Warning: Reading Show Reports May Be Hazardous to Your (Hi-Fi System's) Health
As I casually read what various reviewers wrote about the sound they heard at the show a few things become obvious. This is not about the sound in our rooms, about which I have read one positive and one not so positive (about the small room – but I did not hear the system after a major cable change was made – so do not know if the reporter was right or not)
1. A lot of reviewers just can’t hear. They string together a lot of good sounding ‘audiophile words’ and hope in this way to gain some advertising. This would be shocking if it wasn’t so sad.
2. Some just mention the positive things about the sound, never the negative [same ole same ole – but only a few people/mags are this honest anymore].
3. Some lie, sometimes describing sound more or less accurately, and sometimes just negative and/or positive things in order to achieve some political or economic goal they must have in mind.
As for comments on forums, take a room at random and make it the Best of Show. As far as I can see it is completely random – aka noise. Aka no information provided.
There is not any room so horrible sounding that someone, somewhere won’t post that it is the best of show.
I used to think this was akin to ‘there is no man so ugly that some woman somewhere won’t think he is handsome’.
But this has more to do with the beholder being really confused, than it does with seeing the inner beauty of someone/something. And it has to do with people being manipulated into thinking something different happened [good or bad sound] from what REALLY happened.
Of course, this cacophony of misinformation, lies, political maneuvering, sloth, etc. just mirrors that of the current state of affairs everywhere circa 2009. The difference lately has been that so called ‘trusted sources’ do not have loyalty to the traditional reporter’s ‘creed’ to tell the truth.
That, while representing yourself as being ‘independent’, but instead telling a self-serving point of view that makes you money is AOK.
The 1984 part of this is that people have been programmed to accept this as being acceptable behavior for a ‘news organization’.
The upshot of all this incompetence and deception is that it is really hard to get any real information about the sound at a show, or, to expand our focus, any component. Even if you listen to it, if the person setting it up did not have the correct associated components, you still didn’t hear it [most systems seem to be either the random Audiogon click to buy approach or some dealer putting components together because it is good ‘politics’]. It is hard to get an idea of how something really sounds [think how poorly Wilson has been represented all these years – how many people hate their speakers. This is why].
Because of all this, Spintricity is just presenting things like specs, people, how-tos and why-tos, and ads. Because of the rampant unethical behavior of the press, we can’t even think about doing reviews ourselves, of equipment or rooms at shows, without tarnishing our magazine with the stink of the current zines. [Even though we are darned good at it with having probably the most significant and wide-ranging experience with uber high-end audio of any reviewers/reporters/audiohpiles. And our personal preferences are also 1) known to us [so we can at least try to listen around them] and 2) fairly mainstream]
