… over in somebody ELSE’S system.

Repeat after me:

There is no perfect speaker.

There is no perfect amplifier.

There is no perfect…

It is the components that one Hasn’t heard that are the most incidious at making us doubters, making us wonder if THEY perhaps are the *** U-L-T-I-M-A-T-E *** COMPONENT.

Some of the Jones’ components are good, most are just OK, just like all components once you actually get to hear them for yourself.

It is the one’s we haven’t heard, where we wonder “maybeTHAT box has EVERYTHING… sophistication AND magic AND impressiveness!”, that are the most insidious, making us doubt everything we have learned up until now.

Truth: There are very, very few components that really ARE significantly greener than the rest. Most are just… different. Hey, at least half are actually worse than average :-).

However, it is the actual hearing one of these 8th wonders of the world that REALLY gets us hooked, dooms us to keep looking, always looking, across the street to see if the grass really IS greener over there.

It is our job here, our responsibility, tough life that we have, to scout around the 1000s of speakers, 1000s of amps, and cables and cd players, and preamps and powercords and determine which are truly special and which are just …nice.

Unlike most dealers we actually do not care if they ‘sell well’ – if they are really great sounding we will make the effort ourselves to help build their brand and get the word out there.

Unlike most reviewers we do not have to find a great component each and every month.

Unlike most reviewers (and most dealers who seem to rely more on the big bamboozle – yes, I just had to put bamboozle in somewhere; bamboozle is just too fun of a word to leave out of any good Blog for too awfully long 🙂 ) we actually care about how the components really sound because we play them here for very picky people who will spend some of their hard-earned to take what they are hearing home with them if they really like what they hear (and can afford what they hear).

We take this responsibility to heart – some components are really pretty good so there is no real need to replace them with the hot new brand X, the grass often really isn’t greener (it just the low angle you are looking at it from that makes it look greener 🙂 ) – save a few bucks.

OK, three smiley faces is all I allocate myself for each post (not really, but I bet you wish it were true) so I had better be…

…outa here.

Thinking about the added suspense that the music on the SACD version of Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms seemed to have (see last post), I wonder if and how this might be artificially produced by a system.

When humans talk to each other, at least in English, they can communicate to a listener that they should expect something to follow a particular phrase by at least three methods:

1. raising the frequency of the last word of the phrase, near the end of the word
2. drawing out the last word of the phrase (saying the word very slowly)
3. adding a lot of ‘uh’s or ‘um’s after the phrase

It seems like music also uses these same techniques (a background beat might replace the ‘um’s to mark tiime after a phrase).

So why are only a few systems able to communicate this ‘suspense’? Are so few able to render the characteristic raise in frequency at the end of an anticpatory note? Or is it that LPs and CDs for the most part do not have a high-enough resolution to contian this kind of subtle information?

At a CES a few years ago, there was a system with Joseph speakers, Joule amps and Audio Aero CD player that had oodles of suspense. It was great fun and seemed to communicate the musician’s desire to be suspenseful with both the listener and their fellow band members. So now one can wonder things like: did this system have a tendency to raise the frequency of the sound at the very end of major notes, just a little, to artificially add suspense?

What about the recording engineers who made the Brothers in Arms CD? Did they do the same? Do they have a little knob in the studio that says “suspense”?

I don’t know. I do know I like suspense and anticipation in music. It adds to the excitment and highlights the webs of communication going on both between the individual band members (for example, think jazz and one musician prompting another to play a few notes, who does the same right back at them, back and forth) and between the band and the audience.

The audience can also communicate suspense and most other emotions back to the band and to others in the audience though crowd mutterings and clapping and shouting and whistling. This is one of the things that can make live shows and unprocessed live bootlegs that are recorded from the audience so involving.

[I would like to talk some more about this ‘muttering’ another time, by which we are refering to the largely involuntary sounds an audience in response to what the musicians are doing – and how this is a large part of the (near) instananeous feedback loop between the audience and the musicians which is a whole nuther communication channel being used that is almost completely disjoint from the actual melody being played. The ‘suspense’ added by a musician is almost a bridge between these two channels; one channel being of sound and the other one is .. a deeper message about being human and alive at that moment].

OK, it is time to start composing these posts in somethng that has a spell checker… 🙂

[This post will make a lot more sense to our family of customers than to those of you who are our virutal guests out there].

We have met a LOT of really nice audiophiles over the years (and a lot of nice people in the industry too 🙂 )

So many people, who we have actually come to like quite a bit, whether as friends or as compatriots on the rocky road to audio bliss, call us back after awhile and feel they have to profusely apologize for not buying our X or Y and instead getting somebody else’s Z.

We appreciate the sentiment. We really, really do. Thank you.

But what we really want is for people to call back (or email) and not so much apologize (uh oh, I am starting to sound like Mal on Firefly) but tell us about how ‘Z’ sounds in their system. We can’t buy and try everything out there – and we are probably just as interested in what your experiences are as you are in ours.

Yeah, of course we would like people to buy things from us, in no small part because we think we got the really ‘good stuff’, man.

But we do not carry everything. Actually we do not carry many lines at all (and it seems like we are carrying fewer lines each day :-)). We are so very careful about each line we pick up that it seems to take us forever to find one we like.

So, if after everything is said and done you end up buying something from somewhere else, It is OK.

Really.

Or maybe you decided to hold off and not buy anything for awhile, perhaps because nothing completely bowled you over, or your monetary situation changed a little… That is OK too.

And if you decided to buy it off one of the audio auction sites – well, you know, that is OK too. We sell extra equipment on the net too and the buyer of our stuff must reside in somebody’s dealer area. If we were not dealers we would be tempted to buy some stuff off the net too. Heck, we are tempted now… some of those equipment prices up there are lower than what we can get them at.

Hmmmmm… Can I say that? Neli? 😉

But really, what I want to say is that we have come to really like a lot of you people – and we know that some of you decided… to…. buy… something…. somewhere…. else.

No worries, man.