Critic's Corner

Posted by John Marks (P) on June 20, 2015 at 10:17:06

In Reply to: RE: Absolutely it does... posted by AAG on June 20, 2015 at 09:43:53

But seriously...

Speaking only for myself, and as I understand things, columnists are given a wide latitude to request equipment for evaluation for possible inclusion in a future column, equipment that might not meet Stereophile's normal criteria.

I think that in my experience the riskiest such move I ever made was to request darTZee's NHB-108 before they had a US importer. In the event, the NHB-108 turned out to be not only the sweetest-sounding solid-state amp I have ever heard, it turned out to be a real product from a real company, and was later reviewed and tested.

As I understand it, while reviewers may suggest equipment to be reviewed, it is John Atkinson who assigns gear for review. Which only makes sense. He has to be able to make sure that there is an absolutely fetching mix of reviews in any given issue, and he has to be able to schedule his time dedicated to measurements.

Beyond those pragmatic concerns, I think that columnists in general write from a more personal perspective while reviewers write from a more objective perspective, but that might be overstating things. A review has to include subjective reactions, and a column has to impart objective data points that are relevant to a reader's deciding whether something is worth further pursuit.

And just to tweak your restatement of what I said above, column coverage does not necessarily involve measurements, but in certain cases, there may be a measurements Follow-up. Recent examples from my column include the Lindell AMPX Class A power amp and a couple of ATC loudspeakers.

In rare cases, something that I write about will turn out to merit a review and not just measurement, so the readers get the benefit of more than one complete perspective on an important product, examples being Vivid's B-1 loudspeaker and Bricasti's M1 DAC.

Ciao,

john