The review wehave been promising is up

John Atkinson once advised that a good equipment review should fulfill three functions: To inform, to entertain, and to guide a purchase decision.

1. Inform: What’s the speaker enclosure made of? What’s the DAC chipset used? How readily is the tonearm’s VTA adjusted? That kind of thing. Also, explanations from a manufacturer as to why the product’s design team made the decisions they did.
2. Entertain: The review is well-written and fun to read.
3. Guide a potential purchase: By reading a comprehensive review of the component from someone who has lived with it for months, a potential customer can decide if a product is worthy of further investigation.

"Context," in terms of other, similar products? That can be irresponsible and disrespectful of audio consumers who are capable of creating their own rankings based on their sonic priorities, as well as new product reviews. TAS makes plenty of recommendations—Editors’ Choice, Golden Ears, Buyers Guides, etc. But making a significant audio purchase isn’t like buying a dorm refrigerator after reading a survey of ten models in Consumer Reports.

We want to help you devise a short list of products, winnowed down from a larger number, we’d hope, from reading our reviews. But TAS is not going to tell you that Server A gets an A-minus while Server B gets a B-plus—and thus Server A is "better." That doesn’t serve anyone’s interest. You’re just going to have to hear it yourself, if you’ve decided you are seriously considering a new product covered in he magazine.

Andrew Quint

Senior writer

The Absolute Sound

I don't necessarily disagree with sns and, as noted above, the magazine uses several platforms to let readers know what our favorite products are at all price points, both collectively (Editor's Choice) and individually (Golden Ears.) And references to specific competing components do make it into plenty of our reviews. But, to state the obvious, the ultimate "reference" for us is "the absolute sound"—live musical performance—and reviews that employ the descriptive language developed by TAS decades ago and that present details of a writer's subjective experience can also help quite a bit in making a purchasing decision. Please continue to sample our reviews—there are plenty of recent ones posted online.

Andrew Quint

Senior Writer

The Absolute Sound

This is the kind of dialogue that needs to happen and I always try to attend to constructive criticism from editors and readers alike. It’s just so much more productive when the correspondent adopts the tone of a Mahler123 as opposed to the enraged contempt of a soix. It’s always a bad sign when someone starts writing in all caps about what’s supposed to be an enjoyable avocation. Both posters are making the same points but one seems to be getting unnecessarily bellicose about it. Like it or not, all of us— knowledgeable consumers, dealers, manufacturers, journalists, recording professionals, even artists—are part of the same ecosystem and—I’ll use the provocative "c-word"—a little civility goes a long way.

I’m not certain how having one or two comparison products on hand makes everything right, when there are dozens of potential competing products. Chances are that the comparison product I have on hand isn’t going to be the one you’re interested in. Even if one goes to a lot of audio shows, nobody’s heard everything—and certainly not at length in a familiar system. Is it simply the act of comparing the product under review to something that’s a virtue? Seems kind of arbitrary to me.

That’s why the lexicon that HP and others developed can be so helpful. Employed thoughtfully, it can serve as a point of reference that individual product reviews can point to. It’s a lot like reading music criticism: You can learn the tastes, biases, and priorities of a given writer you don’t even often agree with and use a review of his to predict what your own response will be—so long as their listening habits and predilections are constant and consistent.

But as the more technically advanced and expensive the products under consideration get, the harder it is to declare winners and losers, and the more critical it becomes that a potential purchaser get either a good long listen at a dealer or, best of all, the option to return gear after an extended home audition, no questions asked, that Dave Lalin provides.

That said, going forward, I’m promising myself to name more names in the course of my equipment reviews. Thanks to all who brought it up.

Good point - though the two situations aren’t entirely analagous. Maybe you remember that, for Fanfare, I reviewed pretty much only Wagner for about a decade and I still have on my shelves roughly 20 complete Ring cycles (not to mention a bunch of single Ring dramas.) If I have more than two pairs of full-range, floorstanding loudspeakers in our place at once, my wife understandably begins to get pretty annoyed. Plus, despite rumors to the contrary, you do have to send them back unless you decide to buy them (in which case you’re probably unloading something else—that’s why I’ve been a long-time AudiogoN member! ) Add to that the possibility of streaming and comparisons of different recorded versions of the same music is pretty easy.

Not so with audio gear. You will notice that, when reviewing speakers I generally try a couple of different amplifiers and sometimes need to borrow one from a friend or dealer to do a fair assessment. With the 432 EVO Aeon review, as Lalin pointed out, I do have a Baetis server that’s active in my system and I use a lot and, of course, compared to the Belgium product. But how many readers have had experience with that one? I’ve reviewed a couple of other Baetis models, an Aurender, and a T+A but that’s still such a minuscule part of the server universe. I do listen to a lot of the same music with each review component, using the vocabulary of high-performance audio to describe the sound to myself and to the magazine’s end user—and that allows me to have an impression of what’s really good and what’s merely OK.

Extended listening to familiar music and describing in detail what I hear (and, yes, there is an "absolute sound" with synthetic studio recordings—you recognize it when you hear them played back on a super-system or at a recording session) with the audiophile jargon lets me get a handle on what a new product can do and where it fits in my experience as an audiophile. My hope is that some readers will find some of my reviews promising enough to seek out the product at a dealer, an audio show, at the local audio club (I do that a lot) or perhaps in a friend’s system. No one, I hope, is going to buy a $15K pair of speakers because some reviewer says they "blow away" the $7500 pair standing in the hallway just off his listening room.

That said, I am going to try to do better on the issue of comparisons. Then, the forum loudmouths can move on to giving other reasons why they no longer read TAS. 😁

Best to all

AQ

<<Getting back to the subject at hand.  Has anyone who actually spends their hard earned money heard this piece of equipment?  I'd love to get an impression from a user that plunked down $7500 to see if they feel satisfied with their purchase>>

Well, I did.

And I do.

AQ

Tough crowd.

Even with a reviewer's discount it was a substantial outlay - not the sort of expenditure you'd make if you didn't really like the gear. Sheesh....

Actually, I wasn’t able to complete the head-to-head comparison of Baetis to 432 EVO that I’d hoped to. The Aeon has only a USB output; the Baetis has USB, AES/EBU, SPDIF, and HDMI. The USB interface is an upgrade, employing an SOtM card and in mid-review, it stopped working. I’d developed an impression that the Aeon at least held its own against the Baetis but I couldn’t do the additional comparisons I wanted to – the USB output is the best-sounding one on the Baetis machine, and I didn’t think it fair to make comparisons with another. The Baetis became irrelevant, in terms of this review, and thus wasn’t even mentioned as "associated equipment."

That said—and acknowledging that, in part due to this exchange, I’ll be trying to add specific comparisons to future reviews—I stick by my guns regarding the importance of referencing the absolute sound and of using the descriptive language of our hobby to delineate what I’m hearing. If you don’t find that approach helpful, soix, no problem. But many people do.