Nicely put, thanks.

Kal


On 09 Dec 2004 16:55:20 GMT, (Bruce J. Richman)
wrote:
I suspect there are several reasons for the reviewers not listening to the
"latest, greatest" artists. One of these may well be generational, i.e.
reviewers older and often with musical tastes reflecting a different set of
values to some extent than that of younger viewers. Anoither might well be
that the reviewers try to pick recordings that they think are exceptionally
well produced, have outstanding sonics, and/or are considered to be "audiophile
standards" in the sense that a lot of hobbyists might own them because of both
performance and artistic merits. In the latter category, for example, might be
some of the Harry James direct-to-disc recordings long considered outstanding
soundwise - and of course, available in either LP or CD form. It is also not
uncommon to see RCA Living Stereo classical recordings included on a reviewers
list of favorites simply because some readers like classical music and might
want to get an idea of how a reviewer thinks a paritcular piece of gear
performs with a "state-of-the-art" classical recording (I think Telarc CDs are
often cited for the same reason with classical music).

Finally, and this may be obvious to some, the reviewers - at least the better
ones - have to provide test recordings that provide meaningrul reviews of
specific types of musical reproduction, eg. percussio, bottom 2 octave
response, male & female vocals, ability to handle large-scale symphonic
productions, transient response, etc. I seem to vaguely remember a number of
years ago that the long-defunct magazine, High Fidelity, once ran an
informative article in which the writer listed a number of recordings useful
for testing a number of different aspects of performance of speakers and other
parts of an audio system. The goal was to provide hobbyists with some sort of
standard set of reference records that they could use when evaluating
components. I'd like to see one of the major audiophile magazines write a
similar article today.


Bruce J. Richman