FAKE NEWS - NEGATIVE REVIEWS NOT ALLOWED!!

People who say equipment needs breaking in - NOPE. If it doesn’t sound good out of the box, for me at least, it never changes. That said hotel rooms are notorious for being hard to setup properly and many just don’t have the time. I know I have done some, where audiophiles got together, at a hotel, and setup their own equipment in the rooms. It made me appreciate how hard it is.

As far as reviews, they used to be more up or down before. I mean even car reviews are like that now. An example, I remember going on a business trip to Nottingham UK, and on the way back home trip, bought an English car magazine. It was full of positive and negative reviews, like the Kia Rio. The title of the review was, ’Her name is Kia Rio and she is crap’.

I feel the audio magazines are more to sell the public to the manufacturers, rather actually selling us on the products, anymore. Same with the youtube reviews.

There’s a flip side to any coin. How good is his customer base, the average audiophile’s room? Pretty horrid, I would say. It is usually some living room with glass everywhere, etc, all kinds of suboptimal conditions.

Exactly right!

I had no idea myself many years ago BEFORE i used a dedicated room to do as hobby 2 years acoustics experiments non stopped ( i am retired).

After the results and the way i learned to play with a system /room, i never trusted anymore any users reviews about S. Q. Save statistical analyse about a gear pieces qualities and reported defects.

I discovered Jay years ago here and i was flabbergasted by his reviews of very costly gear in an empty room with no acoustics ...He discovered acoustics power recently.😊

Anyway the room acoustics must be coupled to a specific system and speakers...

Another fact most people completely underestimated...

As the necessary ears measures and HTRF measures if you aspire to high fi with any stereo system ...All stereo system by design are an impediment for spatial acoustics qualities (Choueiri)

Read acoustics articles it is way more interesting than reviews...I advise this to all...

I remember back in the early 1970's, I bought a subscription to an ad free, audiophile equipment review publication called "The Audio Critic".

Their mandate was to publish completely truthful and unbiased reviews of equipment, without the pressure to give favourable reviews to their advertisers.

It was great while it lasted, but physical media requires more money coming in, than is generated by subscribers and that was the end of it.

No negative reviews ever? Maybe that's more or less the case now, but it was not always so. My preferred speaker (and I've heard about a dozen well-regarded and more expensive alternatives in my own listening space over the years, and own three) received a devastatingly bad review from Corey Greenberg in Stereophile when it came out in the 1990s, and that review basically killed the company that made it. Still, it's my strong favorite even against multiple award winners from the reviewers, "Recommended Component" status speakers, and so forth.

Why? Am I "wrong"? Are the reviews "right"? 

A far undervalued dimension of our "hobby" is the ear-brain interface. Personal taste. Even if your "taste" is for "accurate and convincing reproduction of acoustic instrumental timbre, convincingly realistic spatiality, visceral impact"—mine is, and I play several instruments in the same acoustic space my audio system occupies—it remains the case that our bodies and minds are different, and so our subjective experience is different. How different? More difference than a different power cord (etc.!) can cause.

@tony1954 I had a subscription to The Audio Critic from its beginning in 1976. Near the end it was taking limited paid advertising. It failed because it couldn't raise enough money from subs and limited advertising. There were also several other audio publications with even more limited distribution, like Martin DeWulf's Bound for Sound, StereOpus and Sensible $ound. Stereophile and TAS continue because of an influx of investor money and a strong advertising base. Same for HiFi+ and HiFiNews&Record Review in the UK.