Some famous reviewers have atrocious listening rooms!

What is a great room, what is a bad room? I've recorded in underground water reservoirs with over 20 seconds echo and recorded in rooms that have produced 1000s of gold records, at the end of operating jet engines and in opera houses that were reserved for royal invitations only over the last 35 years and I can tell you some of the most popular rooms for recording sound very strange. The playback room shouldn't add anything, closed headphones do a good job of showing the proper vision of the mixing engineer and that's about it. How can a listener judge a recording as if they were all the same? Some engineers care some don't and all of them are working with a budget, there is no standard recording sound studio so how can there be a standard sound in a playback room. After you hear a song you are very familiar with your brain will compensate for the acoustics in about 5 seconds in whatever room you listen to it in. 

The bottom line is you should listen not read🧐

I’m not as concerned about reviewer’s rooms as many others here.

Yes, of course room acoustics affect speaker performance. It’s not for nothing room EQ is all the rage these days. However...I’m less in to hand-wringing over the photos of reviewers rooms for these reason:

Per the work of Floyd Toole and others, speaker room interactions are more unreliable in the bass, but nonetheless Toole has explained that the emphasis on room acoustics is sometimes overstated. This is because our brains have evolved to "listen through" the acoustics of a room to perceive the direct character of a sound source. That’s why we generally easily identify the character of people’s voices in a vast array of real-iife acoustic scenarios. If the surrounding acoustic information so baffled our brains that sources had no defining reliable characteristics, our hearing wouldn’t have been of much use.

I have found this to be true in my own experience auditioning speakers. I’m a "speaker nut" and when I’m on a speaker hunt my auditioning is wide-ranging (even traveling to hear different speakers). Through careful listener positioning - taking various positions to listen, careful speaker placement, I’ve easily been able to get the gist of a speaker’s character in pretty much every room. I have NEVER been surprised by the sound of a speaker I heard in one room, when I heard it in another. I mean, I even auditioned the Harbeth speakers in a room that was literally a gigantic open warehouse room, and yet I simply placed my listening position and speaker arrangement as I have in my 15 ’ x 13’ room at home...and I heard the same essential sound as I heard when I got the speakers in to my room.

So it is quite possible to get a good take on speakers in a variety of different rooms.

It reminds me of the time I heard MBL 101 speakers which I’d become obsessed with. I was able to hear them at a TAS reviewer’s home who had a notoriously, hilariously tiny listening room. I mean, closet-sized with BIG MBL omnis. It was the BEST I have ever heard those things sound. Absolutely incredible. And the descriptions he gave in his MLB reviews were right on regarding the pluses and minuses of that speaker.

Finally, I don’t just take some single review as gospel. Like many, I think, I tend to gain a level of trust with a reviewer insofar has I’ve noted he/she is listening and noticing things I care about sonically. And insofar as his descriptions of speakers I am familiar with have been accurate. And further, I triangulate the impressions with what other reviewers have written, and what other audiophiles have reported.

Very often these converge quite nicely.

So for instance I have found Fremer to be quite accurate in his descriptions of speakers I’ve owned or have auditioned. Even Herb Reichert has been extremely accurate to what I’ve heard. For instance his comparison of Harbeth with Joseph Audio speakers, both of which I’ve owned, got right to the gist of exactly the character differences I heard.

Finally, when it comes to correlating what reviewers write about speakers, for instance in Stereophile, while you can always find embarrassing moments of a mismatch with the measurements, generally speaking I’ve noticed that the reviews tend to track fairly well with what JA measures. Very often certain characteristics cited by the reviewer show up in the measurements. (Fremer is actually pretty good there too).

A good reviewer may not describe a speaker as precisely as measurements, but they can often give the gist of "what it actually sounds like" quite well. IMO.

Reviewers exist primarily to promote product.

I can hardly think of a single review which came close to describing what I later heard in person. [OK, Alvin Gold reviewing the Ruark Prologue ll's, but even there he forgot to mention their sibilance).

The great majority of products that received glowing reviews turned out to be crushing disappointments in real life. [fully loaded Linn/Naim six pack was shockingly bad when I'd been expecting near perfection]

Time and time again I reminded myself to never again trust ANY reviews.

It's the oldest adage in audio but you really do have to listen for yourself.

Decades of reading reviews lead me to arrive at the conclusion that professional reviews in audio magazines were no better than what I might find in a consumer reports magazine such as the UK based Which?

Perhaps the only way to get close to the 'gist' of what something sounds like is by conducting a comparative review?

A straight head to head or a group test could highlight the difference between products and more usefully the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

However, these types of reviews risk giving offence to some of the people the reviewer needs to stay on good terms with and appear to be becoming increasingly uncommon these days.

Some of the more honest of reviewers, Andrew Robinson for one, have even talked about the the normally taboo subject of behind the scenes politics of reviewing.

I like the way he will always come out and tell you that you will need a subwoofer when describing any bass restricted loudspeaker. This is a huge deal and should never be casually glossed over the way so many do.

He also seems to have one of the visibily better demo rooms out there as well as providing a second opinion via his partner Kristi.

It's plainly obvious that he does not have to confine his impressions to only near field listening where the room must matter less.

Herb Reichert's review of the wharfedale diamond 225's is right on! I bought them soon after reading his review. I listen mainly to my Tannoys now, but still own the 225's. For a speaker costing a mere $449, they embarrass some costing much more. He also mentions the Hana el cartridge, not so much a full review, but what he does say about it, I must agree. It Is a fabulous moving coil cartridge for the money.