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In Reply to: RE: Reviews without a manufacturer's prior consent? posted by John Atkinson on May 18, 2014 at 14:41:34
I'm thinking of Magnepan.
Follow Ups:
Just got this and thought I'd pass it on --
From: Wendell Diller
Date: Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 4:30 PM
Subject: Open letter to John Atkinson
To: "Atkinson, John"
John,
Jason completely misunderstood my intent---and he failed to mention that I wished to kill the rumors circulating on the Internet that Stereophile "has it in" for Magnepan. I was not "going off" on Stereophile. Quite the opposite. I wished for Jason to understand that I was defending you. The fact that Paul Seydor from TAS was there to witness what I said did make it "public" to some degree, but I don't understand why Jason found it necessary to air it in his blog. So, now I feel compelled to publicly state what I was trying to explain to Jason.
I have the highest regard and respect for you and Stereophile magazine. It is not fair that Stereophile has been accussed of a vendetta against Magnepan. Jason said that he doesn't read this stuff in the chat rooms, but I believe it can be damaging. There are a lot of "conspiracy theories" why Maggies are not reviewed in Stereophile, but it is not complicated. You and I have discussed them a number of times. And there are no hidden agendas. There will be those that will criticize me or Magnepan, but you and Stereophile are not to be faulted.
Wendell Diller
Marketing Mgr.
Magnepan
Why do you publish an Email from Wendell?Why can't Wendell post the "open letter" here himself?
What is your "private" relationship with Magnepan?
Are you paid by Magnepan as a "shill'?
Edits: 06/07/14
Potzrebie,Wendell no longer participates directly in these forums. He works six days a week and doesn't have time. In lieu of direct participation, when Wendell has something he wants to say on the forums, he emails it to a forum representative and we pass it on.
Currently, I fill that role on the Planar Asylum, and Steve Ford does it on the Planar Circle. Steve and I also pass questions from fellow forum members on to Wendell.
I wish I could say I get paid for it, but I don't.
Anyway, when I pass something on from Wendell it represents his opinion, not mine. Conversely, what I write here constitutes my own opinion and speculation and shouldn't be given any special weight. Sometimes, when I say something wrong, I'll get an email from Wendell informing me of that in no uncertain terms. Ditto when I guess right. And very occasionally, I hear something on background, and then I'm left with the frustrating task of using information that's publicly available to make a point. But basically, I'm just speculating, like everyone else.
In this specific case I haven't spoken to anyone at Magnepan since the incident -- all I know is what I've read here and on Stereophile's site. However, when I visited the factory a year ago as forum representative, I passed on a participant's suggestion that Magnepan send Stereophile a pair of Mini Maggies for review. Mark Winey said he thought it was a good idea, and then said to Wendell that it might be a way to get back into sending speakers to Stereophile. So I didn't get the sense that there was any great animosity. As far as I know the issue is that JA's measurements make Maggies look bad, and that JA understandably doesn't want to publish a review without them. That's just based on what I've read here and on the Stereophile site. And my own comments on this were just to point to the near field measurement problem since some people seemed to think that Maggies have awful measurements.
IMO, E-Stat's suggestion makes a lot of sense: When measuring large planars, Stereophile should just omit the bass curve and put in a footnote to the effect that gated quasi-anechoic measurements don't accurately represent the performance of large-area dipoles. Ideally, they could add an in-room measurement, or make the low frequency measurements at a normal listening distance outside (but at a normal distance from an exterior wall since that affects the midbass response).
Edits: 06/07/14
If Wendall has something to say, he can post just like JA does. He is too busy, is BS!
Wendall is MAGNEPAN'S REPRESENTATIVE (Marketing Manager).
And it is "HIS" job to communicate to customers.
In all fairness, Wendell is very available to customers -- if you call Magnepan and ask for him, they'll connect you and chances are he'll spend a lot of time with you. They take pride in old-fashioned customer service. When we asked for example why they don't include an email address on their site, he asked whether people would prefer to email some phone bank guy in India or speak to people at the factory who really understand the problem.
Also, if you ask a question on the Ask the Factory thread on the Planar Circle, he'll respond there. He just doesn't want to get directly involved in the endless discussions on the forums, although I know he reads at least some of them.
I can also personally vouch for the fact that Wendell works long hours and has responsibilities other than marketing that occupy a significant amount of his time. Magnepan is a giant by high end standards, but it isn't a big company by any means and since they sell to the value market they have to be very careful about labor costs.
Are there other reasons why Wendell chooses to do things this way? Perhaps. He's told me that he's more comfortable with verbal than written communication, so that could have something to do with it. Obviously, not a problem that JA has! And some of the guys on the Planar Forum say that he was driven away by someone back when he did participate. I wasn't there to see it but it seems plausible.
I've long admired JA's cast iron stomach -- most of the time he manages to be unflappable in the face of accusations that would make a divorce lawyer quail. But not everyone in the industry wants to deal with attacks from the same handful of people day in and day out. And, really, participating in these forums can be incredibly time consuming. Between emails and responding to posts, I've spent much of the day on it. These days, I don't usually have time to do it myself, and I don't have a speaker company to run.
Steve Ford is the MODERATOR at Planar Circle.
You are not the REPRESENTATIVE of the Planar Asylum!
Who elected you? You are not even the official moderator.
You are a SHILL for Magnepan! Paid or not.
Wendall is too busy to take 2 minutes to respond? BS!
I hate second hand suspect info!
The guys on the Planar Forum did elect me, so yes, I am their representative. It doesn't make any difference in this case, since Wendell is free to communicate with or through anyone he wants. Before me, it was another Planar Asylum regular, Wazoo. And others are in touch with him as well.
If you don't want to get information through me, call him yourself, though given the tone of your discussion so far I have a feeling that the conversation won't last long.
As to what I say, you are welcome to read it or not, or agree with it or not. Really, it wouldn't really matter if I were Jim Winey in disguise, since what I say is either correct or not, and everyone is free to make up their own minds.
Finally, with respect to why Wendell doesn't participate, have you considered the possibility that he doesn't want to waste time responding to paranoid, defamatory posts like yours?
You are a lousy Jay Carney wannabe!
I think Magnepan and Wendell are the ones that are paranoid, not me!
Care to discuss why Manepam uses a "hidden" center channel speaker, in 2 channel show demonstrations?
No. It's been discussed to death on the Planar Asylum and the information doesn't need to be repeated here.
I am not sure who Jay Carney is, nor do I much care.
What you do for Magnepan is "ASTROTURFING"!
astroturfing
the act of creating a small organization and making it appear to represent something popular for the purpose of promoting a particular entity, cause, etc. (a play on grassroots in the sense of a popular movement originating among the common people, ultimately from AstroTurf, a brand of artificial grass)
The practice of astroturfing a widely used form of propaganda, as evidenced by the media coverage it receives.
Chill Out! Have a drink!
You are not going to win playing a "MANIC" game of WACK -A -MOLE!
Dude, what I am is a retired audio and video engineer who has owned Maggies since he was in his 20's and hangs out on the Planar Asylum. I like the people at Magnepan, I like the company's philosophy and integrity, and I like their speakers, which is why I own them.
By way of contrast, I'm not very fond of the frequently uninformed attacks that people make on these newsgroups, whether directed at Magnepan or Stereophile or anyone else. I think such attacks are dispiriting for those who are their targets and harm good people.
There are too many companies that don't care about their customers, employees, or business ethics. They're the ones who deserve to be attacked, and I reserve my criticism for them.
These attacks on Magnepan are real!
Wendell and Mark Winey have made several BIG missteps that you fail to acknowledge!
And DUDE I am a real EE from top ten university, and Design Assurance Engineer in the medical industry, and have owned Magnepans since 1976!
You are a BLOW HARD!
What you are is a guy with questionable grammar, erratic spelling, and a predilection for name-calling, baseless accusation, unfounded generalizations, and that ever-reliable indicator of a weak position, ad hominem argument.
As for Wendell and Mark's missteps, I'm not sure what you're referring to. I've seen nothing but penny ante stuff -- forgetting to mention a center channel speaker in a few demos, saying something that pissed off a member of the press. If that's what you're referring to, I'm not sure why you say I failed to acknowledge them, given that I've been discussing them for the last two days. Or do you mean that I didn't start inventing paranoid theories about what happened and calling for everyone to be drawn and quartered?
Meanwhile, Magnepan has had a string of successful product introductions, weathered a very difficult economic climate and the challenges that face high end audio without sacrificing its identity as a company that sells high end gear at prices the middle class can afford, and, most recently, introduced a new compact model that won raves. To me a major misstep would be a product introduction that no one likes, or a failed business strategy.
Do I agree with everything they do? No. But look up the Dunning–Kruger effect. I've worked all my life in pro audio and video and had for a time a company that manufactured pro audio equipment, so I know something of the challenges businesses face. But, paradoxically, one of the consequences of that knowledge is that I know how little I know about the their business. I've had the good fortune to get to know some of the people at Magnepan, to get a sense of who they are, warts and all, and of some of the challenges they face and some of the strategies they've tried. But I don't have the lore that one acquires after working for at a company, sometimes for decades. So while like many here I make suggestions and try to convince them to do this or that, I don't believe that I know enough about their business to know better than they do how to run it.
I do not like the way Magnepan is currently run! It is an insult to many, in all the internet forums.The old timers that have known Magnepan for decades are stunned!
The "missteps" with the 3.7i upgrade and launch (no official comment on what was improved), Wendell's public insult to JA, hidden center channel speaker demos, and bogus reasons for no Stereophile review sample, are all insults to Magnepan customers.
Under Jim Winey none of this would has occurred!
You defend all of this, over and over!
You are out of step with the bulk of Magnepan users
The people on the planar forum are a tiny, tiny group Vs the 400,000 Magnepan owners. They buy used Magnepan speakers to modify, and do not like the stock ones. How many happy users even visit the audio forums? Not 400,000!
Edits: 06/07/14
What I try to do is defend them against uninformed attacks of the kind that so often occur on the Internet and then gain currency merely by virtue of having been stated. And I was doing this long before I knew anyone at the company.
When people claim that Magenpan won't submit its products for review by Stereophile because the speakers don't measure well, and I know that Stereophile's measurements misrepresent the performance of the speaker because the quasi-anechoic measurement technique they use is inappropriate for the measurement of large planars, should I not point that out?
When people accuse Magnepan of hiding a center channel speaker despite the fact that they mentioned the center channel speaker at almost every showing, should I not point that out?
Some forum members run at this stuff swinging their axes like Hagar the Horrible. Minor slip-ups like being tired and pressed for time and forgetting to mention the center channel speaker at a few demos are transformed into evil conspiracies.
This is not the same as agreeing with everything the company does. For example, Steve Ford and I have nagged Wendell to death over his refusal to disclose basic technical details, as in the 3.7i upgrade. But even there, I'm aware that we're speaking from the perspective of people who don't know whether a spec can be mentioned without disclosing trade secrets.
For example, the 1.7 uses a novel series crossover with a .5-way supertweeter strip and I can see why they wouldn't want to talk about that -- it's clever and it doesn't have patent protection. But we didn't know that until Peter Gunn opened one up and made a schematic of the crossover. So if we had criticized Magnepan for refusing to disclose more crossover information, would that have been fair?
Let me quote part of an email I received yesterday from Wendell, touching on the center channel business:
"Something as simple as the desire to have a clean backdrop for viewing the two competing cosmetic designs has not occurred to anyone. Rather there are sinister reasons given."
I think that pretty much says it all.
nt
LOL. This post of yours reminds me of that old suggestion about what the US should do about the war in Vietnam: declare a victory and leave.
Yes the 3.7.
Why was it not reviewed????
Because the manufacturer gave some BS about "proprietary" frequency response.
LOL!
> Yes the [Magnepan] 3.7. Why was it not reviewed????
I discussed this matter in the magazine, on the Stereophile website forum,
and on Audio Asylum. Magnepan will not submit products for review unless
I agree not to publish measurements. As I don't believe it appropriate
for the magazine to totally abandon its policy when a manufacturer requests
it, there was no review.
> Because the manufacturer gave some BS about "proprietary" frequency
> response.
Magnepan's Wendell Diller felt that my publishing the MG3.7's behavior
would give proprietary crossover information to Magnepan's competitors.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
CONSENT of the maker of the object to be reviewed? Ridiculous.
BUY a sample and TEST it. Report whatever objective data you evolve and allow fair 'subjective' comment.
Resell on the open market to defer your costs.
Magnepan is concerned with 'proprietary' crossover information! First, as if physics has either been suspended or reinvented for the 3.7 and ALSO, such proprietary information is available to ANY other manufacturere by the simple expedient of PURCHASING a pair for test and dissection.
Car companies have been buying each others stuff for decades without 'foul' being cried by anyone.
Nutty
Too much is never enough
...would steal the crossover info?
Who else makes planar magnetic speakers with ribbon tweeters?
Uh, no one.
So the reality is they don't want anyone seeing the measurements in print.
I vote for a full review, with measurements.
It is a significant audio product, so you owe it to your readers.
Give them manufacturer the option of loaning the magazine a pair - if they won't then I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to borrow a new pair.
nt
This is all conjecture but I suspect the real reason for Magnepan’s reticence relates to the difficulty in obtaining accurate measurements for large planar (dipole) speakers, with the result that the measurements for planar speakers and dynamic speaker may not be directly comparable. Yet, readers would likely hold the planar speaker to the standards of the dynamic speaker.
IIRC, this difficulty in measuring planars was discussed by John Atkinson some years ago in a video about taking speaker measurements.
I seem to recall from the video and related discussion that the difficulty resulted from (1) the large size of the planar speaker and the fact that it outputs a wave of sound from the entire top to bottom of the speaker rather than a direct sound emanating from a point source, (2) the fact that the planar speaker is a dipole and radiates sound from the front and back of the speaker in both directions, rather than mostly just from the front, and (3) the resultant importance and variability of the room in taking measurements, with the room interaction dependent upon the size and shape of the room and its construction material.
Because of these factors, planar speakers often just don’t measure linearly in the same fashion as a dynamic speaker, and I would think that Magnepan would be concerned that the measurements would be misinterpreted by the readers.
Yet Magnepans still sound great.
.
I have taken measurements of Maggies in various rooms and you are correct! It surprises me how rarely (almost never actually) anybody discusses the elephants that are in the room. We (the Maggie owners) seem to also never publish our measurements, I've never asked for any nor been offered any, it's like it's a self-imposed cone of silence. Or a cult. Most likely we don't need the grief of presenting facts. There are solutions of course.
I don't think I'd call it a cone of silence, I've seen people post a fair number of measurements over the years.
or could not one of Magnepan's competitors, assuming they wanted the information badly enough, at the risk of voiding the warranty, simply purchase a 3.7, measure it for themselves, and take it apart and have a looksee? Sounds specious to me.
Like a competitor can't just take apart a Maggie crossover and see what's in there? As opposed to trying to reverse-engineer it from a measured frequency response which includes multiple other variables, including unique-to-the-brand driver behavior?
I think they just don't want anyone to see how badly their measurements suck.
The measurements don't actually suck, check out the measurements that Stereophile did do back in the day or that some that others have done in the years since. The Stereophile measurements do exaggerate the bass response because they're made in the near field -- there's a discussion appended to the review of the 3.6 that explains that. I can see though that a reader who just looked at the graph without reading JA's explanation might be misled.
IIRC, Magnepan had no problem with TAS reviewing their product, but TAS doesn't do measurements.
It seems to me that they either didn't want potential customers (who care about measurements) to see how badly their speakers measure or perhaps they just don't agree with how JA performs his speaker measurements.
Has anyone on the AA asked Magnepan for their take on this subject?
Cheers,
Al
"Magnepan's Wendell Diller felt that my publishing the MG3.7's behavior would give proprietary crossover information to Magnepan's competitors."
You should just borrow one and conduct whatever measurements you wish. Be damned with what the manufacturer wishes. They have no proprietary rights in the performance of their products. If you wished you could even reverse engineer the complete design and publish that and there would be absolutely nothing wrong with doing so. (Someone using this design to build a competitive product might run afoul of any patents, but these would not have been issued without publishing the technology details, because that's how patents work.)
The fact that you do not do this is a strong indicator that Stereophoile is in bed with manufacturers. I don't think that is an intention that a magazine should project. If I am wrong about this and it is impossible to run a profitable magazine without this collusion then this would confirm the belief many have that magazines are not to be trusted or used for purposes other than entertainment.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Well if you've been yearning to get your collusion and lack of trust statement out there you certainly couldn't have picked a more flimsy pretext for the launch!
Talk about taking leave of one's senses!
Sad
Never trust an Atom, they Make Up everything!
Obviously the magazines would be very different under your enlightened leadership. I find it grossly inappropriate to make this kind of accusation without strong proof.
"I find it grossly inappropriate to make this kind of accusation without strong proof."
I made an observation, not an accusation. Stereophile is the most straightforward of the audio publications available today, but it has not reached the point where it is above suspicion. For that to happen, it would have to be "as pure as Caesar's wife".
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Not sure that is fair. Stereophile has a policy - Magnepan doesn't want to play by the policy which is fine because the measurements will concern Magnepan because they don't look good (not for the ridiculous reason Magnepan gave but then what are they going to say - "our speakers' measurements are atrocious and we don't want people to see that" of course not.
Stereophile has said they have trouble measuring certain speaker designs - so what Magnepan should have done was provide their own measurements suite to Stereophile and they could publish both. Or write a manufacturer's comment directing people to a link with their measurements.
There are thousands of speaker makers out there that would be happy to follow Stereophile's policy - even the makers who disagree with the way Stereophile does their measurements. Heck every SET maker who sends a SET amp to them knows their amp is going to come out looking bad compared to $400 Solid State receivers.
I don't think people who buy SET or for that matter Magnepan are all that interested in measured performance.
But that's an argument to made to Magnepan not to Stereophile.
Actually, they measure fine. Here's a measurement of the little MMG's that my friend JBen posted over on the Planar Asylum:
However, look at this measurement from Stereophile:
http://www.stereophile.com/images/archivesart/magfig3.jpg
A reader looking at that would think that it has a 20 dB rise in the bass! Ouch! It's mostly an artifact of the up-close measurement technique but I can see why Magnepan might be reluctant to see a graph like that in a review -- one that shows the bass equalization that compensates for the 6 dB/octave dipole cancellation rather than the frequency response at the actual listening distance. JA would of course explain that it was a measurement artifact but how many readers would just glance at the graph without reading the fine print?
Of course, I don't blame people for thinking that Magnepan is hiding something here.
I don't think people should be buying based on a frequency plot which changes in every room at every distance anyway. I have good and not so good measured speakers come through here - the best have been the ones that didn't look too good in Stereophile. Not to mention what their reviewers have liked and have bought over the years.I don't buy Magnepan's argument about worrying over being copied. That is the issue here. I have the great measuring LS-50 here and my next speaker when I can pull the money together is going to be the Audio Note E/Spx HE Alnico (which won Product of the Year in Asia). But the measured results were not too good at Stereophile. And I doubt Audio Note much cares. here in Hong Kong they were being sold at a dealer along with speakers that are one of John Mark's dream speaker and will measure superbly. The AN E is still being sold the other has been dropped because they couldn't sell any of them against the E. They can't keep up with demand on them...and that's with very middling Stereophile measurements. Magnepan will sell regardless of the plots.
People who buy or consider to drop speakers off their list based mainly on measurements probably aren't buying this sort of stuff anyway (and IMO wouldn't know quality sound if the Philharmonic played outside their window.
While I am not personally a fan of the Magnepan sound I do get why people are fans of them - and really if you love the sound of Magnepan and it turned out that the measurements "supposedly" stunk would that change anything? Indeed, years before the AN E was measured I said - in order for them to sound better than the typical boxed slim line (2-5 six inch woofers under some sort of metal tweeter that glut the audio market) the AN E would have to measure significantly differently than those (like designed) speakers. And since those "like design" speakers were supposedly considered to measure well - then the AN E would have to measure poorly by those same criteria. But since the so called deemed "good measuring" speakers sound quite a LOT WORSE than the AN E then it was easy for me to chuck that part of Stereophile's analysis - since they also didn't perform pair matching measurements, distortion measurements. Measuring one speaker mid room is a waste of time.
The flagship B&W and Quad 2905 were found by Ken Kessler to be 2.9 and 5.9db OFF from each other. The dealer wants to claim the latter is one sample but of course he would. By measuring one speaker you are not measuring a "stereo system" you are measuring mono. Big fat waste of time - but it's cheaper and faster so let's do that.
Dipoles can't be measured properly so why measure the frequency - put something else in like pair matching and distortion. One size measurements doesn't fit all.
Edits: 06/06/14 06/06/14
Well, personally, I like seeing the measurements because they help me better understand the relationship between measurements and audio quality. But I agree, they can't tell you all that much about how good a speaker is. The more practiced you are at reading the measurements the more you can infer but they're at best a partial indication of what the speaker sounds like.
Of course Magnepan's concerns are for business and if they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that a misleading measurement will harm sales more than a review will benefit them, I can see why they wouldn't want to submit a model for review.
BTW, large planar dipoles can be measured, they just have to measured at the normal listening distance because the nearfield measurements are very different from the measurements at the listener's seat. And in the end, it's what reaches your ears that counts. But according to JA, it isn't feasible for Stereophile to do that.
nt
> You should just borrow one and conduct whatever measurements you wish.
I did think about that, but in the end felt that denying Magnepan review
coverage would probably be a more fitting outcome. Other worthy speakers
would get the benefit of our coverage, which would be Magnepan's loss.
> The fact that you do not do this is a strong indicator that Stereophile
> is in bed with manufacturers.
Good grief, why do you trot out this tired old canard? I made a judgment
call is all; you would have made a different one. That doesn't mean I am
corrupt and you are as pure as the driven snow - sometimes a cigar is
just a cigar!
And I don't think Magnepan has advertised in Stereophile for years.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
that's rather odd; can't anyone - with suitable equipment - perform those measurements and a competitor surely knows how to do the measurements.
thanks for interest.
roger wang
"that's rather odd; can't anyone - with suitable equipment - perform those measurements"
Absolutely! And if a competitor were really concerned about matching some attribute of their performance, buying a set is damn cheap R&D especially since they'd need one anyway to compare the results.
I think the excuse is both silly and lame. I'd guess that what they are really concerned about is simply poor looking measurements. Panel speakers are rather chaotic beasts and prolly a lot tougher to meaningfully characterize than systems that are more of a point source because they radiate over such a large area WRT the room. None the less I'm not impressed with their behavior and this information lowers them several notches in my book. If they can't justify their design they can keep it!
Rick
> Panel speakers are rather chaotic beasts and prolly a lot tougher to > meaningfully characterize than systems that are more of a point source > because they radiate over such a large area WRT the room.
Yes, they really need to be measured from a distance. Not practical given the practical constraints of Stereophile's testing program, I asked JA about this a while back.
In addition, I suspect they don't feel a pressing need for reviews to sell their speakers. Why be in a position to feel a need to explain measurement results?
-Wendell
Edits: 05/19/14 05/19/14
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