There are also problems with reviewers. Some will only review things under about $10K because their entire pay is based how many subscribers they get for their channel. If you stick to things that more people can afford, you get more subscribers. So a Raven and Blackbird review is beyond their preferred price point. The other issue is that almost none of them have ever designed or built anything. So they have no idea how things work or the merits of a particular approach to building amps or speakers. There are exceptions, but that is the general rule. Also, YMMV. For example, not to pick on Klipsch, but the Cornwall IV came out and a number of reviewers simply lost it over the speaker. Waxing poetic on its virtues. I had owned a pair of Cornwall I years back that I completely modded and made much better (hey, folks mod Klipsch speakers, it is an industry), but eventually couldn't live with some of the flaws. I wanted to hear what the super, new version could do. The reviewers were so enthusiastic... So I got an OEM deal on a dinged pair of Cornwall IV. They were pretty good, but still had some serious flaws. I opened them to discover 50 cent sand resistors directly in the signal path and $5 MKP Chinese caps. So I replaced the key caps with Vcap odam, and put two path audio resistors in for the sand resistors on each speaker. Did the usual damping of the cabinets, etc.. and the speaker was darn near twice as good. Same character, but no brightness or "shouty" sound, but the same horn jump. If the reviewers had heard that version they would have completely lost it. My cost to do this was maybe $500. If Klipsch had sold them for $500 more and used much better crossover parts.... So my point is that 3 or 4 reviewers gushed over the Cornwall IV and quite frankly, they had some serious issues to my ear. So my faith in reviewers went down a few notches. I also see reviews gushing Chinese tube amps and other things and then when I hear them, they just are not that good. Not bad, but not great. So I just have less faith in reviewers than I used to.... Plus, we all have our taste.
I will say that everything Spatial makes uses top shelf parts at every price point. There are no $5 MKP Chinese caps. Very high quality inductors. Build the best thing you can at a certain level and then price it based on what it cost to build. Don't cut corners. Often you can use $200 worth of far better parts in key spots and greatly improve the sound. That is why the Spatial speakers and the amps sound as they do, and STILL punch way above their price point.
