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This Months Editorial (Issue 57, March 2008) One of the great things about sharing a stable with a legendary title like The Absolute Sound is that it gives us access to a whole new roster of writers. So it’s an enormous pleasure to welcome our first contribution from Anthony H. Cordesman, one of the most respected and longest standing audio commentators in the USA. With a penchant for leading-edge technology, more than 30-years reviewing equipment, including spells at Stereophile and Audio as well as TAS, has left him with an enviable depth of experience and a uniquely balanced perspective. You can read his views on the EMM Labs CDSA-SE player on page 40. Meanwhile, a rather lower key demonstration than we normally stage, this at the Bristol Show, produced no less staggering results than we’re used to. Aiming to compare the sonic and musical impact of connectors, we employed a mixture of genuine, high-end and high-priced WBT phono plugs and speaker terminals, standard lightweight phono plugs and fake WBT clones from the Far East. The phono plugs were all mounted to Chord Co. Cobra cables, at the same time and by the same person. The speaker terminals were mounted in parallel on the back of a set of Audio Physic Virgo V loudspeakers, as described in my column in this Issue. Ringing the changes we were able to elevate or completely destroy the performance of the demonstration system – and not just in terms of hi-fi performance. Using a simple voice and guitar intro with sparse drum and bass backing, in the worst case, the relationship between the instruments, the vocal phrasing and inflexion, the naturalness of the instruments was completely dismantled, rendered tinny, disjointed, grainy and brittle. I’ll be writing it up in full for the next issue, but for the moment take this on board: don’t under-estimate the influence of even the most prosaic parts of the signal chain. Things are not always as they seem…
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What
hi-fi+ stands for For a start, we don’t just review every new product that we can lay our hands on. So many of them are variations on the previous model, or "inspired" by someone else’s market leader, that if you aren’t careful then you spend all your time trying to make increasingly small differences sound important and exciting.
That context is what tells you whether this product is actually going to work for you if you get it home. The "Best Speaker In The World" award is utterly meaningless if you don’t have the appropriate amplifier to drive it properly! Which is why we tell our reviewers to concentrate on assessing a product in terms of its strengths and weaknesses, providing specific musical examples to illustrate them. You need to know what a product does well (and badly), not whether someone else thinks it’s the best. After all, you wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, no matter what Top Gear said about it. We also send our review copy to manufacturers before publication. That way they can correct any basic errors in either the technical description of the product, or our description of their aims. The result of all this is that you, the reader, get more useful reviews. More useful if you are thinking of an upgrade, because we narrow the field for you, and when you do listen, you’ve got a few pointers to watch out for. And more useful if you’re just keeping abreast of developments, because we separate the really innovative designs from the marketing and advertising hype. Finally, you’ll notice that we provide "desert island" sketches of our reviewers. That’s because they’re people not machines, and pretending that they are all seeing impartial beings is as stupid as it is pretentious. We all have our prejudices, and the name at the top of a review is your only protection against ours. This way, you have a better idea of where our writers are coming from, which once again, makes it easier for you to decide how important their conclusion are to you. I well remember reading the mags when I first got interested in hi-fi, and realising that if a certain reviewer trashed a product, the chances are I’d love it. It all helps. |
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Once
we’ve selected a product we make sure that we send it to a reviewer
who will appreciate its virtues. There’s no point in sending an electrostatic
loudspeaker with limited bass extension to someone who listens to a diet
of Black Sabbath and grunge. In fact, our whole approach is based on making
sure that we’ve got the best out of a product before we start making
judgements, and part of that process is to include the manufacturer or
designer. That way we know what his intentions were and what he was trying
to achieve. We also know what kind of equipment he reckons will get the
best out of his baby, and this is critical. As well as ensuring that we
are achieving the intended results (as well as any others we discover!),
it means that the product’s performance is always placed in an appropriate
context.