In 1844, inventor Charles Goodyear made a groundbreaking discovery by significantly enhancing rubber's elasticity through vulcanization, which involved adding sulfur to it. This process not only gave rise to essential products like tires and rubber bands but also introduced a concept of immense importance – elasticity.
The notion of elasticity, a fundamental property of materials, was a revolutionary breakthrough that transformed our understanding of how we interact with and manipulate substances. Interestingly, its impact extended beyond the realm of materials, emphasizing the value of flexibility not only in materials but also in processes, people, and equipment.
Think of what today the flexibilities we take for granted: tone controls, DSP, preamplifier load choices for moving coil cartridges, selectable filter coefficients in digital products, firmware upgrades like Massive for the DirectStream MKII.
Everywhere we look it feels like we're moving away from the hard and fast, the immovable, to the more pliable feature sets that tailor our likes and dislikes to reach our individual desires for music's reproduction.
The more we embrace flexibile options, the more personal our systems become.
