Your most disappointing purchase or audition?

Tubes108, my apologies. I lost sight you were just participating in the thread.

I bought a pair of the now-discontinued B&W 703 speakers and ended up returning them. The pair were store demos and were well broken in. Really muddy sounding. I ended up getting a pair of terrific Triangle speakers.

As far as the "great review/disappointing sounding" syndrome mentioned by a few folks posting, I have learned to immediately discount any review where the reviewer writes about his long personal friendship with a manufacturer's owner. Also, any reviewer who combines his or her (although, it's always a him) vacations with a factory tour merits extra scrutiny.

Audiolabrynth, it was only that one particular pair I'm talking about, original Novachrons, guessing 15 years ago. No use beating a dead horse, old history, I only weighed in due to the unfair beating it looked like Tubes 108 was starting to get.

Kiddman, Tubes108 was referring to a set of MA-1s.

I have made plenty of mistakes in my career and I try to be the first to admit that. However I still have troubles with Tubes108's testimony. Again, we would not have built a pair of amps wherein one used stranded wire and the other solid wire. We have sent parts to customers for field repairs in the past but there is still something wrong with this picture that has me suspicious. We have a fairly relaxed warranty - its transferable, and while usually three years, depending on circumstances we will extend the warranty quite a lot further.

For example one time a vendor sold us some bad power transformers. It turned out that their faults could not be tested accurately on the bench and a number of them made it into the field. The company policy is we replace them under warranty regardless of the age of the amp.

Now what is bugging me here is that if there was an under-rated resistor value in the output section, that would have required a complete rebuild of the output section itself to repair. I know I would have felt really nervous about someone doing that in the field and it seems unlikely that I would have allowed that as there are some very critical connections in the output section- instead we would have handled it here.

**At the very least, these amps would have been bought used, and likely modified- they did not ship from us to Tubes108!**

Further, there is no place in the preamp wherein a diode could be installed backwards such that it could damage a resistor, let alone one that was part of the Caddock resistor package option!! FWIW though, some of the Caddocks are gray to start with, while others of the same value are black. If a diode was installed incorrectly, the preamp could not have passed testing or the listening testes. It would have blow fuses or one channel would have had no gain!

IOW the more Tubes108 reveals, the more I doubt his testimony.

Tubes108 cannot be contacted through this site like many members can, so there has been no mechanism to contact him directly to sort this out. His testimony isn't credible so I am forced to believe he has an agenda. He has certainly made no effort to contact us, which IMO would be something that someone on the up and up would have done at this point.

In short, I think this is all made up.

Tubes,

If I've followed this correctly, you purchased your amps new. So I'm curious:

Which dealer did you buy your amps from?

Is it possible that your dealer took back a mint appearing pair of amps that had been unknowingly (or knowingly, I suppose) modified by a customer and subsequently re-sold them to you as new?

The reason that I ask is because someone, somewhere in the timeline is simply not being truthful. Maybe (hopefully?) it was a third party to this thread.

Ralph has a boatload of credibility around here with many folks, including me. I intend in no way to disparage you with these comments (there's absolutely no basis for that, either), but it's hard to reconcile your story with Ralph's response.

From my own experience with an early production SA-1, I can tell you that Atmasphere was straight up with me regarding product limitations and shortfall in expectations. IIRC, there was an early factory mod that Atmasphere implemented to improve the flexibility of mating that model with trickier loads. Ralph extended that offer to me even though the problem was in my loudspeaker matching decision rather than any inherent problem with the product, itself. Your account is so sharply at odds with my own experience with Atmasphere that I'm left scratching my head.

However, if your starting point was different than Ralph expected (because the amps had been modified), I suppose that it's possible the discrepancies in these two narratives could be reconciled. Ralph's repair/installation advice could have been misguided if the circuit that he was working on was different than he thought it was (i.e., modified). That still leaves some potentially imprecise work when the units were returned for repair, but that kind of thing (unfortunately) happens from time to time, even when all involved are well inentioned.

Beyond that, I will say that this is one of the oddest episodes that I've ever encountered in these forums.