Yes, you've got me there. He hasn't accomplished near as much as you. I'm sure YOUR name is attached to many well respected products.
So, your bottom line is that your "evidence" consists of appeal to authority. And your chosen authority is a cranky old hack who thinks that more expensive wires sound better than less expensive wires.
Pathetic.
That's the whole discussion, genius.
Again, please do not assume others have your low level of reading comprehension.
The scope of the discussion is not, as you erroneously claimed, "every single amplifier ever made in the history of the world."
Rather, it is amplifiers designed for high fidelity reproduction (flat FR, low output impedance, low noise) operating within their design specifications, and not broken.
If you wish it to be otherwise, you must point to a specific
design flaw and show why it makes a sonic differences.
Boy, level matching is really tough. I surely couldn't have done that when comparing two products. You know what's even harder? Closing your eyes and having someone switch out two products for you.
Actually, level-matching to a degree that one can be certain one is not merely reacting to level differences
is rather involved. It requires matching
output voltage at the speaker terminals.
Furthermore, anyone who was actually competent to opine on the "sound" of amplifiers (as opposed to the sound of level differences) would have to know that. That you don't, well, says all that needs to be said.
While I'm kicking back enjoying my wonderful home theater, it's comforting to know that you'll be pulling your hair out because of some imaginary "2 kHz notch" that you think is relevant
Wait a minute. If I am reading you correctly, you think you can hear "sonic differences" between competently designed and nonbroken amps operating within their designed limits, but
not a fairly pronounced intentional dip in the frequency response smack dab in the midrange?
Please tell me where I'm misinterpreting your position. If I am not, your position is so incredulous as to make me wonder if you're an actual thinking being or just a disgruntled audio parts dealer trying to stir up trouble.
Ad for the rest of us, the
room correction study by Dr. Sean Olive et al. showed that in a blind comparison the system with a 2Khz notch was the
least preferred, less than no room correction, even on a crappy speaker with appalling midrange directivity control. (B&W N802 I believe.) None of the other systems were found to be worse than no EQ. All the others tested were either found to be better, or within the error tolerance. And that is because Audyssey's target curve is simply wrong for music. The solution is not an electronic kludge for crappily-designed speakers (see Prof. Kyriakakis'
comments.), but to
use speakers that have controlled midrange directivity to start with!
Now, I used to have two Audyssey boxes, when they were the only serious game in town at reasonable prices. (Also, their DynamicEQ is great software for loudness correction. Though IMO no better than the "volume modeler" part of Dolby Volume.)
While it was a headache, now I'm frankly I'm glad one of them died. Now I use more boxes with more sophisticated room correction systems, ARC and (though I literally just opened the box) Trinnov. And get better sound because of it in the former case. Hopefully once I'm done tweaking that will also be true in the latter case.
(I do still use Audyssey MultEQ XT in my daily driver, through a separate Alpine processor. It's a small and fairly loud 2-seat roadster, so an arguably superior processor such as the JBL MS-8 is overkill. Also, the crappy speakers compensation notch is defeatable on my Alpine PXE-H650...)
watch you try to pick out that huge deficiency in a double-blind study) or that "hackish, kludgy manner in which current AVR's handle multisubs" (millions of home theater clients across the globe are praying a fix is coming).
Most people have lower standards than I do when it comes to bass, that is true. Sad, but true, because getting it right isn't that expensive, and if there were a bigger market of people who actually cared about high fidelity it is a problem well-suited to an automated, measurement-based solution. The only serious product that has been introduced in this area was the JBL BassQ, and it was both very expensive for what it did, and quite limited in capability.
