Matt, what did you do when the speaker was average or sounded worse than gear you would use? It's always interesting how different reviewers handle this.
You can be the best reviewer in the world but if it's not generating income the process soon comes to a stop. It's hard to find a model where poor reviews dramatically increase reviewer income. There's the conflict of interest that causes many speakers to get a decent review even when the reviewer would never buy them personally.
I certainly see what you’re saying about the problem of a business model and too many bad reviews. I think to me that’s the type of balance a publisher or editor has to worry about. So it’s a legitimate issue, of course.
But I guess I’m saying in my experience that kind of stuff is not top of mind to the person writing reviews (unless perhaps they are publishing their own magazine?).
And I guess all this is going to vary among publications and among individual reviewers.
In my case, I didn’t have to deal with reviewing stuff I didn’t like. I was cherry picking speakers that I’d had some good listing time with and which had characteristics I clearly thought were terrific.
So I was thinking: “ I really want to tell you about this speaker I’ve heard, why I think it’s special and stuck out from among many others I auditioned, and I’ll do my best to describe it warts and all.”
I already knew that I found plenty to like in the gear I was going to review. And frankly, I probably wouldn’t have done it if it involved just being shoved gear I didn’t care for.
And a lot of reviewers seem to work in a similar way. Very often they are reviewing gear that had impressed them elsewhere, and that’s why they chose to review it. There’s a lot of “ why would I bother wasting a lot of my life writing about gear I think sounds poor, when I can choose the gear that I’m actually excited about and that I want to tell other people about?”
I think that type of self-selection bias really does account for many of the positive reviews.
On the other hand, there are reviewers who work for large magazines, and they not only choose some gear to review on their own, but they are also sent some gear to review by the editor. So sometimes they have to review gear they didn’t hand select.
I personally wouldn’t be good at this, or at least I wouldn’t enjoy it. As much as I love listening to different systems, I am incredibly picky about which systems actually make me wanna sit and listen for a long time. It’s actually somewhat rare frankly. So plenty of speakers for which I’d have a hard time raising some enthusiasm.
In contrast, one of my buddies who is a reviewer is well suited for that type of scenario. He both selects gear he wants to review, but he’s also sometimes sent gear to review. And he is way more open and easy about the range of gear he can enjoy.
So I’ve heard just about every loudspeaker he has reviewed at his place. We virtually always agree on how the loudspeaker sounds. But we often enough differ on how much we like it. I’m looking for very specific qualities that I like which limits the number of speakers I truly could have lived with, but he is able to totally get into a wider range of different sound presentations. So I find his descriptions are generally quite accurate from what I’ve heard, and enthusiasm in his reviews comes quite honestly. (and I know that he’s never been told by his publisher that he needs to write a positive review)
As I say, I think our individual feelings about these issues are going to be highly influenced by our own personal experiences.
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