gene said:
We don't consider purchasing speakers with our own money from a store just so we can do a review on them since the company doesn't want us to, a good idea. We don't have interest in giving a company free press when they made it clear they don't want to work with us. Thanks.
Hmm, well here's a dicotomy here. If the idea for reviews is to "advertise for them," then the review will be impartial, and readers are forced to read through the lines because if you give a objective/non-positive review, you won't get more review samples later (aka stereophile and John Atkinson's healthy endorsement of "anything" that comes through his door; the last paragraph is the most important in all stereophile reviews--"They show great engineering and were great speakers better than many worth two or three times more, EXCEPT I perferred not to see "insert frequency response variations, cabinet resonance, poor spectral decay, weak voice coils lending to a thin sound at high volumes, etc).
If you do review based on products you buy (and return; which might cost less than return shipping to the vendor), then you can give objective reviews without fear; aka, it's an "owners review."
With the prior, the readers basically read a review that's identical to any/every other speaker, and have to scour 1 or 2 sentences in a 2-3 page review in very nebulous terms that actually describes the speakers shortcomings, and even then those sentences are all dressed up in nice-talk. With the later we can get an objective review.
If Audioholics gives objective reviews and relies on vendors to provide samples, then very soon they (ALL) will get smart and refuse. This would hurt Audioholics ability to get review samples and for the readers to benefit. For one thing, nobody else does speaker shootouts like Audioholics--I think these are the "real" reviews, because you get to compare to real products, rather than see two pages of "listener reviews" with various CDs (that are different for every speaker you review, thus no objective comparison; and lacking objective references, when is a speaker ever "bad" sounding?) or the often nebulous "it's a great speaker, certain shortfalls, but understandable for its price, and also, it's better than products 2 and 3 times its price"...well every speaker falls into that category; you can just use Bose or some other extremely low price/performance speaker as your unnamed "more expensive product.
Anyway, sorry if I offended anyone, I just let go of my mind online alot, so feel free to criticize what I have to say; it's fair game.
