Joe, I remember going to my college library to read the reviews in the magazines I could not afford--hour after hour (ca. 1968). I also remember the transition from tubes to solid state in 1964 or so. the SS stuff had far better specs but I was baffled at the utterly dreadful sound.
You are entirely correct. One must listen. Trust your ears on,y as Joe suggests. I can easily attack any specifications generally employed by most companies. Still, there are manufacturers like Bel Canto who provide incredible S/N ratios and yes, their stuff sounds great. Is it simply due to their specs? If it was, how do we reconcile the superb performance of units with lesser specs? Admittedly, tubes usually have mundane numbers but one must agree many sound wonderful.
Some day perhaps we can finish the science and all enjoy the expressive communication all too often at great financial cost these days. Thank goodness for Andrew Jones who demoed a pair of Elac speakers at CES for $500 RETAIL! They positively murdered a $100,000 system from a very famous company in the same hotel in the same size room. If this industry is to survive, it'll be due to folks like Elac who subverted their German pride, hiring an Englishman to bring young people an astonishing listening experience. They deserve our gratitude and support.
i forgot to respond to Almarg: even solid state amps with very low source impedance can be manipulated by the ALS. With an amp with zero feedback, the ALS is still going to have the same basic character. The equalization is very subtle. One cannot make a significantly crappy speaker sound good with all the band aids in the world. I set up a huge system for a dealer show with the new Yamaha 11-channel separates which use proprietary EQ developed in cooperation with their pro division (it uses two different filtering schemes and sounds pretty good sans EQ anyway) but yet dealer insisted on Polk speakers. The Polk guy was terrific. Worked his ass off. We used at least four of his subs and all 11 channels but my car system sounds better. As I recall. The Polk stuff was top of their line. Very disappointing for all the work we did.
Sorry about the length of these posts.
