Stereophile's 2021 products of the year

I think Jim Austin gave a pretty good account of the design intent: ie deliberately eschewing feedback in the interests of improved SQ into tube friendly speakers - rather than designing a panacea for all speakers. It‘s also interesting to note that Jim confirms that an amp that measures worse (ie without feedback) can actually sound better.

He also made the interesting point that some speakers like to see high output impedances. From memory, I think these these mainly fall into the single driver category. Speaker matching is always important to a certain degree.

@fleschler  I agree entirely regarding sensitivity and impedance/phase angle effects on the in room efficiency of a speaker. I have read many speaker reviews that don't adequately address this. 

I agree entirely regarding sensitivity and impedance/phase angle

This is why I always try to show Stereophile speaker impedance vs -phase angle graphs when recommending an amp for anyone.
Instead of just blindly saying get this amp it's the best.😵

Cheers George 

Didn’t Stereophile lose its credibility when JA became editor in chief over 20 years ago? Lol, how many class A and class A+ components can you have? Perhaps the advertiser’s wallet is the limit. J/k ;)

Stereophile is awesome.  Not perfect, but a very good mag.  

As for their "best of" issues, of which there are more than one per year, I am indifferent.  The reason they do so many of them is because it sells magazines.  There are many budding audiophiles who need resources for buying and upgrading gear.  Stereophile and other magazines provide this resource.  And, yes, publishing IS a business.  And it's a very difficult business to make money at, especially in the internet age.  
I hate to think of Stereophile and TAS going out of business.  The quality of the writing and the personalities of both magazines are very interesting for me.  Compare these two to some of the British mags sometime.  The integrity of the U.S. mags is much higher IMO.