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Reviewer: M.L. Gneier - TNT USA
Published: October, 2023

Keeping an open mind

Bias is unavoidable. Live with it, be honest about it, strive to temper it. I spoke to a new reviewer recently who told me, “Look, I've tried everything and I don't like tubes.” Bear in mind I had not asked the guy about his attitude when it came to tubes. He just had to put it on the record, why I have no idea. Inexperience? Yup? Shortsighted? Most likely. Revealing of a prejudice that goes beyond simple bias? Possibly. Look, I am biased for and against all kinds of things when it comes to audio. And, the same goes for food, bourbon and golf balls. But, if you cannot deal quell your bias, no matter how well it's founded, decline a review before anything gets shipped. Then, live with the truth; you passed on something based on bias rather than after having an actual listening experience. If you ever decide to do that it should be a very rare event in your tenure as a reviewer.

The reason to keep an open mind is because audio design is deterministically indeterminate. I've borrowed the term, deterministically indeterminate from a BBC podcast on probability. One of the panelists stated that no matter how pre-ordained or deterministic the universe might appear it is provably indeterminate, since we don't know what happens next or when the universe ends, or even what that end might be like.

So, when a reviewer says something like that about tubes, you can rest assured he suffers from a mindset that is at odds with being a good reviewer. Such a reviewer, has damned all tube designs simply because of his experience with the limited samples he has actually heard. He ignores the very likely possibility that a tube design he has never heard before will outperform his expectations. Worse, if his bias is truly crippling, even if he were lucky enough to hear a vacuum tube design that exceeded his expectations, he might actually deny it. A good reviewer is also able to set aside his learned biases or those biases that are based on listening experience and the resulting personal empirical evidence. So, consider the reviewer who has found metal dome tweeters offensive sounding. His findings, even if honest, are based on the past or at best the past and the present. His bias renders the future a mere duplication of the past.

Beyond obvious design choices like vacuum tubes, MOSFETs, bipolar transistors and operational amplifiers are something of equal and potentially greater importance: implementation. In audio design, implementation is what is used and how it's used it to render a design that's been floating around inside a designer's brain into three-dimensional space. The final 6” sealed-box two-way speaker with a soft-dome tweeter cannot tell you much about the time, effort and design values that resulted in its final implementation, so you have to actually listen to it. So, a fair reviewer always grants the manufacturer their thesis and renders judgment only after a careful listening session.

I touched on the subject of unduly long reviews in Part One. I'd like to revisit that subject and a couple other unhelpful trends in reviewing.

Video reviews

The first is video reviews. But wait, let me digress. A while back a very respected distributor who is also a very good friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video. I clicked on the link only to see a static frame of a system playing music. My friend said, “Isn't this new speaker great?” I don't recall what I said but I recall what I thought. How can he possibly think I could get any sense of how anything sounds based upon a video that was probably shot with an iPhone? But he did. Such is the nature of some things YouTube. First, let's get something straight. Reviews, even the very best reviews, are entertainment. That's not a problem, it's a reality. What I object to about video reviews is that most lack rigor and are possessed by unwise comparison. A great example is: “Don't Believe The Hype, the Model XYZ is not as good as people say it is!” Video reviews are especially apt to refer to other reviews or what the reviewer believes is generally said about a product. That's anathema to my style. For example, I recently reviewed a pair of speaker made by a very well known company. When the samples became available I was a little disappointed since they had been on the market for a long time and there had been many, many reviews. Reviewers are like old-time reporters; we like to get the story first. Anyway, I agreed to the review and found the speakers quite musical. After my review was published someone shared another earlier review of the same speaker that thought the speaker was both unduly hyped and possessed of a hot top end.

I found that interesting because it didn't match my experience at all. But, and this is the point, I avoid reading prior reviews of products I'm going to review. Dealing with my own preferences and biases is enough of a challenge without suffering from the a priori contamination from other reviewer's observations and, worse, their conclusions. Am I embarrassed that another reviewer heard the speaker differently than I did? No way. He listens with his ears and I listen with mine. Video reviews aren't going away, so if you find them to be entertaining, fine. Just ask yourself whether they're created to inform the viewer or simply to gain clicks. It's always hard to serve two masters.

Measurements

Finally, I want to comment on the wisdom of reliance on measurements to ascertain musical reproduction quality. Me? I love measurements, having watched up close while luminaries (like Nelson Pass, the late Roger Modjeski and Kevin Halverson) have done measurements while speaking of their relevance to good, musical designs. But each of them listened and listened carefully. I pay close attention to specifications and how well a given product meets, fails to meet and occasionally exceeds their specified performance.

Some of the most entertaining reading in the history of the high end took place in the Letters section of Stereophile back in the 1990s and dealt with disagreements over measurements. Stereophile did not always get it right. In fact, I edited a letter from Roger Modjeski about how Stereophile's Tom Norton measured signal-to-noise ratios. You see, I kept pointing out wildly great SNs to Roger until he started to read them carefully and discovered that Norton was doing the test in a way that resulted in very inaccurate and unrealistic results. Roger mailed the letter and later, without our acknowledgment, SNs measured and reported by Norton in Stereophile comported to reality (e-mail me and I'll send a PDF of Roger's letter).

Measurements are fine as far as they go. But, it's an error to assume that measurements are consistently determinative of musical fidelity or its absence. And, I find it to be pure laziness to judge a product by measurements alone, even if the accuracy of the measurements were unimpeachable, which they never are.

My final thoughts about reviewing is these. Be brief, be clear, be unambiguous and be gentle. A long review almost never leads to greater clarity. Say what you need to say and then get out of the reader's way and encourage them to have a listen for themselves. Keep your ears hungry for wonderful music and write with a humble pen.

Copyright © 2023 M.L. Gneier - mlg@tnt-audio.com - www.tnt-audio.com

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