Trollatopoulous
New member
Secrets ran an op-ed defending the trade against the usual charge, that reviewers have become an extension of the marketing department because almost every review reads positive. Two of the arguments hold up fine. Audio taste really is subjective, and describing what a component sounds like beats stamping good or bad on it. Measurements do need interpreting rather than reading straight off a table.
The third argument is where I would push back. The claim is that genuinely poor products have become rare, because the market works like natural selection and badly engineered gear does not survive. That is true in the world where the loaner turns up in a flight case from a distributor. It falls apart the moment you look at what people here actually buy. We have run comparisons of $13 wired headphones and $30 mini projectors that claim 4K and are decoding it at best. Junk is not rare, it is the entire volume end of the market. It simply never gets sent out for review, because nobody shipping no-name boxes has a review sample budget.
The other half is that displays are not amplifiers. You can argue all evening about whether a preamp sounds warm. You cannot argue about peak brightness, near-black handling, colour coverage or input lag, because somebody with a meter settles it. That makes the subjectivity defence far weaker in TV and projector coverage than it is in two channel, and it is exactly why a projector review with no brightness figure anywhere in it tells you nothing at all.
So where does that leave a reader? I have ended up treating an outlet's willingness to publish an unflattering number as the credibility test. What is yours?
The third argument is where I would push back. The claim is that genuinely poor products have become rare, because the market works like natural selection and badly engineered gear does not survive. That is true in the world where the loaner turns up in a flight case from a distributor. It falls apart the moment you look at what people here actually buy. We have run comparisons of $13 wired headphones and $30 mini projectors that claim 4K and are decoding it at best. Junk is not rare, it is the entire volume end of the market. It simply never gets sent out for review, because nobody shipping no-name boxes has a review sample budget.
The other half is that displays are not amplifiers. You can argue all evening about whether a preamp sounds warm. You cannot argue about peak brightness, near-black handling, colour coverage or input lag, because somebody with a meter settles it. That makes the subjectivity defence far weaker in TV and projector coverage than it is in two channel, and it is exactly why a projector review with no brightness figure anywhere in it tells you nothing at all.
So where does that leave a reader? I have ended up treating an outlet's willingness to publish an unflattering number as the credibility test. What is yours?
