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RE: LOL

Posted by Satie on March 5, 2011 at 16:21:38:
Being a scraggly bearded pot bellied audiophile, wearing dis-fashionable clothes and bearing an aura of weirdness, while I am not yet 50 - I don't hang around audio shops - not since I turned 40. I got into the hobby when I was 16 and got into my own entry level "high end" system at 25. I was in the habit of visiting the hi fi stores a couple of times a year each till I was in my mid 30s and moved away from where the stores were. By then the selection of stores and breadth of brands carried was narrowing so that there was little reason to visit at all - you don't get to hear anything new outside of HT, which is uninteresting to me.

I have followed online discourse and reviews since they started and I read the English press for a long while and the Stereo Review, Audio and Stereophile, I was always thinking of getting a TAS subscription, but had too much reading to allow for another subscription. After Stereo Review turned useless and Audio mag closed down, I was looking at Soundstage, Positive Feedback, and later 6moons and got subscribed to AVGuide rather than add another physical mag to my pile. I am considering a sub to UHF mag from up North.

I have read many of HPs reviews and find him to be a trustworthy reviewer with somewhat similar tastes and preferences to mine. I don't need to read between the lines of his reviews to obtain an honest description of the sound characteristics of the equipment. Often a review ends up being a repeat statement of the reviewer's personal biases as they pertain to the equipment in question and his emotional responses to the music, all of which requires much reading between the lines to extract the sonic qualities of the equipment.

The main problem I have had with TAS is the lack of measurements and exposition of specs that may not be true unless confirmed with measurements - though in recent years products have come closer to their published specs than in the past. Some of the sonic characteristics can be explained by particular measured aspects and knowing these can help substantially in matching the ancillaries.

I buy used rather high end equipment including cables, but am more of a cheapskate and tweaker and send my stuff for modification, or buy modified equipment, or modify and build myself. There is very little improvement in new equipment to justify the extraordinary extra expenditure. Rejuvenating your current equipment with up to date caps and cleaner copper wire without PVC dielectric is plenty of an improvement and routinely brings old equipment to near the best of today's. The only exception is in the new switching amps and SS memory digital sources and marginally the new DAC chips and the availability of high rez digital.