Equipment reviews, are they credible?

I think personally the reviews are there to encourage Audio sales which is what Audiogon is about.
There is a lot of chat on these forums about abstracts,music,art,hedgehogs,tweaks,DIY whatever and although there is no hostility from the powers that be about that,I think they realise that they would like to see the forums relate more to people spending money on audio equipment.
Hence the flood of reviews which of course are valid on whatever level you place reviews on,some will need more info as to how they were carried out.
For me there has been too many..too quickly...I think reviews are incredibly powerful from whatever source....

>"The site needs to be constructed so that a review writer can draft their article over more than one session if need be."

For now all you need to do is write it in the wordprocessor of your choice and copy and paste.

I remain,

AudiogoN, thanks for weighing in on this discussion. Your post actually helped to clear up many of the questions that initiated this post I hope I was not misunderstood as condemning the reviews. I plan to do some of them in the future. Possibly even of equipment I own, but who knows. In my mind this has clarified some confusion or uncertainty. Keep up the good work. I hope to see some of the changes implemented soon and also to see reviews from some of the people who responded to this thread.

Cluesless: That would imply a having a working knowledge of how to use a computer. ;-)

Turnaround, your point is very well taken, and I was thinking about some things along those lines after I posted above. I think the pertinent difference in this case between Audioreview.com and Audiogon is the way the reviews are set up to browse. At Audioreview.com, you click on a particular brand and model of component, not an individual review, as with Audiogon. This means that at Audioreview.com, you don't in effect wind up wasting your time opening worthless reviews; as you scan the possibly long page of reviews of any one piece of gear, you can pretty quickly tell the wheat from the chaff as you go, and don't have to wait to open and close separate pages, which takes considerable time all together if you want to peruse many reviews. Here at Audiogon, you must open each review individually, so without some external indicator of the review's quality, you often feel gypped for having wasted the time.

But again, I want to stress that the main thrust of my review-ratings idea was to force an improvement in the quality of the articles themselves (it would probably also have the effect of reducing somewhat the total number of reviews posted - not necessarily a bad thing, IMHO). As for this idea's merely being 'opinion on top of opinion', I think it's much easier to have many people agree on the worthwhileness of an article, than on their assessments of audio gear (also not a bad thing).

Audiogon - thanks for pointing out that the feature allowing multiple writing sessions is in place (has anybody used it so far?). I actually suggested this in an older thread from several months ago that touched on these topics. Whether you read that then, and whether it was a novel idea at the time if you did, I don't know. But I'm glad it's here, and I for one will try to take advantage of it sometime soon.