I have 3 more product to do my listening tests on (sorry Geoff another one came in that I have to do) and then I’m going to do Geoff’s NDM. I’ll do a thread on TuneLand once I get rolling.
There’s two clear sides to this hobby that I started a thread on a while ago. "talk but not walk?" I started that thread on the request of Agon members emailing me privately about the state of audio forums and how far off the hobby track they are. This was not my first experience with audio forum weirdness. On the Stereophile forum I went through something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I was sucked into the most ugly audio experience of my life. I didn’t know what internet trolling even was till I went through it first hand. IMO the Stereophile forum is permanently damaged goods now. As well it has become a graveyard of activity since (haven’t looked at it in quite a while, maybe it has changed, don’t know don’t care). JA has lost my respect as a forum mod, so be it. To me it shows his lack of caring for the hobby he has profited from so majorly or maybe I just don’t appreciate his sense of humor. I’ve told him this directly so I’ve done my duty. At the same time I respect his right to run his promotions his own way. It’s a little on the funny side to be honest now that HEA is on it’s last leg in many regards. If HEA is in his care at the moment, JA has one ill child to look after and maybe he himself has been slipping in spoonfuls of rat poison from time to time just for the grins of it. A little British humor of my own.
Posting "talk not walk" I knew exactly what was going to happen or at least thought I did. I’m sure I received well over a hundred emails telling me to give it to those who belittled our lifestyle and dumbed down the hobby so badly. My response though to alot of those folks was does it really matter. HEA now is a tiny representation of what it once was and have could have been, so me adding my hammer might be too little too late anyway. The speeding decline is gaining volume daily as it is. However it did flush out the active trolls here and makes it easy to spot them. Now you can look at a thread and within the first page choose who you are going to talk to and who to ignore.
But
This isn’t the end of the story because what I was missing several years ago is something I have always made a part of my life’s work but somehow wasn’t able to read between the lines because I was trying to understand two people in particular through my eyes instead of theirs. My moto is "everything affects everything else" and as much as I understood this with Tuning in the case of Geoff and May I wasn’t grasping this humanly. On one side I was faithful to both of them and on my own did the experiments they suggested. When I was asked about the results I gave a faithful account. When not asked I didn’t volunteer but still did the testing. I did the listening tests because it’s important to me to be in the know. I don’t necessarily care about someone else’s physics, in this hobby they’re a dime a dozen and everyone wants to be the audio golden ear guru for all time lol. Big deal :) At the same time everything really does affect everything else, that’s the way our planet and life itself works and always has. Personalities are just the icing on the cake. We can choose to scrape off that icing anytime we want and get down to the business of listening and that’s my cup of tea.
The guy who doesn’t take the time to "do" this life experiment and still talks about it as if they know what they are talking about is the guy short changing his or her own life, I’m not that guy. I have no rights if I don’t explore the possibilities regardless who I might, or what I might think, the person presenting the idea is about. Geoff Kait is as legitimate as I choose to make him, but only if I take the time to respect his ideas, products and relevance. Over the last 3 years I would guess I’ve had 30 or so audio toys sent to me to explore the possible contribution to the sound. In every case they have indeed affected the audio. To the positive or negative completely depends on the application and desired results.
A few days ago I received my sample from Geoff and my responsibility is to find where I think the product might work the best and for who, looking for what. Geoff at this point is as high on my list as the company who sent us their $25,000.00 mono block amps. Wouldn’t it be totally cool if Geoff created the perfect CD tune? I think it would be anyway. Wouldn't it be great if Geoff really was the smartest guy on campus? Wouldn't it also be great if all Geoff has been trying to do is get us to relax a little, and we simply didn't understand his sense of humor? Wouldn't it be great if at the end of the day we realized we were all family? If so, I think some of us should still hold Geoff down and give him a serious torture tickling from time to time.
Michael Green