Sonus faber vs Marten

[frenchmon]

Not sure I understand. The idea is to hear a given product at its best - not to hear it the way it may sounds on your system. The fact what you heard in the store blows your system away in your house should tell you that you need to fix your room or replace your gear.

Hahahaha! Oh brother!

Im done RGA

[RGA]

Frenchmon

So you are saying that speakers are not designed to work in many different rooms. Yes or No. If yes you agree with me - if no you're cluless.

[frenchmon]

Frenchmon

So you are saying that speakers are not designed to work in many different rooms. Yes or No. If yes you agree with me - if no you're cluless.

I never said I agreed with that nor disagreed with that...I never even addressed that all.

But what I found laughable was you statement "The idea is....... not to hear it the way it may sounds on your system. "

[RGA]

Frenchmon

And you conveniently left out "The idea is to hear a given product at its best."

If said product sound MUCH better someplace else then you know what that product is capable of doing - and if you can't replicate that in your room with your system then your room or your system is at fault NOT the product.

An example of this would be my view of some panel loudspeakers - I had a judgment of them based on a number of years of listening to them with highly regarded solid state amps - in almost every case all of them sounded like utter crap. I tried them for over a decade in many different rooms with many different amps and it was almost always very underwhelming.

Then big panel lover and owner morricab I noticed was running entirely "wrong" amplifiers with said panels. Wrong in the sense that it is not a pairing I would have considered based on the spec sheets of the speakers and amps (and the fact that most panlphiles keep blathering about kilowatt amps are needed). What do you know he was right - and now hearing such combinations it was not really the speakers I was having issues with it was the speakers letting me know how truly bad the SS amps sound. For those of us with HF hearing it is stunningly apparent - those without may not be aggravated by the bad HF sound.

But if I took these speakers home and ran them with SS gear I would not hear what the speakers were actually capable of - so I would BLAME the speakers because after all my SS amp has enough power and has good specs so it must be the speaker's fault. If however I heard what Morricab heard with better gear I would not draw that initial conclusion and rather than blame the speakers in my room - I would put the amp on A-Gon immediately and get something that sounds good.

This is why shows and dealers can be vastly better than home auditions - because at a show or a dealer you often hear "the manufacturer's intent" with a mix and match you almost never achieve any sense of synergy. Why? Because most people own a system - say an Arcam amp, Cambridge Audio CD player, Wharfedale speakers, and some sort of wire.

This took said audiophile 5 years to build. He goes out and reads a magazine that Musical Fidelity is good - so he replaces the arcam amp with the MF. It's great he says and buys it. And then 3 months later something else is bugging him. And so the endless rotation of gear begins.

It is far better to actually know what the best sound is first - to actually know what a company sounds like. One eway is the complete system approach like Linn, Audio Note, Rega, Krell, Roksan, Grant Fidelity, and a number of other companies.

You have a baseline sound - you know what they're going for. You have no clue with most companies who don't make systems. The exception to this are those with common partners - Dynaudio with Octave amplifiers, Bryston and PMC and Bryston Magnepan, ARC/Wilson, Acapella/Einstein, Magico/Technical Brain, Boulder/JM Labs.

When you hear the best of these and you like one as your favorite then you have a baseline to get that sound in your house. It may mean buying the smaller version of the speaker but same house sound.

It is entirely logical to start here. This is not to say that down the road you may discover a better preamp from someone else but it makes more sense to start with an out of the box synergistic stereo system than playing the rotate the gear guesswork.

People on forums who give a list of three integrated amps they want to buy - all had good reviews which one should I buy. The Krell owner will say Krell - the NAD owner will say NAD, the Bryston owner will say Bryston - it's a joke since in almost every case - the person has never heard the amp with the OP's speaker and certainly not heard the OP's speaker with all three amplifiers.

Where I agree with you is if you have a SS system of Bryston lets say, and you listen to my speakers on tubes and love it then you may question whether it will still sound good in your room with SS amps - so you would want to try it at home to see how much worse it will sound (and it will sound so much worse on SS gear). So if this is your case it makes sense - but my case would be that the reason it sounds so much worse is because of the SS gear and not your room being slightly different than the show room.

So I do get your argument that if you are going to buy a product you want to hear how it plays well with your stereo system - I suppose I am looking at a bigger picture approach (which I admit is less financially feasible). My approach is saying to buy a complete stereo system - which is a large outlay of cash compared to buying a new CD player and 2 years later an amp (which is what most of us can only afford to do).

Still if you own B&W and Bryston and you love Dynaudio and Octave and your plan is to buy Dynaudio/Octave but you can only do one first - THEN I would agree with your point. You would have to take the Octave home first to see if the 40 watts will play with the B&Ws better - or would it be better to bring the Danes home first and run the Brystons. But the end goal is still the Dane/Octave you loved - and it will very likely sound very much the same as if you heard it in the showroom floor that is comparably sized to your home's living room.

[frenchmon]

Frenchmon

And you conveniently left out "The idea is to hear a given product at its best."

If said product sound MUCH better someplace else then you know what that product is capable of doing - and if you can't replicate that in your room with your system then your room or your system is at fault NOT the product.

An example of this would be my view of some panel loudspeakers - I had a judgment of them based on a number of years of listening to them with highly regarded solid state amps - in almost every case all of them sounded like utter crap. I tried them for over a decade in many different rooms with many different amps and it was almost always very underwhelming.

Then big panel lover and owner morricab I noticed was running entirely "wrong" amplifiers with said panels. Wrong in the sense that it is not a pairing I would have considered based on the spec sheets of the speakers and amps (and the fact that most panlphiles keep blathering about kilowatt amps are needed). What do you know he was right - and now hearing such combinations it was not really the speakers I was having issues with it was the speakers letting me know how truly bad the SS amps sound. For those of us with HF hearing it is stunningly apparent - those without may not be aggravated by the bad HF sound.

But if I took these speakers home and ran them with SS gear I would not hear what the speakers were actually capable of - so I would BLAME the speakers because after all my SS amp has enough power and has good specs so it must be the speaker's fault. If however I heard what Morricab heard with better gear I would not draw that initial conclusion and rather than blame the speakers in my room - I would put the amp on A-Gon immediately and get something that sounds good.

This is why shows and dealers can be vastly better than home auditions - because at a show or a dealer you often hear "the manufacturer's intent" with a mix and match you almost never achieve any sense of synergy. Why? Because most people own a system - say an Arcam amp, Cambridge Audio CD player, Wharfedale speakers, and some sort of wire.

This took said audiophile 5 years to build. He goes out and reads a magazine that Musical Fidelity is good - so he replaces the arcam amp with the MF. It's great he says and buys it. And then 3 months later something else is bugging him. And so the endless rotation of gear begins.

It is far better to actually know what the best sound is first - to actually know what a company sounds like. One eway is the complete system approach like Linn, Audio Note, Rega, Krell, Roksan, Grant Fidelity, and a number of other companies.

You have a baseline sound - you know what they're going for. You have no clue with most companies who don't make systems. The exception to this are those with common partners - Dynaudio with Octave amplifiers, Bryston and PMC and Bryston Magnepan, ARC/Wilson, Acapella/Einstein, Magico/Technical Brain, Boulder/JM Labs.

When you hear the best of these and you like one as your favorite then you have a baseline to get that sound in your house. It may mean buying the smaller version of the speaker but same house sound.

It is entirely logical to start here. This is not to say that down the road you may discover a better preamp from someone else but it makes more sense to start with an out of the box synergistic stereo system than playing the rotate the gear guesswork.

People on forums who give a list of three integrated amps they want to buy - all had good reviews which one should I buy. The Krell owner will say Krell - the NAD owner will say NAD, the Bryston owner will say Bryston - it's a joke since in almost every case - the person has never heard the amp with the OP's speaker and certainly not heard the OP's speaker with all three amplifiers.

Where I agree with you is if you have a SS system of Bryston lets say, and you listen to my speakers on tubes and love it then you may question whether it will still sound good in your room with SS amps - so you would want to try it at home to see how much worse it will sound (and it will sound so much worse on SS gear). So if this is your case it makes sense - but my case would be that the reason it sounds so much worse is because of the SS gear and not your room being slightly different than the show room.

So I do get your argument that if you are going to buy a product you want to hear how it plays well with your stereo system - I suppose I am looking at a bigger picture approach (which I admit is less financially feasible). My approach is saying to buy a complete stereo system - which is a large outlay of cash compared to buying a new CD player and 2 years later an amp (which is what most of us can only afford to do).

Still if you own B&W and Bryston and you love Dynaudio and Octave and your plan is to buy Dynaudio/Octave but you can only do one first - THEN I would agree with your point. You would have to take the Octave home first to see if the 40 watts will play with the B&Ws better - or would it be better to bring the Danes home first and run the Brystons. But the end goal is still the Dane/Octave you loved - and it will very likely sound very much the same as if you heard it in the showroom floor that is comparably sized to your home's living room.

Yeah that was my point....And I have had a good listen to the Octave tube gear...incredible!