Blue sky most of the way here yesterday. Nice.
Just a test photo…. of the Audio Note room during setup. Not sure it will look anything like this by the time the show opens… but I need to put the laptop thru its paces to make sure it all works for the show report.
Mostly having issues with the Flamingo internet connections going up and down and up and down all of the time.
We’re about ready to head on out…
Here we see what was the current state of things, with the Audio Note CDT-Five transport and Fifth Element DAC and its Fifth Force power supply going through… the Lamm preamp and amps in this case.
Have a lot to say about this digital front end, and how it compares with the just-a-few-steps-down AN DAC 4 Balanced and CDT-Three transport.
But now, we need to be getting out of here and down to cold, snowy Las Vegas and T.H.E. Show and CES.
The plan is to post photos and news here fairly steadily during the show. Hopefully something interesting will be there … beyond what we are taking, of course 🙂
‘Till Vegas then…
I was reading the RMAF Show report in TAS… We already did our report, and our report on the Jonathan Valin report – (JV’s report from their website is printed in the TAS as part of their report in the mag). But glancing through the other reports…
These show reports, just like the ‘Best of the Year’ reports, esp. in TAS, and Hi-Fi+, etc. and ALL of the online rags… well, you would do better picking good gear with a monkey and some darts and a lot of beer.
But I want to talk about Wilson, how dealers are selling Wilson, how reporters are reporting on it, and how it reflects what is wrong with… well, it just reflects the lack of support for decent ethics and due diligence in our culture at large, so not much to say there.
The Alexandria X-2 (thanks Jim :-))
To put it simply, dealers are pushing inferior equipment to drive Wilson speakers, and the ‘press’ is, through incompetence or worse, saying that this is just great.
We can talk about WHY, and WHO, and WHAT… but the answer to these is easy [follow the money] but fraught with finger pointing and blame and there is enough of that on the faux news channels.
What we can talk about though, is the IMPACT this has on [the reduced ranks of] audiophiles and the [proliferation of gear in our] industry. I mean, how mucked up is our hobby that the #1 selling loudspeakers have an …undeserved!… reputation for being bright, edgy and hard to make sound good? [where the real truth is that the equipment they are being sold with is bright, edgy and hard (impossible) to make sound good. And to make it Suck Less they are sold with cabling that is choking the sound as much as possible because the less there is of the (bad sounding) sound, the better]
Or we can talk about how to fix this [there are many people, however, who do not want it fixed – again, who makes money off the status-quo?]. The fact is that most dealers and reviewers do not give a hoot. Reminds me of the U.S. auto industry before Japan killed us. Some decent equipment manufacturers do an end run around the whole kit-and-kaboodle – choosing unique, and perhaps crazy [that would be us :-)] dealers who care about the sound. Others try to play the ‘game’ and hope that their higher quality will get ‘noticed’ by dealers and/or audiophiles… someday… hopefully real soon.
But the truth seems to be that it would be very difficult to fix. Someone would need to start their own magazine, with honest (but not ruthless) reviewers. They would have to have a dealership in most major metropolitan areas that focused on what things sound like, and trust that money would eventually follow quality. They would have to eschew manufacturers that, for whatever reasons, just gave up the pursuit of quality a long time ago.
And they would have to point out every once in awhile that the industry status-quo is very sick and this sickness is killing off audiophiles and potential audiophiles faster than they are made [which is pretty darn fast].
Hmmm… [our entire industry] kind of reminds me of the newspaper industry [which doesn’t have to die either, but it does have to change]
