Pure Note Paragon vs. Kimber Select

No admonishment was intended Raquel. I was just making the point that advising someone that you have no advice other than 'buy them both and listen for yourself' seems to defeat the reason why people come here to ask the advice of others in the first place, don't you think?

You're absolutely right. Don't know why we bother posting opinions on anything here, since everything is system and room dependent, and perhaps even taste dependent. Hence it is only right and proper that Audiogon closes these forums forthwith. All requests for advice should receive a standard comment of 'go listen for yourself'.

Pardon the flippancy. I found it hard to accept that your response to the question Raquel, more or less said to the poster - 'Don't ask', and therefore did not strike me as appropriate. I can now see you genuinely mean that any advice given here about the relative sound of cables and equipment will just be misleading and we should not bother. But now that I see that you really believe that, the question strikes me - why do you you visit these forums at all? And this time I am not being flippant. I just don't get it. What do you get out of it if the opinions expressed here are of no value?

Tvad emphasizes what I could have perhaps explained better, namely, that cables are probably more system dependent than other components. In this regard, yes, I believe it would be best if people did not express opinions about the sound of cabling beyond reporting on direct A/B comparisons in carefully described systems, and perhaps discussing capacitance and such so as to avoid obvious mismatches. Reports about poor cable construction and bad service would of course also be appropriate.

I am somewhat less bothered by discussion of the performance of electronics and speakers, but again note that the margin for error, in the sense of attributing a particular sonic signature to a component that in fact results from its interaction with other components, lack of isolation, differences in people's hearing, etc., is high. My best hi-fi friend just completed a thorough revamping of the electrical supply in his house, which included tripling the amperage brought into the house, adding a dedicated circuit box and 7.5 kVa transformer to his audio circuits, new twisted 10-gauge wiring to cryo'd outlets, etc. The most notable change after all this work is that the 5 db. treble hump from 4 - 6 Khz. that he had previously been unable to get rid of and thought was endemic to his Revel Salons is now completely gone. He was on the verge of selling the speakers because of the tipped up treble, but now is reconsidering. The point is, he may have been tempted to say that "I think Salons are bright" before finding the culprit, but he didn't, which is fortunate. What really matters, however, is how you would think they sound if you put them in your system.

The magazine reviewers can make the same mistake, but at least they tend to post their systems so that the more savvy readers can get some perspective about why the reviewer heard what he heard. I recall a Stereophile reviewer a year or so ago describing a component as sounding warm and romantic -- then I saw that he was using Golden Cross in his system -- the sound he was describing was very possibly the sound of the Cardas. Some reviewers have used WattPuppy's as their reference speaker, but the Focal tweeters used by Wilson with the various iterations of the WattPuppy are anything but linear. Thus, everything the reviewers write about the high frequency performance of components they review using those speakers has to be discounted.

So, yes, I believe that general descriptions of the sound of components with no reference to surrounding componentry and context are generally misleading and probably better left unsaid, especially given the number of newbies to this site who lack the background to properly interpret the information. As for cabling, general opinions about their sound are especially pernicious -- cables are entirely suit to taste.