Example of a piece o’ crap, useless review

I much prefer comparative reviews. The British What Hi-Fi mag did(does) it. I always enjoyed Car magazine's shootouts of similar class cars.

@soix I disagree with your assessment of the sites you mentioned. I find them little more than advertising media for uber-hi-end equipment and useless, expensive audiophile jewelry. Any site that devotes two thirds of its viewing space to ads (the ones with ads running down the left and right borders) is unlikely to post honest "reviews" for products that subsidize it.

All reviews and reviewers exist to sell product to their followers ... Either through advertisement fees...or dealers looking to make a profit hocking their wares...Pretty simple huh?

@jhnnrrs @aolmrd1241 I can’t speak directly about the other sites, but having written reviews for Soundstage for 17 years I can tell you that all they strive for are thorough and honest reviews, and BTW they have a site dedicated specifically to “budget” gear (Soundstage Access) so they don’t only review “uber high-end” equipment. Over all those years I was never told to write anything other than what I heard, and all of what I wrote always made it to publication without any alterations (other than some light editing) whatsoever. Furthermore, to ensure the reviews were as useful/rigorous as possible all reviews had to contain a relevant comparison section, and if you didn’t have a comparable product on hand or couldn’t get something you didn’t get the review, period, and all the equipment in the reference system used during the review was always fully disclosed at the end of the review. All this put together makes for what I call rigorous and credible reviews that are likely trustworthy and well worth reading and using to help decide which components are worth pursuing further.

After writing and reading reviews for many years it gets pretty easy to tell which reviews are more objective, thorough, and honest and which are more useless, superficial fluff so just dismissing reviews out of hand because the site uses ads will block you from a lot of truly useful and helpful information that is out there. Some basic tells for me is if the reviewer compares the review sample to other product(s) to give some critical perspective on the sound, the reviewer shares any shortcomings/limitations and/or unique sound signatures the product has (they all have them), and the reference system is fully disclosed. There are some good reviews that may miss some of these, but if any of those elements are missing I consider it a red flag and read with a jaded eye. Last, you can kinda tell just by the way the review is written whether it’s by someone who really did the work as opposed to a guy who just throws out a bunch of generic platitudes. Sorry to drone on, but that’s my approach to it and I’d encourage you to seek out those good sites/reviewers rather than throwing out the whole bunch for using advertising or because of some bad apples out there. There is some extremely helpful and informative info out there if you have the time/patience to uncover the gems. Again, FWIW.

Having given it a little more thought.

I would not call it a review. More of a quick note that the table exists and may be worthy of further investigation. An information note.

I flipped through the most recent edition. There are full format reviews (under the heading of xxxx Focus) on a number of the components: Burmeister turntable, Vandersteen speaker, Magico speakers, and some others. These all contain sections on associated equipment, and are in depth. The “reviews” in between in depth Focus reviews look like an attempt to cover more equipment. With the hundreds of components, there would be no way to cover them all in depth. So, it looks like a way to say something about more.

Given true long format reviews typically take six months to do. It is really not that surprising that each issue could only contain a few of these. Do the math.