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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: Re: I'm not certain we really ave agreementdef… posted by RGA on October 16, 2005 at 13:51:03:
And also how come this thread started out with the subject "Yet again the buzzword to help poor speakers ..." and now we've got the comment "…or the magazines are deliberately touting lousy imaging speakers as being great so that the buyer in 2 years will look to upgrade and of course by some more Stereophile magazines to get more bad advice -- but nah a magazine would not deliberately do that to get people to buy more magazines now would they?"It's a big jump from imaging being the buzzword to help poor speakers to magazines pushing speakers that image badly.
And I, for one, don't think that Stereophile, or any magazine for that matter, goes out of it's way to give bad advice, and I definitely don't think it behaves unscrupulously to get people to buy more copies.
Pick a component, any component, and not everyone agrees on how good or bad it is. Put it in a pile of different systems and you will expect to hear different things. Let a pile of different people listen and expect to hear them say they heard different things, even when they're listening to exactly the same system in the same room. Maybe not big differences in every case but definitely differences.
Is there any reason to believe that any of Stereophile's reviewers, or any particular one of most reviewers, fails to accurately report their opinion of what they heard and thought when they review a component? What makes them liars out to deceive and give bad advice, or at the very least incompetent and unskilled listeners, when they report something that you don't agree with? Why is it more likely that it has to be something other than an honest difference in opinion and listening experience rather than just that? Why are the reviewers always wrong and their critics always right?
And even if the reviewer is wrong on occasion, why should that be automatically put down to something other than an honest mistake when we all make honest mistakes? Why should reviewers be any less fallible than the rest of us?
As far as the accuracy of Stereophile's reviews go, the only products I own that they've reviewed are my speakers - a favourable but wishy washy Sam Tellig review which I think didn't do them credit but I often have differences with Sam's views, and my Arcam FMJ CD33 CDP which was reviewed by both JA - the main review - and Art Dudley who compared it to a Naim that he preferred. I find myself in close agreement with JA and, for what it's worth, the dealer I bought it from believes that about 50% of people prefer the Arcam to the Naim and the other 50% prefer the Naim to the Arcam. Why should I assume that Art Dudley did anything other than honestly report what he heard and felt simply because he and I have different opinions and prefer different products?
Frankly, there's often a discrepancy in the opinion of different Stereophile reviewers on the same product and the magazine makes no effort to hide that fact. In fact they often go out of their way to make it quite obvious. There's no reason I can see to jump to nasty suspicions just because your opinions don't agree with theirs on some products or because they choose to review gear that you don't like and don't review a lot of the stuff that you do like.
Frankly I got into this thread because I disagreed with the view expressed in your original subject matter and the logic in the article you quoted. There seemed to be a bit of reasonable discussion in the middle and all of a sudden we're back to irrational diatribes against reviewers and Stereophile in particular, and a 180 degree turnaround about what reviewers are doing when they talk about imaging in reviews. Hardly a productive exchange so I'll bail out.
David Aiken
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Follow Ups
- Why the regular anti-Stereophile comments? - David Aiken 17:40:15 10/16/05 (1)
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