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In Reply to: RE: High Fidelity Report: Reviewer Accommodations Compromise Credibilty posted by Sprezza Tura on April 30, 2014 at 09:53:47
Ah the search for the true prophet who lives in poverty to prove his truth. If you knew what most reviewers receive for many hours of work you'd realize it is poverty. And for that majority accommodation pricing is their only true reward other than fun and satisfaction. And buying the product reviewed even at accommodation is really only further evidence of a good review. Given the wages one buys only what one really believes in. More can't be afforded unless it comes from the family fortune.
Get off all this negative crap and read reviews to learn about the reviewer for fun, some information and direction so you can do a better job to make up your own mind, the only way you will ever be happy with your purchases.
Follow Ups:
I have spent far more money as a reviewer reviewing than I have gotten out of the deal. I do it entirely because I enjoy it. Perhaps I can help people to avoid the early mistakes I made. Interestingly, the mistakes were largely relying on reviews over my own ears. I should have chosen specific people who hear it the way I hear it.
Fellow forum posters can be just as good as any reviewer in this as well. I have had great insights from people on forums over the years - even the folks who I've argued with often have bits of info I store in the back of my head and used to inform my decisions at later dates.
I always scratch my head when I hear about "mistakes" like this. Was the mistake not listening to the component in our system or even at a dealer beforehand? If so then it's totally on you. If you bought the new hot thing after hearing at the dealer then it blew up a few months/weeks later then I get it. Most of the mistakes I have personal knowledge of fall into the first category and I just look at them and ask, what were you thinking buying something without hearing it in your system first.
As for the original article, the intent was to get the conversation out in the open. I don't think it's that big an issue but it should be talked about especially when you hear the "I bought the review sample" as it relates to the value proposition mentioned in another post in the thread.
The mistakes is in relying on other people/magazines/measurements to make decisions. While rooms are important, the speaker designer ought to design speakers that work in a large variety of rooms. So I don't buy into the notion that a speaker MUST be brought home to know if it will sound good. You can do this at a dealer with a good room or a show if the rooms are good. (walls not made of paper).
Most average North American homes are built from similar materials and have similar shapes and speakers should work in most of them.Since most current free standing loudspeakers designed to measure well in anechoic chambers the speakers are in effect designed for a "no room, room."
They "supposedly" should sound good in "most rooms" provided you keep them far away from room boundaries. Naturally the fact that people keep making excuses for them like "you need to take them home to get them to sound good" should indicate some things about these free standing designs but that's something else.
I should have said "inexperience" over mistakes. If person A has crossed a river and the way across is to jump from stone to stone person a can tell person b which stone is more secure and can tell person b which stones to avoid preventing them from falling into the water. That is where experience comes in. Avoid the pitfalls of those who wen before.
An example in audio is a fellow named Billy-Bob who is an absolute lover of Single Ended Triode amplifiers. But he doesn't know he is because he's never heard one. So he tries all the the usual amplifiers in all the usual hi-fi stores in his town for 15 years spending money buying, trading, reading magazines, and each issue tells him that this new SS high negative feedback amplifier is the best thing ever and some of them even win "Product of the Year" and promises to fix what ails Billy-Bob will be the salvation.
So another few grand out the window and 6 months later Billy-Bob is looking to trade the great new SS amp which will in a few years fall away being sold for peanuts in the used section of the hi-fi store. He see people talking about SETs. SET? Are you crazy? Billy-Bob says. Terrible measurements - no power - A guy on a forum told me so.Everyone says I need 50 trillion watts to drive my speakers properly - I need "grip." Michael Fremer says so and he is a reviewer and a "professional" so he must be right.
The fact that grip makes him unhappy and sounds a bit fake, and every amp he's ever owned that has that "grip" has bugged him in the past is a "mistake". The mistake is continuing to believe what he is told rather than believing in his ears.
Finally Billy-Bob walks into a new kind of audio shop. Strangely, this one has a lot of vinyl and weird tube amps on the wall. But also those big name solid state amps and even panels - interesting.
Billy-Bob sits down and listens to a system with far more organic and natural sound than - well - anything he has heard before. He looks and sees what he thinks he is a 500 watt SS beast - finally this is it - this is by far and by wide the greatest music listening experience of his entire life. "WOW" he thinks "This is making everything that came before it sound like absolute CRAP!!".
Indeed, the best of his previous best was now relegated to a score of 1/10 and this new set-up is a 10/10 - there aren't words for the astounding improvement. How could it be? Billy-Bob has heard plenty of $20,000 speakers with $20,000 amplifiers and $20,000 CD players. Whaaaaaat?
But it turns out that it wasn't a 500 watt SS beast but an 8 watt SET housed in a closed box. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? He says to the dealer.How can 8 watts and those ugly rectangles sound that good? The dealer replies "Good sound looks like that."
Billy-Bob then thinks "I wasted 15 years on forums and reading BS reviews of stuff that is unmitigated and complete rubbish while the ENTIRE time this kind of amplifier/set-up was on the market sitting under my nose?
Billy-Bob looks at the watts and says wow that sucks (8 watts) and the measurements are bound to be kinda kinda sucky (SETS always look sucky) he mutters in complaint. Still the sound roundly bested his sublimely wonderful measuring .00005% THD flat response SS amplifier and all the others he had heard.
Billy-Bob goes back on several occasions to be sure he wasn't tricked by his mood and to ensure his cookies weren't laced with pot.
Billy-Bob even does an A/B level matched comparison cause it just can't be so. Those added second harmonic distortions must be fooling him.
But after a few months of trying and wanting to hate the 8 watt amp he finds that nope it is "da bomb" after all, and he realizes that he was mistaken to have wasted 15 years on an assortment of gear that were all varying degrees of wrong.
He should have been in stores (good ones with good room) listening to a variety of gear not paying even the slightest attention to name brand bias and prices nor to how sexy the products look. Indeed, he should have thought that some ugly stuff might be good because if is that ugly maybe it's pretty good sounding - eesh it would have to be."
That's how Billy-Bob became RGA.
Note: This is an example - the message being listen to as much "stuff" as is humanly possible and "try" to cover all the significant design types as is possible listening to the better examples of each. So not comparing a $80,000 SS Mark Levinson to a 1960s ST70 or $69 Chinese tube amp from shady&willcatchfireelectronics.net and say "I compared the technologies."
Edits: 05/07/14
Pretty incoherent there, RGA. I gave up after trying to make sense of your first paragraph :-)
Hi Dave - man it was truly atrocious - won't be typing on my phone again. I edited it.
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