Very amusing, but wine is very different to audio equipment, if only because wine is an organic material, and not stable. It can get better (or much worse!) with age, and there are different styles of wine - different grape varieties/ripeness, leading to different sugar/alcohol/tannin content, different methods of production (oak versus stainless steel casks/vats, for example), etc, which can lead to very different tastes with demonstrably different chemical make up.
It is certainly possible, through careless manufacture or careless storage, to produce a truly horrible wine, and there probably is a minimum production cost, below which corners are cut to the extent that the wine will not be very nice. But beyond that, it is of course a matter of taste (and smell, feel and appearance), and there is an awful lot of bullshit and snobbery involved. So wine is probably more comparable to different performance/recording techniques in music, than the playback technology. A closer analogy with hifi could be the wine glass - I find myself enjoying wine much more when served in a nice crystal glass, but the difference I perceive between this and a thick glass tumbler or a tea cup might be an illusion, without an obvious way of blind testing! Of course, if the drinking vessel is dirty, or made of a reactive plastic, which taints the contents, that is a different matter, and could be compared with listening to music on a very low quality audio system. And I certainly disagree with the final sentence in the link contained in the OP - the grape every time for me! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ darrell's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13460 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98740 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
