chuckle

jeff,
i hope not.
sherwood and sherwood newcastle are made by the same company so i would expect similar traits from both of these lines. pointing out that sherwood is junk could give some insight into the performance of sherwood newcastle. just as lexicon and hk share similar technologies by being designed by the same people, you could presume that the sherwoods would be also. however the difference is lexicon companies are good and sherwood companies are not. sometimes companies that make crap can also make candy, but not too often. usually bad design plagues their whole line because much more time is spent in developing the top line and then they let what they found there trickle down to the others. if what the others are getting is junk, then you can certainly expect the products above them are junk as well. further if a company was self-respecting (i.e. put out high end products that were well regarded) then they would not let themselves produce such an inferior line, and instead focus of what makes them so great (the forementioned high end product) rather than waste time with inferior products.
oh and harman international has a couple more companies in it than lexicon and harman kardon, however they are huge, so the correlation between their different brands is less, but still obvious to most people.

www.harman.com to check it out for yourself:

mark levinson
revel
hk
lexicon
infinity
jbl

just to name a few. all on the list are pretty well respected. the list on sherwoods site is of a whole other class imo. but hey, what do i know?, my last name isnt mackwood.

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I know nothing about Sherwood, so I can't speak to that topic, but I do question the accuracy of saying that Harman Kardon products and Lexicon products come from the same designers. Lexicon was an independent company that was acquired by Harman International; it is one of a collection of companies that are under the umbrella of the Harman Specialty Group, which is a division of Harman International. Harman Kardon is a (or, perhaps more accurately, the central) subsidiary of Harman International. While the knowledge within the Lexicon area would be available to HK engineers in some form (such as the availability of select portions of the Logic7 processing for HK products), it certainly is not a direct link and does not assure that the skilled engineers at Lexicon will assure any aptitude on the part of the HK designers.

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gonk -- 950 Review | LFM-1 Review | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | Saloon Links

you would be remiss to think that the engineerning that goes on at lexicon is so different than that at hk. ideas and people are something that those two in particular share in common.

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This post has been brought to you by curegeorg, thanks for reading.

While several companies may share a parent co., the people and their design philosophies are not automatically indiginous to each other. The co. I work for owns several different subsidiaries, none of which has a clue as to how we design our products. I routinely spec. components from our "Sister" companies, never needing to fully understand how or why they were designed, only that they will give me the desired service factors. I would never need to know how to design a bearing, for instance, yet I know one or more exists that will fill my design goal. A parent company exists to own sub-companies which are profitable and may be able to work in tandem to solve certain problems thus creating more profitability.

i agree, and so if one company makes a product that is poor and it is used throughout the system of companies then they COULD all be labeled as poor. kind of my point, just stated differently. the interaction of the companies under one bigger company yields a more homogenous product, because who cares how something works it just works for what i need it to. which is why for example hk, would use logic7, even if they didnt invent it. that is a good example, now imagine the other side of that. a company makes a part (or whatever) and it is in turn passed along to other subsidaries under them and then it turns out that that part is of poor quality. so if say harman international holds an interest/owns all of these companies that make excellend products, then everything is great because they all benefit, but if say sherwood does the same thing then the story is different. anyway/.

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This post has been brought to you by curegeorg, thanks for reading.