Please consider doing business with Audio Emporium. We sell cost effective AV gear. We look at the investment/performance ratio with what we offer. We concentrate our interest and demos in products you can actually buy- instead of gear in never-never land. We can help you navigate the enormous landscape of audio gear and provide remarkable value for the dollar you spend.
By and large, the magazines have left those of us who work for a living in the dust. They’re not even trying to help us make sense of what to BUY. They’re not our advocate.
In the July 2020 issue of TAS:
*$3200 Kiseki MC cart with a long history of variability.
How about Ortofon? With TLC from Denmark, NOBODY makes carts with the performance and consistency of Ortofon. Orto MC’s include Quintet Black S, $1k. MC Cadenza Bronze runs $2309. I’ve got my money or Orto!
*$19k Technics Direct Drive table, complete with 1970s detachable head shell design. Convenient
for changing carts- I’ll give it that.
*$12k SME budget turntable. If you can’t pony up for $19k, here’s your starter turntable I guess.
“I have seen and heard arm/table combinations costing multiples its price that come nowhere near its level of performance.” Spending lots of time with $30-250k turntables, A?
*$22.5k Optical Cart & EQ: And it still has a stylus fellas.
*$3500 Interconnects (20 inches) and $4k speaker wires (6 feet)- they speak French.
*$130k Boulder Preamp: $52k Boulder Phono Pre: Three pages of fine print for this almost
$200k preamp stack.
$45k Audionet Preamp and $105k Audionet Power Amps: But you get monoblocks…
Six full pages on this combo…
*$40k Tidal Preamp, $85k Tidal Monoblock amps. Eleven pages on these boys…
“They represent a good value when compared with other top flight electronics.”
I dunno about you guys, but I have NO interest in reading about products for the rich and famous. I know there are speakers that run $100k to a million bucks. No thanks. I’m not interested in jets or yachts either.
Why do magazines that have an annual subscription of $14 write about such over-the-top gear?
One reason is, the guys who make this crazy expensive gear- gladly loan it out for review. It’s free advertising for them. The magazine has something to write about.
The next reason is, if the reviewer chooses to buy the product that’s in for review, he buys it for a fraction of dealer cost. When is the last time you saw a reviewer say WHAT HE PAID for an item he purchased?
Hence the guy writing the review isn’t invested at all. He’s not looking at the gear from the consumer perspective of value. He’s hooking it up to his similarly attained, invariably over the top gear. He’s comparing the item under scrutiny vs like minded/priced alternatives.
I’m sure some of you have looked at reviewers’ lists of gear they use to audition with. In many cases they have MILLION$ of dollars of gear at their disposal- just like you!
I know I’m an old codger. But I much preferred the days when the mags spent 90% of their energy on gear we could afford.
The point of this entry is to remind you that we at Audio Emporium work with people like you
who want great sound – with exceptional merit. We don’t want to insult you with unobtanium.