As home entertainment equipment becomes increasingly more complex, with new products and new technologies appearing almost daily, potential buyers are frequently a little confused, or completely overwhelmed. Many turn to product reviews in various publications, and on the Internet, for guidance. The advice they get may not be exactly what they had hoped for. While finding a true consumer advocate (besides me) among today’s equipment reviewers will be difficult, you may still benefit from these product reviews if you maintain a certain level of skepticism. You must always remember the real business of the source of information that you use. Here is my advice in that regard.

The Internet

Internet publications and newsgroups tend to be very amateurish and the advice you get there usually ranges from mildly inaccurate to completely false. Anybody, no matter how misinformed, can express an opinion on the Internet, and they do. Newsgroups are the worst. I’m sure that some of these people are actually trying to help others with misguided advice, but some mean-spirited individuals appear to be consciously attempting to make humor at the expense of others. Internet “Webzines” are selling advertising just like their print media counterparts, but their writers are paid little, if anything, and most are sadly lacking in experience.

Always remember that old adage: free advice is usually worth just about what you pay for it. Or this one: if you measure a room with a rubber ruler, you still don’t how big it is. False information can actually be worse than no information, because now you think that you know.

People who are genuinely interested in the performance quality of their home entertainment systems, and those individuals with a solid background in technology, are unlikely to be computer geeks who spend hours online answering questions in some newsgroup posting.

The Internet is, however, an excellent source for product details and specifications. Go directly to the manufacturer’s Website or to a trusted source like WidescreenReview.com that offers links to manufacturer’s sites. You can usually get pictures on these Websites too, and some indication of the company’s market position. This can give you an idea about whether you are the intended customer, or if they are aiming their products at those with bigger or smaller budgets than yours.

Mainstream Magazines

The mainstream press will usually augment product reviews with lots of pictures and several meaningless graphs with little or no interpretation of what these graphs are supposed to demonstrate. They may be clever enough to measure components but not clever enough to describe the sonic consequences of the results. You might have noticed that higher-priced products, or products from companies with bigger advertising budgets, always perform best-and nothing ever performs poorly. The product from this month’s biggest advertiser is better than the product from last months biggest advertiser-if it costs more. Otherwise it is just recommended that you consider it as a good value for the money.

Mainstream publications seldom mention how a component actually sounds, with more than a fleeting statement. You get the product’s specifications, a statement that it meets these specs, and the selling price. This information could be retrieved with greater accuracy from the manufacturer’s Website on the Internet.

You may get some advice of value from the picture-book magazines, but always remember that their primary business is selling advertising, not helping you. Promoting their advertiser’s products is called “partnering with the advertiser” in the publishing business. Be wary.

High-End Publications

High-end magazines seem to consider technical knowledge to be an impediment to an unbiased subjective review. They often review products using obscure associated equipment with obscenely high price tags, that you are unlikely to ever have the opportunity to hear for yourself, let along buy. And because they eschew technical questions as irrelevant, they can be easily fooled by products made with questionable design competence. Let me give you an example: in a recent amplifier review published in a “subjective” high-end magazine, the author started his review with the statement that he was a listener, not an engineer. He then described what he heard when he listened to the amplifier under review and compared the sound to that offered by competing products. He used loudspeakers that I have never heard of and I write the new products section of Widescreen Review magazine and go to all the trade shows. These speakers cost twice as much as my luxury sport utility vehicle. Now this is what a subjective reviewer should do,- simply describe how the product under review sounds-but he didn’t stop there.

In the course of the review, it was mentioned that the manufacturer warned in the instruction manual, that the review amplifier could blow up if it was not used exclusively with a certain brand of speaker cable that includes a low-pass filter as part of the cable design. The amplifier’s specifications were listed in the article, and it failed to double in power output when the load impedance was halved. In fact it barely doubled when impedance was quartered. Then the review stated that the amplifier had a 90-amp current capability. Lets take a look at a couple of the questions that these statements raise in my mind.

Why design an amplifier with such extreme bandwidth (-3dB at 1.8mHz) that it tends to oscillate unless it’s low-pass filtered by the speaker cable? Why not put the filter inside the amplifier to make it stable under all conditions? There may be an explanation for this choice and I would have asked the designer to elaborate.

There are only two reasons that I know of that would prevent power from doubling when the load impedance is halved: either the power supply is inadequate and sags under heavy load, or the current capability of the output stage is insufficient necessitating current limiting. Neither of these possibilities seems probable in an amplifier design that costs $15,000 for a stereo pair. Obviously, if the amplifier really could deliver 90 amperes of current, it would produce a lot more power into lower impedances than it did. This requires an explanation and there indeed may be a good one, but this reviewer didn’t know enough to ask.

My intention here is not to malign the product which I have not heard, nor the reviewer who is well respected for his keen ears. I’m just pointing out that I would not purchase an expensive amplifier after reading this review, without further investigation. You shouldn’t either.

Balance

Once a design is completed and an audio product is offered for sale, all that is really important to a prospective buyer is how that product performs, and a review that doesn’t tell you much about sound quality doesn’t tell you very much. A review that only offers measurements, tells you nothing that you can’t get from the manufacturer’s literature. On the other hand, a review can also be misleading when serious questions are raised about a manufacturer’s performance claims or design goals, and they go unanswered because the reviewer lacks sufficient knowledge about how the product works to ask for explanations.

What I’m striving for in my audio product reviews for Widescreen Review, is a balance. I want to present enough technical information so that you can judge the validity of advertising claims and enough subjective information about what I heard when I listened to the product so that you get an idea of what I thought of the product’s performance potential. I also try to describe how the product looks and mention the apparent construction quality, because pride of ownership is important to many of us. I would appreciate your feedback on how I’m doing.