Great, thanks fellas. Isn’t education and knowledge a wonderful thing? ;-) This kind of information was regularly included in reviews in Audio Magazine (except those of TAS alumni Anthony Cordesman), and Stereophile when Gordon Holt and Dick Olsher were doing them. Harry Pearson and his pals at TAS had no technical education or knowledge, and set in motion the subjective-only style (no bench tests, no circuit descriptions) of hi-fi reviewing.
At one of his S. California instore appearances in the 1980’s (to introduce a new model), Bill Johnson told the assemble crowd a story about sending Pearson a new ARC pre-amp (I don’t recall which model). Bill soon thereafter received a call from Pearson, who told him it was defective. He had Pearson send it back, and of course tested it when it arrived back in Minnesota, where the pre-amp worked fine.
Johnson asked Pearson a series of questions to get to the bottom of the problem, and soon had his answer: Pearson had installed shorting plugs into the pre-amp’s unused output jacks! He knew enough to know that shorting plugs can prevent noise getting into unused input jacks, but not enough to know that you shouldn’t short output jacks. Golden ears, perhaps, but is that all that is required to be a professional hi-fi reviewer?