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Does anyone on AG truly care anymore about objectivity & sincerity of Magazine reviews?

The latest cover story In the Absolute Sound triumphs the latest 3rd generation YG loudspeakers & their very best, latest technology. While the accolades commence (& do they ever), they only say, "the aluminum- coned midrange driver are carried over from the series 2" conspicuously omitting to mention nothing whatsoever has been done to it - ever (unlike virtually all their competitors who've had numerous major improvements to their MRs). It’s exactly the same driver that came with the speaker when it was first introduced decades plus ago. Their claims for it have not been verified by any 3rd party ever & no audio company has tried to copy their aluminum drivers ever, either. Entry level Paradigms perhaps, but they have the wisdom to understand aluminum cannot be made to compete with the beryllium they use on their upper end product.

Regarding the revised silk dome tweeter, "you may think your speakers excel in this area but until you’ve heard something like the 3s...you may have never heard true high frequency refinement". So a complete dismissal (with no comparisons of any kind of course) of all Diamond, Beryllium, ribbon, electrostatic etc. tweeters, just like that.

Is it just me or is there (from the Wizard of Oz) a clearly implied, "Ignore that man behind the curtain! !" message, as YG simultaneously has a full page, 4 color ad in the same issue & has been an extremely heavy advertiser for years in the magazine?

I’m reminded of the con man’s credo - You can fool some of the people all the time & all the people some of the time - & that’s enough. I had thought that’s not an especially good, long term business model. Maybe I’m wrong on this last, here.

john1
mitch2
3,967 posts
 

@john1 

"I had thought that’s not an especially good, long term business model."

Uh, define "long term."  YG Acoustics have been around for 22 years, are they almost there?

BTW, how many times did Lamm redesign their amplifiers?  Just sayin'.

pgaulke60
299 posts
 

I cannot present a strong argument against the premise of the OP. I quickly page through most of the reviews. But I do love the music reviews.

bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,788 posts
 

 

Discovering J. Gordon Holt and his Stereophile magazine in 1972 changed my life. Bye bye Stereo Review and High Fidelity, but I kept reading Audio Magazine for it’s entire history. Gordon provided me with the basis tenants of high fidelity music reproduction, how components are examined and evaluated, along with the vocabulary with which that endeavor is described.

Gordon and his mag (founded in 1962) were the first of their kind (and the only of their kind for over a decade, until Harry Person started The Absolute Sound in ’73): "subjective" reviews, components evaluated by listening to them in addition to measuring them. For years Gordon was the lone reviewer in the mag, and he published plenty of negative and mixed-reviews.

Gordon sold the mag to Larry Archibald in 1982, who expanded the mag by hiring other reviewers and eventually bringing John Atkinson over from his editor job at the UK Mag Hi-Fi News & Record Review. John not only became Stereophile’s editor, but also took over from Thomas J. Norton the bench testing of the components being reviewed in the mag. Those bench tests are about the only of their kind in the world of subjective hi-fi publications, and imo are alone worth the price of a yearly subscription

Gordon eventually left Stereophile, but before doing so had hired and tutored a guy named Steven Stone, who has written for not only Stereophile but also TAS and Future Audiophile. He was and remains a credible-to-me source of hi-fi evaluation.

 

But there was another hi-fi figure who became an important source of opinion for me: Art Dudley. Art worked for Harry Pearson at TAS for as long as he could stand, then left and started his own digest-sized mag, the unique Listener Magazine. I have a complete collection of Listener, and though disappointed when he folded the mag, I was delighted when he signed on at Stereophile. In my opinion Art was (as you probably know, he passed away in 2020) the most interesting hi-fi critic alive, and his death created a huge hole in the hi-fi world. His good friend Herb Reichert is doing his best to fill Art’s shoes, and is himself a very interesting writer (and colorful character!).

 

jpwarren58
669 posts
 

Grain + salt

However I do trust my doctor. And scientific consensus.

No such thing as audiophile consensus other than one must go slow and that there is no consensus.

The older some of us get we believe we are the smartest in the room because somehow our age and experience entitles us to wisdom.  Crotchety crockery.

 

john1 OP
114 posts
 
jonwolfpell mentions YG are, "lean, dry & analytical", the issue that typically results with aluminum drivers. Exactly. Some love that, G-d bless them, but its not generally considered the desired norm as is endlessly sticking with that sound & the tech (while changing it everywhere else) that causes it over many decades on into all futures. All competitors seem to agree. The issues mentioned by another concerning the way the co. is managed since its take over is another area worth exploring. Something’s going on concerning their business model mentioned as long lived by another, when your legendary top sales guy for decades leaves for a competitor he calls infinitely better in its use of aluminum drivers - distributed by the current YG distributor no less. They appear to for the first time in decades be going more down market to increase profits, so something appears to be clearly eroding profits to necessitate the move never needed before. All odd and/or slightly bizarre when added up, worth noting & certainly not nothing that some might prefer it to be.

 

A lot of great comments on reviews in general & their place in the scheme of things & plausible ways of viewing them dispassionately too.

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