Did you feel the same thing when Infinity dominated the scene vis a vis the then unheard of priced $25K IRSs?
That speaker was before my time. I have no problems with dominance. But being a student of business history, business dominance is usually very shortlived. Look at the turnover in the Fortune 500 every 10 years. Companies become successful because of certain innovation. Then they fail to innovate and die or become a lot less relevant. Kodak ruled cameras until digital photography took over. IBM was a juggernaut for years, and then mainframes became virtually irrelevant, and IBM almost went under in the early 1990’s. It was unthinkable! Then it was Microsofts turn to be the big gorilla. They were hated by everyone, and had the justice department on their ass. But what is destroying them is also a failure to innovate. Now with PC purchases dropping at record rates and applications moving to the cloud, Microsoft is on a path to irrelevancy. Google is a big gorilla today, but with the world moving to small screen, mobile devices, their advertising revenue will greatly suffer. And although Google may not disappear, they may become irrelevant if they don’t innovate.
As for audio, we only have half baked opinions about what is best. There were very few comparisons done. We just have a few guys yelling out that they think some speaker is the best. Take the Q5 as an example. People talk about its transparency. But it’s not as transparent as the Martin Logan CLX. So it may be more transparent than other big speakers. But how many speakers was it compared to? YG, Wilson, and others may have something to say about that. But the lack of comparisons really hurt TAS. When watching a sporting event, we all want that expert analyst to explain what’s going on. Instead we get the equivalent of a bunch of drunken fans in a bar yelling their player or team is the best.
We already beat up Valin like a drum, so let me start beating on his partner, Harley. Harley’s work is absolutely worthless because he approaches everything he writes about as a brand new idea. Using the previous example of transparency, he goes on and on for pages describing what transparency is. The problem for the readers is that we all know what transparency is. Transparency is not a revolutionary concept to his readers and doesn’t need to be defined. Instead, he should be looking to make connections to something his readers are already familiar with. But he fails to connect an old, easily understood idea to something new, he comes across as mumbling and adds no value to the conversation. He has heard a lot of gear in his life, and his readers have heard some of that gear also. He would be so much more effective if he just connected his findings to stuff people are familiar with. How does the transparency of the Q7 compare with Alexandria XLF? The new YG? Martin Logan CLX? What a concept! Communications 101! And transparency is just one element... Stereophile, while not comprehensive in their comparisons, at least tries to do this. For TAS, on the other hand, looking for the state of art, it’s a must to help those chasing the dream of a live Dead Show or a Hendrix concert in their home, or traveling back in time to catch Horowitz in Moscow. But I’m not holding my breath…
So I don't think we have any substantive domination. We only have well orchestrated claims of domination of a by a bunch of loud guys.
