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Original Message

If you go to Shunyata's website, you can lift the entire review from Shunyata's promo material.

Posted by Enophile on December 21, 2011 at 08:52:45:

If you follow the link on the front page of Shunyata's website to the promotional "interview" at Audio Beat, you will find the same 'review' we saw in Stereophile this month....only in the linked article, the Analog Corner 'review' is given by the manufacturer instead of by the Stereophile author.

Was this simply a case of synchronicity?

The review in Stereophile also started off with a very agenda driven tone....promoting a technology or product was the premise of the review. It smacked of a personal agenda, to me.

Puff pieces are fine, if identified, a la Sam Tellig as being part of how he was charmed by the owner of the Opera factory and Venice is a city of artists, blah blah blah, or something like that, but hitting the reader with a stick right from the start trying to pre-validate a product is a bit much.

The 'review' basically used the manufacturer's pre-existing statements and simply "unquoted them;" offering them up as though they were the result of some sort of journalistic "investigation" on the author's part - it didn't strike me as a review, really.

Then, basically acting as though a promotional piece disguised as a review was the result of any personal investigation, independent research (which should appear, at least a little teeny bit, as though the author had considered some things for himself,) or at all objective struck me as though not much independent thinking went into that piece.

Add together the Shunyata website's front page "Interview" from "Audio Beat," the manufacturer's thoughts being presented as the reviewer's, the oddly defensive/hostile preamble, the images that appear on the Shunyata website and in the Audio Beat "article" and in the Sterophile column, and you have a column that was obviously unoriginal.

If Audio Beat had gone to press before Stereophile with their material, then they should go after Stereophile for plagiarism!

The "interviewer" from the Audio Beat piece basically cut and pasted a previous "interview," mashed it together with some promotional literature and images from Shunyata, and then presented it as an original column for Stereophile.

Think of any late late night infomercial format and you will have predicted the format of this month's Analog Corner "review," sans the faux applause and gasps from the faux studio audience. It crossed into parody for me.

The author in question will now think I don't love him, but I do. I read his work every month, and also enjoy his other reviews. (Except for the cables that don't conduct signal, the love of the broken CD player, and the misunderstanding of 'magentized' vinyl notwithstanding, but I digress.) My not worshipping this month's column has garnered me an invitation to quit reading him at all and te author adroitly tried to turn the criticism into an indictment of reviewing as a whole - this not the case.

It's because of my high regard of the author that I felt let down by this month's seemingly phoned in review.