I am afraid I have a counter view to many of the previous posters. Stereophile sent me a mass mailing survey a few weeks ago and I offered them the following comments.
Stereophile,
I think that your reviewers are fine writers but technically very weak. A reviewer should not just parrot back what the manufacturer wrote about the product, they should think and decide how it works and stay out of the marketing voodoo. If they don't know how it works they have no business reviewing the product. The reviews contain way too much blah blah blah and not enough in depth discussion of how a piece of equipment works, what separates it from the competition, and what unique capability it brings to the table. I think that a mid-fi reference set of equipment should be used for reviewing and comparisons. If the difference with the reference equipment is small state that, don't inflate a subtle difference into a monumental improvement.
I could care less about the reviewer's life history and last vacation, Sam's travel journals don't belong in an audio magazine. Stick to the facts and simple wording and drop the college essay style that goes on for many pages and says nothing. If somebody says something sounds "organic", I immediately wonder if that means it sounds like crap, I have no idea what that equates to musically. Get real descriptive terms that mean something and standardize them between reviewers. Any reviewer that uses electronic music, rap or heavy metal for example, should be dropped.
I think that the cost of the equipment you review is nuts and of very limited value to the average reader. Instead of focusing so much on the ultimate 99% perfect, and therefore unaffordable or unobtainable, equipment I think that you should focus on the high quality / performance equipment in the price range of the average person reading your magazine. It typically takes me less than half an hour to read the articles of interest and most of my thinking and interest is derived from the ads. If the cost ever increased beyond the minimal subscription cost I have paid, I would not renew.
Sorry for being so blunt, but you asked.
Martin J. King
That was my take on the magazine. I really like the ads the best, seeing the different speaker designs gets me thinking about other possible configurations. Probably the reviewer I like the least is Art Dudley, I find his technical descriptions to be a parroting of whatever the manufacturer tells him about how the speaker works. Over the past couple of issues he reviewed one Lowther based speaker and then did a long write up about his new Lowther drivers, I found these two articles contained a number of technical errors which told me he really did not know how the speakers worked.
A few years ago a friend told me I had to get a copy of Listener magazine, it was highly recommended. So I found a copy in my bookstore and it featured a review of a pair of speakers I was really interested in at the time. I bought it and read it over the weekend. There was no information just a ton of blah blah blah. Absolutely worthless. I was not surprised when Listener went under. I have not been a fan of Art Dudley ever since and find his articles to be very weak.
Just my opinion,
Martin
Oh to answer the original question, yes it is worth $10 but not a penny more.
