Expert Reviews vs Truth.
There is a thing that if an expert says things you previously agreed with, you respect their opinion. And of course the opposite is true.
In Audio many experts do not actually have to pay for their equipment or at least not retail. They expound on the subtle improvements that $10,000 wires make on the system. They feed thousands of dollars of NOS Vacuum Tubes into glowing ranks of amplifiers that cost more than a good car. They say nice things and get invited to the right parties. Being cut out of such privilege means you are not as valuable to your publisher so best to say nice things.
Magazines will leave you with the impression a sound system requires a mortgage or a lottery win to get quality. Not so, not even a little bit.
If you have read any of my old Bumph you will recall I was an early subscriber to TAS magazine. I think I missed the first two issues, so almost a charter subscriber. They were extreme in devotion to truth and purity and even prohibited advertisements to avoid even the hint of a conflict of interest. Since the old Long Island days are long gone they have carried gobs of Ads. In that golden age though they had many opinions. I respected many of them until I was able to form my own from personal experience.
My friends and I by some twist of fate either owned or heard much of the good stuff from the era. Our personal experience did seed doubt about some things. The first thing was the idea of absolute purity. For example the best preamplifier of the era bar none was the AR Sp3a1. My friend had one. We spent hours listening to it. It was to quote TAS, “a straight wire with gain.” Yet it really never was. That model is VERY valuable on the collector market, but it is now considered flabby and inaccurate, but very nice sounding. That really is the key.
The thing about playing recordings is preferences. I prefer this to that. I like the sound of this instrument on this recording. It is taste rather than accuracy. A common trap is a symphony recording that seems to capture a concert hall just so, but only when played on this particular set up. Hey if the sound is on the recording you should hear it on almost any setup. If the setup is somehow creating or emphasizing or masking the sound that is not accuracy.
I do not recall if I told this story before but here it is anyway. I was reading a review of a system interconnect. A wire. The person had really expensive equipment and said only with this particular wire between his CD deck and his amplifier could he hear this particular sound. The CD was the famous Trinity Sessions by Cowboy Junkies. The sound was the subtle rattle of an air duct down to one side on the first track. Wire A worked wire B did not. Both A and B were expensive and well thought of but obviously A was superior!
Err but hmm no. My CD player was less expensive than either wire. It was a mid grade consumer Philips player (They invented CD). My preamplifier was a tweaked OP Amp unit, my wires were consumer grade coaxial, my amplifiers were vacuum tubes and also tweaked. I had built my speakers. I heard that sound on my system. So it was not the wire was it.
I have no doubt he was being honest, but what he claimed was not true, and was not a valid test of the product.
The issue and the problem is that all the experts work like this. They say things that probably are only true for a very very narrow set of circumstances if they are true at all. The are demonstrating what they favor, not which is better. Oh and there is psychology.
Here is an example of that. In an OLD TAS article I think it was Harry Pearson was reviewing Magnaplanar Tympanis. In that he said his first encounter was in a room that had a grand piano on the other side of these strange room dividers and they were listening to piano music. He honestly thought he was listening to a live performance, BUT it was a recording and the strange room dividers were the speakers! REVELATION!
Piano is notoriously hard to reproduce. It is hard to record usually taking several microphones on a mix. It is a powerful instrument with huge dynamics. The Magnaplanars are large and couple well to the air in the room and when provided with enough power are very dynamic. But not as much as a real live piano. Thing is when you walk into a room with a piano and weird room dividers you are presupposing assuming and accommodating the idea that the piano music you hear is live. That is psychology. That experience made him believe perhaps that these devices were better than they actually were.
OK I know that Magnaplanars are really good devices. But nobody will claim that the units from 1970s are as good or better than current products. They were and are flawed and if “properly” set up they will put sound into a room that is objectively very different to the signal that is going into them by their dipole radiating nature. I do like them, but I will never accuse them of accuracy.
This process occurs all down the line. I just read a buyer guide to new turntables and it took all of one paragraph to judge that they were rating devices pro and con by the presence of a USB outlet. That is similar to rating an automobile by the ease of touchscreen use. ( think ergonomically speaking touchscreens should be banned in cars by safety authorities)
Oh they had some multi-thousand dollar units listed and assumed as good because they cost so much. A shame no USB.
I have a nice system. If I had to replace my turntable it would cost a few grand. A lot of that would be the no longer made cartridge. The equal is about a thousand bucks by itself. My preamp could be replaced for $1500 ish. My amplifier that is a problem but lets go with $2000. I would just build another set of my speakers for a thousand all in. That comes to 7.5 kilobucks. People can spend 10 times that and do but it does not sound better. Perhaps it sounds a bit different. But recordings are not reality. It is fun to try though.