The Absolute Sound vs Stereophile

Stereophile all day, every day.  At least Art and Herb and Fremer have good (diverse) taste in music.  Sorry folks but if you want to grow the hobby, the mags need to migrate away from reviewers who play nothing but classical and vocal, and gear designed to play the same. 

I subscribed to TAS for a year and got the vibe their next lukewarm review would be their first.  

Sterophile for sure, although I also subscribe to TAS.  Recently  decided it takes too much space to store both mags, so I've been selectively re-reading and then discarding older issues of TAS.  Oddly enough, I never much liked EITHER Pearson or Holt as writers or as "gurus" and can't remember ever buying anything that either one raved about. I once had lunch with Tony Cordesman and especially enjoy both Dudley and Reichart.

There there are few similarities between the TAS of old (pre 1998ish) and today. Reviews today are, generally all positive, significantly shorter, and most significantly, have very little comparison to one or more competing products. You might get the occasional sentence saying x is more polite the y or x is a better value than a,b and c. I find these to be throw away platitudes. With no substantive (multi paragraph) comparisons taking place and general happiness, reviews are like cotton candy - easy to digest but not filling.   

To to experience the difference, open a review from the 90s and see for yourself!  The difference is quite amazing. 

I used to take both but did not renew either starting around 2003. They had both become less and less relevant to my interests, which were primarily the music, not the gear.

Friends loan me issues from time to time and nothing I have seen makes me want to subscribe again.

Now give me the Tracking Angle again and I'd be on it in a flash.

Was just having this conversation with my brother a few weeks ago.  It's all him -haw.  I don't see negative reviews from the big review machines anymore.  No longer see meaningful quantification of a product in relation to its direct competitors.  So many are rated as a value greater than their price tag, that its ridiculous. Everything seems to be evaluated as worth comparing and listening too, or a value, or performs at multiples of its price tag, that its meaningless.  This is very similar to what began happening to the automotive  press in the late 90s as well.  What i see there now is so much worse, with deliberate deceptions, than the audio press we are discussing on this thread.  The primary press money is made from the advertisers, not us buying the subscription, so who do you think they are writing for?...or more fairly said, who do you think the editors and publishers are concerned about when they pre-read a review from one of their writers before letting it go to print, or on their website?  

There are a few key things I look for in reviews now.  If the reviewer makes it part of their reference system, than that product is serious in my book.  Next thing I look for is when reviewers from 2 or more venues make the same, VERY specific, observations of certain qualities of a product...that's evidencing to me.  The downside of that, is the smaller, yet amazing companies, don't often get 2 or more reviews of a particular product.  So, then ofcourse there is AudiogoN and Steve Hoffman.