[Audio Empire]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2012 05:04:33 -0700, Dick Pierce wrote
(in article ):

Audio Empire wrote:
On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:59:11 -0700, Dick Pierce wrote
(in article ):


Gary Eickmeier wrote:

I sat right behind Gordon Holt at a demo

...

But afterward Gordon and I were agreed ...

...
I had a relatively famous British writer and acoustician, Peter Mapp,
over for a listen ...
...
I studied Industrial Design in college ...
...
a letter to Bose and a call from him and subsequent visit to the
factory to talk with his chief engineer
...
Dr. Bose once told me ...
...
Dr. Mark Davis, another of my heroes, was one of his students
...

And my grandfather kissed Jane Withers: so what?

Really? And that didn't turn him off of women for life?

No, but he did subsequently die.

What are you expecting people to do with the above? It's pure hearsay,
and until these people step forward and corroborate your story, there's
no way for us to tell whether it's true or you just made it up.

It would be hard for Gordon to "step forward" as he's no longer with us.

Yup. I knew that, and did he leave behind any corroboration
of this encounter?

But I can corroborate that he didn't think much of the Wilson WAMMs,
and he was one of my closest friends.

Fine, so we have some indirect corroboration of his viewpoint
on the topic.

But that's not the entirety of his claim: he seems to want us to
give credence to his claim becuse of the nature of the claimed
encounter. Now, if in fact you read his claim carefully, it's
an interesting construct: He claims to have sat behind Gordon Holt,
which could mean that Gordon Holt, without turing around, could
have been utterly unaware of his presence. And, he later states
that he and Mr. Holt "were agreed."

So what?

Well, it doesn't really mean anything. Whether or not Gary and Gordon agreed
on something says really nothing about the speakers except maybe that they,
personally didn't like what they heard at that time. Now, I mentioned, in
another post, that I had heard the WAMMs at a CES, and I had also heard them
a number of times when Steve Jobs had them installed in the foyer of the
Macintosh development building at Apple in the mid 1980's. I had a buddy who
worked on the Mac early on, and we used meet over there and listen to music
in the evenings occasionally. The speakers sounded entirely different in
those two rooms. The CES hotel rooms are usually FAR from an ideal listening
environment for most speakers, but a system the size of the Wilson WAMMs is
especially disadvantaged in such a small room. They sounded much better in
the Apple foyer with its high ceilings and large volume. They still weren't
very flat in frequency response, and they still imaged rather vaguely, but
they would play with explosive dynamics and at normal listening levels seemed
to have very low distortion. I.E. they sounded BIG and that is rather a
revelation to those of us accustomed to a more scaled-down presentation of a
large orchestra. But, because of the faults I mentioned above, that novelty
soon wears off. I wouldn't want to live with a pair long-term. Luckily, (and
this was my point) the WAMMs had little in common with subsequent Wilson
designs, and are a poor choice with which to criticize Wilson or its
products.

This is like what my same grandfather used to tell the wholesalers
in New York when they'd ask him how was business, "Great, last month
alone, Marshall Fields and I did over $100,000,000!" The fact that he
and Mr. Holt "were agreed" lends no credence to his claim any more
than my grandfathers lumping his and Marshall Fields business in the
same answer (the only difference was my grandfather was joking,
though not all his audience saw the joke).

And let's go one step further in his claim, "The dealer, of course,
thought they were the end of the trail." Who gives a flying dingleberry
what a dealer thinks? Why is this considered relevant

name dropping doesn't cut much ice.

And this is precisely my point: all of these claims are hearsay,
and without the corroborative backup, they are no more valuable
to supporting data than pure fabrication.

OK, that might be YOU'RE point, Mr. Pierce, but it isn't mine. Mine is that
even with iron-clad provenance and sworn corroboration, anecdotal opinions
like this don't mean much. I have heard speakers at audio shows and CES shows
that I thought were terrible sounding, only to later buy a pair after hearing
them under better circumstances. There was a controversial line of ribbon
speakers that was a perfect example. I heard them at a Chicago Summer CES and
thought they were lousy. To me they had the boomiest, most overblown bass I'd
ever heard. A few months later a pair appeared on my doorstep for me to write
about. Once set-up in an environment with which I was intimately familiar, I
changed my mind about them. THEY weren't boomy, the hotel ROOM was boomy!