The review wehave been promising is up

This is the kind of dialogue that needs to happen and I always try to attend to constructive criticism from editors and readers alike. It’s just so much more productive when the correspondent adopts the tone of a Mahler123 as opposed to the enraged contempt of a soix. It’s always a bad sign when someone starts writing in all caps about what’s supposed to be an enjoyable avocation. Both posters are making the same points but one seems to be getting unnecessarily bellicose about it. Like it or not, all of us— knowledgeable consumers, dealers, manufacturers, journalists, recording professionals, even artists—are part of the same ecosystem and—I’ll use the provocative "c-word"—a little civility goes a long way.

I’m not certain how having one or two comparison products on hand makes everything right, when there are dozens of potential competing products. Chances are that the comparison product I have on hand isn’t going to be the one you’re interested in. Even if one goes to a lot of audio shows, nobody’s heard everything—and certainly not at length in a familiar system. Is it simply the act of comparing the product under review to something that’s a virtue? Seems kind of arbitrary to me.

That’s why the lexicon that HP and others developed can be so helpful. Employed thoughtfully, it can serve as a point of reference that individual product reviews can point to. It’s a lot like reading music criticism: You can learn the tastes, biases, and priorities of a given writer you don’t even often agree with and use a review of his to predict what your own response will be—so long as their listening habits and predilections are constant and consistent.

But as the more technically advanced and expensive the products under consideration get, the harder it is to declare winners and losers, and the more critical it becomes that a potential purchaser get either a good long listen at a dealer or, best of all, the option to return gear after an extended home audition, no questions asked, that Dave Lalin provides.

That said, going forward, I’m promising myself to name more names in the course of my equipment reviews. Thanks to all who brought it up.

Andrew when you or your fellow music reviewers review, say, Wagners Ring, there are usually comparisons to multiple other versions.  As readers we have come to take that as a matter of course.  So why the attitude about product reviews, that comparison are not your bailiwick?  I wouldn’t expect Product X to be compared to every product out there, no more than I would expect a new Beethoven Symphony recording to be compared to the other 200 available versions.  However, most recordings are compared to a few others.  Why the different standard for gear?

Good point - though the two situations aren’t entirely analagous. Maybe you remember that, for Fanfare, I reviewed pretty much only Wagner for about a decade and I still have on my shelves roughly 20 complete Ring cycles (not to mention a bunch of single Ring dramas.) If I have more than two pairs of full-range, floorstanding loudspeakers in our place at once, my wife understandably begins to get pretty annoyed. Plus, despite rumors to the contrary, you do have to send them back unless you decide to buy them (in which case you’re probably unloading something else—that’s why I’ve been a long-time AudiogoN member! ) Add to that the possibility of streaming and comparisons of different recorded versions of the same music is pretty easy.

Not so with audio gear. You will notice that, when reviewing speakers I generally try a couple of different amplifiers and sometimes need to borrow one from a friend or dealer to do a fair assessment. With the 432 EVO Aeon review, as Lalin pointed out, I do have a Baetis server that’s active in my system and I use a lot and, of course, compared to the Belgium product. But how many readers have had experience with that one? I’ve reviewed a couple of other Baetis models, an Aurender, and a T+A but that’s still such a minuscule part of the server universe. I do listen to a lot of the same music with each review component, using the vocabulary of high-performance audio to describe the sound to myself and to the magazine’s end user—and that allows me to have an impression of what’s really good and what’s merely OK.

Extended listening to familiar music and describing in detail what I hear (and, yes, there is an "absolute sound" with synthetic studio recordings—you recognize it when you hear them played back on a super-system or at a recording session) with the audiophile jargon lets me get a handle on what a new product can do and where it fits in my experience as an audiophile. My hope is that some readers will find some of my reviews promising enough to seek out the product at a dealer, an audio show, at the local audio club (I do that a lot) or perhaps in a friend’s system. No one, I hope, is going to buy a $15K pair of speakers because some reviewer says they "blow away" the $7500 pair standing in the hallway just off his listening room.

That said, I am going to try to do better on the issue of comparisons. Then, the forum loudmouths can move on to giving other reasons why they no longer read TAS. 😁

Best to all

AQ

I’m not certain how having one or two comparison products on hand makes everything right, when there are dozens of potential competing products. Chances are that the comparison product I have on hand isn’t going to be the one you’re interested in.

And there it is!!! This is the common excuse used by TAS reviewers to defend not comparing review samples to another product. It’s an utter garbage argument as the comparison product, even if not the one a reader is interested in, is likely reviewed other places against other review products and thus a point of relative reference can begin to be made. Humans are great at determining relative differences between options but not good at judging things on their own — hence the value of product comparisons.

That said, I am going to try to do better on the issue of comparisons. Then, the forum loudmouths can move on to giving other reasons why they no longer read TAS.

Nice. There’s the TAS arrogance in full view. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with TAS reviews, it’s we the readers/loudmouths no longer reading TAS who are clearly making up reasons for no longer reading TAS who are in the wrong. When in doubt, blame the customer! Great business strategy there. It’s much easier to think it’s our problem than to honestly look inward and figure out the real reasons we’re not reading anymore — kinda like it’s easier to write a “review in a bubble” than it is to incorporate meaningful product comparisons. It requires more effort and to embrace accountability rather than make lame excuses and blame others, but there it is.

That’s why the lexicon that HP and others developed can be so helpful. Employed thoughtfully, it can serve as a point of reference that individual product reviews can point to.

Yes, a point of reference in one system and one room, which is in no way comparable to hearing the same piece of equipment in another system in another room much less a completely different piece of equipment in that scenario — way, way too many variables to even begin making a valid or meaningful comparison, which is why comparing components in the same room and system is so valuable and useful to readers.

And @aquint you misinterpreted my use of caps in my prior post — they were made to add emphasis and not made out of anger at all. But HELL YES (ok, this one may be a bit out of anger) I’m angry that TAS eschews doing product comparisons that almost all readers would prefer to have, and I’m angrier still that TAS writers continually try to defend the practice of producing “reviews in a bubble” through very shoddy and BS excuses like the one you used above. As a former reviewer it would’ve made my life a HELLUVA (this one’s for emphasis Andrew in case you’re confused) lot easier if I didn’t have to bother making those pesky product comparisons. I could’ve written twice as many reviews without all the added time/effort involved in doing that, but my reviews wouldn’t have been nearly as valid or useful to readers had I done that. But you go on cranking out your reviews as is and kidding yourself that TAS is above it all and that its flawed review process is the better way to go for readers. I’ll just say that if I’m actually interested in a product and really want to get a good idea of how it sounds, TAS is about the last place I’ll go because after reading a “review in a bubble” I still have very little idea of what the product really sounds like. I can’t think of a worse comment about a product review than that, and it really encapsulates the ultimate problem with TAS and its lax review “standards.”  But I applaud you for considering to do more product comparisons in the future, and if more of your fellow writers do the same you’ll likely get me back along with many other readers because TAS does review a lot of very desirable equipment.  I honestly have my fingers crossed that this comes to pass.

Andrew

  I accept everything you say except the part about their being an “Absolute Sound”, and that issue is tangential here, imo, and could be the subject of a different thread.  
  Shortly before Art Dudley died, he reviewed some French CDP that cost around $25K.  His comparator was a Sony SACD player that he had since 2003.  Now, surely someone at Sterephile could have loaned him something for a weekend that was a more relevant comparator?  I appreciate the difficulties that may be involved, but as a reader, such a comparison is meaningless.

  I also disagree that there is some type of Universal Audio Language, an Audiophile Esperanto, that can be used successfully to describe products.  We all read these terms but overtime they come to mean different things to different listeners, and It doesn’t allow for the possibility that biologically, we tend to hear things in different subtle ways.  Trying to describe in words what one is hearing in sounds is undoubtedly a challenge, but I don’t think that having a codification of terms, and expecting the average Audiophile, not to mention the casually interested person who might pick up an issue of TAS at a bookstore, to master them is the solution.

  Happy Listening