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Does the Audio Perfectionists bias need adjusting?

My systems have included many reference products from Levinson, Krell, Sonic Frontiers, Wadia, Dunlavy, B&W, Magnapan, CJ, Rotel, Anthem, Totem, Wilson, ARC, Martin Logan, Dalquist, McIntosh, etc... Music range is vast with emphasis on classical, 20th century and jazz.

I would just like to ask how someone such as Hardesty can get away with running a site that allows no direct feedback or discourse, utilizes other peoples reviews for data and pseudo-experiencial examples, promotes certain brands heavily, and propogates falsehoods about highly repsectable audio companies. He also assumes that he knows exactly how each of the original recording sessions sounded, because any system that makes them sound other than what he understands them to sound like is trash! What? I owned much of the gear Mr. Hardesty speaks of and I can say that most of it was fine stuff when used properly. One experience I can share is when I moved from Dunlavy's to Wilson speakers after having frequented Boston Symphony Hall....Uh, no contest folks...the Wilsons were by far more realistic in thier portrayel of the real thing. I grew up with Bozak B-313's and suffered through the Flat Ammplitude phase of the high end industry until some manufacturers began actually listening to their designs again before putting them to market. The design by theory crowd has done more to drive away potential customers more so than the design by ear folks...afterall, we listen with our ears and not our theories.
128x128dave_b

Showing 3 responses by stevecham

stevecham
3,340 posts
 
People who are passionate about things they care about stand on their own soapbox. This is true of all of us.

He doesn't "get away with it" when you respond as you did above. I've seen the same stuff with other reviewers as well. I've heard Wilson sound good and I've heard Wilson sound lousy, depending on the system and room contexts.

There are no absolutes but instead a series of opinions, like floats passing by in a parade. Personally, I question a company that spends more resources on paint jobs than on drivers.

It depends what you're comfortable paying for. Some folks want high quality Ferarri paint jobs on boxes with mediocre drivers that sound good and some want high quality drivers in plain looking boxes that sound good.
stevecham
3,340 posts
 
The most "realistic" playback I have heard to date was at the 1999 Montreal Son et Image show with then current Watt/Puppy combo playing big band jazz powered by Classe Omega monoblocks fed by a Levinson CD player and preamp combo.

However, the room was treated to a level I had never seen before and simply was not practical for me. The amount of sound absorption and refelctive paneling was way beyond what I could live with in my home; it was uninviting and cold. Nor did music that was from other styles that was played back in this system sound as "realistic" as that particular jazz recording did. For these reasons, I am not fond of Wilson, which seemed to me at the time to require an "all hands on deck" approach to get them to sound so wonderful on that one recording, but instead, I am fond of Thiel's and Vandersteen's time and phase coherent designs.
stevecham
3,340 posts
 
There is one thing though that I find fundamentally problematic with many manufacturer's designs and I've said this before. I fully support Hardesty on this point: Those speaker designs in which the midrange drivers are intentionally reverse phased to compensate for response/crossover/cabinet anomalies are simply flawed from the get go, and many so called high end designs do this and get away with it. It's poor design.

I will not support such approaches as they make no sense to me. Breaking something twice to make it right is not sound engineeering design. We're talking about preservation of micro detail in the time domain and harmonic and dynamic content that defines accurate timbre; there is only subtractive distortion when neccessity dictates making the critical midrange out of phase relative to the tweeter and woofer, one cannot add back what is removed once it's gone. Musical instrument manufacturs know this and those designs that have stood the test of time have problems solved, not merely with bandaids, which is the approach often taken with out-of-phase midrange driver speakers and high order cheap crossovers.
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