Collective letter s to Stereophile

I find it interesting that several responses to this thread and to others have commended Audiogon for offering consumers the opportunity to give their non-biased reviews of their equipment. One post above reads, "Listen to the folks here on AudioGon who paid good money out of their pocket for their gear and have no vested interest."

I can't help but wonder, however, if those reviews are truly non-biased or without a vested interest. I find that there is a natural and understandable tendency for a buyer to support the gear that he or she has purchased. We do not like to believe that we may have made a mistake. Or, if we recognize that we made a mistake, we may not want to undercut the market value of our own equipment with a negative post, just when we are contemplating putting that equipment up for resale on Audiogon. In any event, like manufacturers, like distributors, like retailers, like the magazines, we all have a vested interest of some sort. I do not believe, however, that this in and of itself makes a review invalid. Every review by its nature is biased, whether of financial bias or simply based on the life experiences of the reviewer. The trick is to recognize the limitations as well as the value of every review.

I find it amusing that 'Grooves' chooses a path of righteous indignation when customers complain, rather than listening and responding thoughtfully. Way to go, Sport, put another nail in that Stereophile coffin!

Mprime: Cut Mike some slack. He came over here after getting worked up in another thread. As such, i'm sure that he was not "thinking elegantly". It's easy to spew "less than polite" responses when someone stepped on your "tallywhacker" : ) Sean
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Sean,

Clearly, there are some harmonics I'm missing. While I examined the AA thread, my take was that it was a dogpile on you. Why you'd defend 'Grooves' is lost on me. So instead, I'll state it clearly, from my perspective.

These Sphile guys are confused on who their customer is. They may think it to be JA, but, in fact, it is us: the consumer. Hence, the credibility of their distribution outlet - whether they like it or not - reflects on them as content providers. Plainly said, Sphile has a *serious* credibility gap. In forums such as these, they have a chance to listen to a lead user group and adapt, or not, at their peril. At the end of the day, such online forums represent the future look of their distribution channel. They might want to consider this - especialy when they attack people of proven crediblity (such as yourself) on these forums.

Enough, I preach.

Peace,

Lee

Lee: While it might have ended up being a "dogpile" on me, i'm not crying foul. Let's just say i opened up all the cages and expected something like that to happen : )

As far as why i "stuck up" for Mikey, i think we all know what it's like when people are on your back, you're agitated and even more crap is dumped on you and your co-horts. It's easy to get pissed and respond accordingly.

As to your other comments, i agree 100%. I've tried to pass on ideas to JA directly and i know that others have posted similar thoughts to those that i expressed in public forums, yet it seems to fall on deaf ears. To top it off, we all know that EVERY writer and the editor have seen the hordes of threads / complaints about lack of diversity of products / brand name coverage, especially from specific parties. What do we get ? ST delivers yet another helping of "Triangle Pie". Really makes you wonder if he's doing this for spite just to get our goat or if he doesn't know how to contact anyone else to obtain other brands for review.

Other than that, i thought this issue was quite diverse in brands and types of products covered. Unfortunately, the price bracket on most everything was still pretty well up there ( $2000 for speaker cables and one pair of interconnects ), but at least there was no Musical Fidelity in this issue. Instead, we ended up with Audio Advisor's replacement for MF, which is now Perreaux : ) Sean
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