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Measurements are objective -------- Reviews are just industry cheerleading (Cheerleaders are not Critics)

Measurements are objective.

Many critics are little more than audio industry cheerleaders.

If your goal to to narrow down the huge number of new products available into a short list worthy of an audition, you only have a few choices:
(1) Measurements that suggest faulty engineering and could be audible
(2) Real audio Critics who are actually willing to criticize a component (such as the British audio magazines that rank components with one to five stars).

With Stereophile and Absolute Sound Cheerleaders, I mean "Critics", almost every component will be implied to be above average and worthy of an audition.

Even if there are a few criticisms that suggest the reader would be wasting his time auditioning the component ... the review's conclusion will tend to say something good about the component, thereby contradicting the prior criticisms. Sometimes the concluding paragraph seems to have little correlation with the prior paragraphs as if the Manufacturer was allowed to write that paragraph!).

I read the concluding paragraphs of over 80 Stereophile product reviews in the 2002 - 2004 period last night when I couldn't sleep.

I can't recall any review concluding with a paragraph that even suggested the component was average, much less below average.

That's audio industry cheerleading -- just like the late Julian Hirsch at Stereo Review was known for ... except the golden ears called Hirsch a fool for liking almost every component he tested ... while they show great respect for Stereophile reviewers who do the same thing!

The people who make the measurements dismiss them as having almost no correlation with what people hear, so there seems to be no bias when collecting data.

In fact, measurements may tell readers more than the Cheerleaders do in their nearly always positive component "tests" ... and the huge "Happy-Face" 500 Recommended Component Lists ... with far more A's and B's than any other grades!

For compoents where listeners often have difficulty hearing differences when the brand names are hidden, such as wires and solid state amps that are not clipping, the Cheerleaders may be telling us nothing more than how excited they are to have a new component to write about!



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