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]

We get a lot of questions about this or that speaker when people are thinking about spending the big bucks on an ‘ultimate’ speaker.

First, if the manufacturer makes cables, or equipment racks, or a couple of amps, or whatever AND then decides more or less out of the blue to come out with a $100K+ speaker, why oh why should a person take this seriously? Designing and building good speakers is HARD. Just because they make it big and put a large price tag on it, is hardly a reason to take it seriously.

OK. That eliminates about 30% of all speakers. [Yes. There are maybe one or two exceptions. But as a general rule, this is a good one].

Second, if the speakers they make at $10K suck, and those at $50K suck, then why of why do people think the $150K speakers they make just ‘have got to be great’? It is more likely that it will suck, just with a bigger suck. The larger the speaker is, the harder it is to design. 2-ways are the easiest… if they can’t get this right, then there is no hope.

OK. This eliminates about, say, 30% [or more :-)] of the megabuck speakers out there.

Then there is the purpose of the speaker. Lump this together with drivability and placeability and even appearance. When deciding whether a megabuck speaker is ‘good’ one has to think about how they want to use that speaker. On a small SET amp? In a very large room or very small one? Is it going to be in front of something you want to see out of once in awhile? Are you going to want it placed close to a wall? Do you want it to sound musical [and various other attributes which we focus on here quite a bit], or be a loud Boy Toy, or just play decent music once in awhile or, perhaps, just be an awesome example of modern technology and it doesn’t matter much how it sounds?

This should eliminate, say, 30% more and leave you with about 10% or less of the megabuck speakers left to consider – probably about 2 to 4.

Now the fun starts

As a side note: It is not just [the better] drugs that do this to us [minus not so nice side-effects], of course, but things like seeing a new born baby [unless you are a pediatrician or something], love making, probably sky diving for the first time :-), and a whole host of things that occur in life [on TV anyway ;-)]. All these are wonderful life experiences that are so powerful that they leave us little room to say anything but ‘wow’. Instead of calling the stereo systems that do this to us ‘drug-like’ sounding systems we could call them ‘sex-like’, or ‘near-death-experience like’, or ‘life-affirming-like’ …