The Absurdity of Some Recent Audio Reviews in Stereophile.

[cjfrbw]

I have to state that it has become popular to trash critics, as if they have some kind of celestial responsibility to issue a guarantee that a component in the review works or doesn't work with every system at all times, and that their impressions and tastes are somehow obligated to segue with the impressions and tastes of a buyer in their home systems.

What a review does for me is: 1. give me a much greater and more detailed eyeball impression of the component i.e. fit and finish and use-ability 2. a much more detailed background of the manufacturer, the manufacturer's history, philosophy etc 3. a more detailed layout and circuit description of the component itself, with its design features and quality of construction and parts i.e. hand wiring, circuit boards, caps quality, transformers, power supply layout etc. also related to philosophy of construction 4. Objective measurements of the item as far as possible and lastly 5. a trial spin in the critic's system with a subjective impression of what it is actually like to use and hear the component.

None of these things could I do myself without actually buying said component.

Almost all of the lambasting of critics seems to surround item 5., as if the critic is supposed to have a ouija board to the reader's system, tastes and requirements, and failing that, the critic is an outlandish thief describing drek to foist on an unsuspecting and unsophisticated public.

Face it guys, we like to have somebody review these shiny and expensive things for us, even if we don't buy them or can't buy them. I guess we like to toss rotten eggs and tomatoes at them as well.

Reasonable credibility is good enough for me, I like reading about the stuff in spite of. If a critic really goes off the reservation on credibility, it seems to get out there pretty fast these days and speaks for itself.

 

[MylesBAstor]

Funny that you posted that Myles, I almost posted earlier this morning this question. .......... Is it just possible that the lack of negative reviews is due to the fact that there is a lot of high quality audio equipment out there for sale????????

I think that that's one reason

And there are some more.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Let me throw this out. Everyone thinks the lack of negative reviews is due to a lack of integrity. Could there possibly be another reason (s)? I can thing of quite a few.

Thanks for the opening, Myles. I have said this many times: I do not take anything for review to which I have not had some prior positive exposure, however informally, or from a source whose prior work I have not appreciated. I have declined products, of which I have significant doubts. This will create the high liklihood of positive, if not entirely glowing, reviews. Frankly, I do not wish to spend an extended period of cohabitation with something I know, a priori, will not provide enjoyment.

 

[MylesBAstor]

Thanks for the opening, Myles. I have said this many times: I do not take anything for review to which I have not had some prior positive exposure, however informally, or from a source whose prior work I have not appreciated. I have declined products, of which I have significant doubts. This will create the high liklihood of positive, if not entirely glowing, reviews. Frankly, I do not wish to spend an extended period of cohabitation with something I know, a priori, will not provide enjoyment.

That's reason number 2 that I was thinking of

 

[Steve williams]

Most of you here as early members know that Amir and I feel that the best reviewer is the one who owns the gear and can say yea or nay honestly. Granted owning a piece of equipment often brings with the need for validation. Having said that we still saw the need to have a dedicated forum for reviews. As a result the Featured Reviews Forum was created

 

[DaveyF]

Myles, don't you think that it is more appropriate for a reviewer to simply be honest about their findings than to be circuitous about an obvious issue, as JA clearly did in his review of the Violincello 11?

 

[terryj]

It begs the question...what is the point of mags?

If, as it seems, you cannot trust the reviews (say), then at the end of the day you need to audition it yourself (naturally)..but if you always have to audition because 'everything is wonderful' then how has it helped? All it has done is tell you what is available for audition.

It is simply a listing of the gear that is continually appearing. But serves no other purpose than entertainment as every one of the newly appearing gear will be put into the highly recommended category (lot's of simplifications there of course)

If everything is recommended, then it offers no discrimination factor at all.

Just hope there are pics of pretty women?

 

[Kal Rubinson]

If, as it seems, you cannot trust the reviews (say), then at the end of the day you need to audition it yourself (naturally)..

Of course. Have you ever heard of "trust but verify?" If you really care about this stuff (and that includes everybody here), you need to audition anything for yourself. I would not buy any audio equipment on anyone's say-so but I do appreciate insights and suggestions.

 

[FrantzM]

Hi

Interesting .. Very much so .. No one wants to make of a reviewer a guru .. At least one hopes not , since we do make of of our designers very close to that down to watching them listening to music ... This is not a matter of life and death no doubt but integrity remains front and center ... Else the very fact of review is an empty exercise .. What does a reviewer implicitly promise then .. Nothing? Really ? SO the access is for ....for ... what then ? the point of telling me, us that you heard a given gear is ... an exercise in what? futility for the person who has written it and the person who's reading it ?

Trust and Verify .. How blithe... That absolve the review of all sins including an absence of conclusion?

So what does a reviewer supposes to be. At the very basic someone who write reviews. It implies a level of expertise at least equal, ideally superior to that of its readership, integrity, honesty and all the nice moral traits we care for ... In that sense the reviewer helps both its readership and the manufacturers ... That would be ideal .. We know it can be entirely met but getting close to it often would not be too bad...

A review demands a conclusion , a commitment of the reviewer toward his position vis-a-vis the object under review .. Let's take movie reviews .. Would we go for such in a movie review? I doubt it .. Yet we see here that the reality of the problem is avoided entirely here ... I called it denial and it might well be .. Such displays make me very happy not to have NOT renewed my subscriptions to SP and TAS ...

Hope the other magazines do look at this and find ways to improve upon their then august but now non-committal sisters ...

 

[terryj]

Of course. Have you ever heard of "trust but verify?" If you really care about this stuff (and that includes everybody here), you need to audition anything for yourself. I would not buy any audio equipment on anyone's say-so but I do appreciate insights and suggestions.

Yes, I knew that when I wrote it, no-one (esp the level of gear under discussion here) would buy without an audition.

What I meant was, the reviews themsleves provide no differentiation if they are 'all class A.' So, we cannot even use the reviews to narrow down the files of twenty items, as they are all equally good.

Which seems to me to be counter to the definition of the word review.

 

[Alan Sircom]

Re-eading some of the posts... It has come to me that the magazines or at least those from magazines who have voiced their point of view in this thread do not seem to recognize how their stock is falling within the (smallish) readership...
This will lead to search for more ways to make money not necessarily atract new readers, meanwhile the old readers, those with the most potential to be loyal are no longer that .. loyal .. I will take myself as an example, (talk about modesty) back in the mid-80's , I did not have a subscription and I remember going to Tower Record just to buy my copy of TAS, which to me was of the proper form factor .. I still do have some of these and reading it from cover to cover .. Right now I have let my TAS subscription lapse and I am not alone. If we were to conduct an informal survey here in this very forum we would have a better idea but I am willing to advance that few here are fans of these magazines .. Oh! we buy them from time to time or download them but admirers ? Reading from cover to back cover? Unlikely
There are problems no doubt but the quality of the reviews, the boosterish attitude and the impression that many of these mags .. I will cite SP and TAS but this applies to ocuntless others, don't have the well-being of their readers ar stake, needs to be addressed for these magazines to survive ...

P.S. I have not yet approach the role magazines have played in the suicidal price strategy of High End Audio (don't look hard but now there seems to be, finally a $200 K DAC) ...but dare I say that when a 80 K speaker has those problems in the treble it should not ...well.. cost 80 K .. because there are truly better speakers at much, much less?

Denial... no. Most of us are all too aware of the negativity voiced toward magazines, especially in forums. And while the same negativity seems not to extend with the same force to those who regularly buy the magazines, it's perhaps no surprise that few audio magazines are considering 2010 the glory days of circulation figures. But those circulation figures do not seem to be buoyed by the nature of the reviews - magazines in the UK that 'tell it like it is' fare no better than magazines that pre-select the best products before reviewing.

My take on this has changed, based on feedback from readers of the magazines I have worked on over the years. When I first started writing for magazines, the UK was still getting over their obsession with Flat Earth (Linn/Naim) products. There was a distinct move away from polemic reviews, because readers had begun to tire of reviewers comparing any turntable that wasn't an LP12 to the contents of a trash can. Instead, people wanted fair reviews that set a product in terms of its suitability and compatibility in different systems. Then, about 15 or so years ago, there was an about face and people demanded polemic reviews again, but this time without the Flat Earth filter. You might think, as reviewer, that the two $1,000 CD players under test sound almost identical, but the review would have to focus on one micro-aspect of performance and pour praise on one and scorn on the other. This was fun, because sailing just the right side of a law suit can be entertaining, both for readers to read and to write. But ultimately it led to a lot of products and brands being unfairly put out of business over comparatively trivial things like the color of the display (the obsession with blue LEDs in audio is from that time, and partly my fault. Sorry). This was something of a last hurrah for the UK audio press, as our influence - which was always more significant that the size of the audio business in the country - began to wane around this time.

Gradually, over the course of the 21st Century, things seem to have changed yet again. Because the audiophile in general is viewed as something of a joke in the outside world, reviewers seem to be perceived as keepers and protectors of the faith by surviving audiophile readers. The drawback of that is sometimes you should challenge that faith if you are to do the job of reviewer. I suspect - and hope - this will swing back to reviews that don't just sit on the fence soon. As it stands, the best I can offer is to try to place the product in context.

-

The 'suicidal price strategy' you state is somewhat tempered by the practical reality of the modern high-end world. That is not limited to high-end audio, but extends across the board. In a time of financial difficulties, the number of high-end customers goes down, but the amount of money those super-rich people are willing to spend goes up. Take the real-estate market as an example; like the US, the UK real-estate market is stagnant. And yet, clients are fighting over the world's first $220m apartment. Luxury brands survive economic downturns by appealing to the tastes of those who are wealthy enough not to be too troubled by economic downturns, and I suspect the $200k DAC does just that.

It's also wise to look past the headline products. So there are companies making $200,000 DACs. So what? It hasn't caused products like the Cambridge Audio DACMagic to go away, and it certainly didn't send a signal to other DACs to begin underperforming. There are companies making $1m cars, but it doesn't really affect me in my day-to-day driving. I don't feel the need to complain to any passing realtors about the existence of a $220m apartment five miles from my front door, because it hasn't altered the value of my property. So, why should the existence of a $200k DAC be so vexatious?

All it's done is increase the dynamic range of the audio industry. And maybe if a $220k DAC has enough bling about it to make those Russian oligarchs who can afford to spend $220million on an apartment get interested in audio as status symbol... well, at least it makes high-end audio 'cool' to people outside our little introspective world.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

I am not sure that a conclusion of the sort that both Terryj and FrantzM seem to want are always possible. A conclusion about a product needs to be made in a context in order to be meaningful and the needs and wants of readers vary so widely. I think the best value of a review is the descriptive/analytical content rather than a conclusion/rating/#stars.

 

[FrantzM]

Alan

High End Audio pricing is a vast subject in itself ... Suffice to say that in High ENd Audio there seemed to be the notion of performance as in reproducing music very well better than ....another ...So the lack of conclusion from a review of a $80 K speaker whose tweeter necessitated the reviewer himself to insert a 600 ohm resistor is a sin ... unless we squarely admit that Performance is no longer part of High End Audio .. I would like to believe it is not so ... I have come to realize however how wrong I am ... How wrong many of us are

 

[terryj]

I am not sure that a conclusion of the sort that both Terryj and FrantzM seem to want are always possible. A conclusion about a product needs to be made in a context in order to be meaningful and the needs and wants of readers vary so widely. I think the best value of a review is the descriptive/analytical content rather than a conclusion/rating/#stars.

I take your point, but ask a chicken and egg question.

Is the reason the 'real' value of a magazine review the descriptive/analytical content rather than the conclusion/rating/#stars BECAUSE we find no worthwhile stars or rankings?

Could it not be both?? (in an ideal world)

 

[Alan Sircom]

Alan

High End Audio pricing is a vast subject in itself ... Suffice to say that in High ENd Audio there seemed to be the notion of performance as in reproducing music very well better than ....another ...So the lack of conclusion from a review of a $80 K speaker whose tweeter necessitated the reviewer himself to insert a 600 ohm resistor is a sin ... unless we squarely admit that Performance is no longer part of High End Audio .. I would like to believe it is not so ... I have come to realize however how wrong I am ... How wrong many of us are

Well, one could argue that simply mentioning that 600 ohm resistor is a conclusion in and of itself. I mean, if you were in the market for an $80k loudspeaker, I'm pretty sure JA's aside about inserting that resistor would have an influence on your shortlist selection process.

 

[Alan Sircom]

I take your point, but ask a chicken and egg question.

Is the reason the 'real' value of a magazine review the descriptive/analytical content rather than the conclusion/rating/#stars BECAUSE we find no worthwhile stars or rankings?

Could it not be both?? (in an ideal world)

Having worked on magazines that apply star or percentage ratings to products, I find them to create more problems than they solve. For example, you don't get five stars in a five-star system. The reality is you have five-star products... and a bunch of things no one's interested in. No matter how much analysis you put into the text, people skim that bit and read the star rating. You also get the very real problem of people selecting a horribly mis-matched set of components based solely on their star ratings. Those who get past the 'five star good, everything else dead-meat' mind-set inevitably get other aspects wholly wrong. "Is a five-star $1,000 product better than a four-star $10,000 product?" being the most common.

If you begin to include star ratings for aspects of performance or for value, you merely compound the confusion.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Those who get past the 'five star good, everything else dead-meat' mind-set inevitably get other aspects wholly wrong. "Is a five-star $1,000 product better than a four-star $10,000 product?"

If, in a a review of an $80k speaker, "simply mentioning that 600 ohm resistor is a conclusion in and of itself," and yet said review can still end in "highly recommended!" one might logically conclude that a 4-star $1,000 product could be better than a 5-star $10,000 product.

P

 

[muralman1]

I have no use for any of the audio publications. I am only interested in the owner reviews of CDs at Amazon. I am finished! Done! with all purchases save a transport replacement one of these days. None of my equipment have any place in any magazine save the AC interconnects.

 

[terryj]

If, in a a review of an $80k speaker, "simply mentioning that 600 ohm resistor is a conclusion in and of itself," and yet said review can still end in "highly recommended!" one might logically conclude that a 4-star $1,000 product could be better than a 5-star $10,000 product.

P

or an $80 000 one?

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

or an $80 000 one?

Or an $80,000 one...

P