At the upper end of the market, more and more customers will deal more closely with the manufacturers of the products they buy; more and more manufacturers will become increasingly involved in the installation and set up of their products; more and more often, the both manufacturers and customers will call on the experience and expertise of the emerging class of independent, set up specialists. It’s a whole new way of building a system, with a redistributed cost structure and responsibilities – but it’s also a sure route to significantly better sound.
“I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality.”
In the same way, the process and purpose of audio reviews has been exposed. With so many products it is simply impossible for any magazine or reviewer to cover them all – even if the manufacturers were willing to allow it. The old premise that reviews rank products or tell you what to buy is – or should be – thoroughly discredited. No review or reviewer is omniscient or disinterested. Instead, a review can offer an (hopefully) informed opinion and report on experience of a given product. It can tell you about a product’s strengths, weaknesses, practical attributes and the necessary steps and system requirements to realise its potential performance. Once those more ambitions are understood, reviews and reviewers can start to occupy their proper place in the great scheme of things – commentator rather than self-appointed judge, jury and executioner. Reviews migrating online doesn’t guarantee that happening – and there are plenty of online writers with a misplaced sense of self-importance or authority; and plenty of online publications with no proper editorial control. But free access at least allows readers to establish their own sense of a review(er)’s relevance to them – and the more they write, the more apparent their capabilities become.
When high-end audio stopped being a hobby and became an industry, at least for those in the upper echelons of manufacturing, it ceased being about the pursuit of performance and became about the pursuit of money, creating a dichotomy between those making equipment and those buying it – a dichotomy that manufacturers and most magazines pretend doesn’t exist. Of course we’re all one happy family seeking audio excellence… Yet, Covid and the cracks that have appeared in that happy façade have brutally exposed the reality, the failure of the established players to significantly advance performance. As one seasoned observer remarked recently, most customers have no problem with (and understand the value to them of) a manufacturer making money – as long as that manufacturer’s products actually deliver the promised performance. If they don’t, then that manufacturer is increasingly (and rightly) dismissed as a shyster selling over-dressed and over-priced rubbish.
“…a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Moving forward, a more realistic and transparent approach to audio publishing is not just a possibility, it’s essential if the industry is to develop and survive, to identify the worthwhile and expose or at least ignore the unworthy. The value of any review depends not just on the process and reviewer that generated it, but on the process behind its publication. Audio is still a hobby and a large part of any hobby is the exchange of views and opinions, experiences and practice. The more we understand how reviews appear, the more we will be able to gauge their value – and the more resilient they will be to interference and manipulation. The issue here isn’t the loan of equipment to reviewers. It’s the latent threat of its removal. The issue isn’t advertising per se – it’s the threat of its cancelation. Increased transparency means increasingly responsible behaviour and that should be the goal.
