Mr. Bumble was crushed. He felt sick to his stomach. Angry and humiliated, he maintained his composure long enough to ask Dr. Grinder to give him a day to consider it. They agreed that that was only fair, considering all of the time he had spent for Dr. Grinder's benefit. When Dr. Grinder had gone, Mr. Bumble placed a call to Mr. Rosy, chief executive of Avian Acoustics, maker of the Peregrine loudspeakers.
"Sleazy's trying to make me pick up the soap," Mr. Bumble complained. "He signed the same contract I signed. He's not supposed to sell outside his area. Why do you let him get…
With demand running high, Ecstatic Audio goes into overtime production on the Behemoth, and quality begins to suffer. The second run of amplifiers has reliability problems. Or owners begin to report performance anomalies in their Behemoth or compatibility problems with other high-end audio gear. Or Ecstatic Audio is rumored to have financial difficulties. Or they release a Mk.II version of the Behemoth before the ink has dried on the Mk.I's reviews. The Behemoth Mk.II is either: a) "much better" (to use a reviewer's superlative) than the Mk.I, which reduces the Mk.I's desirability/price, or b…
"The 'Vietnam' goods were being gray-marketed into Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong. They were undercutting everybody like crazy. It cost the legitimate distributors in those countries a tremendous amount of business, and it cost us a lot of business. When we found out what was going on, we had $40,000 worth of orders in the house for the Viet Tien Sewing Machine Company---a substantial amount of money. We told them we were back-ordered. A month later we told them the same thing. We never officially cut them off, but in reality we cut them off immediately when we found out what they were…
"Say I have a CD player I want to sell. I've had it for a couple of years and now I might be able to get half of list for it, more or less. I have to compete against a dealer trying to unload his demo unit of the same kind at a lower price, and with a warranty. I'm taking a bath on it, while he's used it as a sales tool for two years and at the same time has written it down as a business loss. Is that fair to me as a seller? You can't play both sides." Playing both sides is an issue that raises David Manley's hackles, too. He tells of an afternoon he spent in one of the oldest, most well-…
But even with its dangers, and problematic as it is for dealers who work primarily person-to-person with their customers, mail-order---be it legitimate, gray-market, or otherwise---serves an important purpose. Millions of people in small towns and isolated rural communities have no other access to the goods and services big-city dwellers take for granted. They depend on mail-order in much the same way suburbanites depend on shopping malls. Likewise, specialty dealers in small towns must exploit all the potential that mail-order has to offer them if they wish for anything more than mere…
Letters in response appeared in the August and September 1996 issues of Stereophile High-end Parables
Editor:
In the June Stereophile ("Invaded by the Grays," p.78), Barry Willis did a terrific job of pointing out the problems of free enterprise in the High End. What he failed to do was to explicitly define the solution to the problem. Perhaps he thought it was sufficiently obvious, given the many allegories he provided. In any case, I believe that the solution should have been made more explicit.
The story of audiophile Dr. Grinder and his search for the best deal on…
Although I was trying to earn a living playing in rock bands in the early 1970s, I occasionally used to drag my Fender bass over to a school canteen in the next town for an after-hours session with what used to be called a "rehearsal band." (I have no idea what the derivation of that name is, except that, with the exception of a couple of veterans of the Ted Heath Orchestra, we were certainly in need of all the rehearsal we could get.) I would set up my Marshall stack the other side of the drummer from the pianist and sit behind a set of trumpet players, a brace of trombonists, and a scrum…
Cary Audio Design founder Dennis Had is largely responsible for popularizing single-ended amplifiers in America. Since appearing on the scene in 1989, Cary Audio Design has forged its own niche in the high-end audio industry. I spoke with Dennis Had about how he got started building amplifiers, and why he's so committed to single-ended triode designs. Dennis Had: It all started with a science project I did as a child, which was a single-ended audio amplifier. It was based on a 2A3 [tube] and had all of a couple of watts. It got the blue ribbon, and I was hooked forever.
After…
Mojo Nixon sings, "Elvis is everywhere." My version is "Darwin is everywhere." Last Thanksgiving, as my extended family was gathered around the dinner table, my 11-year-old nephew abruptly reminded us that Darwin was there, too. Out of the blue, he broadcast the $64,000 question:
"Did we come from gorillas...like at the zoo? Or did we come from Adam and Eve?"
Uh-oh. I pretended not to hear and fished for another piece of white meat.
"Ask your Uncle George," his Mom said. "He'll know."
I glared at my sister. Was she nuts? But it was too late. A pair of curious,…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Following its 1/3-power, one-hour preconditioning test, the Graaf GM 200's tube cages and power transformer were too hot to touch. This is consistent with JS's findings. Since heat is the enemy of electronics, one wonders how this operating environment might affect the longevity of the tubes and the rest of the circuitry.
OTL amplifiers do not like low impedances, and although I got respectable power out of the GM 200 into 2 ohms (though at moderately high distortion), the amplifier shut down a number of times during testing, refusing to come back on…
