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One HUGE omission in the review: where the hell is the evaluation of the DarTZeel's vaunted built-in phono stage?!?

Wes pushed hard to do the review, but doesn't do vinyl. A follow-up from Mikey, Art Dudley, or Fred Kaplan would seem in order.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

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...(Really enjoyed reading the Measurements btw, and the designer's response...)

I thought I had written a post regarding this about a week ago, but it's missing. Here it goes again.

This review intrigued me in that the measurement's were "disappointing" per JA. Yet, WP essentially could not distinguish this from the Boulder amp, except for some apparently very subtle things. JA wrote that some of those measurements would indicate that the problems could be audible in some situations. [my paraphrase(s)]

Maybe some of the 'problems' are so far down (-70 dB) that it's really inaudible. Maybe the 'problems' are subtle. Maybe the measurements are capturing things that ears cannot easily distinguish. Whatever it is, there's some important understanding here regarding listening and measuring.

What's the forum members' take on this?

This goes back to JGH's original premise that listening to the gear will tell you much. If it were just up to the "measurements" no one would love tube gear, but they(we) do.

Even in live music, no acoustic space is perfect, so we listen through the acoustic flaws for the performance, of which the hall just happens to be a part of "the event".

It may be that there are other things we should measure in loudspeakers that would reveal more of what we need to know before we buy a particular model. Cabinet resonances seem to be a very important point.

We ask amplifiers to reproduce 19 and 20khz mixed tones with no artifacts, yet any amplifier that measured like a loudspeaker we would dismiss out of hand.

It does seem though that at that price range we are expecting to see a "straigh wire with only gain" and no character. I doubt those that can afford to own a DarTZeel will be disappointed in its musical presentation regardless of the measurements.