[TONEPUB]

Spent a few weeks listening to this classic high performance phono pre.  Still a great product and well worth $2k if you can still find a used one...

[orthobiz]

What vintage? I don't remember ever hearing about it...

Paul

[HAL]

Cool!

I have one of those!   

[Steven Stone]

I've had one in use almost continuously since I got it new from John, many years ago. BTW, most don't have the one-piece face-plate.

[TONEPUB]

You have great taste!  It is really a great phono stage.  Getting closer to figuring out a way to keep it!  Fingers crossed.

[TomS]

I had one long ago and wish I'd kept it.

Who knew good complementary jfets would go unobtainium 

[Brian Cheney]

I have a late model SCP2a which I'm not using.

Offers?

I have a bit of advantage here, as the SCP-2a was built in the factory space John Curl and I still share after all these years!

[neobop]

Beautiful phono stage. It was current around 1988. Vendetta didn't last very long. I believe John Curl went on to design for PS Audio after that (1990?). I remember playing around with a used Vendetta preamp that included the phono. It was effortlessly detailed and musical. It certainly held its own against ARC, Rowland, Levinson etc. Many people liked it better than anything at the time and the SCP-2 became legendary. There was an interesting review in Stereophile which became a series of reviews where the Vendetta was compared to top units of the day.
http://www.stereophile.com/phonopreamps/640

One just went for $1552.50 on ebay. I think it might be worth a bit more even if it is 20+ yrs old. I'd guess that you could put it up against anything made today. It might not beat them all, but wouldn't be embarrassed either.
neo

[jimdgoulding]

Nice reply, Neo.

[Toni Rambold]

... the other part of the story, told by John Curl himself, is here.

[Steven Stone]

Hmmm.

About John Curl's story - I never took my Vendetta to HP's place, and I KNOW he never heard it at my place since he never visited me in Boston all the years I worked for him.

HP Probably heard the Vendetta somewhere, but it wasn't MY Vendetta...

[neobop]

... the other part of the story, told by John Curl himself, is here.

Thanks for posting that. I haven't read it before. It's an interesting bit of insight - the power of one review?  That Vendetta preamp I talked about was used - traded in to store where I worked. The reason I didn't pursue it for myself was because I liked the AHT phono stage better. A few yrs later when Dan Fanny was making the AHT and selling them direct and through dealers, he did go to Sea Cliff, set it up and show them how to load it and set the DC offset. It went on to become the only 5 star component for 3(?) yrs running.

The pieces were very different though. The AHT is super fast, clean and neutral, more so than the Vendetta which is sweeter and more musical. While the AHT is much quieter and more accurate, it uses ICs and many are prejudiced against them. In all fairness, many people would prefer the SCP-2a to the AHT, which can be ruthlessly revealing. The 2a was also less than half the price. I find it a little hard to believe that with all the other reviews, the debacle at AS was the reason Vendetta failed. It was more likely under capitalized and not marketed well. Less than glowing reviews can often be turned around with some input from the manufacturer. The 2a is an eminently listenable piece.
neo

[jimdgoulding]

Hmmm.

About John Curl's story - I never took my Vendetta to HP's place, and I KNOW he never heard it at my place since he never visited me in Boston all the years I worked for him.

HP Probably heard the Vendetta somewhere, but it wasn't MY Vendetta...

I remember your time at TAS, SS.  Nice to see you here.

[TONEPUB]

And this is why I don't write negative reviews.  For the three crappy pieces of gear I get sent every year, I just send em back.

[*Scotty*]

Before the advent of the internet and the online reviews that now abound, there were opinions distributed via the printed word with an emphasis on subjective impressions in only two domestically available magazines.
 Obviously there was a shortage of second and third opinions about what a product might sound like.
Frequently if a product was reviewed in one magazine it might be snubbed by the other magazine.
A positive review could help you launch a product and with an established product usually produced 6 to 8 week boost in sales and then things went back to what passed for normal volumes.
 On the other hand a negative review could kill the sales of a product stranding existing stocks on your dealer network's shelves. A great deal of power to do harm resided in the hands of these two magazines.  The amount of damage that could be done was directly proportional to the size of the company. The bigger the company and the larger their product lineup the less the damage might be. However if you were a small company a negative review could be the straw that broke the camel's back.
 I think things are considerably better now that more opinions about how a product sounds are available to the prospective buyer. Unfortunately,they are still no substitute for actually hearing something first hand either at a dealer or in your own home.
Scotty

[neobop]

And this is why I don't write negative reviews.  For the three crappy pieces of gear I get sent every year, I just send em back.

Could you be doing your readers a disservice by not telling them of less than first rate performance? Maybe a legitimate product supplied by the manufacturer should be reported honestly. If HP or whoever knew that the Vendetta inverted phase, the review might have been very different. Those two subjective magazines used to compete on a childish unprofessional level. It seems like their competition and being different was more important than the equipment or their readers having the truth. When Stereophile got their hands on an AHT from someone who owned a stripped down one, they misreported details of its design. It was not the top model that AS reviewed. This was solely to debunk AS. What if they get a piece in a similar manner and it's not functioning properly?

The description of these magazines at that time as being unprofessional was an understatement. Around that same time it was revealed in Stereophile that reviewers would no longer be allowed to accept as gifts, the equipment they reviewed. Holy shit, how could you believe a word they said? There was virtually no lab tests and we were supposed to trust some self-appointed golden ears with limited resources and an interest in making his gift, or the possibility of a gift, more valuable. As someone who worked in high end I had access to more top equipment than they did. The secret has always been in the combos. I guess things are a little better now, but how much? Aren't their many personal friendships between reviewers and manufacturers? How can they be objective? Maybe if John Curl went to Sea Cliff and held their hand and set it up and checked polarity, things would have been very different.
neo

[TONEPUB]

I've had this argument a million times and the answer is still no.

What good did this "negative review" do?  I've reviewed about 400 pieces of gear in the last six years and about double that in the camera world in the 8 years before that.  I've found precious few legitimately bad products.

As I said, I send em back.  If you want help finding a good hifi system read TONE, we'll help you. I don't have enough hours in a day as it is, I'm not wasting them with lousy hifi gear.

And, if you're sticking to the majors instead of the garage builders, there just isn't that much substandard stuff out there. The couple of things I've received from major mfrs. that I thought was bad, either had a bad tube under the hood, was set up incorrectly, or was damaged in shipping.  That's why we have the mfr. stop out whenever possible to make sure things are correct before we spend three months listening to something.

Sorry, but that attitude won't be changing around here anytime soon. we're not consumer reports.  (and they've been known to less than correct now and then as well.)

[neobop]

Fair enough.

What good did this "negative review" do? 

I'm basically talking about the sordid history of subjective reviewing. The Vendetta was current around 1988. Not all negative or less than glowing reviews are destructive, at least for the consumer. Be that as it may, I think everyone does a better job today and the power of any one publication is greatly diminished with the net.

As Scotty said, "Before the advent of the internet and the online reviews that now abound, there were opinions distributed via the printed word with an emphasis on subjective impressions in only two domestically available magazines.
 Obviously there was a shortage of second and third opinions about what a product might sound like.
Frequently if a product was reviewed in one magazine it might be snubbed by the other magazine."

Now that I think about it, recommending certain components at specific price points and discussing their relative merit or applicability, is a good way to go. The whole idea is to be useful to the consumer. Magazine politics or reviewer incentives isn't the factor it once was.
neo

[*Scotty*]

There is one thing that is not so good nowadays, there are no measurements of a phono-cartridge's physical parameters. To name a few just a few things that affect what you hear and are not being measured by any reviewer: Cartridge compliance,low frequency resonance, channel separation, THD, frequency response, tracking performance.
 When Anthony Cordsmans worked as a reviewer for Stereophile he used measure these parameters and a few others when he did cartridge comparisons, and this was back before the cost of cartridges equaled that of a used car. 
 To have no measurements at all in a review of a multi-thousand dollar phono-cartridge is ridiculous and can only be considered grossly inadequate reporting.
IMO
Scotty

[James Romeyn]

Tonepub
+1