Art Dudley Calls B.S. but without naming names - PLEASE DO!


Hey all,

As someone who hasn't been reading the audiophile press for all that long, I stumbled upon this article that I'm sure it lit up these airwaves when it was first published: https://www.stereophile.com/content/skin-deep

It's a great article and one that any knowledgeable person would most likely agree with, but hey, spending your own hard-earned (or inherited) money is a right and a privilege.  Art does call out some brands that he perceives to give great value:  AMVR, VPL, Conrad-Johnson, DeVore and Harbeth and Kimber and Peachtree and Quicksilver and Rega and Rogue and Spendor and Wavelength.  Shouldn't NAD be on this list?  

But what he doesn't do and I think is warranted, is name the companies that are most egregious in selling high-end products where the performance is far below the cost.  

I, for one, would love to see a list of those manufacturers from the people who read this forum.  You can group them by what they manufacture or just put them in order as you see fit.  I think it would be most helpful in calling b.s. but with "added-value", which is what this whole article was all about.  Right?

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You have to look on the bright side. With a $60 phone call there’s no salesman showing up at your door and no shipping charges. 
 People coming in and out of shopping malls usually are not rich at aIt and most audiophiles have to save and sacrifice for the equipment they eventually buy.It all depends on what equipment.Plus there is the morality issue.
  I am of a very open mind..but only up to a point.Everything that happens in the known universe involves an "action" and a "reaction".Even if you would stretch your mind to the incredulous point of believing that its possible to send some great force over a phone line costing $60, somehow I couldn't picture that force losing steam, over all those hundreds or thousands of miles and petering out over a farm field in Iowa, or more likely a half block from where it originated...assuming there exists such a force somewhere in the universe.In Carl Sagan's great book "Dragons Of Eden" he mentions that billions and billions of miles away from Earth there are blackholes.Just a thimble full of black hole material would weigh more than the entire Earth.But I like to stay within the realm of reality and what's overwhelmingly likely and actually without a doubt.
Re: my post above.Typo.Of course I meant I couldn't picture such a force if it existed somewhere  "NOT" losing steam.The spell-right also changed the name Sagan to "Satan"; glad I caught that one and changed it before.
What you probably don’t realize is that there is a super-massive black hole smack dab in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. By super massive I mean around 4 Million Solar masses in the case of the Milky Way; but black holes can be orders of magnitude larger, even Billions of Solar Masses. Gulp! Not only that there are super-massive black holes in the center of many, if not most, galaxies in the universe. By the way, the $60 phone call has been performed a great many times over distances as long as 10,000 miles which, if my math is correct, is almost half-way around the world. Obviously the operating mechanism - the “force” as you say - is independent of distance. Oh, my! 😬

Kip Thorne of Gravity Wave fame had to correct Carl Sagan’s idea in his book Contact that was to use a black hole to transport Ellie to the very distant planet in Vega. Obviously that wouldn’t work too well. So Carl Sagan used Kip Thorne’s suggestion of a worm hole.
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