"White Swan" wrote in message
om...

Part of what inspired this question is there is a gentleman on another
board whose stated ambition is to become a gear reviewer. But he has
already announced that he will never post a negative review, as that
would discourage gear manufacturers from sending him gear to audition.
If he doesn't like a piece of gear, he simply won't review it.
Further, he says that almost all other reviewers do much the same
thing.


I seek reviews for an honest opinion. (If all I wanted was ad copy, I'd read
advertisements.)

If a reviewer refuses to write something negative -- especially because it would
prevent the reviewer from obtaining gear -- it serves to affect the integrity of
the reviewer's opinions. Why in the world would I waste my time reading
something so affected? I'd be safer reading the user comments on Harmony
Central.

Also, if a manufacturer refuses to hand over gear to a reviewer who calls 'em as
he sees 'em, but instead gravitates to the ass-kissers, I have to conclude the
manufacturer lacks the belief in his own product, and probably suffers from the
same integrity problem as the reviewer (birds of a feather and all that.) I
don't care to do business with a company like that.

Maybe I'm alone in that thinking, but it works for me.

If you haven't already, read through this thread: http://tinyurl.com/x1we

John

On Sat, 29 Nov 2003 21:55:56 -0600, "John LeBlanc"
wrote:
I seek reviews for an honest opinion. (If all I wanted was ad copy, I'd read
advertisements.)If a reviewer refuses to write something negative -- especially because it would
prevent the reviewer from obtaining gear -- it serves to affect the integrity of
the reviewer's opinions. Why in the world would I waste my time reading
something so affected?

Just got the January 2004 Car and Driver magazine. It has two serious
examples of this. They test both a BMW 5 series car, and the BMW X3
SUV. They pretty seriously panned both of them.

BMW is a big advertiser.

Clearly Car and Driver has the power to be straight with reviews.

It is rare to see such bluntly negative language in "pro audio"
magazines, but then they don't have four million subscribers.
The Pro Audio reviews are usually more nuanced when they
dislike something, but you can always tell. When they say
"if you are looking for a cheap Shanghai mic, you should consider the
XYZ model 123" you can take that as a hint.


Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/prc/

John LeBlanc wrote:

Also, if a manufacturer refuses to hand over gear to a reviewer who calls 'em as
he sees 'em, but instead gravitates to the ass-kissers, I have to conclude the
manufacturer lacks the belief in his own product, and probably suffers from the
same integrity problem as the reviewer (birds of a feather and all that.) I
don't care to do business with a company like that.

A couple years ago, I did an article in which I discussed all of the various
mastering tapes available from Quantegy, Emtec, Maxell, and Zonal, and how
they sounded and what the numbers on them looked like.

I talked about how much I liked BASF 468, but that dealing with the importer
was "a trip to voicemail hell." The importer was incensed, and pulled all
advertising from the magazine and kept it pulled too.

Now that they aren't in business any more I can mention this. But I gather
this is not an uncommon reaction to this sort of thing, and magazines today
rely primarily on advertising for their income.

Most of the bigger magazines in the audio industry, like Mix, EQ, and PAR,
are freebies that rely almost entirely on advertising for their income.
This makes it even worse.

So, there is a perception that advertising may get pulled if you do a
negative review. On the other hand, I recently did a negative review of
a microphone and the vendor called me to thank me for actually taking
it apart and doing plots on it because they didn't have the facility to do
that sort of measurement...
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

In Article ,
(White Swan) wrote:
So what DO you guys do when you get something that you think is kind
of crappy? How do you handle it?



1. Contact the mfgr to discuss the problem(s). Maybe I got sent a bad piece,
maybe they goofed. If I listed all of these, I'd be kicked ouot of the group
for making overly long postings. Design and manufacturing is a VERY
difficult process. Most folks have no idea how much energy and money goes
into it. In the heat of it, things get overlooked.

2. Mention, but not dwell on the problem(s).

3. Use to "For the Price" in front of everything, provided it's cheap.

Regards,

Ty Ford


**Until the worm goes away, I have put "not" in front of my email address.
Please remove it if you want to email me directly.
For Ty Ford V/O demos, audio services and equipment reviews,
click on http://www.jagunet.com/~tford

In Article m, "Pat
Farrell" wrote:
On Sat, 29 Nov 2003 21:55:56 -0600, "John LeBlanc"
wrote:
I seek reviews for an honest opinion. (If all I wanted was ad copy, I'd read
advertisements.)If a reviewer refuses to write something negative --
especially because it would
prevent the reviewer from obtaining gear -- it serves to affect the integrity
of
the reviewer's opinions. Why in the world would I waste my time reading
something so affected?

Just got the January 2004 Car and Driver magazine. It has two serious
examples of this. They test both a BMW 5 series car, and the BMW X3
SUV. They pretty seriously panned both of them.

BMW is a big advertiser.

Clearly Car and Driver has the power to be straight with reviews.

It is rare to see such bluntly negative language in "pro audio"
magazines, but then they don't have four million subscribers.
The Pro Audio reviews are usually more nuanced when they
dislike something, but you can always tell. When they say
"if you are looking for a cheap Shanghai mic, you should consider the
XYZ model 123" you can take that as a hint.


Good point Pat. The question you need to ask is "Where's the money?" Is Car
& Driver a subscription-based magazine, or do they send it to readers for
free and get paid by ads?

Regards,

Ty Ford

**Until the worm goes away, I have put "not" in front of my email address.
Please remove it if you want to email me directly.
For Ty Ford V/O demos, audio services and equipment reviews,
click on http://www.jagunet.com/~tford

In Article ,
(White Swan) wrote:
Hi All!

So what DO you guys do when you get something that you think is kind
of crappy? How do you handle it?

After reading Mike's thoughts, I'll add that I have grown relationships with
some companies to the extent that they reach out to me BEFORE the review
process to put an ear on something for a price. It's sort of a shakedown
cruise by a new set of ears.

That process, itself, has resulted in a number of improvements before the
piece actually gets to market. I think more companies should do this. I
understand that after all the infighting between design and marketing teams
that the LAST thing they sometimes want is some outsiders opinion, but
that's just frustratiion talking.

Regards,

Ty Ford

**Until the worm goes away, I have put "not" in front of my email address.
Please remove it if you want to email me directly.
For Ty Ford V/O demos, audio services and equipment reviews,
click on http://www.jagunet.com/~tford

White Swan wrote:

Part of what inspired this question is there is a gentleman on another
board whose stated ambition is to become a gear reviewer. But he has
already announced that he will never post a negative review, as that
would discourage gear manufacturers from sending him gear to audition.

Years ago the Whole Earth Catalog folks put out a little mag about
computers and software, wherein they reviewed apps, etc. They stated up
front that we would see no negative reviews because there was no point
in taking the time to even finish a review if the DUR was essentially
useless. They budgeted their time for the good stuff and said forget the
rest.

But, that rag wasn't driven by fancy ad campaigns, and in fact, didn't
survive many issues. I missed it right away becuase it had a
straightforward approach to basics, starrting with binary math.

--
ha

On Sun, 30 Nov 03 17:03:31 GMT, (Ty Ford) wrote:

In Article m, "Pat
Farrell" wrote:
BMW is a big advertiser.
Clearly Car and Driver has the power to be straight with reviews.
Good point Pat. The question you need to ask is "Where's the money?" Is Car
& Driver a subscription-based magazine, or do they send it to readers for
free and get paid by ads?

Car and Driver is what is called a "buff book" in that fans of the
topic support it with subscriptions. In contrast to "trade books"
that are given away free to folks in the trades, no significant
subscription fees. Clearly Mix, EQ, TapeOp, and others
in this field are trade books.

I'm not current on magazine economics, but I know that in
newspapers, the subscriptions and newstand sales cover
about the cost of newsprint and ink. In other words,
with out the ads, there would be nothing to pay the editors,
writers, pressmen, deliverymen, photographers, etc.

I bet that even Car and Driver has to have the advertisers.
And BMW loved all the past articles where the editors loved
their cars.

The key to remember is that nearly all media is not in the business
of delivering stories to readers. They are in the business of
delivering readers' eyeballs to advertizers' ads.

Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/prc/

In article writes:

After reading Mike's thoughts, I'll add that I have grown relationships with
some companies to the extent that they reach out to me BEFORE the review
process to put an ear on something for a price. It's sort of a shakedown
cruise by a new set of ears.

That process, itself, has resulted in a number of improvements before the
piece actually gets to market. I think more companies should do this.

While I was at Mackie, although I wasn't on the design team, I had
equipment in my hands before it went to market, found bugs, just plain
screwy stuff, and had suggestions for improvement. Sometimes they
listened to me, but most of the time it was already too late to make
those changes before shipping.

Today just about every software manufacturer puts out their product
for evaluation by real world users before it's ready for market. The
only problem is that they sell it to those testers, sometimes called
"customers."

Of course there's a certain amount of beta and post-beta testing, but
this, more often than not with the exception of some pretty small
companies, is pretty close to the company, either entirely in-house or
with a small group of people who they know.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

I really appreciate the thoughtful and detailed responses, which gave
me exactly the information i was looking for. I hope everyone
understands that I was not trying to bait the reviewers here, or put
down anyone's work. I have a lot of respect for the service they
provide, and i hope i didn't come across as confrontational, which was
not my intent. I just had some questions about the the finer nuances,
particularly how the reviewing process in pro audio can differ from
other fields.

Thanks especially to Mike Rivers, who addressed a lot of my specific
areas of interest.

"White Swan" wrote in message
om...

Thanks especially to Mike Rivers, who addressed a lot of my specific
areas of interest.

That's why I let Mike field the question...

--
Dave Martin
Java Jive Studio
Nashville, TN
www.javajivestudio.com