Great stuff!

It just goes to show that everything we add to our hifi's really sounds the same, it's just that some kit may look nicer and impress your mates.

I'm glad we got to the bottom of this, it's going to save a lot of people a great deal of money in the long term.

From a forum's point of view, I guess it makes this place redundent - after all, ZG's raison d'etre was a place for hifi fanatics to get together on line and discuss the merits of various tweaks and pieces of hardware sonically.

With the realisation that we are all wasting our time has come a very significant reduction in posts from the interesting personalities that originally built up ZG. This is sad. But then I guess there will be a lot of used gear on the market, as ZG owners realise that they can acheive the same for a whole lot less. Good news for the unenlightened.

So the forum has gone full swing. It is now so similar to the HFC effort that caused some to "defect" that it is difficult to understand it's reason for being. After all, why not just go back to HFC and get together over there?

One thing does confuse me though. Given that all this stuff is the same, why are these people posting on the HFC forum and buying the magazine? That seems strange. Surely, given the futility of their quest, they would be better off buying home improvement magazines and trawling the DIY websites? Could it be they want their hifi's to look better? In which case, the industry is way off the mark as most kit is hardly aestetically pleasing. Maybe a lesson to be learned from the success of Bang & Olufsson there.

So given these revelations, and the apathy shown by many of the forums founder members to recent discussion topics, what does the future hold for ZG?

There is a possible clue in the conversion of the forum's owner to the DBT mantra and his realisation that it all sounds the same. If this is the new ZG vibe, then I can only see the forum being used for humourous comments regarding the affliction of audiophilia. That seems a shame, given the original goals.

I'm sure many of the "old guard" will continue to converse by e-mail and hopefully surface somewhere else in the future. But until that time, I would be interested to know what the forum is going to maintain it's levels of traffic with.