Upgraded to Audio Note J - and other musings.

[Woochifer]

I am not comparing a wega to a 30 year old television. What I am saying is there isn't something enw about a tube set today than there was 30 years ago or the principle behind todays VCR as opposed to one 20 years ago. The new ones are certainly BETTER.

Well, you're trying to weave this argument that in the good ole days, products were about quality and service, and now everything's about profits and disposability first. How does that explain the fact that TVs now are far superior in performance to anything that was sold 30 years ago, more maintenance free, and much lower in cost?. I suppose if everybody had to pay the equivalent of $3,000 for a basic color TV, then the motivation for repairing as opposed to buying a brand new one might actually exist. The TV is fundamentally about a cathode ray tube (though that is changing very quickly), but the ancillary electronics that surround it have completely changed. What TV nowadays uses vacuum tubes, manual channel dials, analog tuners, and manually controlled vertical and horizontal hold?

Toole does not comment by giving a review but he does work for Harman - Harman has a speical interest in aqcuiring Toole to be on their staff - and when tests are conducted blind Harman speakers come out best. Excuse me for seeing some bias here. Some of those speakers do very well in the blind sessions at Hi-fi Choice(The Intermezzo 2.6 is a Rabos design and was awarded a Best Buy) so there is certainly merrit in them(i'm not saying buy Audio Note or nothing - but these were also awarded a best buy and recommended etc)

If you actually read their white papers, you'll note that they discuss how to use blind testing in the design process, and how their listening setup is designed. It also discusses how in sighted listenings, the sight biases become the main determinent. Has it ever occurred to you that blind listenings are something that manufacturers mainly use to test evaluate their own designs with one another? I don't see anything about how Harman speakers rank higher than other speakers in their tests, and there's no indication as to what speakers they use in their tests. If Harman does tests like that, they certainly don't discuss that in their white papers, so I don't see where you get this idea that there's some kind of conspiratorial bias at work, or that those white papers are nothing more than biased fluff pieces. Your obsession with brand identity and condemning all things about marketing is leading you to make some pretty misguided generalizations about documents that I've used multiple times as a guide to setup my system. It's sound information, often very technical, but worth reading if you're at all interested in learning about how scientific concepts translate into everyday listening. If you equate that to Bose marketing pieces, then it's obvious that you've never bothered to read them.

I like to see external listening sessions rather than those conducted by the people selling the speakers. B&W can do a blind test where B&W's come out on top and Harman speakers come out last and B&W can hire a team of world experts and George Lucas himself to imply that this is the best approach to building loudspeakers and that most people will choose our loudspeakers because their measurments dictate that they are the superior design blah blah blah- and all of that is fine because it helps make a sale much of the time.

Like I said, I've never seen Harman put any listening results in their white papers, and for technical discussions like that, subjective product reviews are not the focus. EVERY speaker company wants to convince you that their approach is the best, but very few companies publish anything approaching the technical level of what Harman releases. It doesn't matter what speakers you own or like, those white papers present valid findings that can help anyone with an interest in seeing how scientific findings can help improve their own system performance.

You lay all kinds of blame at Floyd Toole's feet without knowing what his actual function within the company is, or citing what about his writings you can refute. Your only response is that you don't like the speakers his company produces, therefore everything that he's written is marketing bull****. In case this point hasn't sunken in, Toole is NOT a speaker designer. Yet, you talk about him as if every speaker that you've ever hated was actually designed by him. Harman affiliate speakers aren't necessarily my favorites either, but I've put their publications to the test and found the information therein to be spot on.

Except the flaw in this is that that doesn't necessarily happen when I and a LOT of other people go and listen to the speakers.

Yeah, and who among your LOT of other people has ever done any kind of unsighted evaluations? You mention that "doesn't necessarily happen", well if you're doing your comparisons under sighted conditions and you're comparing that to blind tests, obviously it's an entirely different evaluation. If you believe that you're capable of equally judging things under both sighted and unsighted conditions, then why don't you put that to the test? I used to do blind tests when calibrating tape bias settings for different cassette tapes (trying to identify the setting that was most transparent to the source playback), and the "night and day" differences that I thought that I had picked up on under sighted conditions turned out to be much more subtle and difficult to discern under blind conditions. Same thing occurred when comparing cables, so I'm well aware of the degree to which sight biases can have a tangible influence.