[marone]

I see a disturbing cheerleader mentality in all the reviews which are almost all 3.5 stars or greater out of 5.0 stars.

A recent review stated that a pair of NoiseHush i7 were 'sonically lacking but otherwise good'.

Sonically lacking but good?!? Then they ARE NOT GOOD.

I suspect this site is quickly going the route of Stereophile and other magazines who submit to advertiser 'requests' for 'review input'. Given the obviously very profitable nature of this domain and the high traffic levels, this risk of compromise should have been expected.

If something is a piece of junk that sounds terrible, state so in plain language.

"Sonically lacking, but otherwise good..." what a joke!

 

[Radio_head]

Are you referring to the "Head Gear" section?  If so, you should know that anyone (and I mean anyone) can write a "review" for a product there - meaning its not much different than say Amazon reviews though it is more specialized.  This means that some will be helpful and quite decent, some will just be okay, and some will be plain terrible, but blaming the Head Gear section for the quality of the reviews is like blaming the internet for the veracity of its information.
 
As to the trend in ratings, there is a much simpler explanation that doesn't involve conspiracy.  People only bother writing reviews when they either think something is really good or really bad, ambivalent users just don't care enough to write one.  Since this website is full of somewhat informed consumers, they end up not picking the absolute dreck in the first place.  This leaves most users writing about how much they like something.  They can also only write from their experiences at the time - so many new users may not have experience with everything, but from what they have tried they may rate something 5 stars.  Relative to what they have heard, it deserves it.  Relative to everything that's out there, probably not.  
 
There are probably some shill reviews on the head gear section.  The obvious ones get reported and removed, the ones with no proof of any shilling or affiliation are impossible to do anything about.  Rule of thumb is if there's only one review and its glowing, maybe wait for a few more to come along and see if things balance out.
 
I have found the info on the general forums to be more helpful than the Head Gear section as reviews tend to be stagnant, a snapshot frozen in time of how one user viewed one product at one moment in time.  Forum threads tend to evolve and go in all sorts of directions and take on a kind of organic growth of their own and one can see the genesis of thought concerning a certain product or pairing.  The flip side is that theres a lot of tangential information to wade through on threads.