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This
Months Editorial (Issue 64, March 2009) Roy has also recently developed a listening room with the breadth needed to handle high-end products with true gravitas, which is why one of his first jobs as reviewer is to explore the truly remarkable Focal Grande Utopia EM and the stunning Audio Research Reference CD8 and more this issue. Lucky man! Of course, I also get to play with all the best toys, too. This time, products like the exciting Neodio NR One CD player from France, the sublime mix of Pure Sound A30 amp with Border Patrol power supply and the exciting new (if poorly named) HRT Streamer and Streamer+, that deliver audiophile sound to a whole new audience. Hopefully. And then there’s aural wonderment from AudioSmile, Cairn, Guru, Renaissance and more, all of which have blown away our reviewing team. A change in editor will naturally entail
changes to the magazine, but I’m keen not to shake the tree just
for the sake of making my presence felt. I have intimated my feelings
on Hi-Fi Plus and its future direction on pages four and six of this issue,
but this is just a jumping-off point. I welcome your comments and opinions
about Hi-Fi Plus – good and bad. It’s not possible to please
everyone, and if your dearest wish is that Hi-Fi Plus campaigns to bring
back 8Track, I’m sorry but your dreams are likely to remain unfulfilled.
But maybe, just maybe, together we can build a better magazine. Or at
least one with less cliché. Alan Sircom Contact Alan at editor at hifiplus.com Hi-fi+ has moved! Please note our new numbers
and address! |
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Copyright
of the magazine and site ISSN 1465 5950 |
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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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ADDRESSES
! The Advertising Sales
Office can be contacted at Magazine Design Photography Simon Marsh Website Design, management,
and content management Printed by Distributed by The Legal disclosures |
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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.