Great powers come with great responsibilities.
Sixteen years ago, a wise man told me that I was an dick. I really didn't understand him at the time, because I liked to think of myself as a nice guy and really didn't want to be a dick. But as the years passed, I realized that he meant that even though I didn't want to be an dick, the mere fact that I was a human being meant that I would always be a dick to at at least someone else or some bug or some tree.
Prepo had a good point. I could have handled this with political correctness. So I'm now faced with this decision. Should I become unclear, murky, and mysterious like Six Moons or should I just say it as it is - how a piece of equipment makes me feel - channeling Mike Mercer here because he's right - ultimately it's about how it makes you feel. I probably enjoying Mercer more than I would care to admit. Now consider this. If I don't like something and I wimp out and say nothing, I'm actually being a dick to potential customers who may not know what they are getting into. If I say it is not good, I'm now being a dick to the vendor. If I take the Six Moon route, then I'm a spineless POS or a NATO european "peacekeeper" soldier not worthy of human birth.
The audiophile industry is by far the most opaque of any. If I wanted to buy a computer, it's pretty easy to make an informed decision and get the best pricing. If I wanted the car, it's also fairly easy to make an informed decision and get the best pricing with a little effort. Dealerships let you test drive cars. Sometimes the same car multiple times. And almost always multiple cars to compare to make sure you have the right one for you, especially if you are working with good salesmen. If you are working with a bad salesman or dealership, you can always go somewhere else. If a good salesman puts in a lot of effort to help me make a good decision, I will try very hard to buy from him, even if his price is not the lowest. This is called honor and something rarely seen in the West. Anyways, the audiophile industry is just really slimey. Insiders definitely know about it, but they will never talk to outsiders about it. I don't want to talk about it.
So, I don't think there is any harm if I say something is awesome. That's a win win usually. Unless a person has difference preferences from me and ended up thinking what I recommended as not awesome. This was the case with Tdickweiler when he purchased a Vali. He did not like it. He ended up selling it at a minor loss. So in this instance, I was a dick to him. But then again, I highly suspect that he purposely purchased it to contradict me publicly. So maybe he's the dick to me, but also a dick to himself because the monetary loss affected him more than me.
Now if I say something is suckhy. Maybe the vendor loses, but perhaps many potential customers win because they don't end up wasting their money on a subpar product or a product they would not have liked. Now what if I steered a customer away who would have liked the product in the first place. Then I'm being kind of a dick right? Well perhaps not. Patience is sometimes a virtue, so perhaps if this product had some redeeming qualities, that customer may eventually through further research, purchased that product anyways. In such a case I would not be a dick. In any event, I have observed that people will always do what they want to do, despite valuable advice. This is why I no longer answer questions about how to maintain stable happy relationships from younger folks.
Now at the end of the day, this would only matter if I was somebody important like Robert Harley of The Absolute Sound or Jude Mansilla of Head-Fi. Now those two guys are truly powerful and can make a vendor's product with a video or front page review. Me? I'm just a random focker. I always laugh when people say stuff that I'm a god that will cause five people to cancel their GSX2 orders with a few words. In this case so what? There will be five more in line. A position of power is something I never asked for or wanted to be in.
Decades ago, before I got married, when there were more audiophile brick and mortal stores, I once asked a stereo salesman (no, it wasn't Don Cheadle) why the magazines never said anything negative. He replied "because they could put small outfits out of business." I thought that was a pretty good answer back then. But now almost twenty years later, having spent a considerable number of years working in a small business, I realize what a crock of **** that was. As a senior officer of a company of I worked for, I was always looking at what the competition was doing, soliciting feedback from our customers, improving our product line and internal processes. It was impossible to keep all of our customers happy, but I always wanted to know if we screwed up so we could improve. We had competition, and we knew our customers would talk amongst themselves about us and our competition. There's no free pass in the real world. And there shouldn't be in audio either.
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