Has any audiophile gizmo ever got a bad review?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Mike-48, Sep 12, 2019.

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  1. Xarkkon

    Xarkkon Would you like a Custom Title?

    Location:
    Asia
    indeed. i always make it an effort to hunt down youtubers with a fair amount of bad reviews (Tyll back at Inner Fidelity, Thomas, DMS, Zeos). those are the ones i trust the most! yes, their tastes may not align with mine, but they call it as they see it and i appreciate that.
     
    Cyclone Ranger likes this.
  2. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    This is really the best case scenario for the tweak industry - technically non-false. This allows them to write up a white paper that isn’t total BS, but ultimately customers don’t have the problem that is being solved.
     
    Agitater and vwestlife like this.
  3. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    Go to Amazon and filter by 3-star reviews. ;)
     
  4. motorstereo

    motorstereo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ct.
    How about PS audio noise harvesters gizmos which supposedly turn electrical line noise into light? I wonder if they work and are they on par with a quality line pc at a fraction of the price?
     
  5. Spin Doctor

    Spin Doctor Forum Resident

    The marketing slick is a bunch of buzzwords strung together. It never claims to do ANYTHING except light up...

    "The Internal quantum modules is combined with eight resonate channel and a core processor, the engineer detect the power outlet wave type by internal IC, and generates instant synchronous phase distortion compensation which is made for the beautification waveform through precise resonance and reduce phase distortion."

    What the hell is this? Squarely aimed at the "sucker born every minute" demographic.
     
  6. Tawaun A Williams

    Tawaun A Williams Forum Resident

    How do you know that don't get stuff that sucks, that doesn't end up getting a review?
     
  7. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    The main difference is that a movie critic can spend a fast twenty bucks/pounds/euro to go the local theater and watch a movie. The distributor or studio can’t prevent anyone, critic or anyone else, from buying a ticket. No movie distributor or studio is going to pull its ads on CBS or CBC or ITV because a local, regional or national critic gave it a bad review. Besides that, plenty of movies that get bad reviews succeed profitably anyway. The same is rarely true for home audio products.

    Compare that situation to a speaker maker who sends a pair of his models to a reviewer who works for the limited-distribution print or web mag and ends up with a bad review in the same issue he’s advertising the speakers. The market is tiny compared to movie-dom. Every bad review cuts deep. The problem could give rise to true independents, but unless they have massive fundraising that funds the outright purchase of review products on an ongoing basis (i.e., Consumer Reports) it’s not going to happen.
     
    Xarkkon, Big Blue and nosliw like this.
  8. Big Blue

    Big Blue Forum Resident

    Location:
    Wisconsin
    I understand they may not write and publish a review, but they still need to evaluate it somehow to determine whether they like it. So that leads to the suspicion that many reviewers are just withholding review of products about which they can’t write favorably.
     
  9. The Pinhead

    The Pinhead KING OF BOOM AND SIZZLE IN HELL

    I read a Julian Hirsch's awful review of an uber-expensive Krell power amp once. He said it sounded ¨muffled¨ and ¨not lively. Can't prove it though.
     
  10. vwestlife

    vwestlife Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey, USA
    It looks like a Chinese auto-translated into English description of power factor correction -- which, as I explained above, is a real thing, but completely useless for home audio use.
     
  11. Boltman92124

    Boltman92124 Go Padres!!

    Location:
    San Diego
    I dropped my subscriptions to TAS and Stereophile last year after 20+ years. I kinda miss them though. Something about the nice printed version on the coffee table. But you're right, almost no negative reviews.
     
    Xarkkon likes this.
  12. Boltman92124

    Boltman92124 Go Padres!!

    Location:
    San Diego
  13. Tawaun A Williams

    Tawaun A Williams Forum Resident

    I understand where you are coming from but just isn't the reality and the world we live in....that's kinda why we have these forums..
     
  14. LakeMountain

    LakeMountain Vinyl surfer

    Location:
    Netherlands
    Esoteric home page:
    [​IMG]
    And these are quite some claims....

    “The improvements were not sublte. They brought great transparency without losing musicality. Clarity, dynamics, inner detail, midrange bloom, bass slam and articulation have such an improved sense of openness that they represent a major paradigm shift in resonance control.”

    Has anyone tried these dots?
     
  15. Boltman92124

    Boltman92124 Go Padres!!

    Location:
    San Diego
    They've been around a long time. I remember a review in Stereophile way back when. Supposed to put them all over your speakers and components..tone arm..everything! I actually had one of Marigo's Apparition digital cables from a friend in a trade. I was loving the snake oil for sure...it did sound better than some others! It was so stiff and heavy you had to bend it just right to make a connection. It ended up breaking one day... Marigo also makes a set of "Mystery Feet" that come in a 3 pack for $1,500...Marigo is fully off the deep end.
     
    LakeMountain likes this.
  16. Just Walking

    Just Walking Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    The mystery is that anyone buys them at that price :laugh:
     
  17. Big Blue

    Big Blue Forum Resident

    Location:
    Wisconsin
    But then how do they know something sucks and not to evaluate it? Appearance? Bias?
     
    Tawaun A Williams likes this.
  18. Tawaun A Williams

    Tawaun A Williams Forum Resident

    I'm pretty sure it's a combination of things..with some advertisement in there as well..
     
  19. G E

    G E Senior Member

    I remember those days! I sold IBM PCs and original Mac. The green monitor was text only. No graphics capability. The guys in the data centers called the Mac the ”Electronic Muppet Show”
     
    SandAndGlass likes this.
  20. G E

    G E Senior Member

    Don’t forget to “ArmourAll” all your CDs!
     
    Pythonman likes this.
  21. Balthazar

    Balthazar Forum Resident

    Does anyone remember the photo in the freezer tweak?

    I could have sworn it was discussed, but not endorsed, by Art Dudley in Stereophile and while searching for the column, found this gem. Of course it's the Machina Dynamica guy. :rolleyes:

    [​IMG]
     
  22. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    The original MAC's were pretty worthless, but costly alternatives to the PC. They had only one ultra slow floppy drive, with ann external floppy as an option, and a 9" (diagonal) B&W screen.

    I was a customer of and they worked for the first Apple dealer in the State of Florida, in their second store.
     
  23. BayouTiger

    BayouTiger Forum Resident

    Fact is that many, many of today’s major business applications debuted on the Mac. While Lotus held down the PC’s, we were using Excel on the Mac. And then there was Pagemaker and Quark Express while PC users were still tied to Wordperfect.

    The 400k 3.5” drive was far superior to the PC 360k 5.25 floppy. Macs also debuted the huge 5MB hard drive to the general public while the PC folks hung on to their dual floppies.
     
  24. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    The IBM XT came out in 1983 with a 10MB Seagate hard drive and a single floppy. The floppy drive MAC was not released until a year later.

    Excel started out as a MS-DOS program named Microsoft Multiplan and was migrated over to the MAC 6800 based platform and later was renamed Excel.

    Before the advent of the IBM PC, microcomputers were 8-bit and operated off of the CPM operating system and we used a program called Supercalc. VisiCalc was introduced on the Apple II early on.

    Pagemaker and Quark came along much later as the open architecture Mac's came into production in 1987.

    Back in those early days a 1024 x 768 resolution sony 19" Trinitron monitor retailed for $3,900 and the video card, which was required to drive the monitor was available from Super Mac, Radius, Apple and others but cost around $3,800.

    Setting up a MAC to do desktop publishing was ant an inexpensive proposition.
     
  25. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    I've done this for discs -- CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays -- that still skip after a regular cleaning. It's worked.
     
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