1. It is not playing dumb. As I explained, whatever we did had to be defensible and following the information to the letter, seemed like the right thing to do. Still, Danny was in touch with Rick and based on his back and forth we arrived at what we built.
2. That is absolutely true. The Kit costs $249. Once you add his list of tweaks it just to $449:
Now, I would happily buy these options if there was a shred of documentation what good they do. Where is the measurements of no-res versus none or some other material? How about caps? How about connectors? How about resistors?
Sure, there are people who follow his assertions and pay for such things but we aren't that type. We need evidence of effectiveness before we shell out our hard earned money.
And oh, there was a lead time issue as tube connectors were not available at the time of the build.
3. Correct. Whatever damping material was required in the baseline package should have been provided due to high-cost of no-res. Still, at the end I decided we should add this in and Rick did a bunch of work which Danny should have done to quantify what works best. So complaining about what we didn't do is not proper. We did far more than any DIY builder would do.
4. We absolutely poke fun at useless tweaks offered with no scientific or engineering value shown on their effectiveness. Standard speaker binding posts degrade signals but Danny doesn't know how to measure that? Well, maybe such degradation doesn't exist in electrical circuits relevant to a speaker.
What's next? Putting shoe polish on the speaker magnet making it sound better? We are supposed to jump at whatever someone cooks up with respect to audio tweaks?
And no, your subjective testimonials don't mean a thing. There are people who put sand in a wooden box and sell them as "grounding boxes" for $3,000 or more. Lest you tell me you are using stuff like that, I suggest not trying to tell us how we should treat such pricey promotions.
Still, despite all of this, i wanted to test the tube connectors. But per above, they were not available at the time of the build.
Really, no one could have been more fair in this project. Full thread discussing its detailed builds, objective measurements, research of various stuffings, etc., etc.