Hi Rhapsody,
I think I need to maybe clarify what i meant by my comments. Firstly I’d just like to mention that before I retired I spent over 40 years in the high tech industry, so I’m extremely familiar with product life cycles and the like.
Somewhere back in this thread, someone posted something along the lines of; “if you can think of a better way to develop a product than trial and error......” and that’s what i reacted to. For me, trial-and-error is the same as hit-and-miss and in my experience has no place in professionally engineered high tech products. The problem with my point was, and I probably even realised this while I was writing in, judging by the number of caveats I inserted, as soon as i reflected on what I’d written I realised that the Extreme was not a product of trial and error, hit and miss engineering as I understand it. Quite the opposite. The Extreme is a thoroughly well thought out piece of kit. Does that mean that what i wrote was BS? No....but what it does mean is that what I think of as trial and error.....essentially shooting in the dark until I hit something, was not what was actually meant in the very first text. What was meant IMO was.....”if there’s a better way than testing and listening to all the components before they go into the final design”...If the question had been phrased thus; I would have simply agreed that in matters where audio uses computer components, which were never developed with audio in mind, all need to be listened to as their specs offer absolutely no guide to their effect on sound quality.
I hope that clears up any misconceptions. I think the Extreme is an awesome piece of kit and it was clearly developed with a clear plan in place....to sound the best it possibly could. But from my standpoint at least, the design and engineering that went into it need a better description than ‘trial and error’. Essentially what I wrote was a critique of trial and error, which I would say I erroneously linked to the Extreme. I hope that clears up any misunderstandings
