Agree or disagree with the following statement.

All equipment reviews should have full test measurements, otherwise your at the mercy of reviewers bias and or poetic babble and if the reviewed piece was matched or mismatched to the rest of the system.

By reading and "understanding" all the review "measurements tests" on Stereophile, one can "usually" gauge what a component will do or sound like when it's matched or mismatched with other components.

All reviews should be this informative, and it would be nice for Stereophile to bring back "capacitive stability load testing" of amps into 1k and 10k square waves, which they drop 20 odd years ago, as this told a lot of what an amp was designed like.

I asked JA why this "stability test" was dropped, was it because it taking out too many unstable amps on the test bench, the answer was a coy yes, I thought this is a good test as then the consumer would stay away from such a poor design. I remember if the early Naim 250 was even in the same room as a pair of Quad57's it would blow up. That's how unstable it was.

Cheers George

Every manufacturer worth his salt uses specs to design their equipment. Then they listen. Any one who doesn't, I would give a very wide berth to.

In fact I ask the nay sayer's here to specs, if they can name one manufacture that doesn't use specs/measurements to design their equipment before they listen.

Cheers George

Yes, you should always listen in the end, but specs if you understand them as I outlined above, allow you to weed out the rubbish or unmatched stuff before you spend the bucks, no matter how the wow factor looks externally.

To dismiss specs is just buying on hope and crossed fingers. To do the homework on specs will save you time and money selecting the right matching equipment to start with. Then listen and decide on the bunch that is spec'd right for your system, instead of buying total mismatched stuff.

Cheers George