Audio reviews: too many analogies, never simple, but most of all, never clear.

I agree that audio reviews can be frustratingly long-winded these days, but I love it when a reviewer uses analogies from outside the audio world to better describe what he/she is hearing.  I want the review to be subjective.  Bring on those food and wine comparoes!  On the other hand, yeah, I appreciate it when reviewers engage in musical chairs as they substitute other components in the chain as they attempt to describe what the component under review brings to the table.   But you don't have to cross every "i" and dot every "t."  My poor eyes begin to blur.

+1 douglas_shroeder

Too broad a brush here--you learn who to trust and what is fluff.  Reputable reviewers like Fremer (& Dudley!!) can say what they want for as long as they want before getting down to business--i can always fast forward to conclusioin and Atkinson

Well, not so much with Art now-sigh-a lovely man

1-Any professional reviews are, by definition, ones that have no manufacturer or publisher pressure to like the product ( in exchange for buying it cheaply etc) and/or don’t sugarcoat any problems with it. In a professionally run publication, the mere existence of advertising doesn’t alter this at all. A quick example being in my newspaper reporter days, due to the large amount of advertising bought by the local auto dealers, any article written criticizing them or their products would likely never run. This clearly was a breach of the trust the community had in the paper.

2-Further, the lack of reviews for a brand may not be what they seem - ie they don’t advertise so they don’t get covered - the truth is that if a brand doesn’t provide review samples, the only alternative is to have reviews written by those who’ve liked the product enough to buy it - hardly an objective source of criticism.

3-That said, there are publishers and reviewers that enjoy being in a position to get equipment cheaply, or even free, and are subsequently less than objective in their reviews. There are also reviewers that fancy themselves to be more like Hemingway than necessary, wasting, as the OP said, time and review space. The late Art Dudley was generally good at mixing just the right amount of storytelling with his opinions, creating very entertaining reviews imho. Others don’t do it as well.

Any publisher/editor worthy of the title should solicit reader opinions and act accordingly when his (or her) readers point out that the reviews aren’t providing enough (or any) pertinent information. We aren’t buying the magazines just to see the ads.

There are a lot of things that most reviewers miss when evaluating a component.
Most critical are how components interact with others down and up stream. Also I find it totally ridiculous when a reviewer gives a component a bad review based on only one set of components used within the review. Reviewers should have at a minimum, at least one other system to evaluate the same component to see if there was a miss-match between components that caused them to reach a negative opinion for that component. Where the numbers ( specs ) do mean something is the interaction between components of different impedances and design principles.