Me too, but also check out reviews at www.soundnews.net — some of the best out there IMHO and he reviews lots of good, interesting stuff. That said, I thought Darko did a good job of explaining why product comparisons are so critical to creating a truly useful, effective, and more relatable review. Are you listening TAS???
Comparisons. In my humble opinion, they are critical in helping others understand the sound of a device under review. Comparisons give us context which other descriptions – as eloquent as they may be – lack the ability to convey in isolation. I certainly still want those descriptions, but the comparison is often the key metric by which I decode the opinion of a given reviewer.
Let’s walk through an example. When reading a review of a headphone I have yet to experience, it’s great if the author goes into detail about the sound signature. They tell me all about what they hear, using musical examples when appropriate, or whatever it takes to paint a vivid picture of the sonic landscape. Let’s say their ultimate conclusion is that the headphone has exceptional clarity but also sounds a bit thin and tipped up, and requires very powerful amplification to properly drive. That’s a reasonable conclusion, and it gives me a general idea of what to expect from the headphone being evaluated.
But in order to take things to the next level, it would help tremendously to understand where this headphone sits in comparison to other options. The well-known Sennheiser HD800, for example, is notorious for having just that sort of signature. How does the headphone under review compare to that established product? Moving on to amplification requirements, HiFiMAN’s Susvara is infamously the most demanding option on the market. Is the review headphone similarly challenging, or more/less so? These comparisons (and many others) give us vital context to help calibrate the author’s perspective against our own.
Amen!!! You getting any of this TAS, or are you just gonna keep spewing out basically useless reviews where you simply wax poetic about a product in a bubble with no comparisons and frequently not even disclosing what equipment is in the reviewer’s system? Trash. Absolute trash and lazy reviews that do nothing except get the reviewer paid without being pinned down or accountable for any of their assertions and conclusions. What a joke in glossy print. Argh!