The review wehave been promising is up

John Atkinson once advised that a good equipment review should fulfill three functions: To inform, to entertain, and to guide a purchase decision.

1. Inform: What’s the speaker enclosure made of? What’s the DAC chipset used? How readily is the tonearm’s VTA adjusted? That kind of thing. Also, explanations from a manufacturer as to why the product’s design team made the decisions they did.
2. Entertain: The review is well-written and fun to read.
3. Guide a potential purchase: By reading a comprehensive review of the component from someone who has lived with it for months, a potential customer can decide if a product is worthy of further investigation.

"Context," in terms of other, similar products? That can be irresponsible and disrespectful of audio consumers who are capable of creating their own rankings based on their sonic priorities, as well as new product reviews. TAS makes plenty of recommendations—Editors’ Choice, Golden Ears, Buyers Guides, etc. But making a significant audio purchase isn’t like buying a dorm refrigerator after reading a survey of ten models in Consumer Reports.

We want to help you devise a short list of products, winnowed down from a larger number, we’d hope, from reading our reviews. But TAS is not going to tell you that Server A gets an A-minus while Server B gets a B-plus—and thus Server A is "better." That doesn’t serve anyone’s interest. You’re just going to have to hear it yourself, if you’ve decided you are seriously considering a new product covered in he magazine.

Andrew Quint

Senior writer

The Absolute Sound

Haven't read TAS reviews in years. Context very meaningful, and that includes all price ranges. So, if context doesn't matter, why do we even need to know rest of equipment in system review piece being inserted into. Why even bother to tell us how said equipment sounds, with no reference for sound quality why would it matter.

Reference or context provides us with a measurement scale which informs our equipment choices. Without that we'd be flying blind.

I don't necessarily disagree with sns and, as noted above, the magazine uses several platforms to let readers know what our favorite products are at all price points, both collectively (Editor's Choice) and individually (Golden Ears.) And references to specific competing components do make it into plenty of our reviews. But, to state the obvious, the ultimate "reference" for us is "the absolute sound"—live musical performance—and reviews that employ the descriptive language developed by TAS decades ago and that present details of a writer's subjective experience can also help quite a bit in making a purchasing decision. Please continue to sample our reviews—there are plenty of recent ones posted online.

Andrew Quint

Senior Writer

The Absolute Sound

+1 sns.

Andrew

  You and I had a little back and forth in the Letters section of Fanfare a few years back, and I respect your views.  However I haven’t read TAS for a few years either. I was really turned off by the shilling for MQA.  And I reject the fundamental premise of a system trying to realize “The Absolute Sound. “. Unless my listening room expands to the size of Chicago’s Symphony Center, my system will at best try to trick me with an illusion.  And as for non Classical, who knows what is absolute? What comes out of the mix is whatever decisions the engineer makes.

  You ridicule the “Consumer Reports” type of review.  Surely we all would like to try each component in our own system and decide.  Yet is this practical?  Am I going to carry several different two hundred pound floorstanders up the stairs to my listening room and back out?  Or will the likes of dCS let me audition a $100K DAC Stack in my own home and send it back 3 days later?  Or does Air Force allow $150K turntables out of their factory for an audition?

  The typical review will state something like “Peter McGraff of Wilson spent 3 days toeing in my Alexa’s until they were perfect”.  Can a mere mortal such as I expect such service?  Or else a reviewer might state “The amp made no sound when I turned it on so I emailed the CEO and 3 hours later a truck came with a replacement and the CEO flew in from Germany to plug it in for me”.  I can’t even get Frigidaire to fix the ice maker in my refrigerator and it’s under warranty.

  I think a few decades reviewing can warp the perspective here.  Bricks and mortar stores have gone the way of the Studebaker.  In the Covid era most people don’t want to see your face anyway.  It is all very fine to be Altruistic and say “We ain’t Consumer Reports, do your own comparisons”.  However most of us plebeian non reviewer types have very limited ways to make comparisons.  This may explain some of the reason people become furious with dealers plugging their wares here, because actually evaluating these claims is so darn hard.  We need more from reviewers than what you traditionally think is your purview.  If we don’t get it, we turn elsewhere, and thus less TAS sales, less value for advertising, less money to pay for reviews