Parasound Halo JC-1 -VS- Bryston 7B-ST?


Hello,
I have been reading alot of rave reviews on the older Bryston 7B-ST monoblocks.
Has anyone ever owned, heard, or compared both the Bryston 7B-ST monoblocks and the Parasound Halo JC-1 monoblocks?
If so which was superior and in what ways?
Please describe the sonic differences between the two in detail.
Thanks for all of your information!
daltonlanny

Showing 1 response by veloceracing

I called Parasound and I AM an idiot!

Normally I don't like contributing to these types of exchanges but I am from the restaurant industry and you know the old motto: do something good for someone and they'll tell two people. Do something bad and they'll tell two hundred.

I don't know the gent who felt compelled to pass along second-hand victriolic comments about Parasound and I am sure that there are people out there who've had bad experiences with Parasound or with their bank or with an IRS audit. Yet it says something that many are responding with good things about Parasound and I am one of them. Here is MY story and (to repeat) I am an idiot in this case and no one at Parasound pointed out this obvious fact:

Up until recently I had a pair of the great (no matter what the snobs might say) JC-1s. On two seprate occasions I called tech support to find out if I had the latest versions, if I could get upgrades, if I could have them inspected, etc., etc. You know these calls: I was wasting the tech's time. Yet the person at the other end (whose name I can't remember, unfortunately) was patient, polite and very knowledgable. For kicks I sent Richard Shram an Email and the poor guy answered back in detail at 11 PM the next night. We exchanged a few more Emails and I let the poor man be.

A while back I was moving amps around and moved a delay switch on one of the amps. When I couldn't get the amp to fire up I panicked and dialed Halo-911. It took the tech but two minutes to diagnose the problem (since his first question was "Have you recently moved the amps?"). He stayed on the line while I made sure everything is OK and we even chatted a bit about the (apparently now cancelled) JC-2 preamp and other things.

Prior to the Halos, I had the baby Halo setup: P3/T3/A23. I sold the P3 on Audiogon and for some reason the buyer received the preamp DOA. He returned it to me and I sent it to Parasound. Three days later I had a new P3. I called to find out why they hadn't just repaired my original one and the tech said "hey, don't worry about it. We'll get to yours. We gave you a new one so you wouldn't be without a component." Was that the truth? Was he reading from a script while Richard Shram had his finger on the button connected to electrodes attached to the tech's body? Who knows, who cares. THEY FREAKIN' SENT ME A BRAND NEW PREAMP!!!!!

And I have similar great (but not a manganemous) stories about my dealings with Pass Labs, Magnum Dynalab and Martin Logan.

My point is this: more often than not you get back what you put out in the universe. It takes A LOT to get a company executive and/or employee to call a customer "idiot" unless, of course, said customer is exhibiting all the classical symptoms of being a total a**hole. I know this from experience when I've baited people to see how much crap they'll take from me before they show me the door.

All of us have horror stories. Mine concerns Sound Lab. I have a story that will make the hair on your heads stand on end, and not because of the sonic bliss of their speakers. But if I were to post it I bet I'd have a hundred rebuttals. Of course, if I didn't that would be very telling.

Sure, it's a public forum and we can all say what we want but maybe we should stop to first think about the implications. Getting on these forums and saying "my friend's third cousin called Unlimited Extreme Super Audio Technologies to complain about something and the next night people showed up at his house, very bad people" doesn't really benefit anyone but it sure gets the blood boilin' I'll lell you what ....