The review wehave been promising is up

Well Troy you a vanishing breed, a functioning physical store.  Unfortunately I live in the Midwest so shopping with in person isn’t going to happen.  Btw, I am at home now with Covid…third bout…and I am vaxxed up the wazoo, so please be careful.

And I defend your right to make claims about products you sell, and I wish that you may thrive and other B&M stores do the same.  Regarding your specific product claims, I have no opinion 

Troy at least makes no bones about the fact that he is a salesman.  I prefer that to others who shill for a product and don’t reveal that they have a financial interest.  MC, anyone? And Troy occasionally puts in a good word for products that he doesn’t sell.

  I stopped reading TAS when they became shameless hucksters for MQA

As long as a dealer identifies himself as such, and then makes no bones about their agenda, most of us can handle reading their comments in stride.  We don’t need banning here.  It is also entirely permissible for another poster to point out that the dealer has an agenda and therefore not necessarily be objective 

@toolbox149 

I’ll do it.  Don’t leave Eliot.  We need more people who don’t go ballistic when they find something objectionable 

Andrew

  You and I had a little back and forth in the Letters section of Fanfare a few years back, and I respect your views.  However I haven’t read TAS for a few years either. I was really turned off by the shilling for MQA.  And I reject the fundamental premise of a system trying to realize “The Absolute Sound. “. Unless my listening room expands to the size of Chicago’s Symphony Center, my system will at best try to trick me with an illusion.  And as for non Classical, who knows what is absolute? What comes out of the mix is whatever decisions the engineer makes.

  You ridicule the “Consumer Reports” type of review.  Surely we all would like to try each component in our own system and decide.  Yet is this practical?  Am I going to carry several different two hundred pound floorstanders up the stairs to my listening room and back out?  Or will the likes of dCS let me audition a $100K DAC Stack in my own home and send it back 3 days later?  Or does Air Force allow $150K turntables out of their factory for an audition?

  The typical review will state something like “Peter McGraff of Wilson spent 3 days toeing in my Alexa’s until they were perfect”.  Can a mere mortal such as I expect such service?  Or else a reviewer might state “The amp made no sound when I turned it on so I emailed the CEO and 3 hours later a truck came with a replacement and the CEO flew in from Germany to plug it in for me”.  I can’t even get Frigidaire to fix the ice maker in my refrigerator and it’s under warranty.

  I think a few decades reviewing can warp the perspective here.  Bricks and mortar stores have gone the way of the Studebaker.  In the Covid era most people don’t want to see your face anyway.  It is all very fine to be Altruistic and say “We ain’t Consumer Reports, do your own comparisons”.  However most of us plebeian non reviewer types have very limited ways to make comparisons.  This may explain some of the reason people become furious with dealers plugging their wares here, because actually evaluating these claims is so darn hard.  We need more from reviewers than what you traditionally think is your purview.  If we don’t get it, we turn elsewhere, and thus less TAS sales, less value for advertising, less money to pay for reviews

Andrew when you or your fellow music reviewers review, say, Wagners Ring, there are usually comparisons to multiple other versions.  As readers we have come to take that as a matter of course.  So why the attitude about product reviews, that comparison are not your bailiwick?  I wouldn’t expect Product X to be compared to every product out there, no more than I would expect a new Beethoven Symphony recording to be compared to the other 200 available versions.  However, most recordings are compared to a few others.  Why the different standard for gear?

Andrew

  I accept everything you say except the part about their being an “Absolute Sound”, and that issue is tangential here, imo, and could be the subject of a different thread.  
  Shortly before Art Dudley died, he reviewed some French CDP that cost around $25K.  His comparator was a Sony SACD player that he had since 2003.  Now, surely someone at Sterephile could have loaned him something for a weekend that was a more relevant comparator?  I appreciate the difficulties that may be involved, but as a reader, such a comparison is meaningless.

  I also disagree that there is some type of Universal Audio Language, an Audiophile Esperanto, that can be used successfully to describe products.  We all read these terms but overtime they come to mean different things to different listeners, and It doesn’t allow for the possibility that biologically, we tend to hear things in different subtle ways.  Trying to describe in words what one is hearing in sounds is undoubtedly a challenge, but I don’t think that having a codification of terms, and expecting the average Audiophile, not to mention the casually interested person who might pick up an issue of TAS at a bookstore, to master them is the solution.

  Happy Listening