Jeff Day's CES 2008 Show Report at 6moons
[We are still at the Alexis Park, scheduled to leave in a few hours, missing, hopefully, some nasty weather that was imposing itself on travelers yesterday.]
Jeff Day’s show report is interesting, and disturbing in a couple of ways.
First, it looks like I missed a couple of rooms [in particular Sander’s room with his new InnerSound-ish speakers and his immediate neighbors. Damn. Twice in that area of the St. Tropez I had to stop photographing because the 3 2GB memory cards I use were all filled up. Next year… more cards. Or bigger cards.]
Second, there is this quote:
“The Soundlabs are even bigger than the Klangfilm Bionars, which is amazing in itself. The Soundlabs are so big in fact that I couldn’t get far enough away to get the two front channel speakers into the lens of my iPhone. The rear channels were equally astonishing. If you have a really big wallet and a really small thingy, these babies will compensate for both. Guaranteed. For those of us with a modest wallet and a big thingy, look elsewhere.”
Ignoring the judging of speakers on the focal length of the iPhone camera with respect to the size of the exhibition room [hey, we’ve all seen people evaluate the performance of a product based on all manner of weird stuff. Whatever…], and people’s fascination about the length of this particular appendage on other people [no, no, large penises are a fine thing] – the idea of critiquing the character of the owners of a product, instead of the product itself, besides being content-free and distracting from the matter at hand e.g. the sound of a room at a show, is, in my opinion, a prime example of the decline of the professionalism of the professional journalists not only in our industry but across the board.
Although this is a new low, there have been other instances where very popular reviewers have made comments that are overly bold, aggressive, and incorrect or unsubstantiated. For example: “full range speaker X does not go much below 40Hz”, or “CD player Y is inferior to its competition vis-a-vis its red book performance”. Tell us how you measured the output of the speaker [but, oh, the magazine that eschews measurements]. Tell us how you moved the speaker around to try and get it out of the room nodes. With what speakers are you comparing the low-end to with respect to the energy expected from a speaker in this room. etc. etc. And similarly, what players are you referring to with better red book? In what WAY are they better?
Anyway, I’m not sure we are going to start naming names here but we do try to avoid sweeping stupidities here at Audio Federation, and do try to talk about the SOUND of things, and WHY certain things are superior or inferior examples of various qualities desirable from the point of view of a system designed for music reproduction.
If we ever succumb to the prevailing malaise with respect to replacing straight talk with sensationalistic flame bait, like saying something like… oh… that 99% of reviewers are clueless or whores [thanks F.C. :-)] when the number is really closer to 90%, please PLEASE let us know.
