Richard Steinfeld wrote:

Believe me, Richard, I welcome you. Psychoacoustics is much
underrepresented and your recording experience is valuable since our
leading recordist, Iain Churches, suffers from English reserve and
normally sends only short posts.

Having lurked awhile around these groups, I find the pugnaciousness
around here disgusting; it's a real turnoff. You guys seem to get off on
doing verbal combat; you'll even take on a person who indeed, has the
well-rounded experience encompassing the entire music reproduction
chain, including live instruments, with your blind bigotry. There are
very few people in the world who have my ability to correlate live
musical performance with reproduced sound. I am usually respected by
both audio and music professionals. I've been there.

The Usenet has all sorts. We see many whose only power in their lives
is at their keyboard. It is not surprising that they try to inflate
themselves by tearing down those who have greater achievements. Take a
tip: tell them nothing about yourself, do not demand respect for your
achievements. If you do, that will only provide them with bigger chunks
of flesh to tear off. Grow a thick skin and demonstrate your
superiority and achievement piece by relevant piece. The only
alternative is simply to stomp those who grow impertinent into the
ground by trashing their fragile self-confidence, as I do, and you seem
too sensitive a fellow to do that. (In addition, it should be said that
I am a professional polemicist who can't remember whether I ever
believed the unholy are redeemable.)

Please explain why you are so devoted to the eternal food fight on this
board?

That has to do with the appalling history of this board. In the mid-90s
a winder of transformers and his gang of travelling bullyboys tried to
take over RAT as his personal free marketing channel. Eventually John
Byrns (now probably the oldest surviving member here) and I drove them
out. They still lurk in the shadows beyond the fringes. For instance,
they sent Graham Stevenson to be "on Jute's case"; the results are in
the recent archives and in a gloating letter in my private mailbox.
More recently the presently most valuable contributor, Patrick Turner,
thought that popularity and a claque mattered. The claque harassed me
and I broke them up; the residual nastiness with Yeager is an example
of lingering resentment. There is more. We are often targets for
idiots. One Bret Ludwig turned nasty when I didn't stroke him for
buying one of my books; he causes a lot of trouble by reckless
pronouncements anyway but, on the principle that his enemy's enemy is
his friend, he stole my copyright property and published it on another
conference (RAO, already ruined by a posturing little man called
Krueger) which caused the recent flame war. These are just examples
from a long, long litany. It will happen again and again.

You have to work around the nastiness. You soon learn how. There are
rewards but they don't come from confrontation (I do that out of sense
of duty to fidelity, wasteful but necessary) but from sharing knowledge
and receiving new knowledge in return. It doesn't happen all at once.

It is doubtful that you can equal the following statement: you have
already heard my work. At least once in your life (and that would be
with very, very limited exposure), you have heard my contribution to a
recording coming from your own loudspeakers.

In virtually everything you consume or use, your choice has been
influenced by me or by people who worked for me or by those they
taught, unto the generations of men in gray flannel suits; check the
list of my household-name clients on the back of my reprographics
books. But I don't expect you to thank me for it.

That's the difference.

Indeed it is. And you've just given them another mansized bite to tear
out.

Richard

There isn't much peace in this tiny kingdom, but welcome anyway. Grow
thick skin quickly.

Andre Jute

The noise level on audio newsgroups has disturbed the wider world. A
proxy I was using wouldn't even *open* RAT. The server returned this:

******
Access to this web page is restricted at this time.
Reason:
The Websense category "User-Defined" is filtered. Keyword found: audio.
*******

Andre Jute