Recently there was a 'review' of our class D amps on 10audio.com.
The amps didn't come from us. The author claims he bought them. If he did, it was because he knew very well that we would never release a demo sample to him, as in the past he had done unethical things in his reviews.
This blew up recently when this video appeared on youtube, along with this thread on audioshark.com.
We don't even know if Jerry (the owner of 10Audio) really had a set of our class Ds on hand. Yes, IMO he's dishonest enough that I wouldn't put it past him to fake it. But giving him the benefit of the doubt, we don't know what condition the amps were in, if they had been modified by someone and so on. Heck, they might have been set up for 235V operation (such as set of amps will run on 117V but won't make power).
Now this all started about 25 years ago, back when we still offered our M-60 amplifier as a kit. Jerry approached us about buying one, which he successfully built and liked. He wanted to do a reveiw of it for his new website. He liked it so much that he later bought from us an MP-3 preamp. He reviewed and liked that too.
But then apparently he wondered, since we offer the M-60 with a number of options (Caddock resistors, Teflon coupling caps and a power supply boost option which doubles the capacity in the output section power supply) what a fully optioned set of M-60s might sound like. Rather than talk to us about it, he bought a used set he found and reviewed them. He didn't like them. Turned out the set he bought used was a kit, which was not mentioned in the review, and a poorly built one at that, barely running. He sold them to a customer of ours in New York City (who is still a customer of ours, named Jeffery W.). Jeffery contacted us about getting the amps fixed. It was about that time we found out about the negative review.
The amps turned out to be a rat's nest inside with bad and missed solder joints. We cleaned them up as best we could and returned it to Jeffery, who said a few months back he still has them.
Then I confronted Jerry about this issue. That didn't go well- he was unable to admit to his ethical gaff. Instead he changed the existing reviews of the M-60 and MP-3 from good to bad as retaliation. When we discovered that we posted what we knew on audioaylum.com. The resulting kerfuffle resulted in Jerry not posting on audioasylum for a few years.
There is an internet archive called the Wayback Machine. It archives everything on the searchable web.
Below you can see a couple of links of reviews of the MP-3 preamp. Scroll down to the bottom and compare what you see between the two pages. On any normal review site these two pages would be unchanged or at least all the text would be the same. But in this case you can see additions, and a change a rating in the later page. The wayback machine does not have a snapshot from Novemeber 2002 so we can't see what the original review was. But we can still see that he was changing the existing content anyway:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040111140344/http://www.10audio.com/AS_MP3.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20070524082912/http://www.10audio.com/as_mp3.htm
Why Jerry chose this time to open up this old wound is beyond me; one would think it best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Mike, the Greek Audio Geek on YT, didn't know anything about this. I'm not a content producer so I don't know what sort of pressures exist, but IMO he wasn't making the best move in his video I linked above.
Here is my point: when you see a bad review, in my opinion/in my experience, its unethical. The reason is simple: if the equipment is really bad the best thing to do as a review is to simply send it back and not mention it publicly.
Bad reviews occur because equipment might be damaged (or in the case of this post, might not even exist) in shipment, the reviewer might have troubles setting the equipment up, there could be a system incompatibility, the reviewer (as we see with Jerry) might have an ax to grind, on in some cases the organization for whom the reviewer works might have an agenda- like a punishing review if no ad campaign occurs. I've been in this industry long enough I've seen all of these things go down.
For example Gryphon got a bad review in The Absolute Sound decades ago. It literally ended their US distribution. I was in the room at CES and witnessed the reviewer threatening the owner of Gryphon that if he didn't just give him the equipment that was the subject of the review that it would be a bad one. I don't think TAS had any idea about this; it was unethical behavior on the part of the reviewer. He fell into the category of reason I mentioned above as 'had an ax to grind'; he was also trying to be on the take. Harvey Rosenburg did that to us decades ago as well. In that case we found out he had sold a review sample of ours when the guy he sold the amps to contacted us for a user manual. When we approached Harvey about paying us the industry accommodation, he declared war on us. I found out later he had done this to a number of other companies (one who was forced to fold due to the financial loss) who were smarter than me in that they decided to just deal with the loss rather than Harvey badmouthing them in the press.
I can go on put you get the point. Always be suspicious of a bad review.
The amps didn't come from us. The author claims he bought them. If he did, it was because he knew very well that we would never release a demo sample to him, as in the past he had done unethical things in his reviews.
This blew up recently when this video appeared on youtube, along with this thread on audioshark.com.
We don't even know if Jerry (the owner of 10Audio) really had a set of our class Ds on hand. Yes, IMO he's dishonest enough that I wouldn't put it past him to fake it. But giving him the benefit of the doubt, we don't know what condition the amps were in, if they had been modified by someone and so on. Heck, they might have been set up for 235V operation (such as set of amps will run on 117V but won't make power).
Now this all started about 25 years ago, back when we still offered our M-60 amplifier as a kit. Jerry approached us about buying one, which he successfully built and liked. He wanted to do a reveiw of it for his new website. He liked it so much that he later bought from us an MP-3 preamp. He reviewed and liked that too.
But then apparently he wondered, since we offer the M-60 with a number of options (Caddock resistors, Teflon coupling caps and a power supply boost option which doubles the capacity in the output section power supply) what a fully optioned set of M-60s might sound like. Rather than talk to us about it, he bought a used set he found and reviewed them. He didn't like them. Turned out the set he bought used was a kit, which was not mentioned in the review, and a poorly built one at that, barely running. He sold them to a customer of ours in New York City (who is still a customer of ours, named Jeffery W.). Jeffery contacted us about getting the amps fixed. It was about that time we found out about the negative review.
The amps turned out to be a rat's nest inside with bad and missed solder joints. We cleaned them up as best we could and returned it to Jeffery, who said a few months back he still has them.
Then I confronted Jerry about this issue. That didn't go well- he was unable to admit to his ethical gaff. Instead he changed the existing reviews of the M-60 and MP-3 from good to bad as retaliation. When we discovered that we posted what we knew on audioaylum.com. The resulting kerfuffle resulted in Jerry not posting on audioasylum for a few years.
There is an internet archive called the Wayback Machine. It archives everything on the searchable web.
Below you can see a couple of links of reviews of the MP-3 preamp. Scroll down to the bottom and compare what you see between the two pages. On any normal review site these two pages would be unchanged or at least all the text would be the same. But in this case you can see additions, and a change a rating in the later page. The wayback machine does not have a snapshot from Novemeber 2002 so we can't see what the original review was. But we can still see that he was changing the existing content anyway:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040111140344/http://www.10audio.com/AS_MP3.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20070524082912/http://www.10audio.com/as_mp3.htm
Why Jerry chose this time to open up this old wound is beyond me; one would think it best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Mike, the Greek Audio Geek on YT, didn't know anything about this. I'm not a content producer so I don't know what sort of pressures exist, but IMO he wasn't making the best move in his video I linked above.
Here is my point: when you see a bad review, in my opinion/in my experience, its unethical. The reason is simple: if the equipment is really bad the best thing to do as a review is to simply send it back and not mention it publicly.
Bad reviews occur because equipment might be damaged (or in the case of this post, might not even exist) in shipment, the reviewer might have troubles setting the equipment up, there could be a system incompatibility, the reviewer (as we see with Jerry) might have an ax to grind, on in some cases the organization for whom the reviewer works might have an agenda- like a punishing review if no ad campaign occurs. I've been in this industry long enough I've seen all of these things go down.
For example Gryphon got a bad review in The Absolute Sound decades ago. It literally ended their US distribution. I was in the room at CES and witnessed the reviewer threatening the owner of Gryphon that if he didn't just give him the equipment that was the subject of the review that it would be a bad one. I don't think TAS had any idea about this; it was unethical behavior on the part of the reviewer. He fell into the category of reason I mentioned above as 'had an ax to grind'; he was also trying to be on the take. Harvey Rosenburg did that to us decades ago as well. In that case we found out he had sold a review sample of ours when the guy he sold the amps to contacted us for a user manual. When we approached Harvey about paying us the industry accommodation, he declared war on us. I found out later he had done this to a number of other companies (one who was forced to fold due to the financial loss) who were smarter than me in that they decided to just deal with the loss rather than Harvey badmouthing them in the press.
I can go on put you get the point. Always be suspicious of a bad review.
