If you’re spending your hard-earned on some well-earned, sometimes it can be important to know what NOT to buy.
Writing this as Melbourne enters six weeks of lockdown, I send my best wishes to readers there, although of course by the time you read this anything could have happened and us lot in Sydney may be on our way to joining you under maximum restrictions. Second time around it’s harder to find the silver linings of such an enforced staycation, especially for those who have little or no work to do and the permanent gut-thup of financial worry. When the pandemic first began, all those long months ago, I merrily reported on the value of bonus time to spend in critical music listening, or in catching up on all those movies you’ve wanted to watch. Second time around it’s going to be harder to enjoy a repeat surfeit of leisure without certain end, and with dwindling resources.
Having said that, the business of hi-fi and home entertainment, and technology in general, seems to have held up OK though the initial stages (events excluded). Talking with retailers and distributors, I gather some categories have sold so well that those products in greatest demand have sold out entirely, with little hope of fresh stock because of COVID19’s chaotic impact on production and transport. It must be infuriating in difficult times for retailers to have people who want to buy when they can’t get the product to sell.
One silver lining for purchasers not wishing to wait is the sheer quantity of fine equipment out there. It’s very rare a category has a single ‘this-or-nothing’ product. Of course we’re as guilty as anyone at picking ‘winners’, whether in the upcoming Sound+Image Awards or voting in EISA’s global awards, which we publish this issue. But the truth is that performance levels are widely high; the gap between best and 10th best is generally very small indeed. It is of equal importance to make a choice informed by your specific preferences — no use buying an award-winner if it doesn’t have the inputs you need or the look you like. We always suggest taking advice from a good hi-fi & AV store; even during lock-down nearly all hi-fi shops have remained available by phone and internet, able to advise, deliver and even install (within the limits of local distancing rules, natch). Meanwhile we’ll continue to deliver new reviews with every issue of Sound+Image, pointing you to the best of the latest products arriving.
Not that every product is great; heaven forbid, and far from it. In our soundbar round-up this issue, for example, there were ups and downs. One unit had an enfeebled centre channel under key circumstances, and another really seemed to be markedly overselling its abilities, to put it politely, though competent enough in what it actually did.
While you may not rush to buy products after reading less than glowing reviews, they remain a useful read — if you’re spending your hard-earned on some well-earned, it’s just as important to know what NOT to buy, and to be able to recognise when marketing teams go full-bore fanciful in the absence of anything exciting to sell.
Good reviews are easy to write. I look for bad reviews on any site I consult. A troubled product requires far more careful handling before accurate and fair criticism can be made. And of course, nobody thanks you for a bad review. But if there are no bad reviews, how can you assess the value of all the good reviews? Is everything just great? No. Rare is the product that doesn’t have a problem somewhere — sometimes forgivable against the bulk of goodness, sometimes on a promise of a firmware fix (not reliable, those promises, from experience!). A good review will mention such issues and put them in context. Important as bad reviews are, they are surprisingly few and far between, other than the brutal background backchatter of forum comment, to which credence can be only carefully given. Ditto to dubious suppliers and internet brands which don’t go through recognised distribution at all — we decline to review such alarming items, for any number of reasons, from consistency of supply to unreliable warranties and even electrical safety.
But while we stick to recognised and upcoming genuine brands, you’ll still find a smattering of the longform #fails in Sound+Image, to inform our broader context of enthusing about what the good stuff can bring. In the case of our soundbar group this issue, the overall news is great — the last five years have seen a shift from compromised mediocrity to room-filling systems that can now deliver enjoyable music as well as movie sound, can stream and join multiroom systems with the best of the wireless world, and can deliver Atmos height and sonic width by having dedicated drivers for each channel, rather than phasing up a basic system in the hope of “fooling the brain”. Times were when I didn’t much look forward to reviewing soundbars, as they were an inevitable downgrade from the sound of my usual system. Now the best of them have sound that encourages me to play more movies than ever before, and make it easy to have music playing through the day. And that’s what good equipment is all about.
Whatever you choose, whatever entertainment you already have to get you through the second wave, I hope it brings you joy, creates moments of togetherness for your family, and gets you through to the other side in health and happiness.
Cheers,
Jez Ford, Editor, Sound+Image