When we started these show reports, there was only Stereophile’s printed show reports, which came out months later, and which said little to nothing about the sound.
We knew enough by then to be able to describe things as sounding ‘bright’ or ‘dull’, whether they had good or bad imaging, … the basics. We felt this was useful to people.
Soon thereafter, forum personalities and online magazines would post their opinions. Room X ‘blew the other rooms away’.
Largely as a reaction to these people, we would post reports that would say something about that same room like ‘This was really great… if you like extremely bright and thin sound’.
We tried to counter these dubiously arrived at opinions that people shouted on the net with facts.
Now there are maybe a thousand more voices out there. Still very few facts about the sound, just lots of opinions.
The vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between fact and opinion [facts give you information upon which to base your own decisions about what you like or not, opinions are just someone else’s conclusions, based on wishful thinking usually (though sometimes deceptively wrapped in fact-like terminology)].
However, there is a better way. If you want to hear what a room sounded like, go to YouTube and watch Peter and Terry’s AVShowRoom video of the room. You can learn a lot about what the room sounded like without having to wade through opinions of people who own systems that, if you heard them, would probably make you switch hobbies…
For example, this is a video of a room at RMAF 2015 (which we missed, me out sick. first one we missed, ever). Not my favorite classical music, but extremely complex and you can tell that the system is very clean sounding, dynamic and agile… great separation… well you get the idea (it is also reasonably priced which helps us like PranaFidelity’s stuff quite a bit).
Back to our show reports. We will still take photos of everything and still talk about our favorite rooms; why they are our faves and how they did or did not meet our expectations… fun for us and fun, hopefully, for some of you as well 🙂
