Why no reviews of the Magnepan 3.7 in Stereophile

We naturally agree w/ the positive reviews of our own components and seek these reviews out for validation of our choices. Ask yourself, how do you react if one of your own components receives an unfavorable comment from an Audiogon members on one of these forum discussions? The early "undergound" TAS was valuable because a) they set a listening standard, i.e. live music; b) they advocated subjective listening not because measured data was valueless, but because the measurements being made were not correlated with the goal, the ability to accurately reproduce music to the human ear; and c) the reviewers were free of advertising bias. Those days are long gone.

I like the photos:) Boy, in the old days an "A" rating from TAS was sure hard to get, funny how few SOTA pieces existed and how many do today, at least according to Stereophile. But hey, the magazines are here to entertain, keep us interested, and keep the industry buzz and vitality moving forward - and those too are worthy goals for a hobby that is fun, in addition to the the music which is the ultimate goal.

Pubul57,
I agree with your last post; I treat the mags as entertainment.

Beave, Stereophile has a completely different business model than Consumer Reports. For one thing, CR is a broad-based testing organization with a huge subscription base, and operates as non-profit that takes donations, like NPR. Stereophile is a niche magazine with a small subscription base, and not (intended to be :) ) a non-profit. In CR's annual report they mention subscription revenue of $222M for 2010, and contributions of over $17M. While CR doesn't accept ads and Stereophile does, I'm guessing their ad rates are relatively low because their circulation is small and their advertisers are typically small companies. I'd also guess that CR's revenue per subscriber is probably twice Stereophile's.

In good times I suspect Stereophile could afford some purchases for test, but my guess is that in 2011 not so much. Too bad, because the only reason why I subscribe is JA's testing.

I especially enjoy JA's suprise when his measurements are hard to reconcile with the reviewers observations.