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In Reply to: RE: A reminder for Senile Editors what components they wrote about in the last year... posted by joerosen1 on September 29, 2014 at 21:41:25
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?
Follow Ups:
...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.
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