The review wehave been promising is up

Typical TAS crap review. He says it’s the best he’s heard then conveniently never mentions what else he’s heard much less compares it directly with a comparable competitor. While the 432 is clearly a very competent product, without any context this is just another “review in a bubble” where the reviewer relies only on very fleeting auditory memory while singing the review product’s praises. The review would’ve been much more useful and informative if the reviewer made any effort whatsoever to put the 432’s performance in the context of at least one other competitive product or at minimum bothered to simply share what other products he’s heard that form the basis for his opinions. But that would take more work and involve accountability for the assertions being made in the review, and we surely can’t have that. Argh!

I agree with above that the review out of context of direct comparison is pretty useless. 

Virtually all TAS reviews are like this.  Never bother to do comparisons, and frequently they don’t even list the equipment in the reference system so you can’t even infer what they were using as a baseline.  And, when they do bother to list the reference equipment they frequently leave out the reference piece that would be comparable to the review component.  They go to great pains to not be held accountable for any of the crap they just feel like spewing out.  Useless, self-affirming drivel is all it really is. 

In my opinion the difference is that dealers/manufacturers like Duke, Verdant, and Atmasphere seem to be objective and don't always push their products on members. They offer genuine assistance, even if it means steering you down a different road.
 

What’s even more important is what those dealers/manufacturers mentioned above DON’T do.  They NEVER put down another member’s recommendations or another competitive product.  Dave and Troy have a long history of doing this (they’ve done it to me several times) to push their own products that to me completely crosses the line versus just mentioning their products or providing otherwise unbiased/useful info.  IMHO if a dealer or manufacturer gets on here and starts bad-mouthing other products or member recommendations to push their own products they should be banned from this site.  The whole idea of this site is to help each other by sharing valuable and often hard-won knowledge and personal experience, so when a dealer gets on here and undermines this in a biased effort to boost their own sales it damages not only the member experience but also the reputation of this site so I hope Audiogon gets more serious about stopping this egregious behavior. 

if anyone here has owned more integrated amps please chime in. This is what a dealer can bring to the forums perspective and experience. unfortunately many of you guys just want someone to parrot the product you were thinking of and take offense if another product is mentioned.

No, most people here don’t mind that at all, and notice nobody here ever complains about Verdant, Atmasphere, Duke, etc. Why do you think that is? It’s because they just stick to what their products offer and never say their products are “better” than anyone else’s — that’s arrogant and for us to decide and not a biased dealer. Also, none of those other dealers EVER demean another product or other member’s recommendations here, both of which you have done numerous times in the past. But you can’t seem to understand this simple concept and instead continue to delude yourself that you’re somehow providing a useful service here by saying why your products are better than another product for whatever reason. Until you get why this behavior pisses people off — IF you ever get it, and I have my serious doubts — you’ll continue to fan the flames and anger members here.

Same reason you wouldn’t compare a Porsche to a Civic. 

I don’t necessarily disagree with sns and, as noted above, the magazine uses several platforms to let readers know what our favorite products are at all price points, both collectively (Editor’s Choice) and individually (Golden Ears.

See? This is the kind of BS logic TAS uses to justify not simply making appropriate comparisons in a review. We’re supposed to weed through Editor’s Choice and Golden Ears lists and then somehow gleen how the review product would compare despite the respective reviews being done in completely different rooms and in completely different systems? Gimme a break!!!

And references to specific competing components do make it into plenty of our reviews.

Uh, really? Do you even read your own magazine? I’d put it at no more than 10%(and that’s being generous) of TAS reviews that provide any kind of useful product comparisons.

But, to state the obvious, the ultimate "reference" for us is "the absolute sound"—live musical performance—and reviews that employ the descriptive language developed by TAS decades ago and that present details of a writer’s subjective experience can also help quite a bit in making a purchasing decision.

But what about recordings made in a studio and made to sound like studio recordings? Are they supposed to sound like live performances too? Are systems supposed to alter studio recordings to sound live the way YOU think the live performance should sound? Bogus! The fact is THERE IS NO ABSOLUTE SOUND except what the recording engineer laid down and how well a system recreates it in a listening room.

And that you’ve constructed some ancient mythical language that somehow is supposed to help a reader weed through a reviewer’s words to somehow magically understand how a product sounds based solely on the reviewer’s individual “subjective” impressions is absurd and precisely why direct product comparisons are so helpful. Many is the time when writing a review I thought I had a product’s sound nailed only to have at least some of my impressions shown to be partially or completely wrong upon substituting a competitive product. Had I written reviews based solely on my own “subjective” impressions almost all my reviews would’ve been incorrect or at least somewhat misleading to readers. That’s precisely why publications like Soundstage! REQUIRE a comparisons section in every review, and each reviewer needs to have a comparable component in their system or they don’t review the product. Product comparisons improve accuracy and usefulness of reviews to readers and holds reviewers (and the magazine) accountable for their observations, but we certainly can’t have any of that TAS world now can we? Plus, it’d involve so much more work and effort on the part of the reviewer meaning you couldn’t crank out as many reviews - oh the horror!

But @aquint by all means feel free to keep twisting yourself in knots trying to defend and justify TAS’ outdated and relatively ineffective review policies. As someone mentioned above, in a world where quality audio dealers are few and far between people rely on product reviews now more than ever and thus need ACCURATE AND ROBUST reviews to help them make purchase decisions, and flowery rhetoric waxing poetic about what a reviewer “thinks” they hear without any stated checks and balances is basically useless and self-important drivel.

I’m not certain how having one or two comparison products on hand makes everything right, when there are dozens of potential competing products. Chances are that the comparison product I have on hand isn’t going to be the one you’re interested in.

And there it is!!! This is the common excuse used by TAS reviewers to defend not comparing review samples to another product. It’s an utter garbage argument as the comparison product, even if not the one a reader is interested in, is likely reviewed other places against other review products and thus a point of relative reference can begin to be made. Humans are great at determining relative differences between options but not good at judging things on their own — hence the value of product comparisons.

That said, I am going to try to do better on the issue of comparisons. Then, the forum loudmouths can move on to giving other reasons why they no longer read TAS.

Nice. There’s the TAS arrogance in full view. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with TAS reviews, it’s we the readers/loudmouths no longer reading TAS who are clearly making up reasons for no longer reading TAS who are in the wrong. When in doubt, blame the customer! Great business strategy there. It’s much easier to think it’s our problem than to honestly look inward and figure out the real reasons we’re not reading anymore — kinda like it’s easier to write a “review in a bubble” than it is to incorporate meaningful product comparisons. It requires more effort and to embrace accountability rather than make lame excuses and blame others, but there it is.

That’s why the lexicon that HP and others developed can be so helpful. Employed thoughtfully, it can serve as a point of reference that individual product reviews can point to.

Yes, a point of reference in one system and one room, which is in no way comparable to hearing the same piece of equipment in another system in another room much less a completely different piece of equipment in that scenario — way, way too many variables to even begin making a valid or meaningful comparison, which is why comparing components in the same room and system is so valuable and useful to readers.

And @aquint you misinterpreted my use of caps in my prior post — they were made to add emphasis and not made out of anger at all. But HELL YES (ok, this one may be a bit out of anger) I’m angry that TAS eschews doing product comparisons that almost all readers would prefer to have, and I’m angrier still that TAS writers continually try to defend the practice of producing “reviews in a bubble” through very shoddy and BS excuses like the one you used above. As a former reviewer it would’ve made my life a HELLUVA (this one’s for emphasis Andrew in case you’re confused) lot easier if I didn’t have to bother making those pesky product comparisons. I could’ve written twice as many reviews without all the added time/effort involved in doing that, but my reviews wouldn’t have been nearly as valid or useful to readers had I done that. But you go on cranking out your reviews as is and kidding yourself that TAS is above it all and that its flawed review process is the better way to go for readers. I’ll just say that if I’m actually interested in a product and really want to get a good idea of how it sounds, TAS is about the last place I’ll go because after reading a “review in a bubble” I still have very little idea of what the product really sounds like. I can’t think of a worse comment about a product review than that, and it really encapsulates the ultimate problem with TAS and its lax review “standards.”  But I applaud you for considering to do more product comparisons in the future, and if more of your fellow writers do the same you’ll likely get me back along with many other readers because TAS does review a lot of very desirable equipment.  I honestly have my fingers crossed that this comes to pass.

With the 432 EVO Aeon review, as Lalin pointed out, I do have a Baetis server that’s active in my system and I use a lot and, of course, compared to the Belgium product. But how many readers have had experience with that one? I’ve reviewed a couple of other Baetis models, an Aurender, and a T+A but that’s still such a minuscule part of the server universe.

Strange — can you point out the part of the review where you compared it to the Baetis because I don’t see it. And I would’ve found it very helpful to hear your impressions of how the Aurender and T+A pieces compare to the 432 as I suspect most others would too as it adds a significant level of perspective as to how the 432 sounds. And here we go yet again with the ridiculous contention that comparisons aren’t useful unless someone has the component themselves or that you’re not using every product in that segment. Bogus!!! There are other reviews of the comparison products out there where they’re compared to other products, and by hearing these multiple accounts and comparisons it lends a much greater ability to hone in on a product’s true and relative sonic properties with this additional context. If you can’t see this you’re either drinking too much of the TAS kool-aid or engaging in willful ignorance.

Perhaps even stranger still, if the Baetis was in your system and as you say you used it for comparison purposes in the review, why does it not appear in your stated list of associated equipment as you apparently saw fit to list every other piece except the Baetis? Hmmm. How in the world were we supposed to know you were comparing the 432 to the Baetis? ESP? Hidden somewhere in your unique and mythical TAS prose? Face it — the only explanation is you were hiding the Baetis so you couldn’t actually be pinned down on any of your observations or assertions — there is no other defensible explanation here. For reference, here’s the list of associated system equipment with the one curious omission…

For the review period, I used two DACs, a Bricasti Design M1 and the Ideon Absolute Epsilon [see RH’s full review in this issue]. A Transparent USB Premium cable connected server and DAC. Analog electronics included a Pass Labs XP-22 linestage and Pass XA 60.8 monoblock amplifiers; loudspeakers were either Magico M1s or the TAD E1-TX system [review pending]. Local files were stored on a Synology NAS and reached the Aeon via a Fidelizer Etherstream switch connected to my router.

And I particularly like this little bit…

I do listen to a lot of the same music with each review component, using the vocabulary of high-performance audio to describe the sound to myself and to the magazine’s end user—and that allows me to have an impression of what’s really good and what’s merely OK.

Ah the mystical language that apparently tells all if you have earned the secret decoder ring. It’s great that you can judge for yourself what is great or merely OK, but what about the poor reader? Perhaps you can point to one of your reviews where we can clearly see where a product was “merely OK.” I won’t hold my breath. The point of an audio review magazine is not so YOU can identify areas where or which components are “really good and what’s merely OK” but that the READERS get a sense of that, and this extremely important aspect is where TAS reviews fail miserably and why I (and several other people here) no longer read TAS reviews.

@aquint What your last post once again showed in plain relief was the TAS standard and frankly silly defense of why you don’t do product comparisons along with a stark example of how you actively hide comparable review system components so the reader has no knowledge of your basis for your review assertions and conclusions. As a reviewer and as I’ve said before, the only reasons to conduct reviews in this manner are laziness, the ability to crank out more reviews faster, and/or to avoid any semblance of possible accountability for both yourself or the magazine. I only continue to point out these significant shortcomings because you and TAS at large continue to defend your less-than-rigorous review policies with absurd and thin arguments that most seasoned audiophiles will see right through for the desperate garbage they are. But, and to end on a more positive and hopeful note, the fact that you’re considering doing more comparisons in the future is a huge potential step in the right direction for both the effectiveness and usefulness of your reviews as well as TAS’ overall reputation as a more credible source of truly valuable information.

I don’t have a problem with posts by dealers in general or Dave Lalin in particular. If I go into a dealer’s store I expect him to try to sell me the gear he sells.

Except this isn’t his store you’re walking into, it’s a forum for people to share their advice and opinions.  As stated before, several other dealers/manufacturers post here without issue because they provide information and, unlike audiotroy, don’t promote their products as being better than others or claiming the other recommendations made members here are inferior to the product he sells.  THAT’S the problem and what other vendors here DO NOT do.  See the difference?

this stuff really gets you riled up doesn’t it? While I appreciate your concern for us, the solution is don’t read his posts, don’t reply to them. You would be surprised how much that would eliminate the problem of lengthy threads about misbehaving dealers and bring you and others much peace of mind.

@tomcy6 I see my post went completely over your head — guess you’re more of a visual learner. I’m far from the only one here who has issues with audiotroy’s behavior on this site because we see the danger to the site’s integrity if more like him are allowed come along. Anyway, fortunately for us you’re not a moderator here and hopefully audiotroy will continue to be a one-off outlier here. Maybe someone here will make a video showing some of their prior posts so maybe you’ll finally be able to understand the brewing cancer they are on this site.

Tough crowd.

@aquint Not really, if you’re honest and deal in facts. Otherwise, yeah you’ll find this a little rough especially if you’re not accustomed to being held accountable for what you say. Speaking of which, still waiting, as per my prior post, for you to point out where specifically you compared the 432 with the Baetis in the review as you said you did. Also, if you could explain why you didn’t even include the Baetis in your list of associated equipment in the review that would be very enlightening.

• @aquint So, you started with this excuse…

With the 432 EVO Aeon review, as Lalin pointed out, I do have a Baetis server that’s active in my system and I use a lot and, of course, compared to the Belgium product. But how many readers have had experience with that one?

Now it turns into this…

Actually, I wasn’t able to complete the head-to-head comparison of Baetis to 432 EVO that I’d hoped to. The Aeon has only a USB output; the Baetis has USB, AES/EBU, SPDIF, and HDMI. The USB interface is an upgrade, employing an SOtM card and in mid-review, it stopped working. I’d developed an impression that the Aeon at least held its own against the Baetis but I couldn’t do the additional comparisons I wanted to…The Baetis became irrelevant, in terms of this review, and thus wasn’t even mentioned as "associated equipment."

Please stop. You’re just twisting your excuses in knots to try to explain your inexplicable behavior, and I’m being kind here.  First it was the standard TAS “not everybody owns the other product” excuse, now it’s the I didn’t have the proper connection to do a valid comparison excuse. That crap don’t fly here man, and every seasoned audiophile here will see right through it for exactly what or is, so again I say just cut your losses and stop throwing out these BS rationales or this will get nothing but worse for you as others start to chime in because the truth is plain to see here. I don’t like pressing you at all here man, but I also won’t let BS pass as I always expect to get called out on my statements whether here or in professional reviews and I accept that accountability as part of the terrain. I recommend you do the same, and I really hope you and your colleagues at TAS embrace doing more comparisons in the future because I think you could offer so much more to potential audio buyers than you do now.