Thuaveta

That seems like quite a bit of trust to put in an institution that also hosted a conference about the fundamental importance of power cords.

May I suggest spending a bit of time with (real) 7 year olds ? 😋 More seriously though, and back on topic, maybe that instead of engaging in pub psychology, @John_Atkinson could instead heed Chris' suggestion, and use his superior command of the English language to write a kind request to allow for the use of a snippet of that recording that he appears to purport holds evidence of the birth of a new world, especially given all the embarrassment he could spare his luminary friend of 20 years by providing such evidence... think of the kind of person one must be to refuse something that simple to such a dear friend...

And to quote a more patient mind than mine:

Well certainly, technology isn't yours.

Should one understand that the senior technical editor of Stereophile doesn't know that you can fix a simple annoyance like this when you go to the top right (username), then scroll down to "account setting", then click on "edit settings" (on the right of the overview) one can selectively pick what to follow, or not. Including alerts when someone mentions your name. And that, to top it all, he's bitching about it ?

Wow... looks like none of the reviewers that make up the EISA awards panel have access to measuring gear (and neither does anybody at (Sound & Vision).

If you're in the process of reviewing the Hegel, and it does the same type of back/forth switching as the iFis and the dCS', would you mind considering asking them a rough estimate of how many man-hours went into getting that to work ? (and yeah, it's totally to quiet the "but... but... but... MQA is FREE to the consumer !!!" type arguments some of the shills like to try)

I'll leave this here (it's in the context of the AES paper that came to the conclusion MQA is not Copernicean in its importance, Ms Generale is who presented it) for the forgetful:

May one ask why demanding of MQA that they fully cooperate with the anti-MQA representation, including by supplying oft-requested sample files is not a pre-condition, or would that be vicious, unfriendly, irritable, or accusatory ?

They might not be journalists, but they also aren't idiots. They clearly understand that part of what they're selling is aspirational, and you're (partially) wrong in your assumption. If you look at Stereophile's self-reported readership figures, then track that to household income percentiles, an average Stereophile reader's is 60th percentile, and a median reader is in the 52nd percentile. Hardly 1-percenters... If I'm correct, the cheapest A-class system you can buy is around 3k for amps, 2500 for source (it's "A+", but whatevs), 16k for speakers (which are now old enough to be found 2nd hand around 8k), and then a couple of hundred in cables (why you'd want to do that over BlueJeans is beyond me, but well whatevs). The Kiis are also class A, so assuming you do a bit of 2nd hand shopping around and don't buy into the cable myth, you're at their reference level, with decent synergy (the speakers in the separates system were used for show demos by the amp manufacturer) for somewhere between 10 and 15k, which is horrifying to normal people, but not all that bad as far as audiophilia is concerned, and in the states, probably more in 5-percenter than 1-percenter. Now if we go back to Stereophile's self-reported figures, the average system cost is 10k, with about 30% of the readership having a system over 10k, which makes that 15k system with at least two of the elements (Benchmark amp and Revel speakers) borne of solid scientific principles and engineering all that more sensible. What's interesting to me, and where you are right that the reviews of ultra-expensive toys make no sense, is that only 5,6% of Stereophile's readership self-reports a system worth over 25k... So maybe, just maybe, Stereophile's real question, or answer, is "how much better would the world be if one threw science out the window, and entered the world of fantasy".

There you go 😋

Well, that's one of the things they're selling. The other is that you, too, have superhuman hearing, and that the only way to reveal and nuture it is buying the really expensive stuff they're pimping.

Good to see you finally address the meat of the matter !

Assuming he did so at a price substantially lower than he could've gotten from ex-dem at a dealership, I'd consider it to be a valid question (sorry, @The Computer Audiophile), as I'd hope someone with your track record as a reviewer would, but then again, I also tend to think people working for a publication that purports the type of gravitas Stereophile does should be held to much higher standards than someone who runs a publication they treat with the contempt they treat CA / AS.