Of course I cannot speak for musical head, but on his website it states that he has no financial incentive from the industry, or experiencing any form of repression by the audio industry.
"Und ich betreibe diesen BLOG ja grundsätzlich ohne jegliche monetären Zwänge und infolgedessen auch völlig unabhängig von Repressionen durch die Industrie" .
I on the opposite finds this disclaimer extremely suspicious,
because he precisely avoids to say that
he bought all the expensive gear with his own, independently and hardly earned money.
I used to trust such sites in the past, until I realised I was misled about my purchases.
You might think that I have become too suspicious, and that there is no need for him to be explain how he obtained the products.
The problem is that there is actually a whole reviewing business, (originating from the USA?), the business model is that companies send the items for free to the reviewers, who then make money by selling them as used items, while they never paid for purchasing them. You even find that at amazon (Vine reviewers).
This applies to many kinds of gear-oriented, technically specific nice looking "professional" relatively smaller websites.
Usually the industry does not directly give money to such websites, but the very expensive gear for free. For example I was following headphonia in the past, they were reviewing sometimes several items costing together more than 20 000 euros in a single month, and at some points they sell a lot of that gear as second-hand stuff.
Here at Head-Fi when professional reviewers write a full-fledged review, they will avoid saying that they purchased the item, but usually have a disclaimer at the beginning such as:
"This [item-name] was
received [pay attention, not purchased, just received]
in exchange of my honest opinion" = i.e. they didn't purchase the item, but receive it for free in exchange of writing a long, eloquently written review with beautiful pictures and nice words, and in the case of expensive audio gear : actually never a negative conclusion.
(similar statements are often found on some websites like headphonia).
(Please note that I am not accusing anyone of being dishonest.
These reviewers may well believe what they write. The problem is that when you receive expensive stuff for free, you are happy and tend to unconsciously look at thing through glasses making things look sunnier and nicer than in reality. Someone who paid on the opposite of lot of his hardly earned money will look through different, critical glasses, remembering of all the money and hard work he sacrificed to buy the product, looking for failed aspects of the product and being less forgiving for them).
If you read audio magazines, have you ever noticed a clearly negative review? (even when they show awful measurements, they impressively still manage to remain positive)? (for magazines and very large websites, the business model is different as free items are not so essential, most of their income being instead generated by the advertisements. Following a clearly negative review, a company will "cancel" its ads at a magazin, i.e. decreasing its income). I speak many modern languages (e.g. French, Dutch, English, German, etc.) and in all these languages these magazines do the same thing...
"Reviewers" (in the sense of those having systematic, intensive reviewing activity going at length beyond it being a mere hobby) daring to write negative reviews are exceptional, I only know three cases: Tyll Hertsens (but once he issued a negative review about an item of a given company, in some cases the given company would not send him further models; and he honestly would send the items back to the companies, not selling them second hand), Crinacle (he borrows items from shops and people) and Amir (ASR, he reviews items belonging to people, who usually ship them to him, and he back to them). The point is not to discuss these later person's reviews, but only the principle with which they obtain most of the products they review.
In the present case, given the contrast between :
- on one hand the measurements of the Solitaire clearly not matching the headphone frequency response target curves, i.e. being factually proven as
not being neutral
- on the other hand Musicalhead's claims that this headphone
is "neutral",
I hope that we can at least agree that my questioning about this issue is understandable and that it is relevant re. the discussion in this thread about the Solitaire fulfilling the fundamental requirement defining high fidelity (neutrality) or not fulfilling it.
