Still need to update the Tour photos…

But it was time to update the Equipment List.

Much of the text that we had there (and some of it still is there) was written in the first year of our store, some 4 years ago.

I had included stuff like This Magazines Award and That Magazines Award.

I thought I was sceptical at that time of the Reviewer community… hah! Now it is all but ludicrous.

I can just see the budding reviewer as a child on career day…

Politician? Reviewer? Politician? Reviewer?

Hey, at least it keeps them away from the nukes.

We try hard to ignore that part of the industry… really we do.

The equipment page was fun to redo – we have some cool stuff here – and some cool pics:

Audio Aero Capitole amplifier. The colors! More larger pics

The text describng our equipment here has a ways to go – to sort of migrate from the advertising copy approach which we kind of cut and pasted from various manufacturer’s copy to the “What Neli and Mike Think” approach.

For example:

Our Kharma Mini Exquisite loudspeaker. More larger pics.

What we say now is:

“The best 2-way speaker technically and perhaps the most magical 2-way as well.

Ours here, pictured at left, are in aubergine – which is kind of like an eggplant purple. Subtly hallucinogenic – just like the way they sound.

That 1.0 inch diamond tweeter provides an amazing amount of resolution, seemingly much more than the 3/4 inch, and it just seems to be able to project the music from the speaker into the listener’s head.”

This is all to say that the speaker functions excellently in a technical sense from the perspective of a listener compared to all other 2-way loudspeakers (for the sake of argument please ignore the ‘stone knives and bearskins’ that J.A. et. al. use to measure sound quality).

It also is trying to say that there is something going on that is hard to describe, but revelatory and pleasurable – that the mind, while focused on and enjoying the very high resolution of the one inch diamond tweeter, is penetrated on other levels which at this time there are no words for.

So we call it magic. Or hallucinogenic. Or “don’t know what it is but I like it”.

It would be easy to kind of cop out and borrow lots of terminology from some religion or another, or Terrence McKenna, or New Age Hermetics, or…. .or Cheech and Chong.

But, although once in awhile borrowing phases from Star Trek TOS (which is simultaneously both tongue in cheek and strangely technically relevent), we try to avoid letting the ‘magic’ of muscial experience be drowned by the hyperbole, nomenclature, stifling hierarchical bureaucracy or consensual irrelevancies of these other pursuits.

We have our own hyperbole and consensual irrelevancies, thank you.

Oops, got side-tracked.

So, trying to explain each component we have here in a few words to someone checking out the list to see if we have something worthwhile listening to… What to say. What to say.

If they are just looking around at various dealers to hear what has received rave reviews – well, that is not going to narrow the list at all. Everything sounds great, haven’t you heard?

So, hopefully just putting down what we think is going on, in halting English, putting it out there – exposing our stumbling around in the dark, for everyone to see, as we try to figure out just WHAT this speaker, and a few other components here and there, do that is so darn AMAZING – that this will tempt people into comimg here to hear and experience the whatever-the-heck-it-is for themselves.

[Oh, and now I see in the TAS we just got that Wayne Garcia just raved the Mini Exquisites. Don’t know whether to giggle or scream. So I guess I’ll just go to bed. G’night everybody.]

[P.S. Hope everyone had a peaceful night. The problem with a rave reviews from most reviewers is that it puts a potentially really great speaker or component on the same level as all the mediocre speakers and components that the reviewer also gave rave reviews to.

Yes, many dealers just point to the recommended lists in Stereophile and TAS and grunt a little – and so random raves do spread the sales around to a wide variety of products – but it does a disservice to the consumer interested in the sound of their equipment. Why must this industry treat audiophiles like ‘marks’ at a carnival – like they were just wallets and purses with credit cards for arms, industry sanctioned ‘recommeded lists’ for eyes, and without any ears? We can do better.]