I don't know how much RME is enjoying the new market of audiophiles that recently discovered the ADI-2. Often I see the comment from audiophile community "RME people are rude, I would never buy from them". If you try to understand the "why" and visit the RME forum, you often see the following scernario: On one side is the lead developer of RME, that has decades of experience in high quality, professional studio grade equipment development, that are used in many of the big studios that produce the albums we listen to; on the other side "I am not a technical person, but I know what I hear" person questioning their power supply, DAC chip, casing, extremely clean and netural tuning of their products and trying to convice the lead developer of one of the most famous professional audio companies into accepting the audiophile jargon. No matter what he says, how many times he repeats, our "audiophile with the money" claims that he has the last say on the product. When the RME lead developer gets annoyed dealing with such attitude, as there are owners with real issues that are waiting for support, he is suddenly the bad guy.
Unfortunately our audiophile guy fails to grasp, 1) those products are not meant for him 2) the company has its own philosophy and reputation that is well respected throughout the world exactly for what it achieves 3) the company is not interested in those jargons, as professional audio is based on engineering results that are numerically well defined, can be repeated on different scenarios and can be proven to hold against some benchmarks that are based on engineering data in the professional audio field.
When you settle for a similar criteria (by experience and / or by technical knowledge and / or by finding the sweet spot between added value, price and enjoyment) and choose your gear with based on a similar approach, we often see a similar pattern of reactions as above, even when it was all about my experience and my decision, that I feel happy and firm about. When I try to question the why, I receive the answer "but the (so called) objectivists are very rude against the (so called) subjectivist, which do nothing but try to defend themselves against those "attacks" by the (so called) objectivists", whereas my experience has been often the opposite, here on HeadFi. That really kills all the joy of contributing to this community.
I had much more expensive gear than both ADI-2 and also Stealth. With some of you I already shared my exeriences with them and praised them, but throughout my journey in this so called hobby, I learned that I am missing some pieces of information, and in the end I settled where I am and I am very happy and satisfied about. After all these years of reading, writing, sharing and spending time to understand what I am dealing with; I reached a conclusion that happens to overlap with people that are disliked here, for one reason or the other. At the moment, it just doesn't fully overlap with some of you and your definition of good audio. There is nothing good or bad about it. I am not going to say that ASR does not have an influence on me, they do, as my subjective conclusions has many overlaps with them.
You might not like it, but it does not give anyone the right to be judgemental on my own experience and conclusions. If you don't like it, please ignore me, as dealing with such reactions just kills my joy in taking part in this community.
