On Sun, 13 Jul 2003 20:22:12 +0100, Des
wrote:

Reviewers often comment that it takes about 100 hours before a new amp
settles down and start to sound like it 'should'.

Given some of the hype and other snake-oil that reviewers appear to
fall for, I would treat anything they say with a very large pinch of
salt. A lot of what I read is techno babble. (For example, a
longstanding and generally well regarded reviewer demonstrated his
total lack of understanding of Ohm's law in one article I read.)

If the components in an amplifier are changing their properties over
hundreds of hours in a manner that is audible then the amplifier is
unlikely to be reliable for very long.

If the reviewers said that the vast majority of hi-fi electronics
sounds pretty much the same (which is probably much truer than they
would ever be willing to admit), except when it was deliberately
designed to distort the signal, then their ranks would be heavily cut
by unemployment. It's in their interests and that of their employers
to conspire with equipment manufacturers to exagerate/invent
differences between equipment that the reviewers can spout upon.

Selecting an amplifier, CD, DVD or tuner is much closer to buying a
piece of consumer electrical equipment (like a refrigerator) than you
might think. (Speakers, headphones and record decks are a different
matter - but they are electro mechanical.)


--
Chris Isbell
Southampton
UK