Bottom of the line solid state ARC preamp. The same went for CJ with their solid state pre's. They sounded hard and sterile, while the more expensive tube gear was still top notch.
Is there any bad sounding high-end gear--?
I was reading the thread here today about biased reviewers-
it got me thinking, out of the stuff which is reviewed in the publications which serve the high-end arena, is there really any bad sounding gear?----I am talking about from what I call the golden era of High-end, 1990---2000, stuff from the major players like ARC, CJ, Krell, MLevinson, Jadis---etc-----I use this time frame as this was the pre-Chinese era when most gear was from the US, we also saw stuff from Italy, France and Swiss made stuff.
When I have purchased something and not liked it, I always struck it up to a system mismatch----
If anyone can provide what they bought and really thought it was terrible, I'd be interested to know what it was.
it got me thinking, out of the stuff which is reviewed in the publications which serve the high-end arena, is there really any bad sounding gear?----I am talking about from what I call the golden era of High-end, 1990---2000, stuff from the major players like ARC, CJ, Krell, MLevinson, Jadis---etc-----I use this time frame as this was the pre-Chinese era when most gear was from the US, we also saw stuff from Italy, France and Swiss made stuff.
When I have purchased something and not liked it, I always struck it up to a system mismatch----
If anyone can provide what they bought and really thought it was terrible, I'd be interested to know what it was.