The Credibility Crisis in Equipment Reviewing (Vol.1, No.5: Winter 1977/78)

All sorts of publications are reviewing audio equipment, but on whose review would you confidently stake a four-figure buying decision? We discuss some criteria, perspectives, caveats, and consequences.

Our sequential numbering of topics is continued here merely for easy reference, with out any suggestion of a strict serial relationship to previous articles.

When we started The Audio Critic early in 1977, we had something fairly simple in mind. We felt there was room for an audio publication that would combine the laboratory disciplines and editorial professionalism of the hi-fi slicks with the golden-ear hypercriticism and commercial independence of the "undergrounds." After five issues we have a totally different perspective.

Today we see the entire process of consumer communications in audio, from both commercial and noncommercial sources, in the midst of a credibility crisis, and we see ourselves not so much as the providers of a worthwhile "second opinion" but rather as the only confident and habitual defenders of reality--i.e., the laws of nature and the evidence of comparative testing-outside the professional journals. (Always excepting Richard C. Heyser, who on rare occasions visits the commercial hi-fi press from his faraway observatory of ultimate realities.)

The credibility crisis exists in two more 21 or less independent areas, which nevertheless overlap in the most fundamental sense:

(1) technical background information and (2) reference values in critical listening. Both of these qualify as national disaster areas.

The first is the result of the utter comfort that both makers and reviewers of audio equipment seem to take in the most superficial pop tech assumptions and generalizations, thereby preventing the ordinary consumer from ever coming face to face with the basic, first-year physics facts of life.

For example: What commercial or non commercial audio publication has ever made reference to the fact that there exists an attainable mathematical optimum in woofer design and that nearly all woofer designers are ignoring it? Or that there exists only one mathematically correct number defining the maximum dB's of feedback allowable in a given amplifier circuit and that nearly all amplifiers exceed it? Or that the most common RIAA equalization network used in preamplifiers can't possibly be 100% accurate, even with tight-tolerance resistors and capacitors? We don't see how anyone can review audio equipment, even for a nontechnical audience, without the support of this kind of specific background information, but of course there's no sign of it anywhere in print.

As for reference criteria in listening tests, how many regularly published reviewers religiously align their cartridges and tone arms for optimum lateral and vertical tracking geometry? None that we know of. And if they don't, how do they presume to arrive at a valid opinion about the sonic character of any piece of equipment through which their degraded reference signal passes? And how many re viewers use a reference speaker that can repro duce pulses of various widths with a semblance of accuracy? We suspect that the vast majority of audio practitioners, whether on the manufacturing or the reviewing end, have never really experienced the startling clarity of a system with optimized time-domain characteristics from stylus tip to speaker diaphragm.

Seasoned audio people who visit our sound room are invariably astonished, although we don't do anything there that they themselves couldn't duplicate if they ordered their priorities as we do. (Which is, of course, where the information crisis meets the listening crisis.)

An inevitable consequence of our departures from conventional testing and reviewing is that we need time-more time than we had anticipated before we published our first issue. (Though not as much time as others appear to need to cover far less ground-but we've been through that before.) Think about it. When the commercial magazines receive a piece of equipment for testing, they weigh it, count its knobs, measure its frequency response, and you know the rest.

When the "undergrounds" get one, they listen to it-with their tone arms aligned according to the incorrect instructions that came in the box and everything else similarly shipshape- and find that the upper midrange is whitish and the lower highs insufficiently liquid. Com pare either approach with what you've seen in our speaker survey, for example, and you'll begin to understand why our originally projected bimonthly schedule didn't quite work out. It takes two experienced people a full working day-sometimes even two days-just to analyze one speaker in the lab, and that doesn't include the endless listening evaluations, the write-ups and the editorial work.

Mind you, we're not complaining. We like it this way. We'd rather publish six credible issues in seventeen months than six question able ones in twelve. But every once in a while we get a letter suggesting that somehow we're perversely withholding information that we should have spewed out in print months ago.

We'd hate to think that these letter writers would actually be happier with whitish-and liquid every two months, like clockwork . . .

Speaking of credibility, the oldest of 23 the "underground" audiophile reviews has gone 100% commercial. In addition to hi-fi store advertising, which we never thought was entirely non-corruptive to begin with, it now also runs manufacturers' advertising. And, guess what, all the manufacturers who have an ad in the latest issue are doing very well, thank you, in the "Recommended" listings! In the same issue, the editor takes a rather aggressive swipe at The Audio Critic-not by name, but by specific reference to the views expressed under topic 13 in our editorial series, so it might just as well have been by name.

He observes that we foolishly (foot-in-mouth is the friendly image he uses) discriminate between ''accuracy" and ''musicality." It's easy enough to go back to topic 13 and prove that we were saying just the opposite-that inaccuracy may try to masquerade as musicality but in the end will always be musically bested by accuracy-but the editor's reading disability isn't our concern here. What we find remarkable is that a publication with a triple credibility gap-namely, manufacturers' advertising, lack of realistic technical ration ales, and time-smeared reference material via "Recommended" moving-magnet cartridges- should take it upon itself to challenge the credibility of The Audio Critic.

They say that the right enemies are just as much a sign of success as the right friends.

If that's really true, we've arrived.

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[adapted from TAC]

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Also see:

Records & Recording: Less Is More, By Max Wilcox

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines