Originally posted by Richard_R:
I just wonder if any of the future publications (the reviewers will probably want to but will be overuled by marketing/legal) will have the guts to say:
All things being equal, and they are between the 950 and the P-2000, we see no Spec or Sonic advantage of paying an additional $900 for the P-2000 over the Outlaw 950.
That's if the magazine reviewers actually realize that the 950 and the P-2000 are one and the same.
Just one example: a few months ago, famous high-end audio reviewer Robert Harley rated various surround processors for The Perfect Vision magazine. He gave the Classe SSP-75 a rating of Class 1 (best) and the Parasound AVC-2500U a rating of Class 3 (pretty near the bottom). I don't know how he could have arrived at those ratings since both those processors were based on the same unit. Could the few cosmetic changes that Classe added make the processor sound that different from its Parasound brother? Yet another case of "listening to the faceplate".
Of course, now watch this happen again with the Outlaw and its various clones. Amazing how much different something can sound if it is simply priced higher.
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Sanjay