Cool Stuff

OK, personally I find the tube amps to be damn fine looking... but I can understand that's subject to opinion.

However - when you start getting into high-end turntables - I seriously can't imagine anyone looking at the Transrotor, or the Avid... or honestly, any of them - and not thinking that even if they didn't even run, they would qualify simply as statuesque artwork. Sexy stuff. B)

And as with all art - does the price really need to correspond to anything objective?

 

Just to second Chris' post, this one is absolutely gorgeous:



Hey Seth, you need a subscription to Stereophile magazine. They review stuff like that all the time, including the crazy expensive speakers.

Chris B and I went to a local high end HT shop about a month ago and looked around. We got a demo of a pretty high end system consisting of some Wilson Wattpuppies and a huge sub. The sub was boomy and sounded like crap. I like my little 10" Koda sub much better. The Wattpuppies sounded nice, but nothing better than the stuff we have at work IMO for the upper range. I would love to do a a/b comparison to see, and I may in the end prefer the Wattpuppies. But the differences definitely weren't enough to constitute such a huge difference in price. I do want to mention that the low end on the Wattpuppies is incredible. It was very clean and precise. I liked the system much better when they turned off the sub just for this reason. Sure it didn't quite play down as deep, but for the extention it had it sounded great. They demo'd Little Nemo, some jazz, then some DVD-A Metalica (not a very good demo disc), and finally some Kodo (much better choice). I love the percussion discs like this because they have such a large frequency range, and usually have very good imaging and staging cues. My favorite selection for this is Mickey Hart; Planet Drum. Track 7 has a huge Earth drum that resonates at 32 Hz. :yes:

Steven Kephart
Adire Audio

 

I agree...

In fact, listening to the 'entry level' $2700 Martin Logan Clarity set, compared to the $25,000 'high end' large panel Martin Logans that I heard in the high-end room - the difference wasn't even close to enough to justify the price difference. For that matter - the technology didn't seem to justify it - are the electrostats really different, other than the simple size of the panels? The Clarity also had additional components that the high-end version didn't, such as the NAD tweeter on top... I don't know, I preferred the Clarity set.

But sometimes, people's goals aren't to get 'the ultimate' -
...some people simply want to say that they spent the most... simply so they can tell their friends "I spent _____ on this".

Of course, I consider this attitude mostly ignorant in one respect... these people tend to not realize that quite a few people would not be impressed by the number, but rather struck by how foolish that sounded, given their grasp on the goals and results. :lol:
How does this person save face to these types of people, given their goals of impressing them?

:bag:

Oh well.

I'd love to A/B a LOT of this equipment, in a setup that truly could be fair in the scope of the units being compared. B)