THE HIFI FIVE ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION STREAMING LIVE ON YOUTUBE PREMIERING IN OCTOBER!

[Anton D]

well thank you to all that watch and to those who subscribed. If you haven't please subscribe and help us grow its FREE.

In a hobby that is so male dominated, it's too bad Julie Mullins ended up being the butt of a sarcastic and negative comment about who we'd like to meet in person.

It can make us all look like Comic Book Guy (Jeff Albertson) from The Simpsons.
I have enjoyed my time chatting with her in this pantheon of people in the hobby. I bet Enid Lumley would have been a great hang, as well, even if I did not agree with almost any of her beliefs.. She seemed quite the raconteur.

 

[Kcin]

Im told Danny gets paid by the word and Jay gets a hefty appearance fee.

It seemed like Danny gets paid by how many "sniffs" he takes out of his glass and letting us know he was in tech for 20yrs at each 15 min mark---- I could do without that - and I don't mind a cocktail or two occasionally . Otherwise , Elliot you are most interesting and you can tell you are a true professional. Ron tries to keep it all the cats herded and moderated. Jay will eventually hit his stride.

Tough to put on for a weekly basis and keep everyone equally interested - hopefully it keeps on rolling in a positive direction. Thanks.

 

[Elliot G.]

Thank you for your comments and support. We have done 9 shows! We do not have all the answers nor do we expect too. We are discussing and finding subjects that we find interesting and when there is a guest that might illuminate that we will invite them.
Thank you all again for watching and your comments

 

[microstrip]

(...) Harry Pearson should have stayed an environmental journalist. Many audiophiles don’t like my thoughts about him.

If this is the best you can write about him I understand them.

Telling stories about audio equipment is not a review.

IMO it is entertainment. It is a welcome part of reviews.

It is marketing.

Yes, reviews are part of marketing. I also expect true information.

My view is that the people writing about equipment don’t know how to test audio equipment.

It is true, but what is the point?

The hobby and the industry are fundamentally dishonest. Accommodation pricing influences other activities but doesn’t influence high-end audio? Selling ever more expensive equipment to a market where age related hearing loss is reality. Every difference in sound is automatically better. Do expensive materials really improve sound at the listening position?

The high-end is an hobby of bias , it lives on bias and smells bias. IMO the only dishonest thing is pretending it is not. Or stating there is a "best" in this hobby in a definitive way.

The politics of the hobby influence too much. About 300 English speaking reviewers wrote positive things about MQA. They either don’t hear well and lack expertise, or they wrote about MQA positively because they were afraid not to. Some chose not to write anything about MQA because of the political pressure to support it or begged off and claimed they were just analog guys. Doug Schneider was the only reviewer to oppose it. MQA caused a lot of reviewers to lose credibility.

IMO people loose credibility if they loose their time discussing MQA.

If you don’t think people here aren’t influencers and targets you don’t understand modern gorilla marketing.

Sorry, this hobby is It is much more complex than that.

Don’t consider me an authority.

Ok....

I believe you should be taught audio outside the hobby.

No hope, the great majority of audiophiles don't wan't it.

Have a consistent set of reference albums and recordings.

Most people have.

Seek your information directly from manufacturers as much as possible.

They will not give you the information you want or need. Known since long.

The room is the most important thing to get right, and I wish I permission to reprint Paul Klipsch’s speaker positioning proof.

Yes, many people say so. But there are very different ways of living the hobby.

 

[Elliot G.]

THe best part of doing the show is that we get to say what we want and what we believe, of course when people don't agree they get upset and even nasty. I express my opinions based on my experience and my expertise of being in the Industry for 55 years. I am not strictly a hobbyist or an audiophile and therefore MAYBE i might know stuff that others don't. The internet has given rise to many opinions but in the end they are not anything but opinions. We are living in a very tribal world filled with all kinds of informational sources many of which are just rumor, opinion and marketing .
Facts are in very short supply today.

 

[Rt66indierock]

Well, we have lots to discuss!

'Telling stories about audio is not a review.' True! It is entertainment. I'm fine with this. Sometimes, the stories are used to establish a context for something a reviewer wants to reference or compare regarding an item he or she is currently reviewing. They might be looking for relatable analogies, or pointing out a situation where an initial impression turned out to be inaccurate and the story is their vehicle to arrive at a destination. It can serve many purposes, the foremost of which, to me, is having a conversation, in general. I also don't care if they know a voltmeter from an RMS meter. () For me, reviews are user experiences and are based on their listening/using an item.

Over time, I can see from the stories and descriptions if the reviewer seems dependable compared to my experiences. That's it, the whole ball of wax. I bet you can tell by looking at the systems many 'objectivists' put together that being able to 'test audio equipment' certainly doesn't often enough lend itself to our subjective experience or enjoyment. So, we disagree on that part of your reply, but the hobby comes in many flavors.

"The hobby and the industry are fundamentally dishonest." That's a sort of 'Catcher in the Demo Room' or 'Audiophile in the Rye' sort of philosophy, and I don't 100% agree there, either. If one is that cynical about the hobby, why would one be attending these dishonest galas and relating that people beg one to remain in the hobby? The two positions are hard to reconcile. I'd need to know more about your 'position' in the hobby to be able to figure out your disdain for something you persist in doing at that level.

I wanted to specifically mention age related hearing loss. This is often a big red herring. Does live music still sound like live music to you? Does it seem diminished as an experience as you have aged? Do you sit and say to yourself, "Man, if only my frequency response percetionstill went to 13 KHz, I would like this music better??' Can you still perceive if system has a rising top end, or not? I think many listening phenomenon (and our apparatus) work together to keep it all pretty fresh.

This is a complicated topic and I do not mean to sound didactic. As you say, don't consider me an authority.

We perceive more than just a missing high end frequency as we lose those upper reaches. We are used to talking about 'harmonics' that appear in what we usually think of as the frequencies above a note; you can have frequencies below the fundamental, but they aren't typically called "harmonics" (which are multiples); instead, they're often subharmonics, difference tones, or simply "partials." Non-linearities, or the brain filling in, a "missing fundamental," creates perception of lower pitches that are created from the presence of the higher pitched sounds or higher overtones. We can actually have a subjective experience of notes being present that we didn't catch! If the higher notes were not accurately portrayed, we can often make that out by what else is missing in our current hearing range, or interpret as being lacking or over=-emphasize even when we can't hear the original fundamental.

So, we can still hear a lot (most) of what's going on, even with these age related upper frequency limits we cope with as we listen.

We can also differ on how pernicious we think accommodation pricing is. As I said before, if it is transparent and consistent, it doesn't screw up comparative analysis between pieces of gear.

Regarding the 'politics' of the hobby, the failure of your exemplar of MQA pretty much argues against your point. Were you fooled? Did those 300 journalists cause you fiscal pain or suffering? You sound like it did not, nor did I, or the general marketplace - we all listened and found it wanting. It did cause reviewers to lose credibility, as you point out, which only proves the opposite point, to me: the marketplace spoke louder that 300 evil reviewers! Like I said upstream, if a reviewer is full of it, he or she is found out over time. To me, everything worked as it should.

"Gorilla marketing" claims are fine, but sort of unprovable. No matter how I reply, you can still keep claiming it is the hobby's deep state at work, but you are giving far too little credit to your fellow enthusiasts and members here.

Before I expire from over-talking: "Seek your information from directly from the manufacturers" seems at odds with much of what you say. If the hobby is crooked and corrupt, why on earth would you tell people to invest in seeking output primarily from the manufacturing end if this diabolical diad? I could have been influenced by "trust no one because everyone has an agenda," but telling us to ignore reviewers, other consumer observations, etc. and looking to manufacturers is excusing the evil actors you want about when describing the hobby, in general.

I can see we don't agree on vast swaths of our hobby experience, but that's OK, it a sonically large tent!

Cheers.

(Pardon grammar and syntax, I am trying to squeeze this in in dribs and drabs on a work day!)

All of this would make for great fodder over wine. I bet we have crossed paths in real life at some point!

But is the user experience as you describe in a review? To me a review is an evaluation or critical analysis. Should a reviews dependability be based on your experiences or should it be universal?

I’ve always said the evaluation of audio equipment should be 50/50 listening and testing. You make an assumption that the objective guys know how to test. In my experience that is not generally true. Just because you can operate the equipment doesn’t mean you know how to test.

On either side of the subjective / objective parts of the hobby there are good sounding systems and ones that aren’t.

As far as me being cynical, don’t ask me what I think about the leaders of my profession.

I was on the pro side of audio for 15 years when I was younger. I grew tired of audiophiles in the seventies and stopped interacting with them. My interest is high performance audio. You can do high performance audio quite well without interacting with audiophiles. Why did I come back? I was asked by some pro guys to stop MQA. I listened to their concerns and suggested the best course of action would be to kill the company, MQA Ltd. I organized the resistance so MQA could not be an economically viable product. The market didn’t really decide its fate. We stopped it from ever getting even a toe hold in the market and forcing the company to burn more cash than the investors were willing to provide.

You would be surprised how many people in the industry were on my side in the MQA controversy, I stopped keeping track when the anti MQA side exceeded 70%. The audiophile press needed a new format to promote.

Gorilla marketing is a low-cost way to make high impact product impressions. Just a marketing strategy doesn’t imply anything else.

More on hearing in the next post.

 

[213Cobra]

Gorilla marketing is a low-cost way to make high impact product impressions.

BTW, it's guerrilla (or guerilla - alt spelling) marketing, not "gorilla." Guerrilla is borrowed from the military meaning for adoption and use of unconventional tactics. It's not referencing the ape. -Phil

 

[Ron Resnick]

"The hobby and the industry are fundamentally dishonest."

Hello Anton,

Who wrote or said this?

 

[tima]

BTW, it's guerrilla (or guerilla - alt spelling) marketing, not "gorilla." Guerrilla is borrowed from the military meaning for adoption and use of unconventional tactics. It's not referencing the ape. -Phil

you go Phil !

 

[Anton D]

Hello Anton,

Who wrote or said this?

Post 274, third paragraph…

“The hobby and the industry are fundamentally dishonest.”

 

[andromedaaudio]

Anton is practising guerrilla warfare forum tactics .

Attack followed by a pull back .

@Anton
Some of your posts were so lengthy and detailed you could well be a reviewer , hiding behind the Anton monicker lol

 

[Al M.]

I was on the pro side of audio for 15 years when I was younger. I grew tired of audiophiles in the seventies and stopped interacting with them. My interest is high performance audio. You can do high performance audio quite well without interacting with audiophiles. Why did I come back? I was asked by some pro guys to stop MQA. I listened to their concerns and suggested the best course of action would be to kill the company, MQA Ltd. I organized the resistance so MQA could not be an economically viable product. The market didn’t really decide its fate. We stopped it from ever getting even a toe hold in the market and forcing the company to burn more cash than the investors were willing to provide.

You would be surprised how many people in the industry were on my side in the MQA controversy, I stopped keeping track when the anti MQA side exceeded 70%. The audiophile press needed a new format to promote.

While many people in the industry may have been against MQA, there were a good number of them that bowed to the MQA pressure, including from customers who wanted this "great new format" (ha). I have lost a good deal of respect for companies like dCS, MSB or Berkeley Audio who bent over backwards in order to "accommodate" MQA in their products (googling just now I found out that Wadax was among the "bad guys" too). There were few companies that took a consistent and mostly early stance against MQA, among them Linn, Schiit, Benchmark, Ayre. Kudos to them.

 

[tony22]

among them Linn, Schiit, Benchmark, Ayre

And PS Audio.

 

[Ron Resnick]

Post 274, third paragraph…

“The hobby and the industry are fundamentally dishonest.”

Oh Rt66IndieRock! I'm sorry, I thought you were suggesting that one of the four of us on the show said this.

The quoted sentence is an exaggeration so severe that it inherently proves itself to be fundamentally wrong. The statement is irresponsible and demonstrably false. If the quoted sentence were correct then most of us would be unhappy with playing music on our stereo systems.

I do not believe that most of us are unhappy playing music on our stereo systems. So the hobby and the industry are not fundamentally dishonest. They successfully help us achieve our goals with our stereo systems and our love of music.

Thank you.

 

[Bloomie]

THe best part of doing the show is that we get to say what we want and what we believe, of course when people don't agree they get upset and even nasty. I express my opinions based on my experience and my expertise of being in the Industry for 55 years. I am not strictly a hobbyist or an audiophile and therefore MAYBE i might know stuff that others don't. The internet has given rise to many opinions but in the end they are not anything but opinions. We are living in a very tribal world filled with all kinds of informational sources many of which are just rumor, opinion and marketing .
Facts are in very short supply today.

The best part of the show is tracking the commentary in the chat room, which runs in parallel, or at least attempts to do so.

 

[Anton D]

People bring up points to chat about.

Anton is practising guerrilla warfare forum tactics .

Attack followed by a pull back .

@Anton
Some of your posts were so lengthy and detailed you could well be a reviewer , hiding behind the Anton monicker lol

You guys with the ‘warfare.’

This is the stuff of sitting at round tables in a pub.

Hey, I just met the guy who didn’t even allow MQA into the marketplace and you wanna mewl at me about some notion of ‘warfare’ in Hi Fi?

 

[wil]

the

The best part of the show is tracking the commentary in the chat room, which runs in parallel, or at least attempts to do so.

I thought the most recent episode was the best yet.

 

[Lee]

Everyone knows influencers got discounts. But not many people know the quantity of discount. I applaud Ron’s transparency. This is the first time I read explicitly the discount is 40%.

It’s more often 50% but varies depending on category, stature of reviewer, and manufacturer relationship.

Full disclosure: I purchased all of my gear at accommodation pricing but with the exception of the cables like Fremer. The tape decks were bought the full market rate.

As far as music, the vast majority of my vinyl (99.9%+) is bought at full retail prices at local stores. All of my 6K CDs and SACDs were bought at full retail.

 

[Lee]

Industry accommodation pricing to reviewers is intrinsically corrupting. Saying so doesn't mean there are no honest assessments uttered about gear acquired at half-list and therefore, say, 35 percentage points below what a savvy consumer pays, but the reader/viewer has to suspect otherwise. Why? If a reviewer has a system, or substantial portions of one, assembled from half-price components, it is almost certain they get to own and listen to a system that would otherwise be out of reach if said reviewer had to pay street prices. Is it unreasonable to presume they are grateful for that? So at the end of the day, without accommodation pricing, most reviewers would be living with and listening to lesser hifi systems. It also makes likely that loaned "reference" components will be evaluated in context of not-quite-reference gear. Accommodation prices can inflate reviewers' sense of self-importance and undermine objectivity.

Concomitantly, long term loans of gear to reviewers by manufacturers effectively become lived-with domestic objects virtually indistinguishable from items a reviewer may have paid for. We can debate where the line is, but I think that no loan to a reviewer should exceed six months. If you can't assess an item or even a system with six months of daily exposure to it -- especially as a full-time reviewer -- you are either woefully inefficient, lazy, overscheduled, undisciplined, confused or critically arrested. You can delay writing or recording your review if you need more time to consider your copious notes (you did take notes, right?). That's up to the reviewer. But manufacturers should issue that freight call tag on schedule, or sooner if the reviewer volunteers.

Pearson even more than Holt, planted the idea that hifi reviewing was / is some kind of high subjective art, and that there was something intrinsically valuable about it. There isn't. It's useful to some people, but it's not a valuable human pursuit. A true 1st world indulgence. It's not that difficult. Listen, compare, assess in six months or less, get organized to write or record, move on. It's all going to disappear into the great digital gyre, occasionally pulled from the muck by a search engine or a persisting link, but ultimately obsolesced and forgotten. None of this is important enough to pretend you need to have something for a year, two or three to know what you think about it. Music reviewing is a higher calling than assessments of audio gear, and that still has its foibles. This goes for cars, watches....all the 1st world gear-based hobbies and distractions. But at least in their heyday, the car mags had some friggin' great writers, and they had far better skills for making a car's driving experience vividly palpable to you than any audio reviewer attempting to help you understand a lump of hifi gear. And that includes Pearson. Hartley, et al are whiffs.

Accommodation pricing was originally offered to (underpaid) retail staff and channel owners who sold your product, and to employees of other business partners, friends & family, etc. It didn't start with reviewers, because...well....magazines weren't accommodating manufacturers on advertising pricing, except by price sheet volumes. Some people argued then that the practice was corrupting to sales people recommending products to customers, but it was common knowledge that any possible compromise caused by accommodation pricing was dwarfed by the practice of manufacturers or distributors putting "spiffs" (direct payments to salespeople for selling preferred items) on stuff they needed to move. And dwarfed by the influence of commission-based selling.

But a reviewer isn't in that economic sphere. They are selling trust on a presumption of competence, honesty and an ability to make their assessment comprehensible and meaningful to their audience, for whatever reason.

At the very least, be willing to say something to the effect of, "My hifi includes a bunch of components I got at prices only available to industry insiders like me, most of which I couldn't otherwise afford, or even if I could swing the price you'd pay, I like saving money whenever possible! And I get to have a system at a higher level so I get to review more fun things that I otherwise wouldn't have peer gear for. But don't for a moment doubt my objectivity on gear I bought at prices you can't get!" Na na na na na na; your mother wears army boots, and all that.

Phil

I can share my observations from writing reviews and my experience at TAS and hifi+…

1. Most reviewers I know, and I know most, are decent, honest people trying to “get it right” for their audience. Many want to enjoy a good reputation as being fair and also viewed as an expert.

2. I never once saw money change hands for a review. In fact I saw Robert Harley express concerns on ethics and enforce compliance rules often. Sometimes this involved reviewers being asked to leave. When I bought some gear during this time, I was asked to write email to both Robert Harley and Tom Martin with the details on the items and pricing. Only after approvals did I move forward with the purchase.

3. The tiny industry economics do not create an opportunity to buy reviews for more than $250-$350 per person.

4. The tiny marketing budgets of manufacturers do not allow for payments to “shills”. I have never seen a verified instance of this.

5. If everyone is on accommodation pricing, how is bias created? A rational reviewer will choose what they like.

6. If no accommodation is allowed, why would there be reviewers? Most only get $150-250 a review. That’s terrible money on a per hour basis.

 

[microstrip]

While many people in the industry may have been against MQA, there were a good number of them that bowed to the MQA pressure, including from customers who wanted this "great new format" (ha). I have lost a good deal of respect for companies like dCS, MSB or Berkeley Audio who bent over backwards in order to "accommodate" MQA in their products (googling just now I found out that Wadax was among the "bad guys" too). There were few companies that took a consistent and mostly early stance against MQA, among them Linn, Schiit, Benchmark, Ayre. Kudos to them.

Thanks for telling us about your biases. IMO the jury should ignore any of your comments on any brand having MQA. I regret it, you said nice things in the past about dCS ...

It is curious that many people had similar feelings about SACD in the past - in reality it was a format released mostly to control recordings, avoiding piracy due to its strong copy protection.