Originally Posted by
davef
Hi Sondek,
Happy to hear that you enjoyed your Sierra-1!
With regards to your question about reviews, do you realize that the majority of those publications that reviewed our Sierra-1 are no longer in existence? The entire audio review landscape has dramatically changed in the last decade. In the good old days, magazine reviewers were paid by the magazine to review product. Magazines had income from their subscription base and the companies that paid to advertise within the magazine. Reviewers looked for products that they found interesting and that would compel people to purchase the magazine, generating revenue for the magazine. Sometimes the company whose product was being reviewed would also purchase advertising space. These were true professional reviewers; they placed no demands on the company providing the product other than the company paying for shipping. Often times reviewers would purchase a product they liked, but mostly the products were returned in perfect condition.
Magazines then gave way to audio review websites, which became the new medium. More convenient for consumers, especially since they were free – who would buy a magazine when one can just browse to a website for free? Qualified reviewers still need to get paid so revenue for the site was generated by companies purchasing advertising space. For many of these sites, their advertising rates were absurdly high.
Ascend does not pay for advertising and we have developed a reputation as such – so few sites have been interested in reviewing our products.
This new review medium is also failing, many of these sites failed to generate enough revenue to support their staff. Keep in mind, websites that rely on advertising for revenue must have tens of thousands of visitors every month, as advertising rates are directly related to monthly viewers. Some of these sites have managed to stay in business by expanding to other forms of revenue, by selling products or maintaining an active forum which keeps viewers coming. However, it then becomes challenging to remain truly impartial.
Fast forward to today and it is a real mess. We now have dozens and dozens of YouTube reviewers out there, some are somewhat knowledgeable, others have no idea what they are doing. These reviewers’ goals are to generate enough traffic on to become incentivized, whereby YouTube then sticks ads in the video and the reviewer might earn a few bucks. Problem is, many truly think that recording the speakers so that the viewers can actually hear them somehow represents the speaker’s performance. It’s ridiculous, but unfortunately – there is no way to control it. We don’t know who these reviewers are, they often don’t publish their real names and they then go and buy product, review it without permission hoping to generate visitors and then simply return it. We try to stop it, but there is really no way.
Then we get YouTube reviewers who ask to review product and then expect to get paid from us, or keep the product for which they then sell to generate revenue for their time spent. When a reviewer is compensated by the manufacturer of the product, the review itself becomes inherently biased – or worse… There was a prime example of this documented on AVS forum recently.
Ascend will take no part in this. If you see a review on YouTube of our products, it was done without our permission and without our awareness. I had a rather large email fight with a popular YouTube reviewer who approached us to review one of our speakers. I hesitantly agreed and asked for the reviewer to provide a CC to secure the safe return of our speakers. He was offended by this. It is almost impossible to verify a name and address of a YouTube reviewer so anyone could pretend to have been this reviewer (fraud is rampant these days) Eventually he convinced me to take the chance but when I asked him when could we expect the speakers to be returned, he then stated that he intended to keep them. No way was that going to happen.
So here is where we are today, the state of audio reviews has pretty much dissolved into complete unprofessionalism and it is getting worse and worse.
Instead of looking for “professional reviews” – ask yourself the question, how could a speaker like the Sierra-2 become so popular without even a dime spent on advertising and without many professional reviews? Personally, I think that says so much more than any review these days possibly could…. Think about that…..
Re: Sierra-1 NrT: Next phase?
