Where have the long-time regulars gone?


With the holiday season here, I find myself thinking about friends and acquaintances, as well as the good people I have met here on Audiogon. Next month will mark the start of my fourth year of participation on Audiogon, so it is with regret that I note how many of the long-time "regulars" who began this forum are no longer making posts (at least not with any regularity).

I miss the spirited exchange and occasionally sharp differences of opinion that were aired here (although I don't miss the nastiness that sometimes crept into some posts). I always enjoyed and/or learned from the posts by folks such as Albertporter, Cornfedboy , Garfish, Bob Bundus, Tireguy, Trelja, Sc53, and others, and the forum section is the poorer for their absence.

So, I pose a 2-part question: where have the long-time regulars gone, and what will it take for them to return so that this forum section regains its vitality of old?
sdcampbell
I must have included an incomplete sentence above, because I certainly know the difference between "they're" and "their." Maybe I meant someting like "their calling people names is unpleasant."

"Naysayers," "idiots," "ignorant." See what I mean. We used to fight but we didnt call each other names.

I make all of my decisions on a purely subjective basis and trust my own hearing. And I think I hear differences between components and cables that my electrical engineering designer friends tell me won't hold up in a DBT. But I appreciate their point of view. They don't laugh at me and I don't call them names.

But I don't hear the variety of sonic differences among similar components, or tweaks, that a lot of people here say they hear. Sometimes, all you have to do is consider the quality of the thinking expressed by someone to know that you don't need to try his favorite tweak. That isn't ignorance or idiocy, just a little applied intelligence.

There used to be some guys who would butt in, as I said above, to answer "which" questions with non-responsive rude diatribes. Now, we have the opposite. Honest questions about "whether," are met with mindless drivel so long you don't even want to try to find the responsive comments in the thread.

Right now, most of the people who post here who would be counted among the wire is wire crowd seem pretty reasonable. This used to be a place where both sides could peacefully co-exist, unlike audioasylum, where you can't say "DBT," and audioreview.com, where you can't say any two things sound different from each other.

I almost mentioned missing "Dug" earlier, but didnt want to impliedly criticize the decisions that led to his departure.
I'm really disappointed that everybody has receded from contributing regularly - I'm pretty sure that we're right on the verge of coming to a conclusion about analog vs. digital, tubes vs. SS and whether wires make a difference or not. We recently came to unanimous conclusion that Krell does, indeed, make the only amps worth owning, having convinced everybody who thinks that there is a large premium built into their pricing based on brand name that, in fact, there's little if any profit margin in those prices. And the current DBT thread appears to be close to settling that debate once and for all.

C'mon everybody - I think one more big push and we can get these issues resolved and move onto whatever the next topics might be.
Well, the old time regulars may be retiring, but music and listening are both alive and well. I have undertaken a substantial upgrade that Audiogon - both its prices and its posts have put within my reach. So if everyone is retiring, I say farewell and thanks. I, personally, am not done yet.
From the invisible man who appears to not have much to say but has enjoyed the people on this site for pretty long, have a nice holiday season.
George