Thuaveta

Mea maxima culpa: the April 2015 and December 2013 reviews are identical. The rest of the points - first and foremost that when you call an industry flak a member of your magazine's family, you have no place lecturing on ethics, and that there's a degree of permeability between the roles that is problematic (to atone, and lay off Stereophile a bit and snipe one at the competition, Srajan Ebaen's pre-6moons overlap between Soliloquy and Soundstage! comes to mind here) within the industry.

You mean the two months between March 2014 and April 2015, @John_Atkinson ?

Should I infer the NAD D 3020 is not an audio product ? As everyone who knows anything about advertising, being director of communications for a company has nothing at all to do with writing. As for what can be inferred from what I'm saying, maybe you should blame the idiot who referred to the director of communication for a company whose products a magazine covers as being part of said magazine's "extended family" for the misunderstanding... then again, you're probably too busy lecturing about journalism ethics for that.

There you go - would you happen to know who wrote this on their Facebook page, @John_Atkinson ? Or should I just have framed things differently, and talked about "writing for magazine y and working for company z" ? "Yesterday was Stephen Mejias's last day as Stereophile's Assistant Editor. Stephen, shown in the photo helping me wrangle speakers in March 2001, joined the magazine in August 2000 and grew into one of Stereophile's most popular writers. His final "Entry Level" column will be in our June issue. Stephen has joined cable manufacturer AudioQuest but remains part of the extended Stereophile family."

The reporting on Fanfare's practices are about a decade old by now, and he lists both Fanfare and TAS as current gigs on LinkedIn... I kinda find the full-on bribery of individual writers that's being theorised here a hard sale, in part because (please correct me if I'm wrong), I'd be surprised if, at this point, anyone but the editors was actually making a living from working for the HiFi publications, let alone a living where they'd be able to afford anything like the gear they review. Access, chuminness, incompetent or yellow editors, a way to make a hobby cheaper through long-term-loans-or-rebates, permeability between being in sales for company x and writing for magazine y (which happened at Stereophile not that long ago), all of which aren't exactly known to conform to the kinds of ethical norms one would expect of people not in the job of cheerleading an industry, sure, and these all, especially in combination, explain the MQA debacle better than cash for exposure would.

I'll buy pay-to-play for the editors (Fanfare Magazine, whom @ARQuint proudly works for is an example of that), but it doesn't necessarily trickle down. Totally agree that MQA absolutely isn't a 1st amendement issue: to me, it's more a bunch of losers wanting belly-rubs from some non-entity than anything else.

There probably simply isn't enough money in reviewing products for magazines to buy the writers, no matter how low their moral standards. Access / buddy politics with "famous" HiFi types (that no one cares about or has heard of outside the microcosm), "rebates" on super expensive gear, OTOH...

I just don't understand how, or quite frankly if, these people think. The guy opens his piece with two paragraphs about how what consumers want is dynamics over resolution, and high quality artwork over nothing at all, and then he welcomes the coming of BS, god of remasters and commoditised musak you stream in the background.

You understand wrong. I don't think of myself as an expert on either the business of MQA, or the technological aspects of MQA. I am however lucid enough to see that they're incompetent on many levels. The only door I've shut is one of civility: I'll always assume that the person I'm dealing with is intelligent, a courtesy that no one at MQA, and few within the ranks of its supporters, seems to have extended to anyone else. Try asking for that brand for a change.

For someone so intent on repeating how smart you are, you don't seem to be very good at listening. So let's try this: they're not interested. The three main reasons they're not is that they're arrogant, they're crooks, and they're cowards, as should be evident to anyone with even a passing interest in the matter. There has been ample evidence of both the symptoms and the conclusion for years now, and they have had ample opportunity to fix things. Ask yourself why they haven't reached out to @The Computer Audiophile to organise what you're proposing.

Given the civility police seems to think that factually calling out Bob Stuart for using con man tactics and being a failed businessman are "attacks", and his own history at attempting to censor discussion here, what you seem to be asking @The Computer Audiophile to do is essentially gloss over what Bob Stuart really is, in exchange for... offering Bob Stuart a free audience ? ONCE MORE ? What a fantastic deal !!!

So much this. How stupid do MQA think people are for them to assume people wouldn't understand this ? Just wait until they spin it as "You see ? Even Chris Connaker's finally come around and is publicly admitting that in the real world, bandwidth is a problem".

Nonexistent issue ? What about that someone ! And those, right there ?

Oh, but that should be obvious to you, there'd probably be less antagonism towards hifi rag writers if there'd been competent technical reporting on the claims (instead of leaving that to the readership), and if you lot had made real amends, instead of doubling down in defense of the culprit once the technical (un)reality of BS's claims were made public...

Without going into the technical stuff (which others are way more qualified to do than I am), the aspects of MQA that the technically-sentient have criticised are foundational to the rest. If MQA's technical claims unquestionably checked out, then there wouldn't be a hint that BS is trying to con anyone, and there would be no attacks on his motivations or his honesty. There's a paradox in your thinking though, which is that if BS was proven to be technically incompetent, then one could think that he's just past his prime, and not actively trying to swindle. Him trying to project authority (something that's reinforced by the Meridian fan / old-buddies-from-the-HiFi press crowd) makes things worse, because it makes it more difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt he'd have if he was just a failed businessman - his technical competence is what makes him go from "somewhat slimy" to "full-on mendacious". Well, if there hadn't been about a gazillion claims about magical stones and the extraordinary directional capabilities of cryogenically treated wires before that, maybe...