Where have the long-time regulars gone?

CW, 12/01 only looks like a year to me, but that's ok if you'll fess up to being old. A lot of these issues that keep coming up are just boring to go into for the 20th time, and, frankly, the level of discourse has declined. There's a current thread that asks why the subject of DBT's is controversial. Some of the responses speak to that issue, but they are hard to find amid the 10,000 word essays full of non sequiturs on why DBT's are worthless in that writer's opinion.

There are some people who hang out here and just drown out any chance of having an intelligent conversation. If someone asks gee, do wires really sound different?, he's met with "If you can't tell they sound different, it's because you don't have good enough hearing, or your hifi system is not good enough to allow you to tell the difference." This is just as bad as, maybe worse than, the guys who used to answer questions like "which interconnect shoud I get, the Silver Streak or the Blue Heaven," with "save your money and go to Radio Shack, wire is wire." How about answering, "yes, I think they do, and here's why," or "no, I don't think so, and here's why."
Their labeling people "naysayers" who are responding honestly to valid questions. Too many true believers around here, and not enough skeptics.

That's one reason. Another is there arent as many lighthearted and entertaining posts.

Another reason, and this is more positive, is that many of the people who came here found this dicussion group while looking for hardware or advice about hardware, and arent looking anymore. Charlie (danvetc) as an example, isn't really in the market much anymore.

Where did they go? Some to other forums, but most to their listening rooms to spend time with their hifi systems.

Paul

I must have included an incomplete sentence above, because I certainly know the difference between "they're" and "their." Maybe I meant someting like "their calling people names is unpleasant."

"Naysayers," "idiots," "ignorant." See what I mean. We used to fight but we didnt call each other names.

I make all of my decisions on a purely subjective basis and trust my own hearing. And I think I hear differences between components and cables that my electrical engineering designer friends tell me won't hold up in a DBT. But I appreciate their point of view. They don't laugh at me and I don't call them names.

But I don't hear the variety of sonic differences among similar components, or tweaks, that a lot of people here say they hear. Sometimes, all you have to do is consider the quality of the thinking expressed by someone to know that you don't need to try his favorite tweak. That isn't ignorance or idiocy, just a little applied intelligence.

There used to be some guys who would butt in, as I said above, to answer "which" questions with non-responsive rude diatribes. Now, we have the opposite. Honest questions about "whether," are met with mindless drivel so long you don't even want to try to find the responsive comments in the thread.

Right now, most of the people who post here who would be counted among the wire is wire crowd seem pretty reasonable. This used to be a place where both sides could peacefully co-exist, unlike audioasylum, where you can't say "DBT," and audioreview.com, where you can't say any two things sound different from each other.

I almost mentioned missing "Dug" earlier, but didnt want to impliedly criticize the decisions that led to his departure.