Fair enough.
I think the main grudge against Rambach is that MM started out with altruistic purposes - to honor RVG and the BN catalog and do it to the pinnacle of quality, which it largely achieved. But when Rambach jettisoned the distributors and went direct sale, it started to be all about the money. The reasonable price part - which was generally when the product was distributed by Elusive Disc - was how I acquired all my MM titles.
Rambach redid many of the 45 MM titles because he never really wanted to go 45 at the outset, but was pushed to as at that moment there was some fuzzy fetish for 45. Similarly, he brought in Hoffman because, at that moment, he still had some cachet in audiophile circles mainly due to his forum. Rambach hated hoffman's contributions, and wanted to rework some of what he felt were the biggest misses of the SH/KG period (and note that Rambach kept using the SH/KG hype stickers well after SH was dropped and only KG appears in the deadwax). fair enough, and although some people squaked at the more aggressive presentation of the 33's, I found them consistently more real than the 45's. The first MM 33's were still distributed at retail, but soon after, Rambach shut that down and went to direct sales. Fair enough, to most buyers, that doesn't matter much.
BUT - when he went direct, and basically fucked over distributors and generally abandoned overseas customers loyal to MM with high shipping costs (and obviously, overseas and other customers losing the ability to drop a MM title into a bigger order with non-MM titles to even out the shipping hit), he did so EXPRESSLY STATING THAT HE WAS DOING SO BECAUSE HE WAS ANGRY AT PEOPLE FLIPPING MM TITLES FOR CRAZY PRICES AND WANTED TO PUT AN END TO THAT.
Which was a lie - he simply wanted the ability to do it himself, and soon started playing a game of limiting availability of titles so he could drive up prices by making them appear almost out of stock. This is getting to deceptive practice.
That's where I, and others, lost trust in Rambach. His ethics. And then, I and others though back to where he got his start and made his money - as a second hand record dealers specializing in rare original BN pressings that he sold primarily to well heeled foreign buyers. He was always a hustler.
Given his age, Rambach is likely retired. He used the last few years of MM to build his nest egg, fair enough. But it left a bad taste for many, particularly those who supported him and MM from the beginning.
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