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Hi, I just got the latest Stereophile,March 2024.I think the magazine is chasing Absolute Sound and may be losing some of it's subscribers.I just leafed right thru it because nothing was affordable to the common music lover,only the elite.A letter by Barney V.expressed that in Letters to the Editor.
In the major reviews,starting with the Bower and Wilkins 801 D4 Signature the cost is 50.000 bucks.Weiss,22.000,Krell,73.000 pr.,Gold Note,13.000,Rogue 6,000 pr.,Storm Audio 22,000.
As a test a while back I brought a small stack of Absolute Sounds to my dentists office.As much as he charges he found out that it was me that left them in the waiting room.He got mad at me even though we were good friends and threw them out.He said he would never use Novi cane on me again. He is profoundly wealthy owning a monster estate in the richest neighborhood in Maine.I was originally going to leave some wrestling mags as a joke I found in a friends barn,the ones with Dusty Rhodes all covered in blood on the cover in the waiting room.
What I'm trying to say is there is room for a writer or reviewer like Steve Mejius,I can't spell his last name without looking it up, who used to write for you guys.He was the guy with the girl friends and cats who reviewed affordable gear.If all the expensive gear was tried in a blind test against some stuff like Schiit, and it smoked it,then I would stand corrected.There might be some other subscribers like me who don't write to the editor so I'd thought to give you a heads up.Otherwise I do really like the Stereophile mag....take care ,Mark Korda
Follow Ups:
except for YouTube reviewers.
The monster price tags are the tip of the marketing iceberg. How often do you see ads for Pioneer, Sony, Marantz, etc? The "big boys" are using up all the shelf space.
Nice comments- Mark.
The only "affordable gear" Magazines were Audio and Stereo Review. Audiophiles need the High-End & State -of-The-Art for its trickle down effect. That said, we can all enjoy the Demo/Used marketplace. I do.
Audio was my favorite magazine for years. Too bad it didn't survive.
" Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you"
Satchel Paige
The cost to buy exotic vs the cost of the parts in them is one of the stronger motivations to DIY.
Unfortunately to varying degrees people associate high price with high performance as the price infer's there is something valuable there.
After one has taken many expensive electronic things and loudspeakers apart, one see's that can be an illusion like other marketing images used to justify a high price.
Also, it has never been easier to take meaningful measurements in the design process which can guide you or at least tell you what quadrant your compass is pointing.
A real problem especially with building loudspeakers is everything you change makes a difference. The hard part is telling what changes to a loudspeaker improve all the recordings and not selected ones AND the fact that having put all the effort into them, makes you more likely to overlook flaws.
A danger with colored systems is that you may change your musical tastes around what your system can do best. This doesn't matter individually but is a bad path if your trying to make speakers that are signal faithful and work well with all types of music and recordings (or for other people to use).
As a DIY'r myself, i would urge anyone interested to investigate this, build a subwoofer to start with, they are the simplest speaker to make and places like parts express even sell kits.
Given the relative simplicity, some great results can be obtained making DIY tube preamps/power amps. Higher quality parts, more tube options are just two examples.
There are tried and true solutions for DIY speakers, but it's not as easy with speakers to get the intended results. For me, I'll stick with manufactures who are well know for providing quality at (semi) reasonable prices. Tend to like offerings from ATC and Dynaudio.
For subwoofers, hard to beat SVS for price vs. performance.
" Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you"
Satchel Paige
If I was starting out without all my legacy boat anchors Cheapaudioman would be my bible
...And have actual fun doing it.
Hi,
If you're looking at Stereophile as an indicator of the market, that's the big problem. Print magazines today are thin, less read, and, therefore, very limited in the scope of products they review. They're not indicative of the market at all.
Most people read, view, and research online today. Once you start doing that, you'll realize prices from the low hundreds to high hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everything is there.
So I think that the real problem is picking up magazine with five or six products, picked for whatever reason, and trying to extrapolate that somehow that's representative. It's simply not.
Doug Schneider
SoundStage!
The cost of truly good sound continues to drop if you don't mind subsidizing China.
You don't have to buy Chinese to get good audio gear at an attractive price. I've become a big fan of Schiit gear and they have lots of options at great prices -- I use their preamps, DACs & power amps in main and sunroom systems as well as for my headphone setup; their stuff is made in California and Texas. My speakers are Ohms which come from Brooklyn, NY. My Raspberry Pi players are made in Wales, UK. My Spendor speakers in the sunroom were made in East Sussex, UK. I think the only significant Chinese item in any of my systems are the HiFiMan Sundara phones I use.
So, there are cost effective options if one wants to stay away from the Chinese products for whatever reason.
sounding very, very good and costing very, very little.
Was using some Swan D2.1SE speakers recently that were really, really nice
but I bought them used from a guy in SC, so no subsidizing China at that
point.
Not that I'm against that, but it sure isn't a given as you've nicely/accurately stated.
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" -Michael McClure
That is why you can have far less expensive gear outperform the higher priced spread, sometimes in every way.
Often the higher prices are due to the Veblen Effect and nothing else (the manufacturer has found that some products sell better simply if the price is increased, creating the illusion there is more value).
If products are priced to what the market will bear, its more likely something you can classify as 'Veblen goods'. Campagnolo is a good example in the bicycle world.
Magazines do pay attention to less expensive products.
The Veblen effect is often seen with automobiles. From a reliability standpoint, some of the most expensive cars are also the most troublesome, and costly to maintain.
You do bring up some good points. I've owned a lot of gear of various price ranges over the years, and the cost of the gear often did not correlate to the performance.
There are a few brands where the price could be considered to be high, but do deliver great sound and are reliable performers. The brands also have excellent track records, and are very reliable.
" Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you"
Satchel Paige
-
Gee, I wonder why?
Could it be than a recent college graduate who loves music and wants better sound, but has limited discretionary income, might be a bit put off by such prices? Might decide the whole "audiophile" thing is just a snob club for old, bald, rich white guys?
JVS basically won't review any product that costs less than an average working American's gross annual income. Typically, two or three times that.
HR has covered some reasonably priced gear in the past (like in his roundup of cheaper phono cartridges, and reviews of Elac speakers) but now is back to fetishizing over ultra-bling wires, implying that you can't possibly have satisfying sound if you DON'T spend thousands of dollars on wires alone.
Ditto, ditto, and ditto for most of the rest of the reviewers.
Little or rare mention of the fact that there ARE decent sounding speakers, amplifiers, turntables, phono preamps, DACs, etc. clocking in for well under a grand, sometimes for a few hundred.
Another "entry level" column, seeking out and informing readers of the best sounding affordable products, might alleviate the magazine's increasing irrelevance to average music lovers.
...check out Head-Fi.org. It seems to have the largest, most active group of younger participants of all the audio forums I follow.
Not sure of the driving force behind the site, whether it is their focus on headphones and IEMs, or the plethora of active reviewers which seems to have that "influencer" vibe that is so popular with young people, or something else. The gear discussions range from low-cost value items to expensive so there are headphone-related items to read and write about regardless of your budget. Whatever it is, they've got something going. A lot of their content doesn't interest me, but there is always something that I enjoy reading -- the frequent Jason Stoddard (Schiit) posts, for example.
Believe it's a combination of portability and the fact that one can obtain reference quality sound at a MUCH lower price point than a traditional speaker system. I've been listening to more headphone music lately, as the experience can be very enjoyable.
Younger ears also may have better ability to discern deltas when listening. It's no coincidence that Chord DAC's are a favorite in the headphone world.
" Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you"
Satchel Paige
I think that there is a lot of interest there because the price of entry to high end performance is so much lower.
Head-fi is great, but ya gotta spend some time there, get the lay of the land in order to filter out the noise. Just my curmudgeonly opinion. :)
Cerebrate!
Good point. Besides, the young ears tend to perform better than the older audiophile. Besides, the headphone experience can reveal more than the standard two channel speaker setup.
They love Chord DACs on Head Fi, and for headphones, would have to agree.
" Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you"
Satchel Paige
Brian, thanks for the correction about the wire and Sam Tellig, Mark K.
Like cars, and other hobbies/interests, bling sells magazines.
That said, there is a lot of reasonably priced gear that sounds very good. That's one of the biggest improvements that's happened in audio in the last 40 years. I don't expect magazines to stop reviewing hyper expensive gear, but they should review more realistically priced stuff too.
Jack
I have a very satisfying system in our living room (my listening room is of course better still) which consists of a NuForce DDA-120 integrated amp ($275 used), Polk R300 floorstanders ($100 for the pair - on sale) and either a Raspberry Pi4 ($80) or Roku player ($70?) for sources. digital signal is fed via HDMI to the TV and comes out as optical PCM digital where it is fed to the DDA-120. So assuming one already owns a TV and some sort of streamer box like a Roku, total cost about $375 plus cables. I use a Blue Jeans toslink cable and Mogami 3103 / Cardas bananas (already had them) for speaker cables.Any young person with a job could put together such a system and I lived with just that system for a couple of years. The NuForce amp is very good.
Edits: 02/08/24 02/08/24
Hi you guys, all great replays! Thanks,this one goes to Brian. About 15 years ago a Stereophile writer dared to make solid core copper speaker wires with Radio Shack wire. I think,without digging the issues up that it was Corey Greenberg. They made the best of catagory ,class C or D.That's like 3rd or 4th in the ranking. They would never do that today because it was so cheap.I think the gauge was 20 mil. The cables shown in my picture are not being used right now as I went back to my solid core copper Shack wires.The purple wires shown ,and the Shacks were 8 feet long as recommended by Pierre Sprey who used to send out those real cool green catalogs of audio improvement stuff called Mapleshade.The purple cables are silver coated copper or maybe pure silver which might be wrong.But they are silver.The cost was 30 bucks after looking around the computer. Why I went back to the Radio Shack wires was because the silver wire altered the sound even though both sounded great. The silver introduces a pronounced (S) sound when there was an S in a voice and some instruments sound. I looked this up and someone else stated the same effect. The copper wire,same gauge and twisted to prevent RF from being picked up did not.Thus a wire change. I have not read Herb R's cable or wire article real closely yet but these were my observations about 2 years ago now. I will re read the article as I just skimmed it as I just got it yesterday. I learn a ton from you guys, and I thank you. Everything I have read from you Brian has kept me in the hobby. Take care and thank you guys....Mark Korda....P.S. On top is my new Dyna PAS front face plate. A buddy I met thru the Audiomart, Bob Gates wired this up with great new Wonder caps a long while back.It sounded great and I made a little name plate at the trophy store to honor that.I. Just took out anything not needed and put in gold jacks and an Alps volume control.The bottom slide switch on the left is gold plated and cost about 5 bucks.I will have cd/aux as that's all I need.
I experimented with it too. Hard to say about the sound, as I had no experience with bling cables. It was kind of sproingy and ungainly to work with.
Then I got a big spool of Stinger brand 12ga multistranded OFC speaker cable, which is soft and flexy and super-easy to solder connectors to. Been using it ever since. Made all my interconnects out of some nice Belden pro microphone coax cable, and terminated them with heavy duty, gold plated brass RCA plugs. Forget the brand, but they were NOT in the WBT price bracket!
Thanks also to Sam, "the audio cheapskate," for turning me on to Adcom, which was a major "high value" brand of the day. Still got my GFA-545, and it's still amping away!
Corey Greenberg was another writer who sought out and reviewed high value products, as well as writing up some cool DIY projects. His irreverent humor was a breath of fresh air in the otherwise stuffy confines of the magazine of the day.
Little Stevie Mejias actually had a column called "The Entry Level," where he focused on real-world affordable products that sounded good. Alas, he went over to the dark side and is now writing ad copy for oily snakes. Nobody since has focused on the entry level of the hobby, even though they all started there themselves.Too focused on fancy toys in the four and five figure price range, I guess. NOT the stuff a young music lover, just discovering that better-than-mass-market quality is possible, is likely to go for.
Is Messr Gillette still among us?
That he later had to retract. A lot of disciples ruined a lot of CDs.
It did come off, with a towel and a lot of elbow grease.
The moral of the story, is don't do a tweak you can't undo, easily.
Jack
With a soft optical cloth suitable for lenses.
The tweak doesn't noticeably change the sound of the CD, but it polishes out small scratches that might otherwise cause glitches in the data stream.
I've had a few discs with skips over the years. Post-Armor-all, no more skippy -- even 20 years later.
I think the problem with this particular tweak was that the described application process could seriously microscratch the CD surface if the applicator or buffing pad wasn't immaculately clean or was made of a "hard" material. I don't think it was the armor all itself. I tried armor all on one disc, heard no difference and removed it using liquid laundry detergent. I recall Mr. Cheapskate recommending Dawn liquid dish soap.
The Armor All got cloudy after a while, and had to be buffed off. I thought it made a difference. I've tried a few other cleaners/polishers over the years, but wasn't impressed with some of them. I gave up after a while.
Jack
I am not being facetious!
At least not entirely .
I don't know about reliability or longevity, but in terms of decent performance per dollar spent, one will find dozens of options at remarkable prices -- whether or not one is obsessed with SINAD or other surrogate markers of audio performance. ;)
all the best,
mrh
Edits: 02/08/24
Yes, but the good news is that a Stereophile subscription is becoming more affordable, for as little as 62 cents per issue ...
Edits: 02/07/24
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