The character of an organization is set by its leaders, or by their apathy.
See Bill Gates at Microsoft (internal corporate backstabbing), Larry Ellison at Oracle (armies of attorneys ready to pounce), Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase (deep insider connections), Elon Musk (technological revolutions and long hours), etc. Some corporations win through better products while others win with mediocre products, lawyers, marketing, and social connections. Err…Beats…Bose…
dCS is a small and very high priced audio vendor. They’ve run their business in the ‘elite audiophile’ circle for decades. This typically means positioning equipment with luxury vendors in high-income neighborhoods, finding friendly reviewers who want to keep future review offers coming, and selling to wealthy (and physically declining elderly) men who may buy based on price, salesmanship, reputation, and appearance over quality or performance per se.
This @GoldenSound case follows the audio industry disruption initiated by ASR several years ago: when you have measurements in independent hands, it can be hard to justify massive price gaps for similar performance. In the narrow sense ASR is correct. But in contrast to ASR, @GoldenSound clearly has functional ears too. The double whammy of impressions + numbers is very threatening to old-school, country-club, white-gloves audiophile vendors like dCS.
We have now seen unprofessional content from John Giolas, several errors/distortions (at minimum) from David J Steven (as rebutted with the first post above), and typical cease-and-desist hostile content from attorneys. We do not have a faceless company, we have two very hostile, accusatory, sloppy, and unpleasant faces to attach to dCS.
Evil? Not unless they step into contemporary politics…