Honesty of the Reviewers

@cd318

before I came here, I read, for about 3 decades: car reviews. Every car that just was released got rave reviews and the others came in 2nd, 3rd and 4th. I could tell the pattern, the reviewer had to be able to

1) hype up the product

2) be able to defend their review later

3) be able to justify saying bad things about the product later

It was pretty obvious that they weren’t independent.

I find the audio reviews similar, although more nuanced, e.g., Darko never says: A is better than B, he’d say A is better in a small, untreated room ad B is better in conditions x,y,z.

And I am OK with it, I learned to infer the relevant information from it.

But when someone claims that the best speaker between 1 and 2 grand is one that is absolutely an inferior product to nearly any in the category (I would have a hard time finding a product that is worse), I will stop watching

re "primarily entertainment value only" 

well they are not that entertaining. We are paying dearly for watching those reviews, we better get some value out of it. Please. It's my time, my watching ads, my going through a bunch of info I don't need. 

Also, nobody mixes and presents information and entertainment well, they do either one. 

The funny thing about these youtubers is how much they talk about themselves. I understand that the reason people get in front of a camera is because they believe they are interesting and need to be heard but hanging a sign on the teleprompter: "it's not about you, it's about what you are reviewing" would help. A lot.

I grew up riding my bicycle to Radio Shack where I read everything I could get my hands on. Like Isaac Asimov whose father owned a bookstore but he still couldn’t afford the books so he carefully read each one and put it back looking new, I read all the magazines and tech specs. The guys in the store even put up with me trying out all the different speakers and stuff. 
At some point as I moved up from paper route money to McDonalds ($1.35/hr!) I was able to afford a subscription to Stereo Review. I read each issue cover to cover, memorized all the words of wisdom of that greatest of greats Julian Hirsch. 
 

Years later after college when finally I had some real money and went shopping it was like pulling teeth to get me to realize there really is more to wire than gauge. Frequency response is not paramount. Signal to noise unless obnoxiously bad isn’t even relevant. Watts aren’t equal and hardly even matter. And I could go on. 
Learning all this, or more to the point unlearning all this, was a long slow painful process. 
It wasn’t until much later that I came to learn another guy J Gordon Holt had been writing on audio around the same time. Only unlike Hirsch and his measurements Holt had it right: the final arbiter of fidelity is the listener. 
Hirsch harmed a whole generation of audiophiles, hopelessly misleading them into a fruitless reliance on numbers. His legacy haunts us to this day. 

there really is more to wire than gauge

Speaker cable is a bit different from a lot of the interconnect cables we handle, in several respects. Because speakers are driven at low impedance (typically 4 or 8 ohms) and high current, speaker cables are, for all practical purposes, immune from interference from EMI or RFI, so shielding isn’t required. The low impedance of the circuit, meanwhile, makes capacitance, which can be an issue in high-impedance line or microphone-level connections practically irrelevant. The biggest issue in speaker cables, from the point of view of sound quality, is simply conductivity; the lower the resistance of the cable, the lower the contribution of the speaker cable’s resistance to the damping factor, and the flatter the frequency response will be. While one can spend thousands of dollars on exotic speaker cable, in the end analysis, it’s the sheer conductivity of the cable, and (barring a really odd design, which may introduce various undesirable effects) little else that matters. The answer to keeping conductivity high is simple: the larger the wire, the lower the resistance, and the higher the conductivity. -- Blue Jeans Cable

That’s all there is to know about wire. No magic, no sentient being.

Frequency response is not paramount

If not paramount, I can’t think of any other thing that is more important. The entire freq spectrum of the music must be reproduced.

Signal to noise unless obnoxiously bad isn’t even relevant

Would you buy an amp with 15% THD? Regardless of what you hear, it’s an indication of the skill of the amp designer.

Watts aren’t equal and hardly even matter

The watt is the unit of measurement of electrical power.  Period.  Manufacturers have been known to lie about watts.

the final arbiter of fidelity is the listener.

The listener is the final arbiter of the decision to buy or not. Fidelity can be measured. Fidelity being identified as the degree to which the signal is faithful to the original signal. Once into your speaker and out into your room, well, that’s unknowable except to the listener.

Cheers