What should be mandatory in every professional published review-

You simply won’t ACTUALLY know the sound of a thing unless you give a component time in your system...If a lot of reviewers say the same thing about something you can make reasonable assumptions

@wolf_garcia And that’s the whole point. I’m not saying it’ll be certain that this will necessarily coincide with your hearing, but it certainly gives you a possible indication of what you might expect to hear or want to audition. Nobody’s saying the reviewer should be the final arbiter of what you should think because that’s ALWAYS up to you and your ears, but if you read consistent impressions by reviewers you can certainly include that in your arsenal as to what you might or might not be interested in. To me, that’s as far as the benefit of reviews should go given all the variables involved, but I hope you can agree that used for the information they can potentially offer within their limits they can still be very useful.

El redundo los bloviato a mundo.

El whatevero. 

I am probably idealistic, but I would like to know a reviewer’s ties and obligation to any company whose products are they reviewing, along with the publication’s. "Pay to play", payola, freebies, etc have long plagued magazines that review gear, and it calls into question the independence and integrity of reviewers and their publications. For example, some photography and gun magazines and their writers have been notorious about taking freebies from manufacturers, or doing glowing reviews on products and—like a miracle (cough, cough)—a few pages later you see full-page ads bought by those same manufacturers. For that reason, Consumer Reports buys everything they test iirc, so they are not beholden to manufacturers. The magazine business has gotten very tough, and advertising is the lifeblood, but magazines who basically sell glowing reviews in exchange for ads are whores. I don’t know which audio reviewers and publications are the best and worst in this regard (and I am not asking here!), but I have been told who is by trustworthy by people whom I trust.

It’s a matter of who can one trust, and that is enormously important to me. YMMV. I am not talking about subjective opinions, I am talking about opinions which are purchased.

I won’t name names, but a few notable veteran people in the audio industry have named to me reviewers they trust to be straight-shooters, and also those who are renowned for taking gear (either outright or in the form of "longterm" loans, or buying gear at cost) from manufacturers. One longtime retailer literally guffawed when I mentioned a very prominent reviewer who is apparently egregious in accepting gear as a quid pro quo (either that or he is a millionaire and can afford his $1,000,000 reference system/gear, and it’s possible I guess). I have had personal communication with a reviewer who has probably a >$150K (or more) reference system, and who admitted that most of it is very long-term loans from manufacturers. Hell, I can’t even get most dealers to allow an in-home audition without buying the item in exchange for a return policy (in their defense, they may have only on demo model of an item on hand). For that reason, the return policies of Music Direct, Audio Advisor and some other online dealers are great, but they don’t always carry what I am interested in.

If a publication is afraid to publish critical reviews (that doesn’t mean bad, it means honest), then they should say so. They should also disclose any ties to manufacturers or ways in which they are beholden. I have some experience with this working for the LA Times for 20 years. We were not allowed to accept anything of value over $25 from anyone we were doing a story on, which basically limited it to a modest meal. We had reporters who were fired for violating that code of ethics.

@patrickdowns I totally understand your skepticism and concern, and I can only speak from my own 16 years of reviewing, but I honestly think the corruption you’re alluding to is the exception rather than the rule — or at least I sincerely hope it is. Anyway, I can speak from my time at Soundstage! that I was never offered any free product or was incentivized in any way what to write except just to write about what I really heard. As I’ve mentioned before, by the time a product reaches a level of public interest that it merits a review it’s already gotten high praise or is from a well-established manufacturer, so the odds of getting a piece for review that sounds outright bad in any way is between slim and none. THAT’S the main reason you don’t read many negative reviews. Period. I only wrote one negative review in 16 years, and it ain’t cause I wasn’t ready to write more, it’s just that the products I was offered to review were by and large very good or excellent products. That, and nobody wants to review crap, so crap tends to never rise to the level of even getting a review. I think this could be the case of a few bad apples can spoil the bunch. But, that said, I’d say use your own internal BS meter to judge whether you can trust a reviewer’s opinions or not. Me, as a reviewer, if a review doesn’t make explicit comparisons to another competitive product I dismiss it out of hand because there’s no “fact check” to keep the reviewer honest. Many’s the time I thought I had a good handle on a review product’s sound only to be completely humbled when inserting a competitive product to find my radar was off and had to largely reshape and adjust my impressions — and the review — accordingly. Our aural memory just isn’t that good, or at least mine isn’t. Soundstage!, to its credit, wouldn’t allow a reviewer to review a component unless they had a competitive product available with which to compare it, and I think that’s the way it should be done to produce a truly rigorous and meaningful review. And I’ll once again call out The Absolute Sound (whatever the hell that even is) for going out of their way to not only not provide any direct product comparisons, but also in many cases not even disclose the components in a reviewer’s reference system so the reader has absolutely no clue what basis for comparison, if any, that reviewer was basing their conclusions on. Absurd. Just absurd and outright cowardly IMHO.

Sorry to drone on here, but having been in the reviewing trenches for many years and being a consumer of audio equipment myself I’ve developed some pretty strong opinions as to what a good and genuinely informative, thorough, and ultimately helpful review should contain. Hope this helps at least provide a little perspective and maybe just a touch less skepticism toward reviewers as most reviewers I know make next to nothing and do it purely for the love of music and to provide honest and helpful information/opinions to other fellow audiophiles. Just my $0.02 FWIW.