[fjhuerta]

Preface.

I bought a set of $500 Primo8 by Nuforce, because of reviews posted here, and other places.

They absolutely SUCK to the nth degree.

I also bought a set of Quad Drivers from 1More, and some Dunu Titans. I've been positively underwhelmed by their sound.

I remember a time when Headwize and Head-Fi were full of knowledgeable people who knew what good sounding audio was.

I fear marketing, and a lack of what proper hi-fi sounds like, has made people think "hi-fi" means "Primo8" and "1More", when it should mean "Dr. Sean Olive", "AKG", "Sennheiser HD-600", etc.

As I type this, I'm listening to the Primo 8s, and I'm absolutely horrified that anyone could think this is what good sounding audio is. They are, quite simply, the worst in ears I've ever tried. This includes $5 Wal Mart bargain bin units.

My point - paid audio reviewers, who get "freebies" in exchange for postive reviews, and paid content sites, have ruined this hobby with inaccurate and heavily biased reviews.

Opinions? This is my original review on the Primo8's:

----
Lately, I've been reading praise after praise heaped upon pieces of garbage here that don't deserve any accolades at all.

It's here, and it's everywhere. And they are always prefaced by "I got these from the manufacturer in exchange for an unbiased review..."

Ha. Bull.

Why do you think these guys keep receiving free stuff? Because they say things like they are? Or because they have a following, and manufacturers know that unsuspecting people will eventually buy their crap? I'll give you one chance to answer that question.

The fact is, I've been following the headphone scene for quite a while (22+ years). While at the beginning people were pretty honest about their reviews (having bought their stuff with their own hard earned cash), now manufacturers have realized its far easier to buy a couple of good reviews (from most of the usual sites - except, say, Innerfidelity- ) and a couple of reviewers, who post amazingly good things about pieces of crap.

These are a piece of crap. These are the worst in -ears I've ever listened to . These are $500 in ears. These sound worse than my $10 Samsung in ears. These are awful.

People in these reviews say "they are a hard earphone to get into", but that "in the long run, they shine" or whatever. What a bunch of lies. These sound awful, and the more you listen to them, the more you get used to listen to crap, and think these are listenable. They are not. They are simply, stunningly awful.

No highs. No lows. Weird midrange. Colorations everywhere. They are so incredibly bad I can't even imagine where to start.

This is what happens when marketing people control reviewers and gullible people (including me) on the Internet.

Save your money, and get a real in-ear, with real R&D behind them. Etymotic ER-4SR's. iSine 10's. AKG N20s. Each one far cheaper, and incredibly better performing. If you want to have an idea of how these sounds, buy a $5 in ear at Wal-mart. And no, I'm not kidding.

Not even worth $10.

 

[Niouke]

TBH I'm not reading any reviews anymore. People comparing the sound coloration of perfectly flat DAP's makes me want to puke.

I wonder what you don't like about the quad drivers, I have the Triple and I think they have good value?

 

[fjhuerta]

TBH I'm not reading any reviews anymore. People comparing the sound coloration of perfectly flat DAP's makes me want to puke.

I wonder what you don't like about the quad drivers, I have the Triple and I think they have good value?

The Quads are nowhere near what a $220+ in ear should sound like. The AKG N20's smoke them, and they are $80+

I did own the Triple Drivers, and thought they were OK for their price. I actually liked them more than the Quads.

 

[magicalmouse]

Interesting post, i think that any reviews need to be approached with caution, it is very easy for the reviewer to be caught up with the excitement of a new toy and i consider it erroneous to suggest the idea that 'night and day' differences exist to the extent maintained in some comments on this forum, it is often flavour of the month and often driven by commercial pressures and by the fact that if you have paid for something you are likely to consider it good simply because it cost you and you are unwilling to admit to a mistake.

My personal experience after having hifi systems since the late 1960's - my first headphones were the original stax system which i fondly recall as being bass light but i enjoyed them in their day. - is that comparable headphones/daps/dacs/amplifiers may have differing flavours for example my se535 sound very different from my etymotic er4rx but neither is 'better' just different. Obviously price does matter to some extent but i am unwilling to believe that £1000+ iems sound better than the ones i have to the degree that the price suggests, i remember when hd600/650 were the best obtainable and to my mind still are superb (with a valve/hybrid) headphone amplifier and i still enjoy them more than my oppo pm3/hifiman 400s for most music especially vinyl.

Initial enthusiasm for the new eventually gives way to a more considered perspective but this very rarely appears in reviews or comments.

 

[bigshot]

I don't think it has anything to do with getting free swag. I see plenty of off the wall reviews from people who paid full retail for their equipment. The problem is that a very low standard has been established for online reviews. Anyone can review anything. Some people know what they're talking about, some people make stuff up. You can usually parse the good from the bad by looking for critiques of specific aspects of sound. If you see a lot of vague, flowery language, you know you're dealing with a lousy review. The thing that is harder to parse out is validation bias. People tend to want to validate their buying decisions to convince themselves that they've made the best choice possible. That is one of the most powerful forms of bias, and it drives most online reviews.

 

[amirm]

My point - paid audio reviewers, who get "freebies" in exchange for postive reviews, and paid content sites, have ruined this hobby with inaccurate and heavily biased reviews.

Indeed. I was at RMAF audio show last year and approached a few DAC manufacturers to get loaner gear to review. I told them my reviews would be objective and include measurements. The response? "What's in it for me?" I said if your product is as well engineered as you say, it should do well and I will praise it. Folks just walked away! No interest at all in having any review that is different than subjectivists flowery stuff.

So my path now is to either purchase the gear myself or have the community loan the equipment for me to review and measure. This is working spectacularly well with a huge backlog of equipment to critically review! Over time I hope there is a lot more unbiased, engineering oriented evaluation of audio gear, especially at the lower end of the scale in cost (< $1000).

 

[taffy2207]

Oh this again, joy.

I don't trust reviewers and I don't trust reviews. Reviewers won't even acknowledge that they are freebies on here most of the time merely that they are loaners that they will never give back. Hysterical. They are nothing more than a clique. They post endless photos of their equipment littering up threads showing off. Zzzz....

I trust balanced views from the core of the community in the threads on here. Truth, for me, lies in the consensus of opinions of owners who have owned their toys for a while and gone through several firmware updates. Reviewers on here are pretty much self serving, they don't serve the community. Pretty much every day it's 4 and 5 star reviews which helps them and the businesses. It doesn't help anyone else if everything is rated highly.

It's been brought up before, the rampant consumerism that is head-fi will still chug along no matter what we do or say.

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/how-can-i-trust-head-fi-reviews.744389/page-8

Reviewers rate highly > More equipment received for reviews > more higher value equipment received for reviews.

 

[colonelkernel8]

I don't think it has anything to do with getting free swag. I see plenty of off the wall reviews from people who paid full retail for their equipment. The problem is that a very low standard has been established for online reviews. Anyone can review anything. Some people know what they're talking about, some people make stuff up. You can usually parse the good from the bad by looking for critiques of specific aspects of sound. If you see a lot of vague, flowery language, you know you're dealing with a lousy review. The thing that is harder to parse out is validation bias. People tend to want to validate their buying decisions to convince themselves that they've made the best choice possible. That is one of the most powerful forms of bias, and it drives most online reviews.

If someone refers to the "musicality" of any product, they're hacks. This is my personal rule for reviews of audio equipment.

 

[bigshot]

My biggest complaint about reviews is that they tend to critique in the abstract. What I mean by that is they will judge based on criteria that supposedly is a benchmark for quality, but there's no context for how a piece of equipment is going to be used. For instance, an inexpensive portable DAC or DAP will be judged to the same standards as a standalone home DAC or player. But portable equipment is used entirely different than home equipment. Instead of focusing on how a portable performs in the field- things like "is the screen readable in full daylight?" or "how many times do you have to push buttons to perform some function?", they get caught up in irrelevant issues. The fact is, sound quality is rarely audibly different in digital audio. The thing that *is* different is the user interface and convenience of use. But that gets short shrift because audiophools love numbers and diagrams more than elegant solutions to a problem.

It's also entirely possible that a piece of equipment that is totally unfit for one application is the perfect fit for a different use. There's no one-size-fits-all criteria for judging. The reviewer should be looking at it as a tool for a particular purpose and getting that across, not just saying "this one measures better than that one".

That said, I see people creating incredibly inefficient and pointless combinations of products, and I'm sure it's deliberate. On the Head-Fi Facebook group I see photos of portable rigs that consist of four different black boxes strapped together into weird little bundles with a snake's nest of cabling connecting them all together in strange ways. There's no way that anyone considers "ease of use" when they construct a Frankenstein monster like that. I think the purpose is to create some sort of visual impact- "Hey! look how fancy and complicated my rig is!" If people actually value that sort of thing, there should be reviewers that critique based on the number of blinking lights and ports to plug things into.

Something for everyone, I guess.

 

[taffy2207]

Everytime I see a graph in a review I feel like digging my eyeballs out with a spoon

 

[fjhuerta]

Reviewer rate highly > More equipment received for reviews > more higher value equipment received for reviews.

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/how-can-i-trust-head-fi-reviews.744389/page-8[/QUOTE]

Everytime I see a graph in a review I feel like digging my eyeballs out with a spoon

I'm an objectivist, and I agree with your assesment.
1) I find differences between amps and digital sources to be so minimal as to be irrelevant. The only equipment that sounds different from the rest is the one that is poorly designed in the first place.
2) We still are in the infancy of understanding headphone measurements. Tyll and Dr. Olive have made tremendous advances, and even them say they still don't exactly know everything that needs to be measured in order to decide which headphone sounds better. A reviewer with a home made rig has no hope of presenting his findings in a proper way.

 

[castleofargh]

not too sure this is the right section or that it has anything to do with being paid.

most reviews are 110% subjective without even a pretense of testing method. even better some are actively denouncing proper listening methods and basically claim to have overcome human flaws. so what could possibly go wrong with fools at the wheels aside from everything?
unless you know that your taste tends to align with the reviewer's thanks to previous experiences, there is no reason to trust anything the guy says. relying on some random guy's opinion to know if I'll like something is a gamble and it will always be.


I personally think that Gal Gadot was the wrong choice, and that the Wonder Woman movie would have been much better with him/her/apache helicopter in it

this is my honest opinion on the matter. I am absolutely sure I would have enjoyed the movie a good deal more. I'll be sad if you think otherwise, but amazingly it can happen. ^_^

seriously, many people end up relying mostly on measurements in a hobby about enjoying sound. it doesn't make sense in itself. but reviews are typically so full of crap that we'd rather take a chance at guessing the sound of an IEM by looking at an amateur FR graph. that's how desperate we are to find something we can trust a little.

 

[fjhuerta]

This is a strange moment for me. I used to trust HeadWize. I got my Ety ER-4S because of it. And my AKG 501s.

Now I realize times have changed, and that close knit community is now full of people with no idea what they are talking about, bias, or hidden motives.

It's time to stop trusting this page. I'm sad about it. Jude is a kick-ass dude. CMoy was the best. Tyll and the rest... whoa. But I have to stop wasting money on headphones that sound like absolute garbage, because "some random dude on the Internet said it was the best out there".

I'm just surprised as to what people think hi-fi is! I guess they'll never know...

 

[bigshot]

The thing I don't understand is why people churn their equipment. I make an informed decision and use it until it dies. Great sound is great sound today and it will be the same great sound tomorrow. If your definition of great sound keeps changing, the problem is with you, not the recommendations.

 

[fjhuerta]

The thing I don't understand is why people churn their equipment. I make an informed decision and use it until it dies. Great sound is great sound today and it will be the same great sound tomorrow. If your definition of great sound keeps changing, the problem is with you, not the recommendations.

Now that you mention it, my favorite headphones are the Sennheiser HD-600 and the Etymotic ER-4SR. I started my collection with the HD-580 and the ER-4S. So, you are right. I never found anything better, and I merely updated my gear. The rest of my headphones could die a fiery death tomorrow and I wouldn't care.