[This is a hard concept to get across. Suffice it to say that humans know very, very, very little of the science behind what makes a good sound system – and hold on to your wallet around people who imply otherwise]

Now here I go defending Reviewers, after blasting them last post. Just goes to show that things can always get worse.

Most reviewers (there are exceptions) seem to be able to avoid the ‘self-appointed technological expert’ syndrome which is for all intents and purposes almost indisinguishable from the ‘sales techno-babble daze and confuse them in buying what you are selling’ approach.

To put it simply – Whenever someone says that a product is better than another because of some technological detail – they are lying.

This is true in any technological arena – and any real expert will tell you that we as a species don’t know diddly and what we do know has so many qualifications and constraints thatr we might as well not know anything – and in the end it is all just theories and models. That is just the way science works, sorry.

So then we have the Audio Perfectionist, whose role apparently is to, well in the automobile universe it would be to berate auto reviewers for not spending their time informing their readers that the Porsche is a very badly engineered product (in comparison with the Honda and Toyota, for example) and is therefore not worth 1/10 of the asking price (i.e. the car or product should sell for little more than the cost of its constituent parts).

For example, to state that time-aligned speakers are better than non time-aligned speakers is B.S. Even saying that they are more accurate is B.S.

What is not B.S., but verging on meaninglessness, is to say “From what we know about human hearing, a time-aligned speaker will seem to image better and seem more realistically dynamic than a non-time-aligned speaker, all else being equal”.

“All else being equal” requires us to imagine two speakers that are absolutelyidentical except one is time-aligned and one is not. Of course, making the one speaker time-aligned will in actual reality cause side-effects that might render the speaker less ‘real’ and distort imaging – just those areas that time-alignment is trying to improve, so this statement means very little in the real world where you and I listen to and buy speakers.

And we can go on. Suffice it to say that ‘statements’ like the B.S. above, are only true, if they are true anywhere, in an extremely simplified imaginary view of the world. I am not sure that people really want to spend their hard earned dollars on something whose value is based on somebody else’s fantasy life,

whose only goal seems to be the evangelistic promotion of our era’s archaic definition of what accurate sound reproduction is, from spinning aluminum and vinyl disks no less.

Archaic because scientists know almost nothing compared to what they will know in decades and centuries hence – so evaluating equipment based on what is essentually voodoo may not be very smart if you are technologically minded. And things like…uh…. musicality and enjoyment do not appear anywhere in these kind of voodoo doctor proclamations of what has ‘quality’.

It just seems like a bad buying decision to me to buy something you do not like. Hey! It took me a lot of years, and a lot of cars and speakers and cables… to figure this out. Everyday we talk to people who are seriously considering products based on specifications, build quality, measured performance, reviews….people who are just like me.

That is why it is important to actually go for a test-drive and listen to something to see if you like it and not just read the specs or a reviewer’s description of the component’s construction and measured performance.

[Then we have Romy’s critique of the same Wilson MAXX II speakers, coming from a more experiential perspective, much more in the line of how we think speakers and systems need to be evaluated. Why he liked the referenced Audio Perfectionist article, I couldn’t tell ya]

*There are so many examples of this. Another is: “This amps sounds more organic BECAUSE it is using 1% Vishay resistors” B.S. Does it sound more organic? Listen to it! More organic than what? Than no-name cheap-as-dirt resistors from the Far East? Well, I guess it is nice of them to spend the extra buck. But what else is in the system that we are supposed to be listening for the sound of a few resistors in? The electrical music signal is going though a LOT of things, even inside all but the most simple of components. And the system! It is one gigantic, very, very complex technological-ecosystem; it all must work together in harmony. Each component is affected by every other component. Still trying to pin-point the sound of those resistors the saleperson is touting?

The best scientists using the biggest super-computers in the world can only partially simulate a tiny fraction of this system. And gurus, and salespeople, and manufacturers can’t tell you why it sounds exactly the way it does, either.

All you can do is listen. For yourself. It’s OK, take your time. Enjoy the music while you’re at it.

I think what people often want to know is the details about why we like one thing and not another.

In our report we say we do not like a particular line of amps because the sound it generates is compressed and lacks air and micro-dynamics and a sense of rhythm.

I suppose you may ask: Don’t all amps have similar problems? If it is so bad, then why oh why is it so expensive? My dealership says they sell a ton of them, if they are so bad, why do so many people buy them? The print media say they love their products and gives them ephemeral awards periodically – don’t they see and hear everything – why wouldn’t they know if it was good or not?

I will try to answer these hard questions, though to some degree the real answer to most of these questions is that people in general are not logical and often do not make the wisest or most enjoyable choices in life. Just look around when you are out driving at all the different models of cars people are buying – many of which are known to be pretty darn poor examples of engineering and safety and are really unpleasent to drive.

Don’t all amps have similar problems? The corollary is: there are always tradeoffs when you can’t buy the best, aren’t this amp’s tradeoffs valid?

No, all amps do not have similar problems. Well, yes, they do, but not in this magnitude, they are not this gross. They do not stray from the Path such a large distance. And, yes, these better amps exist, even at this price point. These other amps are just not carried by your dealer, or are not hooked up at your dealer because they are not as impressive for the customer who spends only 20 minutes to a few hours listening to a system before buying.

If it is so bad, then why oh why is it so expensive?

One reason is that, in the set of all amps that are designed to impress a customer during short listening sessions – amps that are priced less are worse and amps that are priced more are better. Dealers have a tendency to carry things that sell well. Things sell well that have good marketing and a good supply chain. This costs money. But let’s be fair, construction, materials, warehousing, offices, parts aquisition, design, all cost money. There are vrey few people in this industry getting rich.

My dealership says they sell a ton of them, if they are so bad, why do so many people buy them?

The customer who spends only a small amount of time listening to a system before buying, often with few comparisons available at the given price point, is likely to be impressed by IMPRESSIVE systems. A highly musical and realistic system will be nice and relaxing but a LOUD and agressive system with oodles of bass will often be an obvious improvement over their smaller system at home. And there will be little doubt in the customer’s mind that their (male) friends, who also will not be listening to the system overly long, will also approve of the purchuse. They in fact, may go out and based on their short yet oh so impressive listening session at their friends house, buy a set of those amps for themsleves. In this way the systems-that-are-unpleasant-to-listen-to-for-extended-periods virus spreads. This is true of other consumer products as well: it is well known that speakers that sound brighter sell better in showrooms, as do video screens that are overly bright and colorful.

The print media say they love this company’s products and gives them ephemeral awards periodically – don’t they see and hear everything – why wouldn’t they know if it was good or not?

Well, for one, most reviewer’s systems suck. The average audiophile often has as good of sounding equipment as the average reviewer. Putting a component into one of their systems, often a balancing act of bright vrs. dull, dynamic vrs.compressed components, is asking the component to particpate in this balancing act. And if the component is not ‘bright’ like the component it replaced, or compressed, like the component it replaced in the system, then the reviewer will not like it. And, realisitically, in systems like this they will not even hear the component, masked as it is by the problems in their other components.

For another one, most reviewer’s rooms suck. Well, that again make them like the rest of us.

Reviewers are also nice people, they know the manufacturers personally. It is really, really hard to say something negative about a product a friend is involved with. It makes you feel like a shit (and I should know. The only counter to this is the forlorn faces and extreme distress of the really, really upset people who save and scrimp and finally buy something that they really can’t afford, only to come to find that it sounds like hell, even though the industry and net hype led them to belive otherwise).

And finally, the real answer is: The industry lives on Hype. All consumer industries do. It is what keeps the industry (magazines, manufactureres, dealers, forums) alive between innovations.

So the short answer is: no, they do not know if it is good or not, except in a gross, it didn’t blow up, kind of way. And nobody cares.

Well some people care.

Some people are angry at this situation and want to do something about it.

We are some of those angry people. And yeah, we get some flak for saying what we say – but not all that much actually – most people are good people, even in our hobby / industry 🙂

Imagine that there is a path from the most basic system that you might like to the most extravagent, perfect system.

All along this path lies systems that you like at their price – you pay a little more, you get closer to your perfect system.

This path is multi-dimensional, in that there are systems that you like that are slightly off the path, for example in the direction of having a little more bass than that which that point, that price, on the path requires. This wiggle off the path in one direction requires a wiggle away from one or more other directions, for example more bass might entail less microdynamics.

It is my beleif that the Path is the same for everyone but that the acceptable wiggles, deviations, from the path are personal, different for each person.

It is also my belief that large deviations from the path, systems that over-emphasize a particular sonic feature at the significant sacrifice of one or more others, are folly.

Examples of such follies are legion, but in abstract terms, this includes the following, common, systems characteristics:

* Over emphasis of detail at the expense of harmonics – very common in less epxensive solidstate and digital sounding systems
* Over emphasis of dynamics at the expense of continuousness and balance – very common in horn-speaker-based systems
* Over emphasis of smoothness at the expense of detail and dynamics – very common with less expensive tube amps, usually on hard to drive speakers

Our Best of Show categories in the CES 2006 show report are fuzzy descriptions of way stations along this path – every stop along the path, every category, should include all the capabilites of the previois categories. This fails for the ‘Impressive’ category because of the energy, design, and room requirements of large amounts of bass.

Our Best of Show systems list systems that seem to be along the Path, deviating, perhaps, from the path in ways that are acceptable, from our point of view.

To illustrate these points, I will describe a few syatems that we like but did not make the Best Of list, and why.

The Oskar Heil speaker system – I love the Oskar Heil speakers; for $6K or less you get a massive amount of musical detail in a very easy to drive load. The only problem is that the bass is not very detailed or all that well integrated with the rest of the frequency spectrum. This is still almost squarely on the path because of the low cost – all the extra ability to render massive amounts of detail of the Heil driver are ‘thrown in for free’.

This year, however, the amp used, presumably in order to control the bass a little better, had a little less harmonic content and continuousness/flow in the midrange – so all the detail revealed by the speakers did not provide the vision into the music that I know the speakers are capable of.

For me, this was a wggle, a deviation too far from the path in the direction of bass control at the expense of harmonics and continuousness and smoothness. But it didn’t wiggle very far so it was a difficult decision whether to put it on the Best Of Show list or not – and I am STILL pondering it.

Another example is both the Lamm / Wilson and Kharma / ASR systems:

At these price points we are very far down the path. There are a lot more stringent requirements to be on the Path at this level. Some of these are the ability to handle complex passages while maintaining separation of the individual notes (it doesn’t just collapse into a molassus of noise) and image stability (two or more instruments playing at the same time should have as solid and cohernet of an image as when they were playing solo). These two systems failed in this way.

These systems apparently traded scale and bass and impressiveness for these capabilities. But I feel these capabilities are necessary to be on the path at this level (and even at somewhat lower levels). The restriction that only simple music can be played, or that one must close one’s mental ears during complex passages is not acceptable at this level, and that to get back on the Path these capabilies need to be restored, perhaps at the expense of a little bass or adding a few more $ (for example adding vibration control platforms underneath the components or trying different combinations of cables, perhaps even the same brands, and seeing if this might do the trick).

Well, this is getting long. Hope this helps answer a few questions…