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"The Shepherded” are the representatives of audio herd, among those, whom the audio industry “affected” the most.

The Shepherded audio person usually has reasonably well paid job and from reasonably to highly educated. He has some extra money and extra time to spend in his life, so instead of sniffing cocaine, polishing his Harley or painting his boat the Shepherded chose to “do audio”. The audio interests of the Shepherded are very restricted and usually drift atop of the audiophile’s foamy waves. The main objective of the Shepherded’s “hobby” is to harvest the industry marketing accomplishments and to implement them in own listening room. Any more or less evolved objectives of music reproduction are mostly alien forms for a Shepherded audio type. If some kind of sounds are played with the Shepherded playback then juts it is juts in order to confirm that the Shepherded playback assembly is still working and comply with the “embraced definition of success”

The Shepherded people are well familiar with many audio models, they flawlessly pronounces the model’s abbreviations and versions. They know many names of many manufactures and have the whole army of audio reviewers at their Outlook contact lists or phonebooks. They change equipment habitually in tight accordance to the new prevailing audio-marketing wind. The Shepherded listening room feels like a trip to a dentist office where instead of the cases with the insurances clams you are surrounded with the fresh produce of the audio marketing …

A Shepherded does not pursue to any specific sonic result and has no explicit sonic objectives. For him Sound in his rooms is purely a unsystematic outcome of equipment he has managed to collect. The criteria for the Shepherded “equipment accumulation” is not “Better Sound” but rather a “Better Company” that with the contemporary audio industry ( and in the context of the Shepherded primitivism) could be summarized by just one factor:  who tall more thrilling and sensational irrelevant fairytales about a company or about a products. Do I have to reveal that the lever of the fairytale’s irrelevancy is very proportional to the level of the Shepherded’s demands?

Sure in his mind the Shepherded’s accumulation of “audio assemblyment” has a deep rational and profound reasoning but in realty it is nothing more then juts the sucking in the audio rumors and reaction upon them with own financial strength. Since, there is for a Shepherded person no association between the efforts he spent for playback and the results he get in his listening room, the only one driving criteria for Shepherded is celebration of own self-image.  Sheng-Yen suggested that satisfaction of own none-noble pretentiousness is one of variation of the deluded view of life. By pretentiousness, he meant an amply pursue of triumphal reputation, the reputation that lacks in substance. Sheng-Yen proposed that person with a deluded view of life is like a dog chasing his own tail while he believes that it is another dog's tail. This “another dog's tail” is EXACTLY where the entire stupid audio industry lives and it is not surprise that the phone numbers of the Shepherded Audio-Morons™ are being sold by audio dealers to each other as the “gateway to haven”. I can give a VERY LONG list of very expensive and very popular audio products that perform at insultingly low level and were made available only because there is a huge army of the Shepherded simpletons out there. My rough estimate that it is 30% of all people who do high end audio…

I relay do not like those people. Sure, I use them; I visit them from time to time and satisfy my curiosity about specific audio products. I do not kiss their asses and care less about their “audio-friendship”. In reality I do not find even my avenue to deal with them is worth any attention. The reasons I do not feel that they are valuable even to “browse sound” is because a Shepherded do not “work” on Sound and if even something interesting or potential had happen in his listening room then the Shepherded juts steps over it without ever noticing the potentials. The Shepherded ALWAYS STEPS OVER THE  NONE-ACCOMPLISHMENTS:  it happened in past with each single Shepherded that I know. It happens with them as soon as some cretin from the Internet or a writing-whore from audio publication screams to the pack of the “pre-tuned” Shepherded: “fetch”.

It is imposable to bring any argument to the Shepherded as they stupid type lacks of any audio sense. I for years try to incentive some people that I know asking them to inject “the Shepherded detector” into the audio awareness. It should be some kind of a placebo notion, placebo devise or placebo technology that has an enormously positive reputation, no benefits and that should be “swallowed” by the army of the Shepherded retards and acts as pH indicator paper on any audio Shepherded. Ed Meitner did it phenomenally with SACD but I feel that even slicker “Shepherded Gauge” might be invented.

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