To kind of go on aroc's story, I was having my little sister listen to my Roger Waters' "Amused to Death" on some Thiels I had years ago, just to confirm what I was hearing, that I wasn't imagining things. It was hear first experience with the soundstage and she was impressed. After hearing some other discs she was like "so how do you know which CD's have this feature and which don't?" I said, "they all do." "ohhhhh, (pause; change of thought) well then what's the point of having two speakers if you're just trying to put sounds back in the middle?" "So the sound can be all over in front of you, move left to right." "ohhhhh, (another pause) I see (kind of nodding her head)"
The other one I found funny was when I was selling a tube amp to an individual over the net. I guess the way I had described the amp had kind of underplayed it based on his experiences/ frame's of reference. He had just gotten a new pair of NHT SuperOne's to go with his receiver (I didn't know this was what he was upgrading from) and even then, once on the phone, he started describing the soundstage of these NHT's like the reviews you'd read of the next $20,000 superspeaker. The way he had used up his words, I guess if he heard some real high-end speakers, he wouldn't have anything to say. And all the while I had been describing the amp as a "decent little amp." So I lost the sale cause I think someone else fluffed the language a little better with there product. This is why I'm not a big fan of using up gushing adjectives to decribe stuff. Its really hard to describe sound and you'll see the reviewers claim this speaker is the new reference and next year there's another that gets the same print. Its kind of like crying wolf. Stereophile gave the Wilson X-1's product of the year in '95 and then the next issue in a face-off between the Grande Utopia the reviewer said he like the utopia better (just one or two months later). Not to mention there were lots of other $60k+ speakers out there that they had never even reviewed. Or over on planethifi the Merlin floorstander were described as "some have called nearly perfect" and then the big Von Schwiekerts are "a world beating speaker systems." Or one review of the MBL radialstrahlers had decided that with these speakers, for once the electronics were the weakest link. I was like ya right, a good plasma driver runnin' 1000hz on up would certianly give them a run for their money, and they've been around 50 years. After awhile it all kind of reads the same. This is why I like measurements with discussion about them. I kind of wandered.