Synergestic Research: SCAM

jandewitt,

What was the equipment? Electronics and Speakers? I am sure cabling was appropriate.
Tube or solid state? TT or digital. Small room ; near field listening? Imaging can be wide and tall; Depth of soundstage and images in the stage? 

Thanks for taking time to respond. 
Always interested when someone finds gear and room especially at a Show that they find exceptional.

Regards

Geoff, regardless of the SR tweaks I have auditioned and returned, I have never lost my senses to the degree that would motivate me to try a single one of your idiotic tweaks.  Your stuff takes the cake for getting audio-fools to part with their cash for no good reason, except their penchant for self-deception.  Folks, use your good sense.  Still, I will applaud SR for their money-back return policy and if you hear the difference, then spend away.  But remember that there are lots of folks preying on your audio-anxiety who are keen to take your money for tweaks of a "snake oil" nature.  Cheers.

Despite the video lack of quality, I clearly heard the differences in the Tranquility base on and then off.  So much better with it on.  I didn't have time to hear the rest.  As for Class D amps, I've heard several recently that were excellent, musical and powerful, selling for $3K to $8K (I think Prana Audio comes to mind).  I prefer my big, monoblock tube amps but Class D can be made to sound musically interesting and involving.  I try not to listen to amps under $1K so the author's cheap (and supposedly terrible sounding) Class D amps haven't  been auditioned by me.

@fleschler 

Despite the video lack of quality, I clearly heard the differences in the Tranquility base on and then off. So much better with it on.

Can you describe what you heard in detail?

To all of the Synergistic Research naysayers & haters out there, after much defense of Synergistic Research products, and truly enjoying their performance in our audio system, I finally have several of their products that I would not recommend; and that do not work well for us in our system. Their router & switch combination. Both are deceptively attractively priced but after the required cables and antenna, are quite expensive (the router with cables & antenna cost us $6,900; and the switch another $3000). After receiving these, I saw little value in their performance and intended to return them to Scott Walker Audio but Josh Doyle insisted that we give them more time. Well, it's now six months and they add virtually nothing; in fact, the music sounds better with them removed.

The other issue we had with these was that we had frequent dropouts from Roon with them in place. Roon would not respond to our prompts for a desired tune and would require a re-boot of our Antipodes streamer to reconnect. I tried different locations of the Synergistic router and its antenna; tried angling them to other positions, to no avail. These frustrating interruptions to our service occurred every time we had our system playing. Now that we have removed them from our system, the problems are gone. We'd mistakenly thought the problem was with Roon but the problems were obviously due to the Synergistic Research router & switch. BTW, Josh & Scott Walker now refuse to take them back, in any way, even as used items at a reduced price. If they suspect there is a defect with these, they are right down the road from Synergistic Research and can easily have them checked out. But... they say they have too many in stock. Before anyone else gets stung with these items, you've been warned.