When a Reviewer "likes" something

I think it would be most helpful if a reviewer used the same battery of test recordings for each review. This would at least give us a constant baseline from which we could evaluate the reviewer's impressions...

-RW-

It means nothing to me when a reviewer likes something because they like their advertisers, manufacturers that give away equipment and their friends, nothing more. Stereophile continues to offer me a 2 year subscription for $14 and TAS continues to send magazines to expired subscribers so advertisers will not know their circulation is diminishing. Reviewers have written "I like these speakers so much I'm buying the review sample." and 2 weeks later they are for sale for 50% of retail, right Art? Magazines have been deceiving the public for decades and in my opinion they have caused irreparable damage to an industry we love. Use your own ears to decide if you like the way stereo equipment sounds. You don't need someone else to tell you if you should like it or not.

I'm now at the age of having read reviews longer than many of the writers today have been writing them. To me it's kind of off-putting that reviewers as a group just simply don't take a meaningful or the proper amount of time to fully come to grips with the particular product they are reviewing. Very often they take no more than a month to listen and evaluate and then only jot down a few of the sonic highlights (while leaving the negatives to be either glossed over or completely ignored...or confined to practical matters as opposed to sonics). I usually find them to be not worth much more than the grain of salt I end up having to take them with...and a preponderance of them on the same product is of little help. To me it's too often as if NO pro writer will tell you flat out what's truly wrong with a component's sonics, even if it's apparent and especially, it seems to me, when it can amount to a flaw. And, I think, that if they see that they can rationalize that there's no point in doing so for us, then any hope of putting things into perspective for us seems to go right out the window and...voila, we exist in what I consider to be a culture of all positive reviews - EVERY reviewer likes EVERY product they've reviewed and somehow there are no bad products (that is, there is at least SOMEthing to like about every product, right?). I suppose I suspect part of the problem is that the fix may at least require a certain degree of comparing equipment to other equipment - something that I myself find perfectly valid in this hobby, despite there being the so-called "acid test" of comparing to live music. Knowing how a piece of gear performs compared to other pieces can be of considerable value, I think, especially to intermediate-and-up hobbyists. For my own money, it's a person's *experience* in this hobby that counts the most - not simply their judgment 'yea' or 'nea', but their *evaluation* of the gear. More evidence from pro writers on their willingness to spend that much time and patience overall and less 'being of help' in the most generic of terms possible is what I'd rather see. Not getting bogged down in minutiae either - just a comparatively informed view of the particular and overall relevance of the equipment involved would do nicely...one based on both its strengths AND its flaws. From a writing standpoint, it may be trickier to write about the negatives without looking like you're condemning the component, but I feel like that can and should be done. Isn't that the sort of thing they bothered to learn how to write for in the first place? I still DO read reviews on occasion, but I no longer put all that much stock in the tributes involved, but when it comes to the performance flaws I reread between the lines a dozen times or more to try (sometimes in vain, for reading's sake) to arrive at the truth of the degree of negative sonic performance that I have to believe the writer may well be only hinting at. Good OP. I realize you may only be talking about the irritatingly pointless trend of pro writers blithely "liking" any and every random piece of gear, but to me it goes deeper than that, I suppose. Regards. John

Do they ever NOT like anything?

FrankC

+1 to what Rrog said, it means nothing to me. I take anything any salesman says with a grain of salt. Sales, that is their job to convince you to buy their product. Don't be fooled into thinking that the glossy rags have your best interest in mind, they are purely sales literature, nothing more.

Do your homework and listen with your own ears. Don't buy the hype. Speaking of hype though, one thing great reviews do is keep resale values high. This may be a good or bad thing, depending on whether you are a buyer or seller. I have no problem buying something I like at a steep discount because some reviewer didn't care for it. :)