Hey Gene...whatever happened to the commentary part of the voting process?
I agree with this, and I also think that signing up should have been required to vote.
Full disclosure: I'm Adam's brother. I signed up years ago, did some graphs, interacted for a bit, then drifted back into the fog as job disruptions and such kept me away long enough to lose the habit of checking.
Also, shockingly, I voted for Adam, which I admit is nepotism to some extent, but I did so after reading and watching each of the reviews, and I was torn between Adam's and Eugovector's. It's not that I didn't like PBC's - I did, I liked them all - but just that I personally felt it contained a lot of material directly off of SVS's site, where I could have found it anyway, and somewhat less subjective material and opinions, which is what I look for in a review.
To me, I'm wasn't looking for numerical data I could find elsewhere. I was looking to be excited about a possible purchase, and I found more of that reason for excitement in the latter two reviews. Again, it's a personal opinion. Ultimately, as much as I loved the golf club shot, I voted for Adam, not just because he's my brother and still has those pictures of that time, but also because I felt justified in doing so because of the content of the review, the comparisons to his current subwoofer, and so on.
However, I can just as easily see preferring PBC's review
because it contained
exactly the material that swayed me away from it. It's a nice, concise summary and doesn't require multiple web sites to gather it.
I think it's easy to justify a vote for any of them. They're all worthwhile.
To get back to billy p's point, though: I think that requiring at the very least an active membership as opposed to random voting) and even going so far as to require a comment about the vote for such an expensive prize isn't too much to ask. Even if it was a new member whose first and only post read "I voted for ___" without even a reason, at least it would have enabled a bit more transparency. In fact, even if a comment was required but without the vote ("I liked them all and am voting now"), at least there'd be some minimal commitment to the process.
If there were 50,000 votes to process, that would be a bit difficult, although it's not too hard to code around. But here, we're looking at a few hundred total votes.
