What's the point of reviewing?

We dont read reviews about an amplifier the same way we read reviews about meals and movies at all ...😁😊 Acoustic concepts are not food cooking or about "taste"...Nor movie genre...

With gear components we identifies what each listener say about, dynamic, timbre, transients, soundfield imaging and soundstaging, with what kind of gear his impressions are build , what are the musical albums used , what type of room...Etc and especially we pay attention to what he does not speak about.. We put them on a paper... After each reviews we add a column...

Statistics here means only that 35 reviews analysed is better than 5....The acoustic factors at play for the analysis had nothing to do with the 35 five different personnalities who created their own reviews...( except for common place fact as : we dont analyse review of people loving heavy metal to pick a balance headphone )

The point here is that if so many DIFFERENT people with DIFFERENT taste CONVERGE in impressions about each acoustic factors then you can believe it as a PROBABLE fact...

What the tastes of a single reviewer are MEANS nothing, because we analyse each acoustic factors written ideally by 35 different people, THATS THE POINT... ...

It is evident that even if someone has the same taste as me in music it does not means that the shape of his ears, the distance between his ears, the different components he was using, and in a very different room than mine all factors that differentiate him from me will help in a lesser way for a good pick up choice of gear than analysing the highest numbers of opinions possible about bass, timbre, highs, imaging, soundstage, transients ...This is so evident that i will not go further...

But if we are lazy we can read a reviewer or two we like and if they say this is very good, we can belive it....For sure... But it is not my general idea about reviews analysis...

And opposing the "similar taste" factor to my "statistics" is preposterous, because my point of view INCLUDE even taste of the reviewers but it is not the main factor at all , acoustic factors are the main one... we can even rank reviewers by our favorable opinion about their teste... ( I generally exclude heavy metal listener opinions or electronical music)...

I pick the Sansui amplifier and my AKG K340 as i described...Complete success...

the generalized question, in this day and age of information overload and the highly questionable veracity of much of said information, is how does one sort through what is available to draw salient, accurate, reliable conclusions upon which to act?

this question/issue applies in spades in this case of audio equipment reviews and online discussions... and lessons learned should apply profitably to all major decisions where info gathering is necessary

You read a review. The reviewer makes a convincing case as to whether the component under review might be something that'll match your taste, give your system new life and altogether enhance your listening pleasure. The component is within your budget...or just slightly beyond it. You buy the thing. You connect it up and listen for a couple days. Does it indeed increase your pleasure? Is it breaking in and sounding a bit better as the days go by? If so, yeah! You're a happy guy or gal!

The trick is that one must be able to take all the information available for a product and synthesize that information to derive conclusions that have a good probability of panning out. Not always an easy task. Much easier to just take advice from someone you trust. That can work as well if that person has correctly done his homework. Sometimes it’s simply just hit or miss and try try again.

You can take what any reviewer says with a grain of salt regarding sound quality, but reviewers can also tell you much about the feature set of a device, how well those features worked, how snappy any software was, and if it had issues connecting to wi-fi, so you'd know to steer clear. And you can at least see the device on screen in a real room, not just some well Photoshopped ad copy. 

If you watch or read a few good reviewers, you can learn their preferences and whether they align with yours.