Example of a piece o’ crap, useless review

I don't even read reviews and have another (higher) level of abhorrence for youtube reviews. 

@carlsbad2  Amen to that.  There are a few decent ones that I’ve seen, but the vast majority are just posers who get off on talking into a camera and garnering eyeballs — depth of knowledge/experience and/or quality/depth of content be damned. 

I totally get how it reads like an ad campaign and not a review but I bet it is a great table. 

@oddiofyl You know, and that’s exactly the point.  I greatly respect the brand and am genuinely intrigued by the design, which made this even more disappointing as the review gives me absolutely no clue as to why I’d want to pursue it further based on its sound characteristics and capabilities.  Absolutely useless and sad. 

The type of review you are looking for might be over the head of the majority of people looking to buy a TT at this price range?

@bigtwin Uh, what??? This is a $3000 turntable without a tonearm and cartridge. In what world does a product at this level not deserve a full and thorough review? Further, I don’t care if it’s an entry level Pro-Ject turntable or an AudioQuest Dragonfly, any product deserves a better effort than this piece of shite no matter what the level of the reader. This thing is utterly useless to anyone. @ghdprentice nailed it when he called this more of a description than a review. TAS has no shame and they don’t care, they just want to crank out “reviews” with as little work/time as possible to keep those ad dollars rolling in. Why bother with all those pesky product comparisons or listing the equipment in the reference system? Takes too much time!  Just throw it out there half assed ASAP. Waste.

Soix, Did you write a letter to TAS complaining about the quality of this and other reviews they publish? 

@lewm Yes.  A while back I wrote to them about these issues but not surprisingly didn’t hear back, and obviously nothing changed.  I’ve also spoken to a couple of their reviewers and they both spouted the same company line that product comparisons aren’t useful because it’s unlikely most readers own the exact component used for the comparison.  This is just an absurd rationale used by them to try to excuse themselves from the considerable amount of added work it takes to do comparisons and the inherent accountability that it brings upon a reviewer — much easier/faster to just wax poetic about what you think a product sounds like in a bubble with no check and balance of a comparison.  One of their reviewers said he’d consider doing more product comparisons in the future, but I’ll believe it when I see it and not holding my breath. 

Most all reviews are now Infomercials.

@yesiam_a_pirate I actually somewhat disagree with this. There are many publications out there where reviewers are passionate about conveying honest and useful information for readers in their rigorous and thorough reviews. Unfortunately there are also many where profit/attracting eyeballs takes precedence over review quality. The key is to identify the more credible sources/reviewers from the hucksters/posers. Here’s a list off the top of my head, and in no particular order, of publications I read and find provide mostly credible and useful reviews…

- Soundstage, 6 Moons, Part Time Audiophile, Positive Feedback, Enjoy the Music, The Audio Beat, Stereophile

FWIW.

@jhnnrrs @aolmrd1241 I can’t speak directly about the other sites, but having written reviews for Soundstage for 17 years I can tell you that all they strive for are thorough and honest reviews, and BTW they have a site dedicated specifically to “budget” gear (Soundstage Access) so they don’t only review “uber high-end” equipment. Over all those years I was never told to write anything other than what I heard, and all of what I wrote always made it to publication without any alterations (other than some light editing) whatsoever. Furthermore, to ensure the reviews were as useful/rigorous as possible all reviews had to contain a relevant comparison section, and if you didn’t have a comparable product on hand or couldn’t get something you didn’t get the review, period, and all the equipment in the reference system used during the review was always fully disclosed at the end of the review. All this put together makes for what I call rigorous and credible reviews that are likely trustworthy and well worth reading and using to help decide which components are worth pursuing further.

After writing and reading reviews for many years it gets pretty easy to tell which reviews are more objective, thorough, and honest and which are more useless, superficial fluff so just dismissing reviews out of hand because the site uses ads will block you from a lot of truly useful and helpful information that is out there. Some basic tells for me is if the reviewer compares the review sample to other product(s) to give some critical perspective on the sound, the reviewer shares any shortcomings/limitations and/or unique sound signatures the product has (they all have them), and the reference system is fully disclosed. There are some good reviews that may miss some of these, but if any of those elements are missing I consider it a red flag and read with a jaded eye. Last, you can kinda tell just by the way the review is written whether it’s by someone who really did the work as opposed to a guy who just throws out a bunch of generic platitudes. Sorry to drone on, but that’s my approach to it and I’d encourage you to seek out those good sites/reviewers rather than throwing out the whole bunch for using advertising or because of some bad apples out there. There is some extremely helpful and informative info out there if you have the time/patience to uncover the gems. Again, FWIW.

Given true long format reviews typically take six months to do. It is really not that surprising that each issue could only contain a few of these. Do the math.

@ghdprentice I can’t speak for TAS, nor would I care to, but at Soundstage we had three months to complete a review. I used to use the first month for break in and initial impressions and the next two months for critical listening evaluation and writing up the review, and that was sufficient time IME.

Out of curiosity, of the full format reviews how many provided a comparison to a competitive product? I’m gonna guess none and will be shocked if it’s higher than that cause that’s just not how they roll. Much quicker/easier that way although much less informative and useful IMHO.

Reviewers almost never give an actual bad review because they know if they do that, manufacturers will stop lending gear for evaluation.

@roadcykler Actually that was not my experience. Over 17 years I only wrote one negative review, and I was not opposed to writing more if warranted. The thing is, for a product to make it to the level of getting a review among the thousands of products out there it needs to have some positive and usually even some special buzz about it. So almost every component that gets reviewed has been well vetted by many users and others so bad sounding equipment just never tends to even get reviewed. In short, the system self selects very good sounding gear right from the start. Also, the major manufacturers know what they’re doing, and it’s almost non existent that something they’d release to the public sounds bad. So this is really why you rarely read a bad review.

That said, that’s where the “art” of reading between the lines in reviews becomes important. Unlike the crappy “review” I mentioned in this thread, most good reviews will include a paragraph or two near the end just before the conclusion (that’s where I always put it) where a reviewer will elaborate on any shortcomings/limitations or qualities that he may have alluded to during the review that seem a bit off or things the reader may want to hone in on while listening or comparing to other equipment. THIS IS CRITICAL INFO SO READ IT CAREFULLY! So, while the product overall may be very good, these would be the potential “negatives” that the reviewer feels are important to highlight but they’re not nearly enough to trash the product and throw the baby out with the bath water. This again is why product comparisons are so important because these potentially aberrant qualities can be analyzed on a relative basis versus another known product and provide a very useful perspective on any potential issues. Also, reviewers aren’t all-knowing oracles and what we may think is a shortcoming for our system/tastes may well not be the case for many other potential customers, so better to just point out what we heard objectively and let the reader decide if that’s something they’d still like to explore further. Last, most audio manufacturers are not rich and do what they do for the love of it and many others might be relatively new, and a bad review could literally sink a company. Now, if the product outright sucks so be it although it’s highly unlikely that product would’ve made it to review anyway as mentioned above, but if a product isn’t perfect yet shows some promise as a reviewer you’ve gotta weigh the extent of the shortcomings and if they’re bad enough to potentially put the company out of business. So there are many things to consider as a reviewer. I wasn’t on the business end so can’t speak to manufacturers threatening to not send any more gear if they get a bad review, but I never heard of anything like that although it may happen. Anyway, I hope this sheds a little light on why there are so few negative reviews. It’s really not a conspiracy in my experience.

The irony with audio reviews is that everyone hears differently.  A piece of audio gear that sounds good to one person may not sound good to another.

@jimmyblues1959 Exactly.  And this is why doing product comparisons in a review is so important.  When a reviewer just shares what he thinks about a product in isolation (as TAS habitually does) we’re only getting his take based on his ears.  But when the product is compared to something else we get a sense of relative differences, which I find adds very important context that can help us as readers form a clearer perspective of the sound of the review product regardless of how the reviewer hears things.  In other words, a comparison acts like a check and balance on the reviewer’s individual opinion and provides for a much more approachable and ultimately more useful review for the reader.  However, if you’ve read a reviewer long enough you get a sense of how he hears so you can compensate somewhat for his biases and still possibly glean some useful information out of the review, but this is still no substitute for doing a legit product comparison IMO.

Really, Part Time Audiophile as an example of good reviews?  Their stated policy is to NOT publish a bad review.  The puff pieces I've read on their site goes far beyond hagiography and would make even the most shameless fan boys blush.  No measurements at all.

@phoenixengr Point well taken.  Truth be told I haven’t read PTA reviews in a while but used to like his reviews back when he was on his own, so I probably shouldn’t have included them cause I’m not very familiar with their current reviews/writing staff.  Thanks for the redirect.

@mschott But it’s not even a review — it’s nothing more than an ad disguised as a “review.”  And as for the readers of this thing not being high-end consumers, how many entry-level buyers is crap like this really gonna attract or maintain as subscribers for TAS?  Then again it’s sadly not all that much more useless than their usual pandering fluff reviews so it’s not totally out of character for this rag — I’ll give you that.