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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

Don't insult my intelligence Mr. Curl, I've been around the block far too many times.

"Soundmind, you are very prejudiced against people who make custom audio electronics for a living"

NO! I am prejudiced against people who set their own arbitrary subjective standards which cannot be verified independently and who are pretentious about them to the point of declaring them to be beyond what others who have set objective standards which can be verified can achieve. Golden eared wizards, the ultimate determiners of what is good and bad who as it turns out have questionable hearing accuity for a variety of reasons not the least of which is a long history of self abuse. As for the so called objectivist manufacturers, their claims are documented and their products are held in the highest esteem by professionals where cost is a secondary factor to performance and reliability, not hobbyists who can and are sold the moon on the strength of their ignorance every day. Having built many A/V projects as a project manager working with A/V consultants and contractors and having worked for one myself for a short boring stint, I know when Bryston has to compete against Crown to bid a job, all the bullcrap they shovel at consumers goes out the window, prices become very competitive, and there's no room for games. You don't sell a three year no fault warranty to pros on inferior parts, weak design, or poor manufacturing standards.

"It is just like buying quality aged wood from a certain tree to make a guitar or violin"

It's one thing to buy selected wood and age it for 20 years to make a violin. It's another to say you can only make an accurate speaker by building an enclosure using Russian birchwood or using 100 pounds of silver in the crossover network capacitors and that's why they have to cost $125,000 a pair. Not everyone out their is both stupid and inexperienced.

If you were a true engineer/scientist in function as well as in training, you would find out WHY one of your designs sounds better to you than another and use that knowledge to produce consistantly better product, you wouldn't be flailing around with wild theories such as which components of harmonic distortion are irritating and which aren't when the whole of it taken together is less that 0.1% of the signal.

"It is difficult to make anything perfectly and consistently."

Tell it the ISO standards organization, that's what they are all about, production units remaining within specified deviation of the prototype and the manufacturer's documentation subject to audit to prove it. ANSI is similar, so are military specifications and contracts. That's how big money electronics is made and sold today.

"Also, the quality of the solder will be different, because I just can't tell some manufacturer in Taiwan to use SN62 solder, in their production line."

If you can't write contracts to produce to your own exacting specifications and enforce them because you don't have the resources of strong purchasing and legal departments that hardly comes as a surprise. That's typical of garage operations.

"Well, soldering every board yourself, gets really old, and so you usually hire a solderer or two to help you"

"One was Swiss trained, another worked at cable making at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, a third was NASA trained, etc, etc. They also get tired of soldering and sometimes make mistakes. Then, I have to find their mistakes, (never the same one) to get the unit to work. You can imagine how much fun that is."


More garage type operations. Professional solderers and wirers are carefully trained and tested to verify their skills. Their work is 100% inspected. This is the function of a manufacturing engineering department. This is what I am talking about when I refer to small time operators. I've seen countless examples of their crap...and I don't authorize installation or payment for it until they repair it and get it right. This is testimony that I will never buy one of your products no matter what is claimed for it. By your own admission, I would not be satisfied with it.

"Automated production with pick and place machines also involves wave soldering, that looks good to the eye. However, polystyrene caps are mostly out, because the final cleaning will probably destroy them, if not the soldering process itself"

Do you think IBM and other large elecronics manufacturers have the same problems? How do you suppose they handle them?

The resources of large companies which buy, make, or sell billions of dollars of electronic hardware every year gives them the resources to make whatever they need to make to whatever standards they choose to make them. Compared to that kind of power, the little guy has two and a half strikes against him before he even starts. If these big guys aren't competing against you, it's only because they don't see enough profit in it. Count yourself lucky, they'd eat your lunch if they did.


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