While I despise the company and their crappy products, I can't say that Blose is entirely evil. Oh, the attempt to punish Consumer Reports for what simply amounted to a bad review was pretty pathetic, true. But preying on the ignorance of the masses? That's a grey area. You can lead a horse to water (slick glossies and ads by audiowhore Herbie Hancock) but you shouldn't be able to make them drink (buy a product they don't actually want). Yeah, they stack the deck as best they can; separate kiosks deliberately isolated from other gear so no meaningful A/B's can be performed against competitors, carefully cherry picked music that won't cast a spotlight on their products many sonic shortcomings, etc. But utlimately if the moron standing there is so ill informed or unsophisticated as to still be bamboozled, s/he deserves a good measure of the blame. Fool me once, shame on you- fool me twice, shame on me!
I will relay an amusing anecdote from about 15 years ago. I was in a local audio salon (back when such places were common
) and a man came in and wanted to hear "the best speakers you've got." A salesman said, "Ah, that would be our 901's," and procedes to demo them to the man. After about half a song the man stated that the speakers "sounded awful". Sheepishly the sale hack stammered that "um, I forgot to turn the EQ on." So he turned it on and the man exclaimed that with the EQ it sounded even worse!
He eventually ended up with a very nice pair of compact floorstanding ARs that mopped the floor with those crappy 901s- and all for about 1/2 the price!
Yep, no doubt about it-
better sales thru research!
