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Agreed

Cables aside, the gear I use is built by larger scale (in the relative sense) manufacturers who have been around for at least twenty five years. I have visited the Audio Research facility north of Minneapolis. Here's an online link to the factory tour. This is not a garage operation, yet hand assembly of all components is not cheap.

Likewise, VTL, and its offshoot, Manley Labs, have been around for a long time as well. I have met Luke Manley before and have spoken with Bea Lamm. They are passionate music lovers who have translated that love to the business of audio. In Luke's case, he grew up in the audio environment with his father's engineering background and work with the professional industry (where he remains today). Despite your mantra of audiophiles blindly buying based upon advertising (VTL and Audio Research do precious little), it was only after auditioning their products that I later came to purchase those products.

Recently, I had the good fortune of meeting Dr. West of Sound Labs in April for a meeting of the Chicago Audio Society. I was invited to join dinner with him and his wife the night before and assisted setting up the system the next day. He is a soft spoken engineer with a passion for music and his products dating back nearly thirty years.

Sidenote: he's not a midget - the Majestics are nine feet tall.

They do zero advertising, BTW. One of the challenges Dr. West mentioned is that because of his relative small demand, getting custom made adhesives and high voltage coatings from the vendors is a challenge. Unlike conventional speakers that use readily available drivers, he has to perform his own materials research and production. Creating the Pro-Stat family of products intended for the pro market has helped focus on durability and reliability across the line. No problems here with incompatible cabinets (or in the case of my U-1s, 100 pound steel frames). You'll no doubt enjoy the fact that they use a Crown Macro Reference to burn in all their speakers initially for an hour at 800 watts. He finds the amp utterly reliable and well suited for such duty. They use the John Curl designed Parasound JC-1 amps for sonic evaluations.


You tend to focus far too often on the minority of companies who do not do the industry justice.

rw

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