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More lies about "apples vs. apples" product comparisons

How disingenuous of you, Mr. Atkinson.

Perhaps you think you are in good company, since TAS also DOES NOT compare like with like, and is equally out-of-touch with 99% of audiophiles (in other words, THE REAL WORLD).
I have NEVER seen an American High-End magazine round up a bunch of similarly priced and/or competing products (I'm pretty easy going: How about four 50W stereo valve amps, say Rogue vs. Prima Luna vs. ARC vs. conrad-johnson or BAT? going head to head, with measurements AND subjective reviews? Or do this with preamps, valve vs. valve, or simply at a given price point but with a similar feature set) and do a good bash-up.
Funny, but I've got a few issues of a British magazine that should be well known to you, it was called Hi-Fi Choice!
Remember them?
Or is your memory, as I suspect, rather highly selective?
Entire issues dedicated, for example, to nothing but phono cartridges.
All measured, all auditioned. I have that issue.
And another that was devoted to receivers, and integrated amplifier/tuner pairs. Funny, I have one of those, too!
Never mind dozens of components: Dozens of brands! AND several components from EACH of those brands!
Grief!
It's there for you to see, plain as the day is long, but you'd like to pretend that audiophiles in 2012 have neither ever seen such a thing, or are too stupid to imagine it???
If one thing REALLY grates on me about the High-End press & its self-serving and self-editorializing conduct is that, like the politicians who run our countries, you lot are stupid enough to think that we, YOUR public, are stupider than you!
Tell yourself all the self-serving lies you like, and believe them if you feel you must.
But that conduct is YOUR problem, Mr. Atkinson, not mine, and not that of my fellow thoughtful audiophiles.
In your myopic & silly little audio universe, products that go out of production or get updated...off your recommended lists, POOF! they never existed! Bankrupt companies and discontinued products don't generate advertisements, do they?
DO THEY????
C'mon Mr. Atkinson, click the heels of your ruby-red slippers together, faster now, faster!
Products that lose their American distribution: POOF! They never existed!
It's all well & good to suggest an audio fantasy world where each new product from a given manufacturer is better than the last.
Sorry, doesn't work like that!
Nor the fact that Mk.II is 0.5% better than Mk.I, but Mk.I is discontinued, so POOF! we'd NEVER suggest you'd want to keep your eyes out for a second-hand one, now, would you?
The ONLY reviewer on your staff that even attempts to compare a few like with like products is Bob Reina, and I've never seen him do it with more than 2 or perhaps 3 products. And these are QUALIFIED comparisons, because either he's relying on sonic memory because the product was recently returned to the manufacturer from a previous review he'd done, or its just some sort of "happy" accident where you made the mistake of giving him yet-another $1500-ish loudspeaker that was also a small 2-way reviewed in the last issue, and he hadn't quite gotten 'round to sending it back yet, so he could say a few words about that.
Sorry, if you think that that qualifies as valid market comparison, that that is all the readers expect of you, then you are really quite pathetic!
I think you can, if you wanted to, bend your format and orient group tests done over a longer period of time, say an entire year, and put out the odd annual issue with group tests.
As it is, you are so bloody lazy that EVERY single "analog" review save the odd "non" review by Art Dudley is done by Michael Fremer.
Why is it that the readership has to endure YEARS of a monopoly on cartridge, tonearm & turntable reviews by ONE single reviewer?
Since Mr. Dudley has no idea what he's talking about, and his idea of good sound gravitates towards old mono junk & refurbished pottery wheels, his analog reviews, I'm sorry to inform you, don't count.
Quaint as they may be.
And that very clever friend of yours, Mr. Paul Miller, seems to have no trouble measuring turntable performance, with excellent measurements of rumble spectra, wow & flutter, and isolation. I'd like to see the kind of measurements that Hi-Fi Choice made in the "old" days: Cartridge square wave response to derive optimal values of capacitive & resistive cartridge loading (since after reading Mr. Fremer's horrid Soundsmith SMMC1/2 review some years ago, he CLEARLY could use his share of guidance in this area! And so could we readers!).
Trackability? Optimum downforce? Tonearm bearing friction?
In the 70's & 80's, many expensive tonearms had badly finished bearing races, and were, as delivered to the customer, defective by any measure.
I've seen my fill of defective Zeta, Syrinx, Linn (Basik & Plus, but even many an Ittok were disappointing) tonearms.
Paul Miller and Hi-Fi News even seem to find decent condition examples of vintage "classic" components, and review and measure them.
He's done it, we've been begging you to do the same for years, so what's your problem? He comes out monthly, has even less content than Stereophile, yet STILL manages to review products discontinued by long-dead companies...from the 70's? But your magazine can't????
We know what your excuses are, and claiming that Art Dudley's refurbished TD-124 & Garrard 401 "dumpster dives" represent the kind of classics the readers want to know about...well, that's hardly a representative selection, is it?
A couple of shitty old pottery wheels, modified with overpriced non-standard fittings, and of course no measurements in sight on this score, just the words of some befuddled Craphound with no concept of high-fidelity sound. A tinkering weirdo who plays with old junk, and understandably refuses to use "audiophile" terminology when doing his reviews. I can't understand jack-s*** what he's talking about sonically 90% of the time, and I'm certain he doesn't, either.
Just sounds good coming out of his pen.
And you're the editor, you vet his drivel.
Your claims about comparing like components with like ring EQUALLY HOLLOW.
Does publishing Mr. Dudley's nonsense make everyone else on staff feel fine and normal? I say this because I truly wonder if he's a whipping boy for you to say to the readership: "Look, we're not terribly honest or efficient, yet you can see how lucky you are...imagine if we were all like this guy over here..."
It's obvious to most readers that your strategy to ensure a constant stream of good reviews is to weed out those might be overly critical, and to apportion the reviews according to the most "appropriate" reviewer for the job.
If the thing kinda sucks, we send it to the deaf guy. Kal Rubinson's not too critical, is he? Nor was Larry Greenhill, as I recall. They're more impressed with tech than with sound. So poor Mr. Greenhill, he did all those boring tuner reviews, when you bothered to do such things. And Mr. Rubinson, he does all the multichannel homish-theater stuff. Couldn't see Mr. Fremer or Rob Reina making much of a fist with that!
OOOOH!Look! We've got this weird tube thingee here, yo! Mr. Dudley! Got a live for you! Says "Prima Luna" on the tin...!
So here's another closely related bone of contention:
If Sam Tellig says that he thinks this conrad-johnson valve amp is "Class A" in the recommended components listing, in it goes.
If Steven Meijas thought a $500 Cambridge integrated was as good as anything HE'S heard, wouldn't you put in "Class A" recommended as well?
Since when is one of your staff reviewers equally "gifted" in hearing acuity to the degree that their opinions of the absolute merit of a component shares absolutely EQUAL ranking?
Or was I not supposed to notice this bit of editorial laziness?
And don't get me wrong, I don't flatter myself that much. I'm sure I'm hardly the only one to discount the hyperbole that constitutes your list of "Recommended Components".
And sadly, that would be but one reason.
I'm really not sure how messy this business of audio reviewing is.
For the life of me, I think that TWO reviewers should audition EACH component under review. And if that means getting the manufacturer to send two of them, all the better!
TAS used to do this, on occasion. It gave opportunities for reviewer honesty. You could have a "Good Cop" and a "Bad Cop".
I mean, gob forbid that TWO honest reviewers couldn't find their way to raving about some poor value/poor performance component (and over the years I'd hear them all time, and many of them were from both your and TAS lists of "Recommended" and highly-ranked components).
And since your reviewers seem quite unable to describe the sound of components in any meaningful way (funny, I don't seem to have this problem, and neither do my friends. Interesting that, isn't it?), maybe one of them can describe the Elephant's right hind leg, and the other could perhaps describe the tail a bit, you know, we'd still have little idea what the damned thing was really about, but we'd know THAT MUCH MORE than with just one idiot mucking about on his word processor & dancing about the truth, wouldn't we?
Why so few reviews in any given issue? Lack of space? Well, two samples, two reviewers, ONE review, and a postscript or REAL "Further Thoughts" from the other guy! What would that postscript take, TAS did it in about two paragraphs, typical. Back in the '70's. Before they took advertising.
Before magazines like yours compromised journalistic integrity for circulation-based advertising revenue. Hence, the $10 magazine that now costs, what, $1.09 by subscription?
Well, that was 2 or 3 years ago, which I don't think was a terribly long time ago.
Stop trying to insult readers intelligence by saying that the Reader's interests' are supreme! Any fool can clearly see what the business model for your magazine has become. Even if the magazine was made in mainland China, and it isn't, you STILL couldn't make money on even 50,000 subscriptions at $1.09 per month!
The readership can very, very, clearly see what the business pressures are for Stereophile. And your publisher has made his decision.
Advertising allows the magazine to be profitable at pretty much NO COST, a balance is stuck between content & advertising, between size & weight for mailing cost purposes & content vs. overhead costs (such as per diem's for articles submitted, or outright staff salaries, never mind the elephant in the room, sheer production cost).
To me, it seems that is why we, the readership, see so much more of this monstrously overpriced hi-fi hubris from companies such as Engstrom & Engstrom, Koetsu (Axiss Distributing), Vitus/German Physiks, Plurison (Focal/JM Labs), and all those ripoff artists with their spiffy woven & braided nonsense cables (and even more nonsensical theories, like cutting snail shells in half has anything to do with anything other than the purchaser's gullibility...and wait! There's MORE! The price!!!).
Any given issue, all 150 pages or so, and fully one-half is advertisement!
One half!
Again: 75 freakin' pages of adverts!!!!
Oooh! You review products from companies that DON'T advertise in your magazine? OK, I'll "accuse" you of rolling out the welcome mat for their advertisement money.
And if you don't get it, will you keep on reviewing their products, even they're the "hot tickee", when your regular advertisers are clamouring for coverage?
Why don't you give it to them then?
What are they going to do, send all their advertising to TAS out of spite? With a circulation of what? Maybe 20,000 on a good day???
They need you more than us subscribers do! If you did have the SHEER BLOODY-MINDED TEMERITY to publish a MOSTLY or SLIGHTLY negative review, how long would an advertise hold it against you, anyways?
Like that T-Shirt that Nelson Pass wears: "Don't like that idea? I've got ANOTHER one!"
They'll be back!
Your readers...now, you aren't any good at getting new ones, let along young ones, and the rest of are dropping like flies, if we worked for Hitler we wouldn't even be fit enough to join the "Stomach Brigades"!
Smarten up!
A few, nice juicy "All Amplifier" issues, or "All preamplifier" issues, say every 3rd or 6th month?
Granted, that would mean stuffing the record reviews and a bunch of regular columns in the affected issue.
But I'm quite certain you won't get any major complaint, and the kudos would far outweigh them, as long as these issues were done as "specials".
Besides, we might miss Sam Tellig, but we wouldn't miss Art Dudley, or "The Final Word", or "As we (don't) see it (ever, it seems)", or even "Mikey". Besides, he'd be too busy scribbling notes on the listening panel for the group test, right there besides Arty & "Wezz" and...YOU!

So Mr. Atkinson, PLEASE stop insulting the intelligence of your readership! So, the conspiracies aren't quite how they seem to most of us. But you know what?
CLOSE ENOUGH!
However its' playing out in "absolute" terms, even if I or anyone else "nailed it" and told you that we see things EXACTLY as they are at your end, you'd dance & deny and just squeeze your eyelids a little harder & imagine you were wearing little ruby slippers as you clicked your heels furiously together and said a little prayer.
No Toto, we're NOT in Santa Fe anymore, are we?
A simple set of requests, Mr. Atkinson.
Or is your answer simply, "$1.09 an issue! Shut up and stop whining!"


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