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A reminder for Senile Editors what components they wrote about in the last year...

Posted by joerosen1 (A) on September 29, 2014 at 21:41:25

In Reply to: 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!

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