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In Reply to: RE: Do you really care about suggested components? posted by Ozzie on September 29, 2014 at 18:15:41
Well I agree that it is a sorry thing to think that there may be some Gullible who thinks that either the rankings OR the reviews mean anything other than just that.
Chicken & Egg question, then. If they review it, then they always say it was good. So if it's good, do they need to pretend to review it anyways, then?
I also like the dumbing down of no-fi dross with the real HiFi stuff.
I'm supposed to believe that Class D SHIT is HiFi, either because it has a Mark Levinston badge & a $50,000 price tag, or its something from the WOP's at ARC. I think that Bill Johnson would have gladly put his name on a Class D amp if he was still active with the company, he surely made some AWFUL tranny-trash in his day, all potted in epoxy as if anyone cared to copy it. Hilarious! Such hubris!
Class D is NOT HiFi! It's SHIT, you put it in compooter speakers or maybe a car stereo in your Owwwwdi!
Tube equipment is HiFi. But not when it's decorative, in a sub-$1000 hybrid thingee with USB inputs (another sure mark of NO-fi), and made in China.
Maybe Emotiva, Peachtree, NuForce, and NAD are good for the money. But "High End" they ain't!
Can we PLEEEEEZ stop calling "Mid-Fi" and "No-Fi" High-End?
Well, not if Robert Harley & John Atkinson can help it!
Then there's the stuff that isn't so cheap, and GOB! It sounds BAD!
Kudos to Mike Fremer who pissed on Chord's parade, the stuff is EVIL BAD sounding! It's not exactly cheap, and I wouldn't listen to it for free! Arcam is nasty, too. Exposure is almost as good as 70's Pioneer. And the last HiFi show I went to, the sound of Burmester WAS about as good as 70's Pioneer, and no better.
Which is a whole lot more than I can say for Naim!
Ayre is High End. SimAudio is High End. Spectral is High End.
Theil is an expensive substitute for a rat & bat eliminator, or when you have to remove old wallpaper & you can't find the steamer...
Every squarehead with a machine shop in his basement has replaced every lunatic eccentric Englishman with a wood lathe in HIS basement and the world is awash with $10,000 suspensionless turntables that sound worse than a 30-year old Dual 505 with a pound of Duxseal stuffed into it, and I'd be happy to prove it to anyone in the Toronto area!
Don't forget to get all excited about all the overpriced tonearms that used to cost $300 and now cost at least ten times that; no figuring for inflation, then! OR decreased manufacturing volumes, although the price should contribute to that. Any jerkoff can make a Unipivot tonearm as good as a Naim ARO or a Graham or a Basis. Just take a tube of metal, screw it to a cup, and balance it on a pin.
Presto! $5000! Recommended Class A component! If VPI can make one for a couple of grand with a 3D printer, I can make one for alot less...and I get to keep my FREE 3D printer!
Need a phono cartridge? Don't buy the superb Shure M97xe! It tracks better than anything made by anyone else at any price at 1.4g, and any price is around $90, so buy a screamin' bright Lyra Titan or Atlas for 100 times that and...oh!
I forgot you'll need a sound-degrading head-amp or syrupy-slow transformer & extra sound-degrading interconnects to mess up the ultra-low signal even further. Make that...200 times what the Shure costs!
Or follow their advice, get a MudAudio Shitslider & don't forget to stack your extra pennies on top of your Grandeeza! And remember: "Denver" mint pennies sound better than the "Philadelphia" ones, it'll slide into Class B if you screw that detail up! Use anti-skating compensation and do not pass go; go straight to HELL! Undistorted, better sounding HELL, but HELL nonetheless...
And there's SUCH new developments in audio these days!
Did you hear? Shure dusted off their 50 year-old tooling and are making the M44-7 again! And Grado didn't even need to dust off anything; they NEVER do! They've improved their old hummy cartridges by...gluing them into pieces of wood so that they'll hum even worse, AND you can't replace the defective stylus! A BARGAIN at $1500!
The best cantilevers were hollow sapphire. They don't make them anymore. And cartridges deteriorate with age, just by sitting around.
Doesn't that just make the latest $10,000 Ortofon with inferior Boron cantilever so exciting? But wait, they're melting flakes of stainless steel to make "dead" bodies out of them, and apparently, they sound that way too! Even when they're NOT defective! Which isn't often!
And if you believe new phono cartridges & turntables are better than the ones made 40 years ago, you probably think new LP's are made & sound better than they did 40 years ago, too!
OK, so what about...amplifiers!
Surely they've improved! Of course! They're all Class D now! Ahhh...but there's still the TUBED ones! The cheap arseholes at ARC & c-j couldn't be bothered to pay an extra $5 for American GE tubes in your $5000 preamp or $10,000 power amp, they preferred supporting communism by buying inferior Russian & Chinese tubes instead. Now that American GE plant is gone, along with all their superior American know-how...and SOUND.
Believe the pundits when they say that the gap in performance between Tube Amps & Transistors Amps has been closing; that's because shitty post-communist tubes make your tube amp sound more like a shitty transistor one, NOT vice-versa!
Oh, but transistor amps HAVE gotten better, haven't they?
Oh yes, Virginia; there's hardly a model out there that requires that you to move your stupid, lazy ass to adjust the volume or change an input: that's all handled with nasty Ladder-DAC's that convert your yummy analog signal into a shitty digital one, and then back again.
Notice the incredible tonal neutrality in all the soulless ARC, Ayre, SimAudio & Pass equipment!
Where's the balance control on this thing, anyways? It doesn't image, so I guess it doesn't matter...
At least I still have a "tape out". Only now its called a "Home Theatre Pass Through".
SIGH!
Follow Ups:
"Every squarehead with a machine shop in his basement has replaced every lunatic eccentric Englishman with a wood lathe in HIS basement and the world is awash with $10,000 suspensionless turntables that sound worse than a 30-year old Dual 505 with a pound of Duxseal stuffed into it, and I'd be happy to prove it to anyone in the Toronto area!"
LOL! It is funny not least because it is partially true!
Edits: 10/03/14 10/03/14
A brilliant rant, Joe. Thanks for the good read and I hope you get a column in Stereophile soon.............
Now if I could only get my hands on that pair of V-FET class A amplifiers Sony ran in Brooklyn....
Or the Western Electric snail horn playing 78s.
> > I hope you get a column in Stereophile soon.............
Good idea! What should Joe's new column be called?
Rosen's Rant
90% of Everything is [overpriced] Crap
The Devil's Advocate
This Magazine Sucks
Ha!-- had a good chuckle-but hey mate you were pretty much on the ball with some of the Quips
Couldn't said it better myself
Bit of Humour never goes amiss!
Des
but your oldies from the early 2000s were funnier. :)
My apologies. I'm rusty from lack of practice...;)
But it's good to see him back.
Thanks, Ivan! Very nice to be back, and nice to be among friends!
P.S. There's GOTTA be an invisible human hand in that cat video clip...either that, or we've been breeding them too well, and they're gaining on us!!!
" that's all (volume control) handled with nasty Ladder-DAC's that convert your yummy analog signal into a shitty digital one, and then back again."
That seems unlikely. If they are using ladder DAC's it's probably because they can work entirely in the analog domain (albeit at a finite number of settings) from the perspective of the signal.
But I doubt that blowhard's care about such matters.
Rick
I may not have all my technical facts on these things completely straight, but blame Dallas Semi & not me!
And for all my hot air, I come by my opinions honestly, which I means I LISTEN honestly before I spout off. I did some homework, but Dallas SemiConductor's datasheets weren't exactly helpful.
Think about what you just said (besides the blowhard remark).
"A ladder DAC operating in the analog domain".
Hunh? Excuuuuuse me?
DAC's operating in the analog domain???
Not the current chunk-spitting I2S DAC's I know & love, anyways!
Two things: One, going from memory of a datasheet I looked at 10 years ago. Two, remembering how incomplete & bizarre the data was.
Typical op-amp or other chip datasheets proudly show you an internal schematic in full & glorious detail; if there is proprietary technology they're not worried about since they patent those things!
Either this Dallas chip (which I looked up because it was doing suspicious shit in the ARC integrated, a CA-50 or 40, that I found the little devil in) is soooo complicated that there just wasn't the room on the page to disclose full schematic detail, or these guys were trying to hide something knowing full well its audio applications.
The whole thing started when I heard this integrated at a show, and I was VERY impressed by its "neutrality" and "cleanliness" for a tube amp, especially a lower-priced ARC one.
That was a quick listen, under show conditions, so I didn't get the full picture and made certain assumptions based on the "usual" technology that I otherwise know INSIDE & OUT.
This "blowhard" KNOWS his tube technology & sound, has heard and/or owned/and or/owns every notable vintage piece of tube audio gear EVER made; DESIGNS & BUILDS it, and has a schematic collection that fills a large filing cabinet. The blowing is backed up by more than a little bit of thinking, and even more listening; trust me when I say that.
The upshot of that little audition was that I mentioned to it some friends & customers, so one guy bought one on Audiogon based on my favourable comments.
HE noticed that something wasn't quite right sonically, but couldn't quite put his finger on it. So he invited me over to check it out, make sure it was working OK, double-check the bias & balance and all that sort of rot. So I did, I gave it a little tweak here, and a little tweak there, but it was basically within spec and running well.
As it should, since it was fresh back from ARC after its second trip (first post-warranty) where it had blown an output transformer and some other nasty things. Cumulative bill was around $1200!
I'm not used to seeing exploding ARC, I used to consider it a quality product (at least, compared to c-j, VTL, Sonic Frontiers or Counterpoint). But this thing was the harbinger of the shit we see today: bass-ackward hybrid retard technology, Russian tubes, dodgy little trim pots for bias, and "actuators" instead of real selector switches OR volume controls.
At least the microprocessor that ran the little shitbox wasn't switching FET's or bipolar transistors to do input selection; ARC had the good sense to make it actuate a bank of little cheapo relays.
And this is fine, it doesn't hurt the sound; only the idiot inconvenience of having to "cycle" through inputs instead of immediately getting the one you want! The audio circuit looked "harmless" enough, selected FET's with ARC's habit of etching the numbers off so that they can fuck you over for replacement parts, driving some clangy & cold Russian 6550's from a pair of 6DJ8/6922's. Or something. But the outputs were a quartet of 6550's, because to ARC there is no other output tube, and they WOULD pick the shittiest sounding one available short of a 6L6/5881...
So given what I "knew" from the sound of things like the Classic 30 & Classic 60 hybrids, with which I was pleasantly surprised at how much of an improvement THEY were over the deathly-dark & filthy-dirty opaque sound of the earlier D75/76/150 that I am also intimately familiar with (only ARC could make transistors sound better than tubes; this takes a special Johnsonian kind of incompetence), I expected that the CA-40/50 was much like the Classic 30 with maybe a bit less feedback to improve input sensitivity in its conversion into an integrated amp, along with the addition of the input switching & volume "pots".
But this fellow wasn't wrong; there WAS something "different" & off-putting about the sound of this integrated amp. For all its apparent cleanliness & clarity, good dynamics & excellent S/N ratio, it sounded very...ARTIFICIAL. Timbres were cold, thin, and just plain WRONG. I then noticed something else: where the heck was all the low-level detail that I should be hearing, even in a backwards-hybrid with sterile-sounding Russian junk tubes? Even if I mentally "lowered the bar" to Classic 30 standards, this CA40/50 still wasn't clearing it.
And Buddy found he was getting restless during his listening sessions. No listening fatigue in the obvious sense, but its complement: Audio Boredom.
When the sound is "strange" or "weird" enough, like it is so obviously with MP3's & Cellphones, our connection to the music-making gets TOTALLY severed. We invariably find ourselves staring at the wall between our speakers, wondering what kind of Aliens from an alternate Universe were inhabiting our music collection.
Such strange and not entirely wonderful noises they make! ALMOST like music, strangely similar, but definitely WRONG.
So there you go, Rick.
All other variables analysed & dealt with, and the only thing left after perusing the schematic was this strange & wonderful neat-O Dallas Semiconductor Attenuation IC (I don't even think the data sheet identified it as a "Ladder DAC", and I found the omissions both ominous & misleading, to say the least).
The definitive thing to do, which I suggested to the fellow, was to bypass the volume control entirely, and see what the unit sounded like then. Then we'd know, FOR SURE.
But even if the Dallas chip was found to be the chief sonic offender, what to replace it with? I don't pretend to be clever enough to know how to reconfigure a microprocessor that talked to a Ladder DAC chip to now talk to a motorized ALPS potentiometer, and that would have been the ideal solution. Never mind cost, time, etc.!
And even though Buddy primarily used CD as his source, he also listened to alot of FM, and neither of those units had output controls to substitute for the lack of a volume control on the ARC.
He bought an integrated amp instead of a switchbox & a power amp for a good reason!
In the end, that left only one solution.
Since the unit was clearly an exploding turd in terms of reliability, and all the proprietary ARC parts made repairs expensive no matter who did them, and "fixing" the sonics was far too complicated & sketchy, he did what anyone in the same situation would & should do: he dumped the f***er, before it blew up again.
At that, my explorations & immediate curiosity for the anomalous Dallas "Attenuator" IC came to an end. Silly me, I thought it REALLY was an anomaly, and I'd never quite see the likes of it ever again. After all, back then, the motorized ALPS pots were still Kings, and I didn't consider that tin-eared engineers would see garbage-sounding chips like these as an "improvement" over more expensive (I should have taken that clue as hint, right there!), and limited-lifespan eventually-noisy motorized potentiometers.
I got out of audio for a time, I've been back into it for the last 2 or 3 years, and as you can tell from my rants I'm experiencing quite a bit of culture shock, both from the stupid-tech & sticker-shock aspect of the current crapnology.
Lately I've been attending a few audio shows, and have chaperoned some friends on equipment-sniffing forays & have auditioned a smattering of new, laughably-overpriced Hind-End ARC preamps like the Ref3 (same sound), SimAudio, Ayre, Spectral, Linar, Pass, Prima Luna, Bel Canto, Mark Levinson, Anthem/Paradigm, and a few others.
Now that my ears are accustomed to that fake-neutral/no low-level detail sound, I can hear it in ALL the components that use this ladder-DAC crapnology, and that's all there is to it. Why did Ayre go to the clunking & hideously-expensive electro-mechanical rotary attenuator with discrete resistors in their top preamp?
Rick sez: "I dunno!"
Why did Spectral go ape-do in designing an over-the-top mechanical potentiometer in their DMC-30SS?
Rick sez: "I dunno!"
Why does Prima Luna insist on the motorized pot when their cheap chinese-made stuff would be cheaper still with a ladder DAC in it?
Rick sez...
ARC has this "synthetic" and uninvolving tonality. Levinson now has it. Bel Canto has it. SimAudio has less of it, but...
Whose to say whether these things are being used in the analog domain or not, when they're DAC's, which are nothing if not digital by their very nature?
What kind of DAC has networks of REAL resistors in it, and if so, why aren't the actual resistances specified (maybe they are, but I remember ambiguity even with this spec!) or readily able to be tapped into? And even there WAS real resistance in the chip, what quality of resistive element are you going to get on a microscopically-thin ceramic substrate, and what kind of wattage/temperature coefficient/voltage coefficient performance are you going to get?
Bottom line:
1) They sound like crap, every which way I've heard them used so far.
2) If it's a DAC, and it walks like a DAC, and it quacks like a DAC, and it smells like a DAC...then the only way it's outputting an analog signal from an analog input is if all the King's horses & all the King's men are taking the analog signal and making it digital again. Oh, but I do remember another piece of missing data: sampling rate & word length! What IS this thing???
3) If you have ears to hear, which you probably don't, along with the preening bright-light engineers at Harman International, McIntrash, Bel Canto, Chord & ARC, what compelling reason would you have to use a lousy-sounding part other than "it has lower noise" (a good tin-ear justification if there ever was one) or "it integrates better with microprocessor control & system displays" (ditto).
In a really well-designed piece of equipment like SimAudio, maybe the sonic compromise is minimal, and you're catering to rich lazy idiots who'd rather build up the lard stores on their arses than get the absolute sound anyways. Idiots that think their hard-drives sound better than a CD player (anyone else notice what a fallacy THAT is?), even when they ripped the file from disc to begin with!
If you start off by using & listening to substandard/sub-optimal sources, then obvious sonic degradation sounds rather less obvious, and the compromise is even smaller!
Of course this all a matter of degree.
Like Jonathan Valin, whom I otherwise think is an apologist for the consumption habits of Marie Antoinette (as well as his mentor, a certain HP), I feel STRONGLY that there is NOTHING in digital, 24/192/DSD and probably up to infinity, that rivals the experience and data density of GOOD analog.
If you are someone who doesn't, then excuse me if I come to the conclusion that you really aren't trying to get the absolute best sound possible that you can afford. In that case, the logical conclusion is either:
a) You are a lost soul, an audio loser, doomed to twiddle knobs and admire shiny faceplates, drool over spec sheets, and I'm sorry for you because you have no concept of the emotional ripoff you've signed on to or
b) Good sound doesn't really matter that much to you, you may like it but you're not that passionate about it. In that case, a nice set of $10 earbuds and a decent-capacity micro-SD card in your iPhone and you're good to go. If this is the case, and this is otherwise a perfectly valid lifestyle choice in my book (and you're in the 99.99 percentile of humanity and I accept defeat when I'm so vastly outnumbered, if not outgunned). However, you shouldn't be lecturing others on lowering their standards just because YOU have hair in between your front teeth...
In which case, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight back to option "a"...
In closing, I'd just like to say that being a Blowhard isn't so bad.
It beats what most other people are doing; which is sucking, hard.
You should try it some time. I think the change might do you a bit of good.
"DAC's operating in the analog domain???"
Yup. Some are, or at least were, just R-2R networks and transmission gates so you could use them for four quadrant multipliers (one axis being digital, the other the "reference voltage" port) with a little biasing.
I would like to offer you more detail but I'm not sure that I still have any information (or if I do, that I can find it!) as it was something I did over a quarter century ago.
Since this wasn't an audio project I have no idea what it might have "sounded" like but it is an example of using an R-2R DAC in the analog domain.
Regards, Rick
> Some are, or at least were, just R-2R networks and transmission gates so
> you could use them for four quadrant multipliers (one axis being digital,
> the other the "reference voltage" port) with a little biasing.
I always thought this was an elegant piece of lateral thinking: rather than
connect the DAC's voltage-reference pin to a steady DC voltage, you feed it
the audio signal The value of the DAC's internal resistor ladder is then
set by applying an 8-bit word to the data port.
I first knowingly saw it used in the Mark Levinson No.38 preamp from the
early 1990s, so I am astonished to learn that the Acoustic Research SRC,
which I used 30 years ago, also featured it. I believe that this kind of
control gives an improvement in S/N ratio as the volume setting decreases.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Yup. My wife bought this for me as a surprise because I once mentioned that I was curious about it. It got some rave comments from the Boston Audio Society, iirc. I got a schematic, did some opamp swapping and upgrading of the passive componets and it was quite respectable as a simple preamp back then.
Yup. AR implemented that in their System Remote Control decades ago. They used the R-2R ladder as a controllable voltage divider.
"Yup. AR implemented that in their System Remote Control decades ago. They used the R-2R ladder as a controllable voltage divider."
Thanks! I thought I had seen it done in audio and that was probably where since I remember knowing of the product.
Rick
I still have one in the original box sitting in a closet. Cute idea.
A very creative rant.
I have been a subscriber to Stereophile almost from the beginning. I did not discover it until 1965 and had to make do with Xeroxed copies until my own issues started showing up (irregularly!) on my doorstep. I have been a subscriber to Absolute sound from Issue One. They’re still fun to read, but I don’t find them very useful anymore as I continue to build/improve my system. The audio blogs and my audio buddies are much better for that.
My whole approach at home is based on the idea of “system.” A conglomeration of Stereophile A+ listed components may not sound as good as “lesser” components carefully put together. Thirty years ago, I took a certain stupid pride in knowing that my system components were all Class B or above. Now I get more enjoyment out of “discovering” components that few have heard of yet. My present system—my best one ever—is a combination of a couple of Class A components, a couple of home-brew’s, and some components offered by manufacturers too small to be noticed by the major audio pubs.
One more thing. The Stereophile rankings really give one pause. The October issue lists over 500 components. One can put together a Class A analogue front end for $21K (least) to $199,450 (most). I’m not sure what to do with that. Absolute Sound lists components by price category. I’m not sure that’s any better. Arthur Salvatore puts together his ultimate system and improves it one component at a time. I like that approach better, but that has its own problems.
Is there a better way to give rational guidance to consumers?
...and a thoughtful reply punctuated by an excellent final question.
Like I said, these magazines don't "review" components in any sense of the word that you or I or any sensible person would call critical analysis. If that were the case, with the "absolute sound" as the criteria, the average "Class B" component would be in the "Big Fat Class F" category.
No sleight on the gear you've owned over the years, as a tough reviewer could have put a "Class A" component in "Class B", and Stephen Mejias would put a no-class component in "Class A", because despite (or more likely, because) he's worked side-by-side John Atkinson for 13-odd years, he's as deaf & dumb as a small rock. Thick as a proverbial brick, audiowise.
Nice kid and all that, doesn't belong doing reviews at an audio magazine,let alone one of Stereophile's (former) calibre. Another humiliation to the name of J. Gordon Holt! Never mind how low John Atkinson has lowered the editorial standards of criticism since he took over along with "Frankenstein" Archibald, which is IMMENSE, Mejias still wrote like he'd been involved in audio for exactly 3 hours and had picked up an equivalent amount of technical knowledge from his "Chief".
Another monstrous editorial distortion of the value of criticism is Mr. Atkinson's willingness to place equivalency to the values of the opinions of each and every critic. All very democratic, but mostly suitably for optimum advertising pandering.
Send the crappiest component to the stupidest & most inane reviewer, everything gets a glowing review...ANYWAYS (Gob Bless Michael Fremer, at least he finally seems sick of sullying his chequered reputation with the never-ending pandering & actually occasionally pisses on a truly unworthy component like a Chord amplifier, and telling you what a component actually sounds like...IS THIS SO FREAKING HARD??? and then satisfies the editorial pressure for pandering by going on about its positive qualities and how YOU might like it anyways, even if he didn't...which STILL means "IT SUCKED!"...so again, GOOD WORK MIKE, too bad you're the ONLY one doing some!).
So, Class A Stephen Mejias $300 Creek integrated amp next to Mike Fremer Class A $160,000 DarTzeel monoblocs. An exaggeration, perhaps, but not by enough of a margin...
And what do you do with an Art Dudley recommendation? I put them in the bin, where they belong. Alternately, since he lives in an alternate audio universe where bad is good as well as old is new and mono is the new "Hi, Deaf!", you'll probably do well to take his advice and turn it right on its head, where it belongs.
If he says it's bad, you KNOW it must be good! And if he says it's good, then you KNOW it's incredibly overpriced, equally unreliable, has 300% distortion even when its not hooked to anything (and 634 times that when it is), and made in singular quantities by a naked guy with a bone through his nose who lives in a dumpster in Manhattan. Or Moscow...
No, that's not right!
If Art Dudley says a product is good, you know it's AWFUL. And if he says it's bad, it probably is that, too; just for entirely different reasons than ANY of the ones he'll notice, since the part of his brain that processes "common sense" and "logical progression" are completely missing, possibly as a result of a birth defect that isn't his fault.
He does seem to come to his mind-boggling audio stupidity completely honestly.
So here's another piece of golden audio advice:
-Just because you read it in a magazine, doesn't mean shit.
Here's another:
-Just because a person is an audio journalist, this doesn't mean shit, either. Or, maybe it does, because that's what they're full of. As for their qualifications, they don't necessarily have any.
Talented Audio Engineer? Well, Dave Wilson wrote awhile for TAS, and he was quite an excellent reviewer. But then he got a real job, and now he makes real money.
That brings us to Advice #3:
-Those who know how to do, leave. And what they leave behind...egads!
Or Golden Advice #4:
-Recommended components are like cable TV channels. The more there are, the lower the quality of each one.
Golden Rational Advice #5:
-They got paid, one way or another, to say that some piece of crap gear was good. Whose paying YOU to take it home? You can't lose if it's a free sample; even notice how Sam Tellig/not Sam Tellig/actually Tom Gillette because he's probably afraid you'll find out where he lives and for good reason, anyways...ever notice how much audio JUNK Tom mentions keeps falling out of his closet? He must have every single product Roy Hall (Music Hall Imports) has EVER imported, and quite a few of every one that anyone else has ever made or imported, and how do you think THAT happened? And you know what else? Do you ever notice how when reviewers are sooooo impressed/gobsmacked by the product under review, and they purchase the review sample, they NEVER admit what price they paid? Now, why would those nice, honest guys with the high-paying dream job at the audio magazine not do that?
Golden Advice #6:
Do you remember the name of that ridiculous game show on TV in the first "Robocop" movie? Do you remember how the host would blurt it out from time to time? Ask yourselves if the reviewer even paid THAT. As for the high-paying job, keep dreamin'. These aren't greedy guys getting fat on perqs. These are guys with day jobs getting 50 cents a word (or less) and if you look closely at the masthead of the magazine, you'll see that it has, like, maybe 3 full-time employees? And one of them is the invisible Greedhead publisher who doesn't do anything that you, the reader, can actually see? If Stephen Mejias is assistant editor of Stereophile for 13 years, and his prime source of music are his headphones while he takes the "A" train to work every day, and he needs to shack up with another broad (or two) and he doesn't especially seem to be the studly type...what do think HE's making as the least-important of the 3 or 5 full-time staffers?
Golden Advice #7:
-If you can't blame a desperate guy for accepting a perq, would you blame him if he was offered a bribe, too? Not that Tom Gillette is a desperate guy. And I'd love if John Atkinson would tell us the REAL story of Mr. Gillette's work for Stereophile. And if you think it was just writing "The Audio Cheapskate" & "Sam's Corner", you're as stupid as John Atkinson hopes you are...
Golden Advice #8:
-If a magazine recommends EVERY SINGLE FREAKING COMPONENT IT EVER reviews, like some kind of Sol Rosenberg going to his optometrist appointment ("should I bring my shoes? ...so that I have them?"), then is it all-encompassing in its criticism when that list swells to 500 components? Or does it just do alot of "Advertainment" in a given year, that it cannily calls "reviews"? Anyways, you needn't worry about the Recommended Component list going much over 500. Unless they hire double the number of free-lance writers by cutting their per-word fee from 50 cents to 25. Could happen, though. These ARE tough times...And something else. The other reason that list won't grow is because when a component gets discontinued, it's suddenly a f***ing piece of crap. Like in Orwell's 1984, what was true yesterday is not necessarily true today. And if we tell you it never existed, well...
So why WOULD they do such a thing??? Well, if not's made, then there's advertising needed to sell it, is there? How can you pander to advertisers when they're not advertising with you anymore for that?
Golden Advice #9:
-Stop being a fool and calling it a "Recommended Components List".
Replace that silly thought with the correct one:
"The Audiophile Home Shopping Channel, Print Edition".
Golden Advice #10:
-If they stop "recommending" it just because it isn't in current production, or worse, simply because it lost its importer (so no advertiser to buy space in Stereophile, BWAAAAAH!), should you NOT buy it anymore, either? I mean, REALLY?????
And if a component is removed from the Recommended list, to be replaced by its Mk.II or another gizmo from another manufacturer that just happens to be new whilst the removed component is just so old...
Does that mean that any component more than 3 years old is plainly a piece of shit? And if not, that new components are ergo gof***o sum, "better" just because "new" is "now"?
It's just a list. And a mostly random one too, btw. So just get over it. Use your own ears. They don't think you will, so they're not afraid to make themselves look like big men by telling you to do so.
That's as honest as they pretty much get, so grab that ball and run with it as fast and as hard as you can.
Golden Advice #11:
-Make your own list. Don't worry, it won't be worse than theirs. It can't be. Let Google be your guide. Just type "Audio Gear" into the search engine and presto! You too have a "Recommended Components List" issue...and best of all, it's free in price, and free of pandering, and will provide you with even more hours of fun & REAL discovery!
Bring back the stereo console!
It probably would sound about as good anything digital on the recommended component list, so why not?
Then again, it's a new millenium, and even when we "go back" it's just not the same.
Still, you COULD throw your MP3 player into an empty cereal box, punch a couple of holes for the earbud wires to get out, and PRESTO!
Bravo!!!
Best post I've read in a long time.
........I was a vegetarian for 15 minutes... until the main course.
Thanks for the kind words.
Enjoyed it but your way too generous with calling Spectral high end.
Matt at pitchperfect took some on trade and then stated he would not sell it as he would be doing a disservice to his customers. (In keeping with the spirit of your post.)
I own some of the gear you eviscerate and still loved the post.
You either had a bad experience, and I've had a few, or you are relying on someone else's opinion, if so, DON'T.
When I hear any potential I try to hear the component(s) at least one more time to give them a fairer chance.
And I'm talking top Spectral, I remember the lesser preamps in the line were...well, "lesser". But the smaller amps sounded great to me, too. Maybe there are certain people who don't like the sound of Spectral, and the gear does have a few quirks despite its' veneer of high-tech snootiness (which I suspect is reason alone for many of the poorer folk to want to piss on it).
I recently heard the DMC-30SS with a DMA-360, and I thought it sounded excellent. Not that Ayre or SimAudio wouldn't match or even slightly edge it out, but EXCELLENT...for a transistor unit.
HUGE qualifier, but then there are losers who don't like tube gear, and that's their problem!
Keith Johnson would be one of them, I suppose...
Anyways, the main problem I had with what I heard is that despite the fact that the 30 & the 360 are touted as latest & greatest (especially by the Prince of Perpetually Suspended Beliefs, Robert Harley), they sound EXACTLY the same as the old DMC-10 & DMA-200 demos I got oh, 25 years ago?
And that's just how good Spectral is, AFAIC. Even 25 years later, and no improvement, and it still more than holds its own. Just that, 25 years ago, it was like from another planet...now it's merely as good as the best of transistors I've heard.
Oh, and I've not heard Soulution, or Halcro, or Technical Brain, or BSlabo. Just SimAudio, Linar, Levinson (worse than ever, and I never liked it), Bryston (HP is stone deaf on this one), Pass (gives the Spectral a run for the money, but I can't honestly call it "better". Similar quality, different sound).and Lux (sounds like my old L-58a, only alot more expensive now. But what isn't? Curiously the most Spectral-like sound of any other gear out there).
The other thing Matt at Pitch Perfect has to pander to is Spectral's insistence that you use only Bruce Brisson's fraudulent MIT cables. I wonder if they are backward-compatible. If I got the cables with the FART control, can I use those on my old DMA-200?
Anyways, Spectral claims that MIT cable is the only cable that is "safe" to use with their stuff; i.e., it's so badly designed on the verge of instability that Kimber or Cardas cable is gonna make it blow up. Solid-State IS far more fussy than tubes for cable compatibility. Even narrow-bandwidth stuff like QUAD's 405 will have a screaming shit-fit if you connect unshielded interconnect to it like Kimber (needs a minimal,critical amount of capacitance). Michael Fremer damaged some DirtZeel junk he was reviewing some time back because he used a non-recommended interconnect and the amplifier went into ultrasonic oscillation. Not exactly great for tweeters or electrostats, btw!
Solid-State designs are bizarre and quite non-linear until substantive amounts of negative feedback are applied. Sure, they'll tell you their amp doesn't have any, and they're full of ship. The heavy feedback is all local these days, not global. Again, not taking the feedback over more than one stage helps twitchy exploding silicon switches better behave themselves, because they fundamentally don't want to!
If you know the sound of MIT cables, and you don't like it (too soft, bloated, fuzzy, rolled off, etc.) then you won't like the sound of Spectral. And without their cable, if the amp blows up, you're warranty is supposedly void. Would you be stupid enough to admit it?
What an "out"! Yes, we make hyper-expensive junk that only works with one cable, and if we think you weren't using it (you probably have to show receipts for, and/or send along your cable as proof when it goes for warranty work?) we'll fuck you over by not honouring our warranty.
Swell! Like their heads!!!!
Well your right Joe, I am relying on someone else's opinion and that is my bad. I did use my past experience in that I believe pretty much all solid state is, well, err, solid state. awww, ok. I heard top line Pass stuff and others and I know I was supposed to like it but it did not do much for me.
I will differ in that the only solid state stuff I heard that I thought was fantastic was that big ass Mark Levinson ML-2 driving big Beveridge speakers. Loved those amps although I could not afford them. I will also defend Dudley as after hearing Shindo gear count me as a fanboy. As for the Altec Valenica's I have never heard them but I prefer a classic JBL over about anything I have come across playing in audio salons (remember those) in the past few decades.
In any event rock on my man.
Oops! I screwed that up. The "Least" Class A front end (turntable, tonearm, cartridge)should have read $7,950; the "most" should have read $212,500.
You could look it up.
Say what you will, but that post nearly made me sneeze my coffee out my nose. And given it is a Starbucks coffee it kind of seems somewhat fitting to your post.
Thanks Joe! Great post as usual. Speaking of ARC not only do the tubes the use suck but they want you to pay NOS Genalex prices for the ones they sell.
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