Why is there so much Rowland gear for sale?

4yanx, I knew it was tongue in cheek from you. I thought it was funny, actually. I need to use smiley faces more I think. Also, still stirring, can't help myself. My apologies for using you as a foil, but if I admitted the foil part then we couldn't get these guys out of the woodwork. Thanks again for the chuckle. Your responses are very interesting, at least to me, and they make me think.

MacIntrash, love it! Now that's FUNNY!

Ohn: "reasonable quality food." My my...matter processed for the masses with chemicals added to stay here longer. Are they food companies or chemical companies that process processed food? Regardless of context, ie price, doesn't something drop below the radar of quality, any "reasonable" utility, at some point? If they put a two stroke lawn mower engine on a Harley, what would be the point, regardless if someone who was poor could afford it? As you said, either you know or you don't...I sympathize with your compassion for the meek, financially speaking in the context of the "american project", but maybe start with the horse before the cart: maybe, just maybe, the problem is in an acceptance of the means, especially when it means eating a horse, analogically speaking. We have enough food now to feed everyone all over the world and not kill another mind; its just a distribution problem, and one of greater empathy than just for the $2 dollar guy, problems that multinational food processing companies would like to catalyze, not cure. Of course, just my opinion...

Asa, we live in a world where many problems (healthcare, clean water, nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, etc.) are all technically solvable, but the political economic system does not encourage their implementation of these solutions. To say that it's a distribution problem really means that it's a political problem.

McDonald's has been a a successful company because of its ability to attract paying customers. You don't sell a billion meals without making someone somewhere happy. When you criticize McDonald's, or to bring it into the audio world, Bose, you are implicitly criticizing the decision-making ability of its customers. "50 Million Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong", but apparently a billion McDonald's customers can.

I have owned a 1987 Harley Davidson Lowrider and a 1940
Indian Chief. No comparison. I have heard the Rowland 302
amplifier with the Meitner preamp and the Avalon Eidolon,
with both the Spectral frontend and the Ayre frontend.
It was an excellent sounding setup, whether the Rowland
made it better I could not say, but the owner likes it
better than the Rowland 10 or 12 which were in the system
previously.

One thing that I have learned over the years dovetails with the lyrics of Jim Croce (how often can you trot out that reference?). :-) You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don't mess around with Harley riders (the "pin setters" of the AMF days excluded, of course).

Ohn: "distribution" conotes distribut-ing, which is an action. All human actions originate from the mind. Similarly, a political hierarchy, in our case, democratic-capitalism, is an abstraction that hides its deeper, truer meaning. To illustrate, I can not walk out my front door and point to "democracy" or "capitalism" because they are words that denote a collective state of mind; in our case, conformism by a group of minds we call "America" who conform to certain ideas. Again, you are still brought back to the origin; that the mind decides. There is no structure apart from the minds which envision it, and that abstraction only becomes a "thing" when those minds assume that it is the only truth, or the only possibility for the collective. Economies of scale - that alot of minds eat processed food, so, therefore, the truth is defined by their actions - confises what I was taliking about, namely, that it not a political issue, but an evolutionary one. If you say, "Well, everyone else is doing it so it must be right" then you conform to others mind's rules. This conformism keeps you from seeing that the empathy I mentioned is not perceived by "happiness", or the desire to stimulate instinctual pleasure centers of the mind, but is found through transcending that desire for materialism, ie empathy is attained through perception of meaning, not simply pleasure.

Oh BTW, Harleys seem cool to me...(as a machine and apart from their internal combustion heritage)