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Stitch wrote:

….both highly regarded Cartridges from TAS (Jonathan Valin) of course....

Yes, this is the problem. I do not mean the habit of playing bad record (that is problem itself) but I mean that people who in this industry are in position to shape official public opinion are just too idiotic. A few months ago I have a debate with a current US distributor. From what I know about Valin I always considered him just as a meaningful simpleton and not particularly smart fool. The guy I spoke with instead that he is a start but very diabolical-minded person and brought to my attention a number of incidents after which the people from other industry would deservingly end up in prison. Another dealer, distributor, who know Valin for year and deal with him on regular basis told me that anybody who pays attention to Valin shell visit his listening room. According to him Sound Valin getting in there is horrible and has absolutely no relation to the comments that Valin is spraying to public.

I personally have only one exposure to Valin and it was enough for me to discard this idiot since then. It was back in CES 2000, or 2001, or 2002 - I do not remember already. It happened that I was sitting in some kind of room, listen the extremely bad sound, and exchanging opinions with the room’s owner why the sound was so poor. Then Jonathan Valin come to the room and after a short listening come to the room owner, shake his hand and informed him that it was the best sound he ever heard in audio. The room owner, who was not a Moron and knew what Sound it was had difficult time to look into the Valin’s eyes but he understandably kept playing his role of grateful manufacturer…

Then I did something evil, I juts form fun ditched my badge with name “Romy the Cat” (he does not know me by face) and followed Valin for a next 30 minutes across a dozen of the rooms. Guess what, this son of bitch did the same “best sound ever heard in audio” in each room without any regards to what the rooms demonstrated. The most expensive equipment was the more “glorious” this asshole sounded to the manufacturers, presumably trying to extort from them the opportunity to review their equipment.

I know that demean the reviewing dirt is my very favorite topic at my site but let do not forget that it is very important. We talk about Koetsu and some voices say the Koetsu was fine 20 year back. Let however do not forget that the Yoshi Sugano making his cartridges in his basement 25 years back is not something that public see.  There are very many basement-manufacturers of cartridges in Japan and wide public know nothing about them. This industry removes the microphone from manufacturer’s hand and give the microphone to the media reviewers. So, no one know about good cartridges but people only know about the cartridges that are exposed to public by media. It is reviewer responsibility to conduct initial quality control to filter out faulty products. Koetsu that I have is a faulty audio product and I see Valin and the rest audio dirt direct responsibility that bad manufactures was able to screw me, the consumer. If Valin in his numerous “glorious” Koetsu review would take as position to alert public that the new Koetsu production is very bad then the bad Koetsu production would stop and they would change this ways or go away.  This is how it shall work and it is how it works in most of the civilized industries…

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