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A couple days ago a local friend of mine asked to let him to listen my Celestion SL600 monitors:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/TreeItem.aspx?PostID=2500  (on the second page)

I brought to him the monitors with the stand (but with no LF section). The SL600 sounded like crap, very identicall to the sound of my Melquiades driving SL600. It was very obvious after the very first notes that his 50W PP A class B amp juts can not drive those speakers. It is not the issue of power but the fact that SL600, for whatever, reasons demand incredibly high QUALITY of amplification… Anyhow, I told him that if he promises to find a better amplifier then I will leave the SL600 in his room for a while, so I did… The guy didn’t disagree that his amplification was very poor but still he asked me why I feel that his amps were inadequate. I made an attempt to explain but while I was pooling out of my ass my bogus explanation I was wondering what the hell I was doing. I really do not know any explanation why some SS amps sound good or bad and pretty much anything that I’m capable to provide as “explanation” (even for myself) is completely fabricated. For instance I know very defiantly that an amplifier does very poor job but why do we (the peoples who juts USE audio) should care WHY the amp perform poorly? Yes, there are some very basic and very simplistic things: like amount of bias current relative to the load impedance but why we, THE USERS OF AUDIO, need to go further to understand how this damn amplifier works?

I think the reasons why we, THE AUDIO USERS, mistakably feel that the nuts and bolts of audio design is something that we should touch is the very same reason that brings so much evil in audio – the mediocrity  and stupidity of audio reviewing. Those people, the reviewers, year after year without having talent or skills to sell Sound, they force audio people to buy into a semi-technical justification “WHY SOUND SHOULD BE GOOD”. As the result a cretin-reviewer writes about among of capacitors, silverness of the cables or amount of flux  but at the same time he is falling give an objectives assessment of the actual Sound. The irony that even if a reviewer would try to say anything about sound (presumably that he would know “how”) then we the morons-readers would not understand him unless a reviewer will justify “the quality of sound” by some kind irrelevant technical fact.

We, the people who use audio, really do not need to know all those night and bolt – we juts ride horses, we as not veterinarians, and we do not need to know the acidneed of the horn’ stomach in order to ride her. A couple weeks back I stopped by at auto-dealer to buy a car. The sale- guy told me a long story about the amount of titanium in the car’s engine, the exclusive torch generation algorithm and unique weight distribution. I suggested him to shut up because nether I not him have any idea or interest what these words means. After driving test, the car was driving very poorly. So, where all that glorified “torch” gone?

The point that I’mtrying to make is that we really need to define for ourselves what we are interesting in audio: do we shovel technologies and try to fit them for our demands or we just try to fulfill our demands without any regards to technologies… After all - when you buy a car that drives as you expected… DO YOU REALLY CARE HOW IT WAS DONE? Do we really need to know about the “uniqueness” of the speaker’s drivers if the speakers sound like shit? Do you really need to know about the benefits if a given amplifier topology if from the sound of this amplifier the cactuses desiccate….

Perhaps if the audio – reviewing Morons would self-impose a ban to writhe up bogusness about irrelevant technology then perhaps the entire possess of reviewing would be different. Last year I asked a guy who occasionally write reviews if he think to abandon to write in his review about that irrelevant pseudo-techno-crap and he replied “what else to write about?”

We, the used do not need explanation, he need a “black box” with demanded performance.  If we, the users begin to wonder about differences between bipolar vs. MOSFETS, Bessel vs. Butterworth or cathode bias vs. self-bias then the people who furnish us with solutions of the people who critique this solution do very piss-poor job and they should be thrown out.

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