seanwee
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2015
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There are many factors that may affect the objectivity of a reviewer. And unless the reviewer always keep these in mind, they will end up with an unobjective review.For the most part, i only heard/see review with different reviewers taste/preference.
But recently it came to my attention, things like facebook reviewers which by the things i read its more of hypeman post or paid review-like ads
Before i get started, keep away from the big commercial reviewing sites like What Hi-Fi if you aren't already. Those reviews are just a waste of time since they gloss over any bad and just review everything as "good" or "not bad". Why? Because a good review gets them clicks and commission from affiliate link purchases. Nobody is going to buy or waste time reading a review if they know the iem/headphone/dap/amp is bad.
The most common and hardest to avoid one is the lack of a reference point. People who have not tried the best of the best wouldn't know what they are missing, what could have been better and so on.
Brain burn in or what people tend to say as subjective preference also plays a huge part as some people may be used to hearing their music with a muddy dark tonality or are used to a sibilant sound that their brains have already tuned out. And when they get introduced an actual natural sounding iem, they won't like it initially. But after some "recalibration" by listening to said natural sounding iem, only then will they realise how skewed their preferences were. Think of it like tuning stockholm syndrome.
Another annoying bias I've seen is that expensive iems are often given special treatment and different wording to describe the same sound. Like how the same overly dark tuning is described as "smooth and relaxed" in expensive iems but "muddy and lacks extension" in cheap iems. Similarly, an excellent tuning is often downplayed or labelled as hype in cheaper iems while given high praise in expensive iems.
I've long since abandoned reviews as a trustable iem buying guide. Even the most trusted reviewers fall into one of the aformentioned traps occasionally. Nowadays good reviews simply tell me what iems i should consider demoing.
Edit: Right, I forgot about boot licking. Long story short, reviewers give biased good reviews because they don't want to burn bridges with a company and stop recieving review units from said company.
It used to be problem with tech reviews as well until they basically unionised and got together collectively boycott a company when said company blacklists a reviewer because they gave a bad review. We've yet to see such a move in the audiophile space yet though.
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