The "good old days" of CA.com was 5+ years ago. There are a number of issues with this site, some have been mentioned earlier in this thread. I don't feel it needs to be wiped clean like Jntar said, but there needs to be some serious changes to get it to a real audio enthusiast website. But the conflict that will always happen is the fact of the dominate domain name lands high on searches, so all walks of life/education/experience/skill etc. end up here. Which will naturally bring down the quality of the average member here. But the goal is to share experience and information to improve it. People mentioned SSA a few times, we from the get go, years ago, made the focus on the DIY'er who wants to know more and share their experiences, and not put up with any drama, and all spam is centrally located in one thread, in addition to a mod team put in by me of experienced people who act like adults.
So the question remains, what exactly needs to be done? No one person knows for certain, but a similar site, ROE, with a similar member base, and a similar downward track of flaming, spaming, bashing, inappropriate topics, absent admin etc., where the negative manners spread out from the OT section, under went a cleaning house of the members that degraded or hurt the goal of. Since then the forums are running much smoother and much more back on topic. If a house cleaning were to happen here, as I have seen, people will run off into a corner and bad mouth, flame, and attack the mod team/forum, but once that all died down it would return a better AUDIO forum.
In the end, CA.com may have out grown the people who got it to where it is now, and be too far gone from a pure audio forum, and I feel until goob really wants to take the reigns and transition this forum, which has tremendous potential (based on the domain and search hits) to what is should be, CA.com will continue on this path.