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RE: My Reading Comprehension Shortcomings

The writer is, I believe, Jonathan Valin, to whom I usually pay little attention for three reasons: (1) The gear he reviews is almost always stratospheric in price, thus beyond consideration for purchase by this writer; (2) He's far too prone to hyperbole for my taste; and (3) He's quite possibly the worst extant example of the "component-of-the-month" syndrome among audio reviewers. This is not to suggest that I don't read him in TAS, I just take his work there for what it is worth to me, i.e., very little. (This doesn't mean either that Valin is incapable of decent writing; some of his works of fiction are quite enjoyable as what I refer to as good "airplane" reads.)

As to your actual question, I think he is saying that the tapes were so well recorded that what he believes to be inherent shortcomings in Ayre equipment were over-ridden, while Ayre's own CD player simply couldn't pull this off. He doesn't seem to address the possibility that the flaws were in his own discs compared to the tapes nor the seeming contradiction in his suggestion that the "arid" Ayre gear could sound terrific with the tapes and lousy with the manufacturer's own disc player.

Speaking of contradictions, what I find most fascinating about audio show coverage generally is that, to a man, the writers (not just for TAS, but all of them) disclaim the validity of evaluating equipment under such conditions-and then promptly proceed to do just that, producing mini-reviews and choosing "best sound" winners!

Oh, well, who ever said audio writing has to make sense?

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