[WallaceRoger]

I've read a few of the forums over at Audiokarma, and indeed some are quite nauseating. One involved some China made tube amplifier, which some had bought and tried out. It seemed that they were much more obsessed with what tubes were used in the China amp then either on what circuitry it used, or in the quality of the output transformers. They were debating whether it needed the Chinese tubes replaced with American made or European made tubes to improve the audio quality, odd that only one suggested maybe trying some Russian/Soviet made ones. What annoys me are the sellers on fleabay that list RF tubes and rectifiers as being in "matched pairs" which only ever applied to audio output tubes, and even then it isn't that precise as long as one tube isn't running at 30% and the other at 80% emission, and using fixed bias.
 One of the testers of this amp was using a Carver made using for a pre-amp, from what I heard about Carver products is that the only thing special about them is the price. I can recall watching a series of videos a You Tuber made regarding the repair of a Carver power amp, what a headache he had getting it going again, everything had to be just so thanks to some stupidly and unnecessarily complex circuits. One of the comments someone made about them is that not only are they stupidly complex but they don't even sound that great, so clearly when it comes to Audiophools if they pay enough they will convince themselves that it's a great sounding amp even if it sounds like mud, but if something is reasonably priced then there must be something wrong with it. If you think that the speaker cable thing is bad some even think that they need to use a special power cord, which has 120 v 60 cps AC running through it, and I don't mean that the cord has a shield over it  I mean that it has to be made out of special wire, or at least that's what the slicksters who market the things tell them so that they will pay $200 for the privilege.
Regards
Arran

This reminds me of my year working in inventory/receiving at a Best Buy. Part of my job was scanning new shipments into inventory, which was an eye opener because the system showed both our retail price and the price we paid the manufacturer for the item. One of the items sales was instructed to push relentlessly with every TV and stereo system sold was Monster cables. Monster cables (just the regular RCA audio) retailed for around $20. Our cost per piece? $2.35. We used to sit back there and laugh at this stuff. The funny thing was that all of the floor demo models were using the OEM video and audio cables from the manufacturer, so if Monster cables were so great, why didn't our demos use them? Haha