Phantom-av, sure magazines need to make money to stay in business but the audio magazine groups do it the worst way possible compared to other high budget hobby magazines: like car magazines. You can take any 6 of car magazines and they do a much better job at describing their car up for review without the unnecessary sugar coatings that audio mags introduce. In car mags, you will see true head to head real-time comparisons between 2 to dozen related cars, and guess what, there is 1 winner and 1 or more that didn’t win, not every car is the best they have reviewed. I never trust an audio magazine review for the sq of the product, I view other avenues that I have found trust in to base my initial feeling on a new product.
These car rags have bashed cars dozens of times and these magazines are still in business today, with much less cost per subscription compared to say TAS or HIFI+.
I think the audio press group as a whole think they are above say the car enthusiasts and they should be treated differently. There are more million dollar cars than there are millions dollar audio products so if you base thes hobbies on pure dollar value, audio products are fairly cheap and the audio magazines could follow the same format as the car magazines and could very well stay in business or grow their sub base.
