“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” – John Keats
A former co-worker of mine, Alexey Astanovitskiy, told me what his father had told him with regard to electronics design: “If it looks beautiful, then it will work beautiful.” He was a very gifted designer and I have sought to emulate his example ever since.
This beauty in design goes beyond that which the customer is intended to see (i.e. the outside of the product) – it is in every aspect of the design, right down to the layout of the PCB. Take off the cover and look inside (please unplug the unit, allow some time for the capacitors to discharge and don’t touch anything). Was the layout put together last minute with little attention paid to aesthetics and the difficulties of switching design? Was the designer involved with this critical part of the design, or was it simply handed off to a layout person to “finish it up”? Gaps like this in execution can turn an excellent design into a marginal product.
It is the little details that make a big difference. The ones that nobody may ever be consciously aware of. However, audiophiles do have an interesting habit of noticing these “little details”.