Anyone that tells you he is an expert is likely not; your best course of action in such cases is to turn around and run as hard as you can.
Ethan was adamant that power cords could not make a difference so I asked him (here on audiogon) if he had ever come up with any measurements to back that claim up. He had not -which I found odd for someone who lays all his faith in measurements! I found that it was quite easy to demonstrate how power cord affect things by measuring the voltage drop across the cord and the resulting loss of power/increase in distortion in a power amplifier. As you might expect, the power cord is governed by Ohm's Law.
In that conversation I discovered that he did not understand how the ear uses higher ordered harmonics to sense sound pressure and so is very sensitive to their presence and also that it assigns a tonality to all forms of distortion. So he was prone to making statements that certain types of distortion are inaudible when the opposite is the case. The brightness of solid state is an example: it arises out of distortion and is literally why tubes are still around 60 years after being declared 'obsolete'.
Ethan's 'reference' amplifier at the time was a $600 Pioneer which has good specs as far as spec sheets go, but is a good example of how such amps can have brightness due to low levels of higher ordered harmonic content.
I find he's pretty good with digital stuff. But I noticed that he's into room treatment, but I've not seen him working with Distributed Bass Arrays (please correct me if I am wrong on this; a google search to verify my impression in this regard produces no results). The bass is usually the most problematic issue in any room but room treatment is a relatively ineffective treatment for the problem, which is standing waves which cancel and reinforce bass notes depending on frequency and the room dimensions.
IMO/IME, actual experts usually don't refer to themselves in that manner.
Ethan was adamant that power cords could not make a difference so I asked him (here on audiogon) if he had ever come up with any measurements to back that claim up. He had not -which I found odd for someone who lays all his faith in measurements! I found that it was quite easy to demonstrate how power cord affect things by measuring the voltage drop across the cord and the resulting loss of power/increase in distortion in a power amplifier. As you might expect, the power cord is governed by Ohm's Law.
In that conversation I discovered that he did not understand how the ear uses higher ordered harmonics to sense sound pressure and so is very sensitive to their presence and also that it assigns a tonality to all forms of distortion. So he was prone to making statements that certain types of distortion are inaudible when the opposite is the case. The brightness of solid state is an example: it arises out of distortion and is literally why tubes are still around 60 years after being declared 'obsolete'.
Ethan's 'reference' amplifier at the time was a $600 Pioneer which has good specs as far as spec sheets go, but is a good example of how such amps can have brightness due to low levels of higher ordered harmonic content.
I find he's pretty good with digital stuff. But I noticed that he's into room treatment, but I've not seen him working with Distributed Bass Arrays (please correct me if I am wrong on this; a google search to verify my impression in this regard produces no results). The bass is usually the most problematic issue in any room but room treatment is a relatively ineffective treatment for the problem, which is standing waves which cancel and reinforce bass notes depending on frequency and the room dimensions.
IMO/IME, actual experts usually don't refer to themselves in that manner.