Stand and Rack Reviews

The subject comes up every now and then: Audio reviewers don't write nearly enough negative reviews. One old attention-seeker on Audio Asylum went so far as to characterize Stereophile and our would-be competitors as "happy face" magazines—a joke in which he seemed to take tremendous pride—simply because we hand out a lot of As and Bs. By that logic, assuming that a certain percentage of underachievers is inevitable in any population, our schools aren't handing out nearly enough Fs. (I have a suggestion for where they can begin.)

One more word for unhappy consumers, in any marketplace, who confuse praise for the new with rebuke for the old: 20 years on, I continue to admire the best qualities of my Linn">http://www.stereophile.com/turntables/1103linn">Linn Sondek LP12 turntable (itself not the first LP12 I've owned). I smile to think of all the records I enjoyed during those two decades.

There seems to be a fairly common evolution among audiophiles: First, they notice that there is better sound available than they have ever experienced before, so they buy (we hope!) better-sounding equipment—but sooner or later, upgrading becomes terrifically expensive, while the urge to improve the system remains constant. What to do then?