One thing which differentiates audio equipment magazine reviews from those reviewers of other cultural products— painting, music, film, dance, etc. — is that audio equipment is only partially an expressive artifact. It is necessarily instrumental to its purpose; in short, it is not trying to communicate something meaningful in the same vein as those other cultural products are.
Because of the above fact, magazines like Stereophile are forever beholden to the churn and hype of products-for-sale. They exist to help companies sell new stuff, and while they have developed standards based on subjective listening experience and engineering know how, they can never abandon their core mission: to celebrate or denigrate somehow, the “consumability” of the new thing for sale.
People say it all the time: namely, that the improvements made in various elements of an audio system are either imaginary or incremental. Given all the equipment which has been produced so far, if there was never any more “progress” and all we could lay our hands on was the existing range of options, surely there would be an adequate number of combinations to keep our quest for the absolute sound alive and well until the sun burns out.
The gist of my point is simply that there’s a major difference about the kind of “criticism” done by audio reviewers from those in other areas (who are *not* just trying to stuff a concert hall or a rodeo with easy marks) trying to interpret and convey the meaning of a new work of art. I make this point explicit here not because I think folks are unaware of it, but because I suspect this aspect is playing a role, somehow, in the ongoing discussion.
