Unusual TAS bomb

I think Rrog nailed it. Reviews have become so homgenized in the listening and sound sections of the review to be almost pointless.

Well, in an at least modest defense of the TAS writers.... I write record reviews for All About Jazz, and believe me, by the time you've done fifty of them its really easy to run out of adjectives. It's hard *not* to be formulaic.

Does anyone here honestly think that Audio Research would put out a new piece of equipment one level from the previous piece if they didn't feel that it was superior? People that owned the DAC 7 would do a direct comparison with the DAC 8 before buying and hear for themselves. I would think that AR would have a few DAC 7 units around to A/B compare with the DAC 8. I read the review and even listened to a DAC 8 and I have to tell you, it sounded wonderful to me. At the Store (Stereo Design in San Diego), we A/B'd it against an older Mark Levinson CD/DAC combination, so the comparison wasn't exactly fair, but I was deciding on whether to buy the older Levinson unit and wanted to hear it against the new DAC 8. The DAC 8 was warm and open to me. I think something else is going on with the reviewer. That review was entirely too negative and having heard the unit and knowing the quality of Audio Research products, I would not trust that review and go listen for myself.

To be fair you see this kind of writing in other hobbys. I like cars like many others it is a rare day indeed when a car that isn't a family sedan gets a mild panning. Otherwise everything is pretty positive some writer will alude to a somewhat better function in the competion but saying a car completely sucks is out of the question. Lets also be real the mags depend on adverstizing and if I were a company exec I wouldn't appreciate serious criticism, and if it persisted would stop advertizing. Some measure of reality must be injected into the discussion. As a hobby we don't really have disinterested reviewers, after all the reviewer is usually an owner and might try to justify the purchase of whatever it is he is reviewing. Not always but fairly consistantly.

Audio Research, they simply needed a segue to the DAC 9 Reference Special Edition.

Bashing the audio press is silly. I don't listen with my eyes so they can say whatever they need to say. For $12 a year the periodicals are great fun.