicians who just continue using generation 1 airpods or the headphones included with their phone, birdwatchers who don’t care about their binoculars, people who don’t care if they could easily make their food taste better, and more examples of people who, in my opinion, could get 50% better results/experiences by putting in 1% more thought/effort.
When I’ve asked some friends about it, it sounds as much like they just don’t care as they don’t experience the difference as starkly as I do, but I have a hard time understanding that, as it’s most often an objective sensory difference. Like I experience the difference between different pairs of binoculars and speakers dramatically, and graphical analysis backs up the differences, so how could they sound/look negligibly different to others? Is it just a matter of my priorities not being others’ priorities, or do they actually experience the difference between various levels of quality as smaller than I seem to? What’s your take on both major and, at the high end, diminishing returns on higher quality sensory experiences?
To some extent. For audio, I don’t really have to much experience with expensive headphones/earbuds but I do notice a difference. I still usually go with cheaper headphones though because the difference in audio quality and durability aren’t really enough to justify the price difference.
For visuals in games, I do prefer to have the best experience but what settings I use depends on the game. There are some settings that are universal to me, like for example, if anti-aliasing is available, I always have it set to 2x (or 1.5x if the game has it) because every option for anti-aliasing in every game I’ve tried looks exactly the same to me, so going higher is just a waste of system resources. For similar reasons, while both of my monitors support higher resolutions, I still prefer to use 720/768p.
I think the only time I really don’t care about visual quality, is just when I’m watching videos online.