Originally Posted by
davef
We continually get requests from self-proclaimed YouTube audio reviewers who wish to produce video/audio reviews of our speakers. I do everything I can to avoid this as it is nonsense for anyone to think they can get a fairly reasonable idea of how a speaker sounds from watching / listening to a youtube video... Sadly, it seems like the days of truly professional audio reviewers (people like Howard Ferstler for example) are long gone....
I've been working in this industry for my entire adult life, and most of my teen years as well. It is really the only job I have ever known, from sales to tech to engineer to business owner... I find it interesting as to how the industry has changed and how the internet has allowed consumers to become more educated, much less snake oil products these days (a good thing). The converse is that now nearly anyone can become a reviewer, whereas in the old days, most reviewers were highly educated - many were practicing engineers as well and reviews were both objective and subjective.
In general, we average at least one request per month from someone who wants a pair of speakers "in exchange" for them posting a youtube review. As if we couldn't simply post some videos of the way our speakers "sound" on youtube - and we actually have the professional gear to do this in a controlled and proper environment. Problem is, of course - that youtube compresses the audio and who knows what the video is being played back through -- earbuds? PC speakers? Seriously? Even if the listener had the most accurate speakers ever made and the reviewer had the best B&K mic - they are still listening to a recording of 2 speakers being made from a single microphone. The only thing the microphone is recording is the summed response of the entire room. All off-axis information is lost, all imaging is lost, all separation is lost, all transient information is lost - all the characteristics that make a quality speaker a quality speaker…
It is really no different than thinking you are getting a taste of driving a McLaren P1 by driving it in a PS4 game…