Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

OK. I am sure many of you are wondering why I like Romy with his ad-hominems and invective and posting of wildly gross misconceptions about our products and motivations.

I thought I needed to clarify with everyone, just in case they are the wondering type, that we do NOT agree with Romy’s opinion on some things, namely that everything out there sounds bad. In particular, we think that a few things actually sound pretty darn good and we really enjoy listening to music on them. These are the things we talk about on the blog and demo to people visiting our home and at show exhibits.

Romy is one of the best writers we have in audio, and one of the most perceptive – but unfortunately it does take some amount of effort to read through the emotion-laden confrontational approach.

I see a lot of myself in Romy. He sets up a Platonic Ideal of how audio *should* sound, how *all* manufacturers and dealers and audiophiles should behave – and that is that we should all be focused on just one goal – achieving that Platonic Ideal of *perfect* audio reproduction.

How is this like me (and Neli, too, in fact)? This is how we approach our other profession: computer software. No, we don’t make asses of ourselves, and we probably only think slightly less of Microsoft and Adobe and Apple’s fleet of lawyers and Rational and the average IT manager, etc. than, say, the average Linux geek.

But I would argue that Software is much more ephemeral than audio – and that the Platonic Ideal of perfect software is indeed asymptotically approachable through a little discipline and a little sympathy for all the users out there (and it would make fiscal sense). But even here – it is important to stay grounded – computers are only so fast, people only can only come up with new models of how to organize information just so quickly, the state-of-the-art has only come so far. It still will be awhile before we have Star Trek-like computers we can ask general questions of.

Romy’s problem is that he creates all these cities in his head, and then compares real live available speakers and components to this ideal. It is not even clear that this ideal would be an ideal any of the rest of us would even like – and he has not communicated very much about this ideal, which is a shame because this is where he might be able to contribute something of real significance to Audiophiledom.

At Audio Federation we seek for ourselves, and help other people find, the best available REAL WORLD solutions using the best audio reproduction equipment available today.

So, and this is my point, Romy antagonistic approach has put him more and more out of touch with real audio in the real world – and people have to be careful when they read his stuff about specific pieces of equipment [but his more abstract stuff is great]. Not recognizing differences between Marten and Kharma, about which every visitor can tell you about who has been here – not understanding the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to vibration control – making general statements about Emm Labs [have to wonder that perhaps personal enmity is getting in the way of being able to hear what they do?] and the Supremes and on and on… leads me to think that, Platonic Ideal is fine and all that – but there needs to be some grounding in reality, in the Real World, and it just doesn’t make good sense to compare things to the Best CD Player Imaginable, or the Most Faithful Speakers Imaginable.

We are perfectly aware that the products we carry, like all products out there, have various faults. It is our well-reasoned judgment that our products have fewer faults, often much fewer, than other products out there – and further that any faults are manageable through working with the setup and the rest of the system. And it is this information about how to manage the issues like this, working with optimizing system performance, that keeps us busy with all this equipment we always seem to have have hanging around.

It is this balance, between everything sucks [except what I own, sell, imagine] and nothing sucks [that we review, see, hear about] that makes us kind of the odd man [and woman] out.

But it is this grounding in reality which gives us our real advantage. We get to live with the state-of-the-art, day in day out. We go to shows and I, anyway, get to hear every room. We talk to people and, Neli anyway, spend hours with each caller, several callers per day, hearing lots of people opinions about what kind of system they want and working with them to get them what they can afford. We focus on learning about and hearing the differences that make things sound good, stuff that is available, stuff that people can touch and have for themselves and enjoy the heck out of.

Yeah, we have our own Platonic Ideal about how things should really sound. Who doesn’t? But most of us just don’t get so angry that we start attacking people just because they are not as upset as we are that Audio reproduction is not perfect yet – nor manufacturers just because they are not getting there fast enough (or at those that do not care about getting there at all. OK. These guys do irk us) – nor at the capitalistic ambitions of honest dealers and manufacturers (very little ambitions in this smallish hobby of ours) because it sometimes hinders progress [though I would say lack of progress has more to do with human nature and people tending to be cautious and lack confidence and imagination)].

So, enough is enough. The nuggets are becoming too hard to find, mired in the anger, and the GoodSoundClub goes back on our ‘just another forum of angry people who get their rocks off attacking other people’ list, just like most of the other major forums out there.

I tried to login and post my comments there, but the site seems to have forgotten me [or I forgot my login], so I’ll just post my comments here.

The latest post in the ML3 thread at the GoodSoundClub talks about my Initial Impressions of the Lamm ML3.

I am happy that Romy found it informative [thanks Romy], but…. I have a few corrections to make 🙂

First, the Ongaku, the Audio Note …. U.K.(!) … Ongaku, that we have here is not micro-details challenged [to say the least]. The Kondo Ongaku may indeed be challenged in this way – certainly sounds that way at shows… but then again, they put the darn things on nightstands and other suspiciously inadequate platforms that are probably sucking all the micro-details out of whatever there was there to begin with.

If any of you weren’t happy with digital four of five years ago – and gave up on it – give it another try. Digital music reproduction has evolved significantly in the last few years, along with the rest of the digital landscape.

And, just another pet peeve :-), the sound of the Martens are in fact almost diametrically opposite to the sound of Kharmas. Both have their fans, and you can like both, like we do, or not. But they are really not at all more alike than any other two random ultra-high quality box speakers. One is very even handed trying to be as accurate as possible, one is very exuberant trying to be as engaging as possible [the way I think about them, anyway].

And regardless of all this – our reportage was about the sound of the ML3s in comparison to what we have heard here before – namely the ML2.1 and the higher level Audio Note. If we say there was significant micro-dynamic/harmonic capabilities [I hesitate to say micro-details because by detail most people mean – if they think about it – a well-delineated (best case) or, sometimes even sharper-than-natural leading edge to notes, usually at the macro level, sometimes at the midi-level – and this is not that. This is *extreme control* of the note envelope so that it is formed in a much more natural way than the saw-tooth-curve approach of lesser amps], then there was significant micro-dynamic/harmonic capabilities with respect to these other amps that we are familiar with [which themselves are the best we have heard in this regard, especially on average-efficiency speakers] – as heard on a very, very high resolution system, whether someone thinks they will like the system or not.

And, as far as “Mike always overly-exuberant about the things he sells”, well, I try to be clear about why I recommend various things, whether we sell them or not, that I think people would love to hear for themselves. But me? Overly exuberant? If you knew me, you’d realize how much of a stretch this would be. 🙂 But seriously, most people want me to be MORE exuberant on the blog – but less so than the typical reviewer – so that is the balance I struggle for.

Anyway, Romy, you are welcome to visit here anytime, or our room at RMAF. Then, at least you would know *exactly* how bad everything sounds 😉