This confuses the hooey out of some people in the industry – especially those who are salespeople who are only mildly interested in audio.
“What?!?!? You mention brands of audio equipment on your website that you don’t even sell?” “You tell people that there are pieces of equipment that you don’t sell that they should consider buying? Are you nuts??!!”
Ignoring the literal interpretation of nuts for the sake of argument…
We are not here to push equipment on people. We don’t do the lie, cheat, cajole, threaten, intimidate, techno-babble rag to make people buy something. We don’t like it when it gets done to us, and we bet our customers don’t like it when it gets done to them either.
We ARE here to help people build systems that they love and that they can grow with.
Sometimes this takes awhile – everybody has a different word for, say, detal, and everyone thinks transparency means something different from what everyone else thinks it means. It would be kind of funny if it weren’t so tragic.
But eventually we do determine what each person’s personal preferences are, and make recommendations about how they can get where they want to go, either step-by-step, component-by-component, or as a compleete system upgrade.
And, yes, we have to admit it, we do indeed carry some of the world’s most consistantly state-of-the-art equipment – each of our components provide a sound that is the best-in-category solution to several different types of sonic preferences – and which have little, if any, deliterious …side-effects.
But we don’t carry everything.
It a customer wants bottom end slam, and that is all they want – and they don’t care about any … side-effects… then we would probably recommend a Krell or VTL amplifier – they are some of the very best at this in our opinion. No we don’t carry these lines and never will – too many people (including us!) want something more than just slam. [And besides, on a near-perfect vibration-controlled system, the Lamm ML2.1 or high-gain Audio Note Kegon will provide as much slam, in a much more realistic manner, on many if not most loudspeakers – that is for all kinds of bass except that originally generated by the muscians using electronics for, say, techno – which we love but it is only one genre we love of many].
What are our preferences?
Our personal preferences, as always, are that we want everything. From Impressive to Magic. Lots and lots of everything.
We run our systems, when they are tuned just for our ears, with very low-profile tires, close-to-the-metal, red-lining the performance so that it is as real as possible without being too neutral sounding, as much slam as possible without overloading the room or causing an unbalanced presentation, as much detail as possible without the midrange calling undue attention to itself, etc., etc., etc., etc.
Neli feels like we may be leaving too many people behind, as we continue to optimize the systems as we try more and more pieces from all over the world that increase the performance a little bit more here and a little bit more over there….
However, I think that people want somebody who is going the same way they are (no, not to the loony bin, we are all already there! :-)) and want someone they can talk to about what each of these optimizations do so that they can decide which one is right for themselves at this time – and which ones might be right next month, or next year.
In any case, this will hopefully give our readers an idea of WHY we have the Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Show Reports that talk about the sound and don’t just gawk at the pretty things, and this Blog that talks about the different purposes of different systems and components and how each of us wants a different balance and therefore different components – and the rest of our ever-evolving ever-expanding Audio Federation website.
And hopefully this will give our readers an idea of why WE are here.
