On Tue, 07 Mar 2006 02:23:52 -0800, andy wrote:

Jim Lesurf wrote:
I see no reason to think that all potential advertisers have a
'collective line' on such things. Hence as with pretty much anything a
magazine says, you risk annoying some by pleasing others.

What proportion of advertisers would be pleased by a switch to reviews
claiming little to no audible difference between the majority of
components (given the obvious exceptions)? Regardless of the truth, surely
this is running down the whole industry. Would manufacturers want to
advertise in such pages given the alternatives?

It is not just about numbers but numbers of readers the advertisers want
to reach.

I think I'm one of those readers. I was in the market for a basic
separates system, but now that I've successfully repaired my old midi (all
it needed was a new laser PUH from grandata.co.uk for just over 11GBP all
inclusive!), I've decided I'll probably spend the money I was going to
spend on separates on components for the planned home entertainment PC
instead. Doing so will *definitely* give me functionality I don't already
have (e.g. recording radio from DVB-T straight to MP3 files for my iRiver
H3xx, pausing live TV, recording to HDD/DVD with a wholly digital path),
and I found the subjective reviews I was reading to be useless for
determining which were "the best speakers under 200GBP", say.

Combine this with Richer's shift towards shifting more and more of their
own-brand product (Cambridge, Gale, Mordaunt-Short) rather than their
original raison d'être of selling discounted end-of-line goods, and
that's another potential source of objective information that I feel I
need to disregard.

Ultimately, I began to wonder how much of a difference I would really hear
between my repaired midi which probably cost over 500GBP in today's money,
and a basic separates system costing about the same. To put it another
way, if I spread that expenditure across my 300+ CDs, would I be able to
expect each to sound at least 20% better (based on original purchase price
of 10GBP each)?

Then again, maybe the magazines and vendors would rather lose ten of me,
in favour of one buyer who spends 10K GBP on a pretty IEC mains cable, or
whatever...

Besides, build the HEPC is kinda fun (for certain values of 'fun' .
Cabling up pre-built components and trying to get them working 'just so'
is just a drag. :-)

Best Regards,
Alex.
--
Alex Butcher Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK Need reliable and secure network systems?
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