He's back.(FORUM)(Letter to the editor)

The current (#108) issue of the magazine says that to contact you with an editorial comment requires sending regular mail to your Ohio address. However, in reading some of the mail in the magazine I see that some people did contact you via email. So, here goes. Although I am no longer a professed audio commentator or reviewer for this or any other magazine, I think that my new "retired writer" status does allow me to submit an occasional letter to the editor.

OK, regarding issue 108. The best things in there (after my own final articles in that issue, of course) were the two articles by David Rich: "Compact-Disc Recorders" and "Searching for the Sensible Products at CES 2006." Fine jobs, both. Rich has a better sense of what is going on in the industry than just about anyone else.

Some of the other stuff was not quite so good, and most of that material involves product reviews. Before getting into those reviews I do want to say, regarding your footnote to my article on speaker sound, that the reason Sean Olive discovered that speakers with flat power sounded bright to some listeners is that most recordings are voiced for speakers that do not have flat power. They are voiced for speakers that attenuate the treble to some extent, and they are that way both because of engineering and performer taste and the design of the monitoring components. It is likely that any speaker that delivers a "flat" response of any kind to the listening position (be that speaker biased towards flat power or towards a flat and dominating direct-field signal) will sound bright with some recordings, at least to some people. Needless to say, speakers with a flat power response will sound particularly bright in rooms with a lot of sound-reflecting surfaces.

The Cary Audio SLI-80 integrated amplifier review seemed rather out of place in a magazine devoted to Sensible choices. I mean, the bottom line here is musical sound reproduction and it seems odd that a tube amplifier with only 80 wpc (or 40 wpc in the triode mode) and costing three grand would be considered a sensible choice by any music lover, particularly when replacement tubes needed someday will cost $400. Any $300 or $400 AV receiver could do better in terms of clean amplification and would throw in a tuner, surround sound, and long-term reliability as a bonus. In addition, when a reviewer, when describing the sound of an amp, says that "at times warmth is the correct thing," we have a situation that demands that said reviewer get out some good test gear and try to discover just what is happening when an amp sounds "warm."

The $14,999 ELP Laser Turntable review was even more over the top. Is a device that expensive a Sensible purchase for even the most devoted and well-heeled LP enthusiast? First off, no serious measurements of any kind were offered to show that the unit had a reasonably smooth output. The same reviewer used some test gear in his following review of the Grado preamp (which cost $500 itself, a bit over the top, too), and yet that gear was not used to check out the laser turntable. Also, he mentioned that the first unit did not work (perhaps shipping damage), but he then noted that a second sample had a 60-Hz hum problem that may or may not have been ...