I know we've been to the moon, I saw the flag the other night.

Cool sub Casing.

Here is what Randy has been doing in his spare time.

I think that was RickF's house at the 36sec mark...

NO, NO. It goes in front of the projector to make 965" image of the Moon!

I'm beginning to understand that high end audio circles are populated by mostly A.D.D.survivors. And when I mention A.D.D. I'm talking about the... hey look, a pretty flower.

No, A.D.D. is:

Recorded on analog tape
Mixed in the digital domain
Mastered digitally

That and OCD. OK, this is starting to bug me. I have been reading spec sheets to see what they say and its all obfusculated up. One Denon gives a max power rating, the 3808 does not. Maranz 7002/8002 is the same. It only gives the max per channel info.

I remember Julian Hirsch, the head tester for Stereo Review, giving less than stellar reveiws of amps and receivers that didn't make their specified output.

I just went to Sound and Vision online, and apparently it is now perfectly OK to come up short. I read glowing reviews of a new Denon, an Onkyo and a few others. Amazing how they are rated at, for example, 140X7, but then in parenthesis farther down it says (two channels driven). In fact, I believe it was an Onkyo with a rave review. The sentence was along the lines of "with one channel driven, it easily beat its specified power, and it came close to its rating, even with 5 channels driven." Of cours, all 7 channels was a bit less output yet.

This is a load of crap. Amplifiers and receivers should be rated as watts per all channels driven into 8/4 ohms from 20-20k at .01% distortion. They should need to meet their ratings.

Heck, one of the reviews showed that a 90X7 receiver put out 85x5 and 80X7, but then their was an asterisk behind the results. When I looked at the asterisk on the bottom of the test results, it said that this power was sustained for several MILLISECONDS before thermal protection reduced power output to 1/3 of that. Is that somehow real world? This tells me that if I bought this 90X7 reciever, I could expect protection to limit it to about 27X7. Come on...that is 6db of headroom lost!

I am not trying to be a butthead, but this is wrong. Don't play games. List power as watts per channel continuous (not short transient bursts), all channels driven into 8 and 4 ohms (dual ratings) from 20-20kHz (full spectrum white noise, not a simple 1kHz sine wave) at .01% THD (to keep all the players honest!).

Apples to apples!