It's a good rant and I am glad someone else is making it, too. There is absolutely no question that what he describes goes on all the time. I've been at this long enough and bumped into enough people often enough to know.mattek wrote:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22332
It's a fairly long rant. But there some interesting points made. Makes you think differently about hardware sites.
Sometimes I feel like SPCR is alone in trying to play the straight game. It's not like I want to knock companies down, I just want to tell my honest opinion based on careful examination of the product -- and if it happens to clash with the marketing story, well, I still want to tell mine, and they should have told a better story. And if the product maker does not understand my or SPCR's PoV, well, they better start trying harder, because acoustics is quickly becoming a permanent desirable feature for many buyers.
It's not like "ethical" sites are not commercial. They are. They can't afford not to be. They are by their very definition. Their real function is to provide additional info / insight to help people sort out what they need / want / should buy. This is an essentially economic function. It's what a famous NYT book critic used to say about reviewers: Our job is to sell more books. And he did, I am sure. But he panned the bad ones. And no one told him what to write in his rave reviews. It's his originality and creativity that made people value his reviews even of books he didn't like.
There are a few products we've received and not bothered to review (usually because it's hopeless & a waste of our tiime to write the review and yours to read it). One or two we finished reviewing -- only to decide not to post the review, because all we wanted to do is slash and cut, which doesn't really help anyone. In exchange for not posting the negative review, we have accepted some wee compensation for time spent once or twice: basically, just to keep the dumb thing, for whatever it is worth.
There are in fact 2 product samples in the lab right now that I reluctantly accepted and am in the tedious process of returning because they are useless for SPCR readers. I won't go against my instinct again in future.
Our point of view on this is simple: We want, in general, to review products that at least have a chance of being useful to the goal of PC silence. If it doesn't do that, we don't really want to review it. It's too much of a waste of time to look at bad products; just trying to sort through the better ones is a big enough job that keeps us constantly busy. And if we haven't reviewed it or had first hand experience, then we're not going to vouch for it.
Some readers may feel SPCR doesn't review enough of the latest and greatest gear. The truth is, most of that stuff is too hot and/or too noisy. SPCR now has enough market presence that we could probably get a lot of that stuff... but for what? So you know not to buy the latest and greatest? Most readers already know by the time they get here that the leading edge is usually ear-bleeding edge.
Trust us on this: If we think something is truly useful or revolutionary for quiet computing, we'll tell you about it whether other sites are covering it oor not. And if it isn't, even if everyone else is writing about it, we'll be whistlng along our own quiet lane.
At the moment, dual core obviously doesn't do a thing for quiet computing.