GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: Signal variation, noise, and effects on circuit topology

Post Subject: The Living Encyclopedia of Hi-Fi (A Rose is a Rose...)Posted by Paul S on: 12/9/2008

Adrian, as a purely practical observation, I just re-read your examples of the format you suggest, and I have to say I would need a good deal more information than that before I could figure out enough of what was going on with the components in question to be able to make useful decisions for my own applications. By this I mean to say that even a brief anecdotal context would be of more value to me than the few related-but-still-isolated facts profferred with the examples.

So, what other sorts of examples do we have?

I'll assume that everyone following here has spent some time at Joe's Tube Lore, and maybe they've read the Cap Tests, too. While a LOT of relevant information is missing from these "comparisons", still, there are enough terms getting re-cycled that one can almost get some idea what those guys are talking about, setting aside for the moment the critical issue of consistency, example-to-example, within any given make, model, value, year, etc., etc..

What I have found interesting with the above-cited "comparisons" is that even though I might actually agree with the "tester's" observations, as such, there are always things peculiar to my own particular usage that I wind up weighting more or less heavily than the tester did. Or, I find out that the tester either did not notice or he glossed over traits that I find important with respect to my own final decisions. So, I followed up on what I read, paid my money, did the damned DIY, and now I hear pretty much what he heard, only I hear other stuff, too, and/or I come to different conclusions about the relative weighting of the tester's observations. Does this mean I basically wasted my time and money despite the "information"? Yup. So, how could we keep the info "vital" (which is to say, dynamic)?

In practical terms, this seems to encourage at the least a "Wikipedia"-type format, as unwieldily as that might become (and as much as it might discourage the hard-working "tester", who eagerly posts his hard-won findings only to have them subsequently picked apart by crows).

Some sort of cross-referencing system would be important, too.

If I think of this idea as a "Living Encyclopedia of Hi-Fi", it sounds quite interesting and even potentially useful. Sort of like the Good Sound Club site, with a different name...

Best regards,
Paul S

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site