This is not a binary thing. A bit of bias is different than completely be sold to the other side.
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Paid reviewers
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CleanSound
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I've been waiting for this topic to come up, so you bet I will opine.
Any reviewer who earns money from their reviews either through direct manufacturer advertising, sponsorship or commission will have some level of unreliability, some more than others.
I think most of us by now know Amir is non profit and he is the baddest mofo to walk on HiFi land (with the most recent Tekton demonstration), so take him out. As for Erin, I think he is second on the list in terms of honesty, but I also think he is more inclined to be a bit more diplomatic as he does need to recoup that $100k from his NFS and of course it doesn't hurt to earn some extra side income and hopefully get 90% off of that Blade 2 Meta. Then I put Gene DellaSala as a far 3.
Everyone else will feed the status quo in the HiFi ecosystem to not offend any manufacturers, distributors, showmakers and dealers, they need to navigate the delicate landmines so that manufacturers will continue to send them products to review, hence they continue to churn out healthy amount of contents, resulting in a healthy readership base, which entices the advertising dollars to flow, so they can afford to pay their mortgage and send their kids to college and retire with some dignity.
What's getting dangerous now are paid reviews and paid indirect endorsements. Take Soundstage for example, they are flying around the world to make these videos disguised as documentaries and interviews when in fact, it's paid advertisements from the manufacturer and it's a form of indirect endorsement as these videos portrays these manufacturers in the best light possible.
Any reviewer who earns money from their reviews either through direct manufacturer advertising, sponsorship or commission will have some level of unreliability, some more than others.
I think most of us by now know Amir is non profit and he is the baddest mofo to walk on HiFi land (with the most recent Tekton demonstration), so take him out. As for Erin, I think he is second on the list in terms of honesty, but I also think he is more inclined to be a bit more diplomatic as he does need to recoup that $100k from his NFS and of course it doesn't hurt to earn some extra side income and hopefully get 90% off of that Blade 2 Meta. Then I put Gene DellaSala as a far 3.
Everyone else will feed the status quo in the HiFi ecosystem to not offend any manufacturers, distributors, showmakers and dealers, they need to navigate the delicate landmines so that manufacturers will continue to send them products to review, hence they continue to churn out healthy amount of contents, resulting in a healthy readership base, which entices the advertising dollars to flow, so they can afford to pay their mortgage and send their kids to college and retire with some dignity.
What's getting dangerous now are paid reviews and paid indirect endorsements. Take Soundstage for example, they are flying around the world to make these videos disguised as documentaries and interviews when in fact, it's paid advertisements from the manufacturer and it's a form of indirect endorsement as these videos portrays these manufacturers in the best light possible.
Consumer Reports employs a team of reviewers who are paid. They are impartial*
* in the present day with all of their standards for conflicts of interest, etc.
They can be biased and they can have opinions that differ from mine, but the reviewers can make a honest living by being paid.
* in the present day with all of their standards for conflicts of interest, etc.
They can be biased and they can have opinions that differ from mine, but the reviewers can make a honest living by being paid.
God can be without bias. Humans have point of view, they have word choice, adjectives, adverbs, things they include and give more space to, things they exclude (when they shouldn’t have), things they overlooked without malice, laziness, rhetorical flourish, informal fallacies,etc. Even someone with the most neutral intentions has a pov, heck there is a scientific pov. Let’s count the ways to deviate from ‘objectivity’ before I even attempt to understand a reviewer’s writing.
That is all difficult enough to cut through and come to a judgement on. Add money?
What if your lawmakers took advice and white papers from industry lobbyists? What would you think of those laws?
That is all difficult enough to cut through and come to a judgement on. Add money?
What if your lawmakers took advice and white papers from industry lobbyists? What would you think of those laws?
Are we including guys who post affiliate links as paid reviewers? To me that seems a little much. If a guy has affiliate links for Amazon, Crutchfield, Parts Express, and Monoprice are we to assume he can't impartially review a pair of KEF or Revel loudspeakers? To me, something like that hardly seems to compromise a reviewer's objectivity and/or create a conflict of interest, but I'm willing to entertain any argument why my opinion might be ill founded.
It’s not just paid review. You’ve frequently spoken about your bias in non-blind testing, which is one reason why we test
That specific scenario sounds like ships passing in the night; however, which company owns which, and which insider owes another a favor (like lobbying) can make a for a tangled skein.
Ze Frog
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Affiliate links are kinda odd in the sense it can still corrupt an influencer into making people want to go and buy the product for the gains from such. However, Erin for example or Amir, if they were to have product affiliate links then that's kind of a mute point as their review can't really lie as they provide factual evidence and their subjective always correlates to the actual facts. Stereophile measure, but they make that fact entirely pointless by praising and hyping a product so much in the subjective beforehand that a large majority likely never get far enough to see them or are so sold on the hype by then it's pointless. To me Stereophile is a bit of a joke to be honest.
An interesting aside as well is someone like the 8 Bit Guy a few while ago explaining content would be slower in frequency because of various things including needing to do more to bring in money to pay the bills outside of YouTube. The guy has well over a million subscribers, if he still needs to do stuff to keep the lights on I'm pretty sure these Hi-fi influencers who as time goes buy our purchasing ever more expensive gear and room treatments etc etc, jetting around the world or whatever are certainly getting money beyond the YouTube revenue with their prospective audience count.
JSmith
Master Contributor
Apart from Amir’s just consider ‘reviews’ as adverts.
Keith
Keith
Advertorials are a form of public dishonesty, and more so the more so the more they are disguised as impartial information.
Not to argue your main point, but I don't believe ASR is set up technically as a non-profit entity.
That is a specific structure usually set up for charities.
Making profits isn't an issue to me, and I hope it isn't to you, it is rather how they are made.
Here, all donations are purely discretionary from those who feel motivated to do so. I'd have no problem with him making a mountain of money from this site, but not by charging for sponsored reviews or anything like that.
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I think you've hit upon the real meat of the matter.
Word salad is totally subjective. Whether it's free or paid, I view it as worthless garbage, unreliable and misleading. Tests and measurements, OTOH, are technical work, not opinion. They are dispassionate and objective.
I don't pay for gossip, but I have no problems paying entities such as the water company, the hospital or my mechanic for legitimate tests.
Jim
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No what Amir does is a review. Its just that many Infotainers call them self reviewers. And many people are just used to this.
Amir clearly doesn't need the money he could get from some shady co-operation and that is what shuts up people.
I know it does as I have pointed it out a few times in some forum, the conspiracy theories usually stop right there as there just isn't any clever comebacks.
Conspiracies like a deal with Topping to give great reviews. Not that it couldn't be debunked by just reviewing the units yourself, but who wants to do that?
Personal opinion. I think that before understanding whether it is right to be paid, we need to understand whether it is a profession or not, who works, how they work and what service they provide to the community: I think I can divide the world of disclosure into these categories.
- the professional reviewer and the sector journalist, who carry out a service for the community; they will always have, like anyone, a minimum of prejudice, but they are absolutely capable, with their work and their preparation, of producing irrefutable objective evidence.
They are also very often professionals in the sector. They are prepared both in terms of experience and education. It is the category with the smallest number of exponents.
Their commitment is more of a service mission, in terms of content, quality, originality.
For personal value they sometimes collaborate with producers and institutions who recognize their intuition and preparation.
- the long-term hobbyists: people who are often very knowledgeable, but do not work in the sector of the chosen hobby, and very often do not have an inherent scholastic preparation: they have a medium level of social usefulness, normally a little more emotional , with more prejudices, are often a little more biased and less detached. They are people driven by constructive dedication.
- the enthusiast and the one who “would like to do it as a job”: they have more business benefits, so they are biased. They have no particular social utility in the strict sense, they do not always have adequate knowledge or training, but they play more on the consensus of social media. They feed on big headlines and are almost always the driving force of the click-bait category. They are "technical data sheet readers" who must continue to produce content of a precise number of minutes or lines
- the influencer: he has no social utility, but uses society to earn his own money. They are at the service of companies and themselves. They do mere marketing work, with well-defined logic. criticism is clearly not allowed. The prejudice is maximum, they are clearly biased, they earn precisely by being so. They are the ones who get paid the most….
- the professional reviewer and the sector journalist, who carry out a service for the community; they will always have, like anyone, a minimum of prejudice, but they are absolutely capable, with their work and their preparation, of producing irrefutable objective evidence.
They are also very often professionals in the sector. They are prepared both in terms of experience and education. It is the category with the smallest number of exponents.
Their commitment is more of a service mission, in terms of content, quality, originality.
For personal value they sometimes collaborate with producers and institutions who recognize their intuition and preparation.
- the long-term hobbyists: people who are often very knowledgeable, but do not work in the sector of the chosen hobby, and very often do not have an inherent scholastic preparation: they have a medium level of social usefulness, normally a little more emotional , with more prejudices, are often a little more biased and less detached. They are people driven by constructive dedication.
- the enthusiast and the one who “would like to do it as a job”: they have more business benefits, so they are biased. They have no particular social utility in the strict sense, they do not always have adequate knowledge or training, but they play more on the consensus of social media. They feed on big headlines and are almost always the driving force of the click-bait category. They are "technical data sheet readers" who must continue to produce content of a precise number of minutes or lines
- the influencer: he has no social utility, but uses society to earn his own money. They are at the service of companies and themselves. They do mere marketing work, with well-defined logic. criticism is clearly not allowed. The prejudice is maximum, they are clearly biased, they earn precisely by being so. They are the ones who get paid the most….
I was once paid, quite well, being senior software architect in consultancy. I estimated the solution, number of persons required to complete the plan within certain time and the overall resources needed. And all this work was to be done by my employer.
Horrible conflict of interest, but that is how it is done. If you tend to deliver on time what was actually needed, customers accept the risk.
Why wouldn't this model work when it comes to reviewing hifi?
Horrible conflict of interest, but that is how it is done. If you tend to deliver on time what was actually needed, customers accept the risk.
Why wouldn't this model work when it comes to reviewing hifi?
It’s the test protocol and the transparency with which it and the resulting measurements are reported that makes a review authoritative. A paid reviewer’s measurements are still useful unless the reviewer is lying about the test protocol. But dishonesty can happen whether or not the reviewer is paid.
Lots of unpaid reviewers are as influenced by the desire for insider status or a following as a paid reviewer.
And reviewers’ subjective opinions are subject to their measurements in any case.
Rick “not being paid is no guarantee of veracity” Denney
Lots of unpaid reviewers are as influenced by the desire for insider status or a following as a paid reviewer.
And reviewers’ subjective opinions are subject to their measurements in any case.
Rick “not being paid is no guarantee of veracity” Denney
Anton D
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Paid or unpaid, my 'relationship' with any reviewer is a function of time, for me.
It takes me time and experience with the same gear to form my opinion of whether a reviewer has valid opinions. There are even subjectivist reviewers whose reviews I enjoy and find common ground with regarding this hobby. There are members of either 'camp' whose opinions don't stand up to my scrutiny, as well.
So, bottom line: I watch them over time and learn to heed their word, or not.
Oops, work calls, more pontificating in a bit!
ADDED: To add some opinion - I think it's actually a good thing to have reviewers who are enthusiastic about a certain niche. I know that brings with it the possibility of being overly/unduly positive, but I'd prefer a reviewer who was fond of a certain type of gear rather than predisposed against.
Example: I wouldn't give a new Rolling Stones album to a reviewer who only likes classical music. Beter to someone who already likes the Stones to give me context from that point of view. For Hi Fi gear, I am fine with a vinyl lover discussing a cartridge and not to a analog 'hater.' Same goes for good digital reviews: don't make someone who is predisposed to whine about digital slant a review negatively vis prejudice.
I know this is a double edged swrod. I don't want only cheerleaders for a format, but, in general, I'm OK with entusiasts who stay in their lane, so to speak. As the reader, I can sort it out.
This is a great topic. many good takes already!
It takes me time and experience with the same gear to form my opinion of whether a reviewer has valid opinions. There are even subjectivist reviewers whose reviews I enjoy and find common ground with regarding this hobby. There are members of either 'camp' whose opinions don't stand up to my scrutiny, as well.
So, bottom line: I watch them over time and learn to heed their word, or not.
Oops, work calls, more pontificating in a bit!
ADDED: To add some opinion - I think it's actually a good thing to have reviewers who are enthusiastic about a certain niche. I know that brings with it the possibility of being overly/unduly positive, but I'd prefer a reviewer who was fond of a certain type of gear rather than predisposed against.
Example: I wouldn't give a new Rolling Stones album to a reviewer who only likes classical music. Beter to someone who already likes the Stones to give me context from that point of view. For Hi Fi gear, I am fine with a vinyl lover discussing a cartridge and not to a analog 'hater.' Same goes for good digital reviews: don't make someone who is predisposed to whine about digital slant a review negatively vis prejudice.
I know this is a double edged swrod. I don't want only cheerleaders for a format, but, in general, I'm OK with entusiasts who stay in their lane, so to speak. As the reader, I can sort it out.
This is a great topic. many good takes already!
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