What an interesting thread. In some posts, so much ill will ascribed to Stereophile (corporate marketing shills!), without much reflection on why someone may read an article (is it for a science-based evaluation? is it mere adult entertainment? is it a mix of hobby reading and looking for casual inspiration where to consider an upgrade?) or even more fundamentally what the magazine purports to do, or even what its realistic limits may be.
Even when Stereophile finishes with something like a "highly recommended" in the conclusion, I don’t believe they have ever written "buy this without doing your own listening, trust us!"... which of course would be folly.
The personal responsibility to understand your own preferences, and do the work to do your own listening, will never go away. No Stereophile article, ASR review, or forum post eliminates that. But they can certainly inspire in terms of directions where to look.
Hopefully one gets an understanding relatively early if one is one of those ’kooks’ (who may like low powered horns, tube DACs, or other non-traditional measuring things) or can more safely rely on what a measurement/ASR review say, and thus which source is a more reliable indicator of where they will find bliss.
At the end of the day, we all have our own objective function in this hobby (the best ’measured’ sound?, what was in the mastering studio?, gear that looks nice on a rack?, gear that sounds pretty good but is physically small?, what emotionally transports us to a live venue?), but let’s be humble in assuming that our objective function has to be the same as the next persons – and thus that a single magazine (or forum, or other review website) could claim to solve that.
