HiFi+

I have bought this on and off since it started; mostly due to an unnatural desire to look at pictures of stuff I can't afford.

However, it is almost beyond parody at the moment. I picked up a copy in the railway station and fortunately read it before I paid for it. I know SQ already alluded to this article here:

https://www.audio-forums.com/as-rediect/showthread.php?t=19488&page=5

but I want to rant.

I can't remember exactly what the reviewer said because I resented the idea of paying for what I consider to be bollocks.

However, the general gist of the summing-up paragraph of an article on 2 mains regenerators, (PS Audio and Vertex) was: 'The two regenerators will offer very different presentations. One is neither better nor worse than the other and which one suits you will really depend on the system in which you use it, presenting the musical performance as a whole,,,etc.'

So now you can use a mains regenerator to 'tune' your system, genius.

Now following this 'whole system' approach to it's logical conclusion have we considered how we prepare ourselves to listen to a musical performance? Possibly the type of Sausages you eat before or the apples in your White Lighting might make a perceivable difference to our hearing. Also, have we considered the fabric of the chair we sit on, is soft necessarily better? Would Slazenger Sport improve the odour of the listener and hence their listening enjoyment?

I do think cables make a difference, and I do think mains quality contributes to your system, but is this not taking the piss?

It is no wonder that the market is on it's arse. Oh and elsewhere in the issue, £425.00 for a fucking Kuzma teak record weight?£"!$ Sweet jesus.

Can we start a sticky thread along the lines of Private Eye's 'warballs'? 'HiFi Balls' can include occasional gems from the hifi press.

 

If you did half the posts on here would be in it.

 

Hi Scott 01

Have you tried these reviewed items in your own system? If not how can you be so adamant that they are crap or wrong or snake oil(use what ever word you like). If you have not tried them, then and while you are entitled to your opinion it would have more weight and authority if you had and found them not to preform to stated standard then fair enough. One thing i worry about is the number of people who have an opinion but don't have the actual experience with the item you are being critical off. Now if you have tried these products and think they are poor okay i can and will respect your findings but if you have not(and past trials with other items can't count)tried these then.....I Can't.

Every thing works differently in different situations and none more so than Mains related products. I know this from experience and almost more than any other product out there (and they should all be tried in your system before buying),mains filters ,cable and regenerators will work well,brilliantly or poorly in different areas in the house and in different parts of the city. The quality of house wiring,sub station placement (where you are on the line and so many other factors). The only valuable thing that can be said about any of these is what it did in your system and only that it is worth trying ,nothing more nothing less.

As to the value of HI-FI + ,it has its flaws but compared to the other UK mags it is IMHO the best out there at the present. It covers every price point and while it is High End mostly ,i for one don't want to read Nad reviews and such like . The state of the Art is where most big developments happen and then filter down to the mid and budget market.

Have you tried the wood record weight?,no,thought not. When you have tell us what you think and if its worth the money.

If you have the experience of all these products then all you can really say is in my system these are as you put it Bollocks.For many other people who can hear what these do or don't do ,they are worth trying and quite often are a revelation and not Bollocks.

Please qualify your comments and if you have in the past and bear in mind i am new to ZG then fair enough. I just wish posters and Thread starters would give detail and not sweeping statements either for or against a product etc. We deserve more meat and experience in what we read here and in magazines too.

Regards D Louth

 

Hi D Louth,

the impression I had was the OP was popping off at the florid nonsense found within the pages of HiFi+ not at the effectiveness or not of the items reviewed.

I have to admit I find the magazine hard to swallow personally. It either makes me laugh or grind my teeth, but Roy Gregory's writing really is insufferably pompous don't you think? He must work like a demon though.

I'm more of a fan of World myself and the technical articles in News these days are quite good. Unlike Plus you can read these magazines and learn something. I'd happily pay for a HiFi magazine that had no reviews in it at all except for reviews of obsolete kit.

I think the HiFi Balls idea is a good one, though I suspect it would be closer to Pseud's Corner.

 

How the hell any blob of wood to weigh a record down can be worth 400 something quid is beyond me. As the man above said, there is little wonder the Hi-Fi market is on its arse when people that may be thinking of making the move from a all in one to a system pick up a mag and read about mega bucks mains re gen kit, 400 quid clamps, £1000 cables, etc. Its fantasy island time.

Then to ask have you heard it, and can therefore comment, how are people that inhabit the real world supposed to pay for stuff like that to try. And if dealers are dumb enough to buy in stock of the things to allow them out on sale or return or home dem then I'm not surprised we have a lot less of them than we had.
(either that or the margins they are making on them don't bear thinking about)

Thank god for hi-fi world is all I can say, generally honest reviews of things that make a difference to your system.

 

Exactly UncleAnts. I was, the standard of writing is (in my opinion) cringe worthy, sub DH Lawrence, but er, about electronics not liberated love. And every F!"$!"ing review is the same.

Components can: 'hang the musical whole together, so the performers are as one, not simply playing but in a very real sense feeling every nuance of their Stradivarii / Bontempi'.

The almost breathless exhortation to purchase increasingly ridiculously priced (for me) products is a little wearing. It's a free country though so all power to them, I certainly won't be losing sleep over my great HiFi+ vendetta.

I don't want to read reviews on the latest £150.00 NAD either; (especially not for £4.50) but in this world of balances the writing has tipped the scales for me. I can no longer stand the drivel that comes with the nice pictures in+

I feel World is better. I like the way they publish critical letters, if not the way that the writers are subsequently dismissed. Also think they let Russ Andrews off a bit lightly. The rest of the mag is pretty good overall. I particularly like 'olde worlde'.

Also bought Stereophile the other day. Apart from the terrible name, on first reading it seems pretty good, a nice balance of views and , shock horror a review which approaches unfavorable!

 

Hi Guys

I for one like Roy gregory's Magazine and look forward to it. World is okay but has its flaws too. Both of these are better than the others IMHO. Hi-fi News should crawl off and die instead of falling,getting up and falling again(used to be a good read 14 years ago) Choice is better than it used to be and What no Hi-fi is just as poor as it always was and maybe worse.

Dudywoxer most people who are getting into audio from the one box system buy What HI-Fi and not any of the other magazines and all i can say is Abandon Hope all Who enter here. I am not saying that there is not some dubious kit out there but i am frustrated by the number of posters who have sweeping un-qualified(may be they are,please give us more info on what you have tried that leads you to your load of bollocks comments)statements on Isolation,cables ,mains etc. I want to know why some posters think what they do,all i am asking for is qualifications and more info to back up what they believe. I don't think that is to much to ask. debate is good and healthy but a statement of fact or an opinion without qualification is much reduced in worth.

But just because you struggle to understand the worth of an item,without trying it opens you to the good chance you are wrong. Back opinions up with experience.

The ability to put on paper an experience is a hard thing ,to try and sum up listening to music and how an audio component or components affects the sound is very hard as well. Yes a writing style has grown up to help reviewers to do that and is it perfect,no. I think there is a lot of confusion surrounding the language used,the exact meaning of terms. But audio writing is suffering due to editorial pressure.Just compare any extant magazine to how it was written say 10 years ago and i think you will be shocked. They have all shortened reviews and dumbed them down . Hell HI-Fi news a few years ago was almost audio porn with very little writing and loads of picture of kit in multiple angles. I want reviews to have the space to explain properly and none do it the way they used to. I have been reading Roy's reviews for years and i think he gets it right more time than he doesn't and for that i give him more respect than many other reviewers.



Regards D louth

 

They measure stuff too

The letters pages of World are possibly its best asset and so far as I can tell unique in the context of HiFi mags.

 

Yo D

I'm a bit off track here but

I have no problem with the idea that a mains regenerator can make a difference to a Hifi system. Indeed it could make a very substantial and positive difference. I hope I didn't make a sweeping statement that mains regenerators were bollocks. I just meant the way they were being written about is bollocks.

THE MAINS

Whether two separate mains regenerators which purportedly do the same thing, (i.e. regenerate mains electricity, in phase and at a given cycle) can be differentiated by the audible effects within a musical reproduction is a different matter.

I don't want to get into the subjective / objective nest of vipers , but......I find that an almost totally subjective stance, (Gregory in particular) enables writers to justify almost anything on the basis of 'I can hear a difference'. The implication being that you should too and if you want to really hear your music, and i mean really hear it then you'd best buy it. I am willing to bet (about 10p) that if you put the same components in different boxes and told him one was different he would hear a difference. Of course it could just be that he has very good hearing (I'm not taking the piss, maybe he does have unusually good hearing and tonal perception).

THE RECORD WEIGHT

As with nearly everything in life it is a question of balances and costs. I do think peripherals make a difference but their level of importance is surely not such that you can justify this outlay. The £425.00 record weight is ridiculous. It is made of WOOD. It costs £425.00! It may well be justifiable and reasonable to many people, good luck to them. I hope it gets them 'closer to the performance'. It wouldn't be any less effective if it cost £50.00 though would it? And I wouldn't have made a comment if it did, in fact I might have bought one. It is priced like that because that's what Kuzma feel the market will bear. There is little or no relation to the actual cost of turning some wood. This milking of the decreasing numbers of cash cows is surely part of what is killing the industry stone dead.

P.S. If I find that the wood was specially turned by the Queen in her own workshop at Balmoral from a Teak timber taken from the inside of the Titanic then I may feel a bit embarrassed. I'm sure the manufacturing process isn't this expensive though.

 

Its good to have differing opinions eh? Roy Gregory's writing makes me cringe. The self importance of the man oozes from between the pages. Nice pics mind.

PS. News is mostly not worth the paper. It was the recent series of technical articles I was referring to, which have been pretty good. More of this and fewer reviews would make for a better mag I think.

 

Whether he can hear a difference or not, the levels of hyperbole he indulges (in his writing and that of some others who write for him) destroys a great deal of credibility. To the extent that differences you know for a fact are subtle are blown up into differences of world shattering significance.

One starts to discount the differences he says he hears because you know that if there is a difference, reality is fairly unlikely to live up to the description.

 

It's made from 600 nanolayers of a special wooden compound called mahoganite which are hand selected and bound together with bee spit. I trust you now feel suitably daft

 

I did not say anything was bollock, I merely questioned its worth. I am sorry. but I do not need to experience a ?450 quid record clamp to understand some one in marketing thinks I am an idiot and will buy it. I would not pay that for a cartridge, never mind a clamp. ?50, and ?400 on vinyl probably. My main interest in this hobby is reproduction of music in a way that suits my ears, not the collection of weird and wonderful bits of kit. Any comments on wire, clamps, mains regeneration can only be personal opinion anyway, as I doubt if the changes could be measured.
________
EVELINES

 

To be fair, the marketing guy doesn't think you personally are an idiot. They just think someone out there is.

 

I'll e-mail a friendly Mod and ask about:

'Pseuds Corner'

A sticky thread devoted to gems from the HiFi press and marketing people.

I somehow don't think Private Eye will be suing for copyright.

Back to the mags:

HiFi+ is by far the nicest looking magazine and was a regular purchase. I haven't bought News for ages since it became like a higher-end What HiFi. Oh that and the Strapline on Ken Kessler's bio: 'Almost singlehandedly responsible for the revival in vintage hifi'.

I thought Noel Keywood's article on CD sound quality recently in World was excellent. Not too difficult to understand and easy to then recite to people who say CD is 'closer to the original' than vinyl.

 

HI Guys

Hi scot 01 ,look i have re-read your first post in this thread and i don't really get from it that you were being critical of the writing style ,perhaps my frustration about lack of qualifications to opinions blinded me a bit to the main thrust of your thread,so sorry about that.

If any one but Audio freaks was selling this stuff,it might be cheaper. I have to admit to one and all that ,while i have not heard this clamp,i have heard the difference a Shun Mook Resonator made on the arm board of a Clear Audio Master Reference turntable/Graham Phantom/transfigeration cart. I was of the load of bollocks thought until i heard it. By moving the wood?disc around the arm board the sound changed. Anyone who has seen a Clearaudio knows this is no light weight turntable.I had to put my attitude away and re-think this. I don't know why but it did make a difference and i heard it. Now the Air resonators(wooden poles with thread and wood tops hanging from them) i think these are very dubious but i have not tried them so i can't comment.

As a non practicing crafts person(mainly metal) i can tell you that this Record weight does look complex in design and maybe construction. The cost is as discussed in the Hi-Fi dealers thread down to manufacturer/distributor/retailer chain. Is it to dear maybe but with out hearing it or handling it i can't estimate its worth. I am not a fan of Audio Freaks(Branco) but i am not going to knock this with out trying,sorry if that makes me a fool but so be it.

Regards D Louth

 

Fair point D, and a good reasoned post too, (hope this isn't patronizing).

 

Hi Scot 01

No not at all ,best wishes D Louth

 

It doesn't does it? Blimey. I bet he wrote that himself.

 

By that logic before I can know fire will burn me I have to stick my hand in one?.
Yours is clearly a dealers position with all its associated vested interest. Some of the claims in the Hifi press are far from credible and don't need an independent personal review before you can make a comment.
I don't need to try quack medicine to know it doesn't work.
With likes of £400 wooden record weights we could be forgiven for thinking as the Hifi dealers reach their endtime the crazies are crawling out of the woodwork to try for one last gasp to con the gullible.