watchnerd
Grand Contributor
Wetherspoons.
You may need your beer goggles, pick them up at the bar.
Make sure you go on Curry Club Thursdays for the most chavvy selection.
Wetherspoons.
You may need your beer goggles, pick them up at the bar.
Umm, chavvy mums .., Swap ' hysteria' for ' chlamydia'Make sure you go on Curry Club Thursdays for the most chavvy selection.
Speaking of audio journalists, and I know we have some celebrities amongst us, I understand it is not an especially high-paying profession. Yet we hear many times of reviewers loving a component so much they buy it. I'm thinking of $20k+ amps, speakers, etc.
Are these folks otherwise wealthy/CEOs/big-firm law partners? Or is there another answer?
Speaking of audio journalists, and I know we have some celebrities amongst us, I understand it is not an especially high-paying profession. Yet we hear many times of reviewers loving a component so much they buy it. I'm thinking of $20k+ amps, speakers, etc.
Are these folks otherwise wealthy/CEOs/big-firm law partners? Or is there another answer?
The mysteriously rich are everywhere, I met many in the wine scene. Like the 18 yr. kid whose father invented the menthol formulation for cigarettes. A really nice personable kid who happened to have a $100M trust fund in 1975. Dow had a policy of sharing patent royalties with the inventor, there was another guy, by benefit of his father, who would invite you to dinner and open a 1959 Romanee Conti and many more.
$28,112 - Romanee-Conti DRC 1990
A set of eight bottles fetched $224,900 at auction at Sotheby's London in 1996. One of the prime reasons for the high price of this wine is the extremely low yield of the soil in the area of France where it's produced – it takes the produce of three Pinot Noir grape vines to make one bottle. The average age of the vines, extending over 1.8 hectares, is 53 years and the Pinot Noir harvest can produce up to 450 cases of Romanee-Conti DRC wine.
My dad got 10 patents through his job, some of them for very successful products. Guess how many royalty checks. It's not hard to guess.Dow had a policy of sharing patent royalties with the inventor....
Ah! Romanee Conti Pinot Noir. The perfect pairing with Audio Note electronics...a transformative experience...
My dad got 10 patents through his job, some of them for very successful products. Guess how many royalty checks. It's not hard to guess.
The wife is still beckoning from the other room now in more screeching tones
And why would I then spend $43K on a DAC with horrible performance, with absolutely no objective benefits? Why wouldn't I just get an inexpensive badly-measuring DAC off Ebay instead?
Audio Note's products exist only for the "more money than sense" club to buy, so they can lord their expensive purchases over their peers. Sold with woo-woo-mysticism to the overly-gullible.
Anyone interested can read more about Martin Colloms here <https://www.hificritic.com/colloms.html>, where a number or articles can also be downloaded for free.Well I am a reviewer for an online magazine and covered Audio Note for a long time. So I get the lunatic fringe and scam and various other comments leveled at them from time to time - though it usually always comes from people who have not auditioned the gear or in fact auditioned the gear level matched and blind. I am a proponent of both sighted long listening sessions and also blind level matched sessions because there is a lot of bias. Being scientifically minded does not shield you from bias either. The measurements suck so the product must suck is an assumption bias allowing your eyes reading a graph dictate what you think you will hear.
Someone mentioned the Hi-Fi Critic - it should be noted that the reviewer of that $192k DAC is an engineer who formed the speaker company Monitor Audio, he has written several books on loudspeaker design, chaired the Audio Engineering society, and was the measurements taker at Stereophile before John Atkinson. So he is not the sort of reviewer who just gets sucked in by pretty looks (which AN doesn't possess) or Price - there are plenty of other expensive products.
I won't defend Audio Note on technical merits - how can I - they are, to be blunt, awful. No one who buys an Audio Note (anything really) is going to be buying it because of the "great measurements" in the likes of Stereophile.
I merely point out that companies usually don't last selling smoke and mirrors at high dollars for 30 years as AN UK has done. Contrary to popular belief not everyone who has money is a dolt. Most Audio Note customers tend to arrive at Audio Note after they have owned Genelec, Revel, Paradigm, PSB, B&W, PMC speakers mated to Bryston, Adcom, Rotel, Classe, Naim, Bricasti, Levinson, Krell amplifiers. Not the other way around.
I began with PMC and Bryston back in the day because of the measured prowess of studio quality loudspeakers with amplifiers that were practically bomb proof in build and various technical merits like ultra low noise floor, vanishingly low IM and THD figures and flat response etc.
And what is more funny is the compounding measurements disaster that is Audio Note. Stereophile called their CD 4.1 "broken" in measurements (yet still gave it Class A and the reviewer felt it was the best CD player he had ever heard. Now good scientists would like to marry these subjective results (which are long and many) to "broken" measured performance.
Compounding the CD player is that Audio Note makes SET amplifiers - Single Ended Triodes. You know those crazy $20,000 8 watt tube amps with high distortion. So now you have the worst measuring amplifiers combined with the worst measuring CD players into their AN E speakers which can be described at best as - pretty middling measured performance. They go to audio shows and they always have this combination. Speakers in the corners (rear ported!!). They have now begun entering recording and mastering studios - shock horror.
Yes it all sounds very PT Barnum but I can't get past the fact that their crappy measuring amps beat up the Bryston and Arcam amps, and that their speakers beat up my B&W and KEF LS-50 and that that "broken" CD player (non oversampling stone age WTF are they thinking) designs actually sound "clearer" than the dozen Solid State CD players I have had over the years. It's baffling.
Further I would suggest that when Peter says Measurements don't matter - that is not entirely true - they matter from the manufacturing end of it and design stages. Further Peter owns the company but he is not an engineer - he hires engineers - and Andy Grove is their chief designer and Kondo was a Metalurgist who headed Sony's engineering team specializing in micrphones - so these people are credentialed people - not some guy in a garage. This factory tour of Audio Note illustrates the depth and breadth of the company - and this plant is in fact B&W's old plant.
I say again - I get the rubbish measurements - but they're not lying to anyone - they tell you the measurements suck - Peter said the DAC's "measure a bag of nails" but if they feel it sounds better - and so do people who buy their gear - then what's the problem. Listen level matched and blind. See what happens. Part 2 is a discussion with their head engineer Andy Grove
Someone somewhere is supposed to have paid well over one hundred large for a banana taped to a wall. In that context, a 43 thousand dollar kind-of-DAC could be considered a bargain. I mean, you could buy three idiot DACs for the price of one idiot banana. If someone is trying to show off their idiocy, it's a pretty simple choice, it seems to me.Well I am a reviewer for an online magazine and covered Audio Note for a long time. So I get the lunatic fringe and scam and various other comments leveled at them from time to time - though it usually always comes from people who have not auditioned the gear or in fact auditioned the gear....