Rude and CRAZY Custom Transformer guy....

[clintrubber]

[quote author="JohnRoberts"]then later as a big company with an "un cool" brand association due to success with entry level players.[/quote]
That's a funny coincidence, I'm downloading new samples for an ooold rackmount sampler of that brand - still going strong and people still sharing own-made sample-sets.

If the uncoolness was a problem, why wasn't the range splitted over a few brands ? (like Fender for instance did with their cheaper stuff)
But I don't doubt this has been considered.

Regards,

Peter

 

[pstamler]

I've always had a different take on "good for the money". To me the phrase means that it outshines the other products at that price point. The Real Nice Compressor, the Peavey VMP2 and the Sytek preamps are good examples.

Peace,
Paul

 

[lofi]

agreed. but i very rarely trust a review to be unbiased

 

[okgb]

Paul , i'd call those great for the money ,
but agree with the others

" good for the money "

is usually code for " the drawbacks won't affect some people
so we don't have to say anything negative and still be truthful
[ not have to lie by saying it's great ] because it is a reasonable value

 

[Rossi]

[quote author="pstamler"]I've always had a different take on "good for the money". To me the phrase means that it outshines the other products at that price point. The Real Nice Compressor, the Peavey VMP2 and the Sytek preamps are good examples. [/quote]

I guess that would be excellent for the money. :wink:

As far as advertizing and reviews are concerned: I've been in this business for five years now, and never has anyone from the magazine told me to write a more positive review (and I have been fairly critical at times). Also, if you look more closely, you'll find that half of the stuff we review never had an ad in the first place (of course I can only speak for the magazines I write for). Often enough we review stuff form boutique manufacturers that have no money for placing an ad, and we know it. Apart from that, a lot of the stuff in our magazine is workshops and other stuff that is totally unrelated to any kind of advertizing. For instance I have a 6-page special in the current issue of Sound & Recording, Germany, about building your own re-amping box.

 

[okgb]

I don't know , the American Mags are just too drippy to believe at
times , it may sometimes be a case of " if you don't have anything nice
to say , don't say anything at all "
Some reviews have Pros / Cons and you might say that the shitty
stuff never makes it to market [ we know that's not true ]

Some reviews suggest enhancements and the better ones will have
response from the manufacturer [ which if it is a political sales dance ,
it becomes obvious ] But where money is involved there is judgment
" Is this worth it " which needs to be qualified , but the less you pay ,
the more you tolerate except for marketing has gotten very slick at
upselling to features or downselling to pricepoint making it harder to
decide what you really need , so you read an opinion from someone you
don't know and hope it at least informs you in some way .
Any business including mags need to make a profit in order to stay in business ,
and one could look at it as people simply being positive about
things but " good for the money " is not quite informative , i'd say .

Curious , are you asked to review specific things ? , do you suggest or freeleance reviews on spec ? Do the mags ever turn down or simply
not use your reviews , do the review items more often come from the
manufacturer or brokered through the mag ?

Is your article online ? sounds interesting , regards Greg

 

[JohnRoberts]

[quote author="clintrubber"][quote author="JohnRoberts"]then later as a big company with an "un cool" brand association due to success with entry level players.[/quote]
That's a funny coincidence, I'm downloading new samples for an ooold rackmount sampler of that brand - still going strong and people still sharing own-made sample-sets.

If the uncoolness was a problem, why wasn't the range splitted over a few brands ? (like Fender for instance did with their cheaper stuff)
But I don't doubt this has been considered.

Regards,

Peter[/quote]

I was hired in '85 by Peavey's AMR (recording products) division, a separate company at the time. There were several reasons why the brand was unable to escape the huge shadow of the parent brand.

Ignore the man behind the curtain...

JR

 

[solder_city]

I have installed some peavey amr equipment. it worked very well, anyone who avoided it just because of the brand name stigma was missing out, in my opnion.

 

[Rossi]

[quote author="okgb"]
Curious , are you asked to review specific things?

Is your article online? sounds interesting , regards Greg[/quote]

It works both ways. Sometimes the magazine suggests gear, sometimes I do. Quite often they ask me about gear that I think is worthwhile. As the magazine needs to be an interesting mix of topics, there's always a lot of communication going on between writers and editors about what to order and what not to order. One of the key questions usually is: is it worthwhile? If you ever wondered why there are more positive reviews than negative ones, it's mostly because nobody orders a piece of gear that they think is crap. More often than not you can smell crap. But sometimes you do get stuff that doesn't work as promised and nobody ever told me I can't write this or that. Since reviews are commissioned by the editors, they can't turn them down, either.

I suppose that's the usual modus operandi (all of the magazines I've written for work that way). It's a bit different for workshop articles. I've written a monthly microphone workshop for the past two years or so, and it's always been entirely up to me to come up a topic, as long as it's interesting. Often enough the editors don't even know the topic before I hand in my article. I've handed in some weird articles in the past, for instance a two part article on ribbon mic modification (including winding your own transformer ), and the editors never complained. My current re-amping article is a similar case. Other magazines may work differently. But I like the way things are handled at "my" magazine(s). Because no editor would ever ask a freelance writer to come up with a weird, out-of-the-way article. So the only way to get unique articles is to just trust the writers to come up with interesting stuff, and so far we got lots of positive reader responses for articles like that.

Most of my older articles are available online, but as payed downloads (and in German, of course) via the magazine's website (www.soundandrecording.de). It takes 6 months, I think, before they make articles available online, until then you're supposed to order the back issue in paper form.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I would like to run another data point up the "good for the money" flagpole.

I follow placebo research since this seems to be the ultimate "perceived result from a null stimulus" experiment. The recent trial that I found of interest, was that there was a positive bias to outcome of placebo medication that correlated with the price of the fake medicine... Simply put the patient had higher expectations for more expensive medicine and responded accordingly.

In the world of Hifi, audiophools may likewise be rewarded by their multi thousand dollar speaker wires, in the inner realm of their perception.

I'm not sure how to square this with consumer's obvious attraction to lower prices. Perhaps some form of self hate.. :wink:

JR

 

[Rossi]

I think the reason is: people want to believe. Also, people think in analogies and metaphors instead of trying to understand the thing itself. If a better guitar cable makes a difference (it does), a line or microphone cable must make a differences as well. If a 100 buck cable sounds twice as good as a 10 buck cable, it may not be exactly cheap, but certainly worthwhile. So let's get it. And once you paid 100 bucks for a cable, you're more than willing to hear a difference. Other people did, too. Of course they also paid 100 bucks, and were more than willing to hear a difference. You keep listening until you hear that difference. :roll:

 

[pstamler]

[quote author="lofi"]agreed. but i very rarely trust a review to be unbiased[/quote]

Of course reviews are biased; reviewers are human beings, and we bring our biases to our work. I make it a point to try to be upfront about what my biases are, and try to work around them.

Case in point: I don't like over-bright microphones, and have said so many times in print. A couple of times I've gotten new microphones to review that were, in fact, over-bright, and I stated my bias, saying they weren't my cup of tea. It's important to recognize, however, that not everybody shares my preferences, so I've always added a sentence reading something like, "If you like bright-sounding microphones, then you may find these to your taste." Those aren't weasel words, but a recognition that other people don't always like and dislike the same things I do.

Then there was the pair of microphones I got that were screaming bright (sharp 8dB peak at about 8kHz), but I actually liked them on certain things. It was enough of an anomaly that the editors made a subhead out of it -- something like "Stamler finds bright mics he likes!!!!" In fact, I liked them so much that I bought them, and still use them on a very restricted list of things (bodhrans and guitar amps).

Peace,
Paul

 

[okgb]

And that their "ego's " won't allow this incongruency to proof them
wrong , therefore the more expensive MUST be better
[ otherwise you are stupid and got sucked in which seems more painful
to most than just sucking it up ]
Some manufacturers use this to enhance the product appearence ,
with high retail . Sometimes i believe the doctors & the Lawyer's just
want to show they have the money to throw away by buying it .

Others suffer it when people don't believe something good can be cheap
and ignore .
We know Berhringer uses many of these ideas , attempting
to look like expensive things , just as good when it is only a shell not well
copied [ or bean conted way down ]

 

[bcarso]

I try to hear effects and differences in fringey things and usually cannot. I'm not a diehard skeptic in most areas either. I probably wouldn't make a very good hifi reviewer, from the standpoint of generating lots of copy. I suppose I could fake it, but where's the fun in that?

 

[thermionic]

The no.1 governor for any kind of appraisal of the merits, or lack of, on any piece of audio is your acoustic environment. How on earth can you accurately say that a particular sonic nuance is coming from the hardware and not from the room unless you have a professionally-designed listening room?

How many hi-fi reviewers have Munro-designed listening rooms?

Personally, I find that my perception of any device with regards to its finer details can vary a good deal according to my energy levels; a typical device will sound different when I get up from when I go to bed.

How many hi-fi reviewers have undergone blind listening tests?

Why is it that, considering all the hi-fi magazines I know of review exotic cables (particularly Stereophile – for whom the test was initiated), none of them have stepped forward to take James Randi’s 1-million USD challenge? What have they got to lose?

How many hi-fi reviewers have humidity-controlled, air-conditioned rooms? Again, as we know, temperature and humidity, along with acoustic environment, will swamp the audible differences between one $*0,000 preamp and another.

Have you ever seen 2 people that looked identical, other than twins? What makes anyone think that our auditory mechanisms aren’t as different in terms of the way they translate sonic perception as the way people vary in appearance?

All forms of review, online or paper, should focus on that which is relevant to us all: engineering quality. It’s up to the individual as to whether they like the subjective sound. Unfortunately, people have such a massive choice in the marketplace, subjective reviews tend to be a powerful thing… As the saying goes, ‘life’s unfair’…

I could go on… Some of the engineering slackness I have witnessed in the brands vaunted in the hi-fi press boggles the mind… It’s a social thing in hi-fi: either you're one of the boys or you’re not… If you’re not, you won’t get distribution, so you might as well have a bonfire with your money anyway.

James Randi has 1-million smackers waiting…



Justin

 

[JohnRoberts]

[quote author="thermionic"]

How many hi-fi reviewers have undergone blind listening tests?

Justin[/quote]

And hearing tests, as Brad noted...
------------

Connecting a few dots about brands and reviewing, I recall a recording magazine (EQ) sponsored blind listening test of studio monitors years back using a group of bay area studio types as critical listeners.

AMR (Div of Peavey) had monitors entered into the test that had a switch that altered the crossover for two different voices. These speakers were tested as if they were two different entries.

AFAIK the test was only single blind, and while it was probably a decent room, it's hard to fairly compare a large group of speakers that way, but the punch line of my story is after, when several of the studio types were told they picked a "Peavey" monitor as best, they became upset and withdrew from the test.

I suspect the Peavey monitor would "not" have come in 1st (and 3rd in the other switch position) if it wasn't a blind test. That's just the way our brain works..

Try to balance on one foot with your eyes open and closed. Our brain uses all the data it can get, for better or worse.

JR

 

[bcarso]

[quote author="thermionic"]
Why is it that, considering all the hi-fi magazines I know of review exotic cables (particularly Stereophile – for whom the test was initiated), none of them have stepped forward to take James Randi’s 1-million USD challenge? What have they got to lose?

...

James Randi has 1-million smackers waiting…

Justin[/quote]

Although I'm amything but a cable freak, Mike Fremer did agree to Randi's challenge, and from what I can gather Randi backed out. See a recent Stereophile for Fremer's side of the story.

 

[bcarso]

[quote author="JohnRoberts"]AFAIK the test was only single blind, and while it was probably a decent room, it's hard to fairly compare a large group of speakers that way, but the punch line of my story is after, when several of the studio types were told they picked a "Peavey" monitor as best, they became upset and withdrew from the test.

I suspect the Peavey monitor would "not" have come in 1st (and 3rd in the other switch position) if it wasn't a blind test. That's just the way our brain works..

Try to balance on one foot with your eyes open and closed. Our brain uses all the data it can get, for better or worse.

JR[/quote]

Another funny bit: Toole and Olive conducted some blind versus sighted speaker listening tests. When they reported their results at a convention, Stereophile writers jotted down what they thought they said and reported it in the magazine. The amusing part, which was never acknowledged or corrected, was that they thought the paper said that Harman employees had favored the Harman speakers, once they could see what they were. And the Stereophile item chided our boys for such natural results and (with a hint of scandal) self-serving favoritism.

However, the actual and presented results were that the Harman speakers were NOT favored once the listeners could see what they were! As well, a big Thiel scored much HIGHER when it could be seen, compared to the blind results.

Clearly, even with verbal material, the Stereophile people heard what they wanted to hear :razz:

 

[ghanks]

RIGHT ON JOEL!
I build custom electronics .... sometimes.... My real income is from corporate computing.
Audio is flakey... the people who buy are difficult, the people who supply are difficult, but what do you expect for a business that is based on passion and NOT on business sense or personality.

 

[jackies]

RIGHT ON!

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