Yes, Slawney, I'll correct you.
1. Where do you get off insinuating that I "personally" got someone to buy cable and now have some kind of vested "personal" interest that they keep them? You'd better read this stuff again because you are thinking too much. I like you so I'll chalk it up to quick fingers on keys and not enough self-reflection. The next time you insinuate that someone "influenced" someone else, the insinuation being that there was something subtlely nefarious in the motivation, you'd better think twice. Frankly, its an off-handed swipe at Bwhite that somehow he can't make his own decisions - which he can.
2. Sead (all the way back in November...) wouldn't honestly engage on a dialogue - failing to offer arguments for his positions while criticizing others' positions and finally resorting to the childishness of calling me names - and I called him out on it. He chose, evidently, to quiet-up and I let it go. What I don't get is your riding to his defense, mistakenly and months later (because, if you look, I haven't said anything to him since then, even ignoring his 4-29-02 swipe).
To wit: anyone who reads Sead's 4-29-02 comment above can readily discern his flippancy and to claim differently is, well...You know what really gets me about this? Inauthentic chimers-in who start off a post with a bunch of statements about how nice everyone is - establishing how nice they are - and then proceed to deride (Sead insinuating that Bwhite is trying to posture himself as an audio "God") and mischaracterize (saying that I "disqualified automatically" OTA - a complete lie) to others detriment and then end it all with a "cheers" (Sead's MO), or some other self-serving smarm thats supposed to make it all sweet again. And now a further mischaracterization from you, Slawney, that Sead did not commit these, um, "errors", and that he's just so-so misunderstood. Maybe Sead is alright in a deal, or over the phone, or shooting the audio bull one-on-one, but so far, he has a penchant of popping into discussions with an inauthentic sweet tone masking an actual derision.
3. No one is stating "conclusions", just opinions, and the thread is just fine. Where you've perceived the circumstance that's its getting out of hand - as in, insinuating that an opinion becomes a "conclusion" when, allegedly, offered to shut someone else up - perhaps has more to do with your desire to defend Sead, assumably, than the tone of this dialogue presently.
4. As much as we would all like to maintain out egalitarian self-delusions, ears are not equal and opinion is not radically subjective; in context, some opinion is more true than others. But dialogue works fine when everyone offers theirs' authentically, as an adult, and is willing to state why and how they arrived at that opinion. I'm soooo tired of hearing on these threads people who evidentally have a strong sense of opinion on the gear they like - which, Slawney, I know you do - to then at some juncture say that all opinions are equal, as if, by offering this observation, they are settling down a class of schoolchildren (and they the lone adult seeing from on high the foibles of others). There is a difference between the democratic notion that all have equal access to voice opinion and the fact that some opinion is better than another - all displines of knowledge depend on it. Yes, I know that opinion in audio is system-dependant, but that does not reduce all opinion into an undifferentiated morase of, er, "equality". Why people who obviously have a strong opinion feel compelled to at some point trot out a position that then claims all opinion is equal is beyond me. It does always seem to happen though when someone is being "diplomatic".
Slawney, in the future, let Sead defend his own "errors"; you get caught up in them when you try. Oh, and the next time you are wondering if, in fact, I "influenced" someone, you have my personal e-mail address. Just ask me.
Er, cheers,
Mark (Asa)