Reporter John Lawton, speaking to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists in 1995 said "The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion." I suspect that there are two main reasons for this.
1) It has allowed more people (including myself I must admit) to contribute information
2) There are very few checks and balances on the information being disseminated.
Now, of course, both of these conditions apply to this blog, and so it can be argued that Lawton’s quote applies to me equally if not more so to anyone else. But in practice much of what I write either is the result of my direct experience with the Stuart piano (and therefore can be tested in the Hume’s Fork sense) or else based upon my many conversations with people with intimate and accurate knowledge and experience with the Stuart piano.
Which makes it all the more galling when this gem of wisdom is published on the internet:
“Wow! I almost never visit piano manufacturer web sites. Nor do I read brochures. It occurred to me early on that 1) all pianos are much the same 2) the only way you can differentiate is to play them. The marketing stuff is mostly either obvious or nonsense!”
a) if you don’t visit websites or read brochures how do you know about the pianos on offer – even if you consider the information contained therein to be ‘crap’ at least you know the piano exists.
b) All pianos are not ‘much the same’. All right, they have cases, strings, keyboards, pedals etc etc but this statement has as much truth and sense in it as saying all cars are the same because they all have engines, seats and a steering wheel. As I and many others have opined, the Stuart piano is certainly and quite demonstratively not the same as any other.
c) If all pianos are ‘much the same’ how can you differentiate them? And, if you can differentiate them, surely they’re not ‘much the same’ no matter how you define the word ‘much’?
d) It is easy to recognise nonsense in ‘Marketing stuff’. Many manufacturers rely heavily these days on their websites to generate interest in their products, and Stuart & Sons are no different and indeed perhaps more than any other manufacturer place significant emphasis on the website to disseminate quality and factual information about the pianos. To dismiss all ‘marketing stuff’ in this way is errant nonsense.
Indeed, some people have commented that they consider the Stuart website to be best of all of them in those terms.
It is a truism that a speculative conjecture made in a post in a forum or other mechanism on the net soon becomes accepted wisdom in following posts made by people who have absolutely no clue about what they are talking abut. And that includes the original poster as well. If this blog is seen to avoid that trap, then the effort I put into this will not be in vain.