What do you know: I invested into my entertainment and subscribed “The Absolute Sound”. Sometimes it is really amusing to read this magazine. Those audio publications quite long time moved in my home from the “toilet reading” into the section where my entertainment DVDs live and now the TAS magazine sits right next to the Disney’s cartoons and Richard Jeni beautiful show “A big Steaming Pile of Me”.

My first issue of TAS was very fanny with Jonathan Valin as the brightest star of the entertainment. Jonathan always was nice and soft person. He dose not say or write anything off the bitten path or smart but he never staff his writings with idiotic pomposity or with overwhelming sense of self-importance (as most of his colleges do). My perception of Jonathan Valin in regards to his audio views is following: Jonathan sits in a 8’x8’ room smocking 23 marihuana joins and the room filed with the marihuana smoke up to the point that the room’s walls are invisible. Suddenly Valin stops to smoking and begin to express his opinions about something… well, in our case it would be audio and in this particular case it was be the Lamm LP2 phonostage review.

Really, it is imposable to get anyhow different then the reports about the drag trips from the Jonathan Valin’s “review”. I remember that he totally out blue suddenly begin to worship the Kharma loudspeakers. The loudspeakers were crap (as anything else the Kharma does) but Valin dived in such a deep depth of his marihuana-inspired emotionalism that the distributors had not other ways the react then to increase the retail price twice.

This time Jonathan presumably inhaled even deeper … and the Lamm’s phonostage reviews was born… :-)

The first mentioning of the LP2 Valin suddenly begin to sing ode to Jansen transformer that Lamm uses in his phonostage. It is not that it is absolutely objective and commonly known fact that the Jansen epoxy-glued magnetic is horrible. It is not about the fact that any person who own this phonostage admit that the MC level of this corrector is severally compromised and made the MC input of this phonostage to sounds no better then $50 worth SS phono-box for DJs. What surprises me how Jonathan Valin picked from the unit the worth element and proposes in his review this element as the keystone of sonic beauty? I have no other explanations for the Valin’s observations then the density of the marihuana’s smoke…

Then, Jonathan Valin claims that LP2 uses The Western Electric 417A. I have addressed this subject for the Morons ™ at Audiogon.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?eanlg&1119995647

It is well know that no one LP2 ever was sold with 417A and Lamm deceives customers, prostituting on the “famous” vintage name. OK, in realty the LP2 is not Lamm’s design and Vladimir license it circuit from Mickey Mouse. Why not? If to dump BS around the LP2 then why stop on the WE tubes?

Next? Jerry Gladstein suggested waiting for 6 month unit the unit opens up. Well, I never liked Gladstein and I do not like what he proposes. I own the LP2 for a year and a hafe and I am intimately familiar with other dozen LP2s. I can testify that even after 5 years they sound completely identical: solid state-like, syntactic and insultingly flat image–vise. Sure my opinion is as subjective as Gladstein’s or Valin’s but… there is difference: I do not sniff the marihuana smoke….

Next. “The clear harmonic details”, the “best reproduction of the duration of notes”…. Is it in context of phonostage that has no upper bass? Good luck, Jonathan. Inhale deeper!

Next. Jonathan feel bad that LP2 dose not “gives the CD definition of bass”? Here is apparently Jonathan jumped from marihuana to cocaine as if he feel that any imaginable, even the best ever CD, can even remotely approach to what analog does with bass then he should not be a reviewer….

I can go on and on but what is the point. I said enough about the Lamm LP2 at:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/TreeItem.aspx?postID=708#708

and essentially at:

The point I am making that TAS is a wonderful invitation for a public drug-trip diaries. Different potheads probably do a few joins and then begin to combine words into the paragraphs… Look, look, it was another Lamm LP2 review!!!. Come on! Close the door, you let the fumes to escape…