Critic's Corner

Posted by John Marks (P) on March 24, 2008 at 10:47:34

In Reply to: RE: The swipe at TAS... posted by mkuller on March 24, 2008 at 09:54:09

Hey, I have no problem with you. Always liked your stuff. I hardly ever had any personal interaction with you the way I did with Neil Gader, so there was no intended slight in your direction when I said Neil is the only one I miss. I qualified that by, who is still writing there. Had I been speaking of the time I quit, I would have included Scott Markwell.

I never aspired to be HP's successor or favorite. I am a true team player, a classic example of a diligent perfectionist introvert. I want to be left alone to do the best job I can; all I ask for is professionalism, and that includes a level playing field. Yeah, I know, dream on. I've worked in some law firms that were as dysfunctional as TAS.

As I believe Scot Markwell will confirm, if he remembers that far back, I requested the brief loan of some tube amplification to try to get better sound out of JM Lab speakers I had in to write about. REG stepped in with both feet, and announced that if the speakers did not sound good with "known good electronics" (a phrase I am told he has often employed) such as the Plinius gear I had on hand, JM should have the moral courage to call bad speakers bad speakers.

When I asked HP to referee the dispute, he backed up REG and made fun of me.

This, despite HP's later claim that the official TAS policy was that speakers under review had to be evaluated with three disparate amps... . As REG had already been deputized to write the second opinion, I saw the scribbling on the sheetrock. For whatever reason, REG had evidenced a prejudice and a refusal to depart from his own associated equipment in an effort at least to meet the device under review half-way. Kind of like using a Plinius SA-250 to drive Avant Garde horns, in my book.

It certainly appeared to me that because JM Lab was Jonathan Scull's refrence speaker at the time, it at least bore thinking about that REG was positioning himself to ding the JM Lab speakers I had, and in that way one-up JS. Not that I had any particular feeling about that, but, I could not participate in a process that was showing every sign of heading toward a manifestly unfair result, especially when "management" belittled my concerns. I asked JM Lab's importer to pick up the speakers and I resigned.

This was not the first episode at all that called into question the findamental fairness of the review process. As Brian Tucker should be able to confirm, after I filed my review (IIRC, not column coverage, a stand-alone review) of Wilson Benesch's ACT One, Brian agreed that the speakers could go to Sea Cliff for a brief audition by HP. There was an express requirement that the audition be brief and that the speakers go nowhere else, as they were spoken for by a tri-state area dealer.

When Brian Tucker was faxed the preprint of the review, he went crazy, because the reviewer whose second opinion damned the speakers and damned my review and purported to show by actual measurements that John Marks could not hear a 6 dB rise in the treble, was by a TAS writer who lived in California. Forget about everything else, was Brian's attitude. Who sent my NY-area dealer's speakers to California, in violation of our agreement????? Those speakers need to be picked up at Sea Cliff, like yesterday!

Oh, don't worry. The speakers never left HP's garage. They had sat for weeks, unopened. The California fair haired boy who had filed the slash and burn second opinion hadn't, um, er, actually LISTENED to the same pair that John Marks had liked so much. But, seeing as he was a true fair-haired boy, and HP didn't want to do the work, HP let the other writer RECYCLE a years-old review that had run in "Fi." Problem is (aside from basic issues of professionalism and ethics) that since the time that review had run in "Fi," Wilson Benesch had made changes to the ACT One in the:

Woofer-mid drivers;

Tweeter; and

Crossover.

The cabinet was the same, though. The speakers that "Fi" had written up were four generations back. Kind of like recycling an old review of Wilson Watt/Puppy 3s to comment on a new reivew of WP7s, don't you agree?

Brian told me what was going on, and what he suspected, and I went ballistic--yeah, Mike, I guess I just didn't "fit in." I can't at the moment think of higher praise. Thanks.

I threatened HP that I would go public, and he agreed to get the speakers I heard out of the boxes and listen to them. Oh, yeah, poor Scot Markwell was the buffer for my phone calls, and he should remember.

The upshot was, as far as I could tell, no action was taken against Mr. West Coast Recycler; but, the fraudulent second opinion was scrapped, and HP listened to the Wilson Benesch ACT Ones, and wrote a generally positive second opinion, including that had he not heard them he could not have put his finger on what the $86,000/pr Burmesters did not do as well, and that they were (IIRC) the only cone speakers he could think of that approached Magneplanar levels of coherence. But, in true passive-aggressive style, he just had to comment that John Marks' carping about how he had to listen to them was, sigh, just part of the job. Look it up for yourself; somewhere around Issu #116, IIRC.

So, that was Strike One, and the JM Labs episode was Strike Two, and I decided not to wait around for Strike Three. I had tried to view the score-settling aspect of the Wilson Benesch episode as an aberration, but one more data point nudged it more in the direction of SOP, and I said who needs this?

Those were the major episodes that directly went to the integrity of the review process. There were enough minor episodes where people in power at various levels seemed to put aside the responsibility to advise people how best to spend their hard-earned money and instead pursued different agendas to make it a near-constant struggle to stay focused.

My abiding feeling is rueful disappointment; I feel the re-start of TAS was a phenomenal opportunity for the good of the industry and I feel that for the most part that potential was not realized--what is the topic of this thread, hunh????

Is there is nobody at TAS or AMM who has a red pencil? Is there nobody with the balls to say to him or herself, "Regardless whether JV is right on the sound of Ayre, in view of the history, and the need to avoid the perception of score-settling, for the good of the magazine and the industry, I am going to delete this phrase"?

Apparently not.

Cordially,

JM