Quote:
Originally Posted by
buzzy_ 
Keep thinking and reading, you'll get it eventually.BTW, lots of the Stereophile reviews of budget speakers compare them to other speakers. Just a hint, when they say one speaker is better than another one, it's a subtle way of saying the 'nother one is not as good.
IMO, the way to read Stereophile to best extract all of the relevant information out of a given issue (I've subscribed since the late 1990s, with about three years interlude as I was living abroad) is as follows:
Read Prof. Rubinson's "Music in the Round," especially his music reviews, closely, and also read the other music reviews in their entirety.
Look at the measurements for the loudspeakers (particularly the horizontal off-axis plot - of the speakers I've heard that have been measured by Stereophile or another source with good measurement procedures, that has the highest correlation with my subjective impressions; anything with an off-axis flare in the midrange due to inept tweeter/midrange directivity matching is going to sound bad to me - and the last line of JA's comments on the measurements. On speakers that are actually excellent (e.g. KEF Reference, Revel Ultima) he will say so forthrightly. On speakers that are less excellent than the best-of-current breed (speakers such as KEF Reference and Revel Ultima) there will be subtle caveats. Sometimes, as with a recent budget speaker (Energy something?) he will straight out say that others are more neutral. (Though one may of course prefer the less neutral speaker!)
Ignore the rest. Much of it will just make a sensible person angry anyway...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Venomous
Audioholics was on a good track and fell off somewhere. But there is definitely room in this arena for someone to step up.
Audioholics has some great content. They were notably bolder and more honest in their comments about Lexicon's Oppo BDP-83 re-clad than, say, Prof. Rubinson was. And Josh Ricci's sub reviews are the best in the business. The main problem with Audioholics is that Gene has a huge conflict of interest with RBH or whatever that speaker company is called. I don't know if it's a pecuniary interest, or merely that he's good friends with that firm's proprietors. But whatever the tie is, it colors his judgement. Any review of that company's products should be ignored. And they should really step up and offer a disclosure about what the conflict of interest actually is at the front of each review.
Note, for instance, that of the recent subwoofer measurements, the only ones NOT done by Josh Ricci were of an Emptek unit 2x10" unit that shipped with different-DCR voicecoils in each unit! Emptek is a subsidiary of this RDH or whatever company.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Venomous
When a pos home theater in a box gets a glowing review, you know there is something wrong.
One shouldn't necessarily exclude the possibility than an HTIB could be quite good. I've never heard/seen one that is, but given how cheap sonically transparent electronics are in quantity, I wouldn't be surprised if a big firm with a good loudspeaker engineer could make a better HTIB for $2000 than any of us could assemble from component parts for considerably more money.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
MikeBiker
Video games differ greatly from one game to another. Speakers ( at a given price point) don't really have lots of differences. Some speakers will not compare well with others, but the difference is not as great as between video games.
I don't know anything about video games, but price point and sound of loudspeakers are weakly correlated at best. And two different speakers can and often do sound drastically different from one another. Consider, for instance, a speaker based on a Lowther drive unit in a backloaded horn with no crossover, a Bose 901, a Martin Logan electrostatic hybrid, and a Revel Ultima Salon/2.
