Hall of Shame

1. All "high-performance" cables (with few exceptions for speakers that have demanding impedence curves in the upper frequencies where the cable's "low impedence" will be of use).
2. Most all pure vacuum tube circuits (some hybrids are ok and tubes can do well in an fm tuner)
3. All Class A/B amplifiers (the designer should have just stuck with class B if s/he couldn't afford the heatsinking for class A).
5. D'appolito and line array designs (only the latter one's incorporating electrodynamic transducers)-both have too many interference problems that there is no way around.
6. Ridiculously overpriced gear given the cost of its parts (design time does not makeup for it): 47labs sakura systems gets top place-$600 for a piece of stupid 28g wire and that dumb gaincard amp, Genesis follows a close second with thier crap-$12 tweeters and sub-$200 ribbons in a $90,000 system?)
7. All vibration control devices-microphony in most gear is inaudible. Turntables exempt, its important here.
8. Many more not caught in any category who missed the boat because of bad engineering choices.
9. Burn-in CD's, wonder contact cleaners, etc., etc., etc.

10. Compressed digital audio

Ezmerelda,wow your advice is as valuable as fish guts. All tube stuff sucks eh? You have a real credibility problem. All quality cables? All vibration controll devices? Your advice is rather misinformed, closed minded, and frankly(kooky) incorrect. Go and listen to what I am sure sounds like a big table radio and quite dolling out advice.

Well based on the advice before me I should start all over, I have a new audio bible and can now throw out that crutchfield one I used to use, Thank you Ezmeralda I was so foolish in the past, I actually thought I could hear the difference!

Why is so much of the advise in this forum worse than my spelling? Many of the contribuors here belong in the hall of shame! So many nay sayers and philastines. I do see that there are a few careful listeners with genuine and helpful info here but the rest seem to think that they need to have something bad to say about so many products(based on the fact that they can't hear it,don't know how to measure it or don't "beleive" in it, and probably never herd it at all or not under controlled cercumstances), perhaps to show that they are descerning"critics". These are the same people that in a different time would have been the "critics" that refered to the Expresionist painters animals and paned their work as trash. I applaud the open minded few that give out genuinely helpful advice. The rest I am sure are hopelessly condemened to a hell of listening to their own horrid(and I am sure very thin,edgy,and bright) systems. As it should be!