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Topic: When it walks like a duck and quack like a duck…

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Posted by Romy the Cat on 07-02-2008

Many audio publications grand some kind of idiotic rewards: “Product of Year”, “Editor Choose Award”, the “Best Sound at Show, “The Golden Ears” and so on. Trying to stay in the moronic awards-granting crowd I decided to form my own award: I would call it “The Ultimate Audio Dildo Award”. The “The Ultimate Audio Dildo Award” will be granted to companies, products, and any other public entities that pushed Audio bullshit envelop to very ultimate absurd level.  Be advised that “The Ultimate Audio Dildo Award” has no consideration to actual sound of the products but given just for marketing idiocy of the products presentation.

Taking about overwhelming absurdity: here is my first nominee: Balance Audio Technology REX preamplifier.

http://www.balanced.com/products/line/rex/index.html

REX is BAT’s new flagman preamp. I like BAT, I use to own some BAT equipment – they do OK within a context of a given requirements. They are kind of Starbucks of audio – good stable result that certainly leave a  LOT of room for relay serious and relay “high-end” coffee.  I like Victor Khomenko even though he is a menacing republican - well not one is perfect. BAT has also the very best customer service I have seen in audio...

However my general appreciation of BAT does not shadow the fact that BAT pretty much year after year keep re-packages the very same products into a new marketing BS and to promote the re-packaging as a “new invention of alchemists from Amsterdam”. Here is where Victor team out of picture and where the BAT’s marketing gurus take over. I truly hate those cardboard-cut, Vaseline chewing bitches – I met them a few time and I felt like some women after a rape – what to take a shower and forget that it even happen. Let see what they came up this time – this time it is a true “invention” well-worthy of my “Ultimate Audio Dildo Award”.

BAT have figured out that there is a limit how much to charge for a single chassis preamplifier and decided to hit marker with dual-chassis model. So, they took two ready to go BAT’s preamps, connected them with a cable and then say to each other:

“Hey! Here we have predrilled AC power entry on both units and the pre-laid out boards with power transformers and power supplies. How would we justify it if a person who sees it has more IQ then a typical idiot-reviewer (courtesy to Mike Framer who reviewed the REX)? Sure we can’t acknowledge that we are lazy and “economical” dudes who would like to announce a new model each 18 month and ignite a new round of marketing hysteria. So what we need to say? We need Victor to help us.”  

The task was given to Victor to pull out of his ass an explanation why dual-chassis BAT’s REX has so fuck-up PS design. Well in a few weeks the BAT official sales spiel was flying:

“We not want to make PS and control units properly (here is where they deployed a very fraudulent fear of low impedance lines between PS and load) so, we made one PS chassis as negative supply and another – the control chassis - as a positive supply. Oh, yeas, we ALSO do not believe in single-ended PS and we do only balanced PS.”

So, Balance Audio Technology REX Preamplifier has “intentionally-made” two chassis: one positive chassis and one negative chassis, the symmetric power supplies and the control line-level circuitry sitting on the positive chassis.  This design is priceless!!! I am sure what Victor wrote this justification for his marketing folk he was thinking: “If I were able to get away with this shit, then my next model I will have a microphone to witch a users whispers wisher for sound improvement…

Anyhow, the BAT’s REX preamplifier is my nominee for my site’s “Ultimate Audio Dildo Award”. 

Rgs, Romy the Cat
Posted by el`Ol on 07-04-2008
Reference
http://www.thorens.com/electronics/amplifiers/tem-3200.html

former reference
http://www.kraudio.cz/amps.html

former co-reference
http://www.cruz-digital.com/products.htm

ampliers from a German hifi mazine.

All so extraordinary and anusual they couldn´t have got anything else than that status.
Posted by Romy the Cat on 11-16-2011
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There is nothing more absurd in audio than to see how people wish very sober faces pontificate about absolute BS and treat themselves with seriousness of NASSA engineers. Here is the new round:

http://www.walkeraudio.com/Eliminator.html

Nope, flaks it is not BS but it is “Eliminator Directional Antennae.” I think it needs some Latin or French article in the name to be more “weighty”. This is very funny as I am testing now another electricity treatment devise and the makers assured me that without his device “I hear only 20% of music”. You understand that the devise if used fucks up all sound and most likely will be send back to the “designer”

Rgs,
Romy the Cat
Posted by Romy the Cat on 01-05-2012
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Czech Republic company Euro Audio Team introduced a “revolutionary” Flat Tonearm.

http://www.euroaudioteam.com/en/eat-e-flat-turntable-000046.html

(click imaged under the bottom to see it)

This is the most retarded design ideas that I have seen for a while. I think the next step would be to make a car with triangular wheels….

Rgs, Romy the Cat
Posted by Jorge on 01-05-2012
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Seems they never heard of the principle behind an I beam.
But wait, it is carbon fibre, I guess all is well then...
Posted by Stitch on 01-05-2012
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RFA.jpg
Posted by Amir on 11-03-2018

$80,000 per pair Speaker Cable from MIT 
http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/music-interface-technologies-acc-268-articulation-control-console-and-ma-x-shd-interconnects/
Robert Harley wrote: Yes, the MIT ACC 268 is crazy-expensive, but for those of you well-off enough to afford it, I don’t think that you’ll find a more musically rewarding speaker interface.

I have no problem if a company sell overprice non-musical products but i think about direction of magazines? is audio journalism going to hell?
Posted by Paul S on 11-03-2018
OK, I read the blurb.  Now that the cat's out of the bag, and we know it's just a resistor ladder, why not use... a resistor ladder?  Gotta hand it to those "MIT" guys, also I think there's room yet for upgrades.  How about a deluxe, super-limited, low mass edition, which is this (keep it between us, please): use the current edition to establish the setting you prefer with your Focal Utopias, then our Rolls Royce stretch limo will arrive and our Gucci suited valet will take the standard unit (under armed guard) to our mountain top laboratory, where we will precisely match that value and return it by guarded limo.  The new, low mass version is potted in a hand polished fruit wood box. Classified information: Inside the box... a resistor.  Investors, don't worry. There is always a "next" upgrade!  In this case, we will go from Allen Bradly in steps until we get to naked Vishay resistors.


Feh!


Paul S
Posted by rowuk on 11-04-2018
Even if we assume that this thing really "works" - does it not show fundamental problems in the design of the equipment usually placed north and south of these cables? Maybe highest end audio is wrought with impedance/reactance/capacitive and resistance mismatch. This would however merely serve to show that we have no engineering for the customer benefit.
In any case, this is compelling evidence that we need Romy and his website...
Posted by Paul S on 11-04-2018
Seems like the real idea behind this is (as ever) to get money from chumps, so the real reactive load is the load of crap that is "high end" audio, populated, as it is, with a mix of hapless chumps and opportunistic a-holes.  Best case, the truly rich chumps spend the money and wind up believing themselves to be the lucky ones.  Not so lucky are those who stretch to buy expensive stuff and wind up unhappy with it.


Paul S
Posted by Romy the Cat on 11-05-2018
I have absolutely no idea what you people are pissed about the new MIT’s ACC 268 cables. You need to separate in your heads two separate things. The MIT new cable as a product and the MIT new cable as a concept. 
 
The new MIT cable as a product is of cause is ridicules. Here is the industry idiots like Robert Harley making this leaving. There are plenty of people with plenty of money out there and I see absolutely nothing wrong if they by cable, play them with their playback and be happy. Howe much it cost and hos they sound is kind irrelevant to me, it is irrelevant to them, it is irrelevant to MIT and it is irrelevant to Mr. Harley. The industry pimps are not able to understand audio as abstract or a philosophical concepts and they can operate only by the products. Trust me. I am very familiar with a highest echelon of the industry participants: they are product-centric dead-weight. In the very same way the company like MIT do not produce audio for listening but they furnish products for dead-weights, or as one of the VERY high flying industry manufactures told me: “I build product mostly for bottom eaters” and he was absolutely correct. 
 
Nevertheless, if you remove from the new MIT’s ACC 268 cables the definition of “product” then what MIT did is very sensible, absolutely not necessary in my view but sensible. You need to understand that MIT made name by associating with amplifier designer houses that build kind of shitty SS electronics. The crappy ported speakers that dominate industry for the last 50 years require a lot of dumping top amplification and the “best” SS amp have near nill output impedance and not able to drive any capacitance of anything else. Here is where MIT come with amplifier-external impedance and capacitance correction. Did you even wonder why any dealer who sells Spectral amps for instance invariably is pushing MIT cables? Anyhow, from the perspective of MIT cable philosophy, where problems with amplification need to be corrected externally what MIT did is very sensible. 
 
There are many other developments in the same direction: active-biased cables from I believe Nordost, the self-correcting cables from POD and many other interesting solutions. As a solutions the concepts I do welcome what the makers they. As a products… I do not particularly care and the efforts of the morons who is trying to sell it makes no dent in my awareness. 
 
Some years back I was having a conversation with a new audio whanau-be-dealer guy who is nowadays is a huge name audio sales. He was expressing his idiotic view about audio and I stumbled his with a request. I asked him when he talks to me drop words: price, cost, sale and product from his vocabulary… The poor man was not able to talk to me anymore…
 

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