jas@proteon.com (John A. Shriver) (09/17/90)
While I normally have great repsect for Hi-Fi News and Record Review, I have no respect for Ken Kesseler's reviewing. He can be a very entertaining writer, but his reviewing is of the "boy and his toys" school. He has no concept of a reference sound having to do with live music, and reviews primarily on the basis of electronically processed non-classical music. He never writes bad reviews, he just finds the toy of the month to have a "fascinating" approach to sound. (Examples are some of the "great for rock and roll" speakers he reviewed last year, such as a JBL.) In the end, Kesseler does have a good system, and can tell what equipment is of the top rank. However, he does not have the discernment to say with any accuracy what the pros and cons of these top rank units are. He would argue that it's a matter of taste, rather than rightness, and I will admit that there are probably many buyers of that bent, the "sounds good" school. [The reviewers of note in Hi-Fi news are Messenger, Miller, et. al., who can combine subjective reviews with some attention to measurements. Some of them are active in trying to find meaningful measurements. They were certainly among the pioneers in looking at CD low level linearity.] There have been more informative reviews the the two Carver aplifiers in The Absolute Sound. Harry Pearson did go nuts over the Seven, although he now finds the Goldmund Minesis 9 to be contender, but with a very different approach. He can now contrast the strengths and weaknesses of each. John Nork did a review of the Seven t, which he feels does not live up to Carver's billing of "every bit as good as the Seven". In that respect, he panned it, against its ambitions. If you read the comments on the sound, it is probably a perfectly creditable $2000 amplifier, and is competitive in that bracket. Given the huge difference in internal compenent quality between the Seven and Seven t, this is expected. Carver has a gift for gab and hype. This is not to say that he is not a good designer. However, he cannot build quality without spending some bucks, transfer function or not. (It would be an interesting exercise to tweak the parts quality in a Seven t.) Interesting about the output impedance on the Seven. Of course, frequency response is not everything. One can hear more differences than that between speakers. (The Theil speakers have virtues that do not relate to Jim Theil's choice of flat high-end power response, which makes them comparatively bright.)