computerparts wrote:
Congrats on your purchase.
Thanks!
It takes a while of reading professional reviews before you can be able to discern the bad ones. In essence, it's just as you said, there are no bad reviews. A reviewer is not going to come out and say point blank that a certain product sounds horrible. It would be bad publicity for the manufacturer. So rather than say a certain product sounds horrible, a reviewer will go about discretely naming negative aspects of said product throughout the review. Or in some reviews, there will be no negative aspects, but a rather lack of overall enthusiasm.
I do appreciate your candor but in the case of reviews such as you described, you have a clear form of skulduggery. If a piece of gear sucks, come right out and say it; this gear stinks and this is the reason why. The company brings bad publicity on themselves by putting bad gear on the market. That's why I wrote of price points as price should be a reflection of quality. In a three hundred dollar DAC, this is what can be expected. Instead you have three hundred dollars DAC reviews describing the reviewed DAC as a giant killer of DAC's much more expensive. Sweeeeeet. Yet nobody will say what's to be expected of different price points in a DAC. It's not the reviewer's fault who makes an honest evaluation because they noticed. When somebody writes in code, and only those who know the code will understand, then the reviewer is being disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worse. Not arguing with your above but a reader shouldn't have to know the code in order to understand the validity of a review.
FWIW, not knowing I had to, I did take time to carefully read the reviews and looked for and made note of nuances (the devil is in the details), hence why I'm so vocal or critical in the displeasures of my findings. As one local politician likes to speak: "Say what you mean and mean what you say." I'd like to see all folks go by those words. We can be thoughtful about what we have to say but we should also not be chastised for speaking the truth as we see it; opinion.
Again, thanks for the thought.
dura wrote:
You choose a Stello 100S above the NFB-1? You surely read reviews different then I do!
With all due respect, correct me if I'm wrong but there are no reviews out on the NFB-1 to compare against the Stello DA100 Signature as so far it seems, the NFB-1 hasn't been shipped. And FWIW, the NFB-1, by Kingwa's own admission is a motherless child. How's that? He's going send the product out in REF5's clothes because he's so sure of the product's sales potential, that he'd rather dress it up as a REF5 then give it it's own identity. What this tells me is, the company has serious cash flow problems. Nobody dresses a new product up in another product's clothing and expects the new product to be well received. Yes, it matters, I want "any" product I purchase to have it's own identity. We're talking about simply having the enclosure re-silk screened, minimal costs.
There's many, many other reasons that I didn't buy the NFB-1 that I won't go into and none of the reasons have to do with product quality questions. Folks are welcome to buy the NFB-1 all day long and I'm sure they'll be very, very happy with their decision.
In the meantime, based solely on the content of this thread, the several other threads I've waded through and the many off forum reviews I've read, I'll be very happy with the used (four or five months old and yet to be delivered) Stello DA100 Signature DAC as it will do everything that I expect of the mature technology in today's DAC's. Why? As an analogy, in city driving, my eleven year old pick-up truck with ladders and tool boxes goes just as fast as all the sports cars that pull up along side of me during the work day. How's that you ask? Because of speed limits and traffic lights. In the case of city streets, it's not about speed because it's about safety. And that analogy seems to apply to CD's in that you're limited by Redbook specifications and the quality of each recording on the CD you're listening to, not to mention the many limitations introduced by gear between the CD and the DAC and DAC and your ears. I can neither afford nor am I attempting to put together the perfect listening system. Why? All I'm wanting to do is clean up the rough edges and be happy. So far, I have close to three thousand USD's into this sojourn, including beginning tagents of a portable kind, which in my and my wife's book, is more than a reasonable effort to achieve this lofty goal. More than this, and it will have to happen without me.
Being a critic of reality is not always an appreciated art form.
