Same reviewer for hifiplus & TAS reviews - downward spiral??
turntable -- Tue, 05/26/2009 - 06:36
I noticed that in issue 64 of HIFI+, the Focal Grand Uptopia EM was reviewed by Roy Gregory. I won't go into the actual content but it read like an advertorial with no comparisons to any of the other high end speakers Gregory has reviewed.
Along comes TAS issue 193 with a review on Focal's Grand Utopia EM speakers. I go to page 104 and it is written by Roy Gregory and COPIED WORD FOR WORD with the previous hifi+ review. TAS were to lazy to change a single word.
What the!!!!
Along comes the new hifi+ issue 65 this week.
Oh good, a new review on the Pass XP20 and XA160.5 amps. I can see how they compare to Cordsman's review back on TAS issue 192.
What the, It is written by Anthony Cordesman. At least hihi+ asked Cordsman to re-write the review but it still has the same reviewer, same associated erquipment with the same conclusion.
If this is the new direction of TAS and hifi+ to share reviews, I for one will be staying away from one if not both mags.
All this just makes Stereophile look and read so much better.
Given the expense to the manufacturer and the logistics of delivering and setting up a speaker of the Grande Utopia's size, it made sense to have one reviewer cover the product for TAS as well as our sister magazine, Hi-Fi+. We will occasionally share some content between the magazines, but generally under the circumstances I've outlined.
Robert
So why was the pass review copied from TAS to hifi+??
The review was not copied. AHC has (actually, owns) a Pass Labs pre/power. He likes it and wrote it up for both mags independently. I wanted to see an important Pass Labs product in my magazine and I have been asked about this - and many other products - by readers of the magazine. Unfortunately, these are often the products I would struggle to obtain from UK distribution agencies, due to availability issues. Were I to have waited until a review sample was made available in the UK for that product, I might have been waiting a year or more before I could even place the review in the magazine, if at all.
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com
Alan
as you said in your review, there is no distributor for Pass in the UK. Why do a review at all if the common punter canot get to a dealer and have a listen to the product. Of is the review a pre curser to find someone to be a distributor?
the bottom line is that any reader of hifi+ can go to the AVguide web site and read the review of the same products, by the same reviewer, with the same conclusion, abeit rewritten in the middle.
When the review was arranged, there was a distributor. As we did the final facts check, the previous distributor announced the change. The ink's not dry on the contract for the new distributor, but it has been arranged.
As to products in dealers, there will be products from the new distributor. Unfortunately, the number of bricks-and-mortar dealers in the UK has reached an all-time low so such an important product could be in the UK and not be available in any dealers.
And yes, any Hi-Fi Plus reader could go to the AVguide website and read the review, but very few do.
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com
If TAS were a few pages shorter and simply omitted the Grande Utopia review, would that be preferable to you?
Er No Robert. A review of something else, rather than a verbatim copied review.
I don't want the number crunchers start to think your sharing idea's are so good that you can reduce staff and resources and share half a magazine each month or worse. be careful what you wish for as it woul be a pity for either magazine to lose its indepenance or worse its place in the marketplace.
When, those several months ago, I read that TAS's owner/s had bought Hi-Fi+, it seemed clear there'd be opportunities for shared content - to the benefit of the readers of both magazines. I was happy to see Roy Gregory's Grand Utopia EM review, and I hope we'll see more (judiciously measured) shared content.
"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful . . . upward spiral."
Thanks for the comment Michael Bradley.
There would be no point in having two magazines with identical, or substantially duplicated, content. We'll share reviews when the situation warrants it, either from a logisitical standpoint as I mentioned in an earlier post regarding the Focal review, or when one of the magazines has access to equipment of interest long before our other publication as Alan stated.
I am more concerned with having the same opinion of overpriced gear echoed leaving the impression that more than one high end reviewer finds someting magic...ie; if the same reviewer reports in the same words in two magazines, it is still one review. The speaker noted is not what I mean when I say 'overpriced' but the Hi-Fi+ review of Renaussance Rap-3 preamp...Take a look at the pictire of the thing with the top off....empty...I doubt it has $500 in parts including the case...yet they sell it for close to $1600....It would be a killer $700 preamp....The reviewer does not note the disparity between what in in the thing and its price.
On the specifics of the thread. I am also concerned with buying two different magazines and getting 1 1/2 magazines worth of different content. An occasional dupe review in both magazines is not a problem...routine duplication will stop me from buying future copies of Hi-Fi+.
The Renaissance preamp has been praised by two separate reviewers in two editions of Hi-Fi Plus. One as a standalone review, and one as part of a complete system. Which would suggest the preamp has something going for it, irrespective of the base cost of components inside the case. High-end audio is often like that, because products are frequently hand-built.
That hand-built nature costs. For example, take two almost identical red Fender guitars - one a MIM (Made in Mexico) Classic Series 60s Telecaster (Guitar Center price $750), the other a MIA (Made in America) Fender Custom Shop Time Machine '63 Telecaster (Guitar Center price $2,850). Both have exactly the same number of notionally similar parts, but one is hand-built, using special components and one isn't. When you play both, the MIM Tele is very good... for the money. The Custom Shop one is very, very good, irrespective of money.
Ultimately, isn't it all about performance?
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com
Perhaps, BUT, look at that picture...I could put that together by hand in 30 minutes...there is nothing in the box....generally that is good but it should not be used as a plus when marking up the thing...The other componeht had more inside, but at a much higher cost. Do we really need more audio gear that costs a half a months wages before taxes that could be sold at 1/3 the price?
One of the problems small-volume, high-quality manufacturers face in the real world is they suffer in physical comparison to high-volume manufacturers. A high-quality sound card designed for studio use might cost hundreds of dollars and have less components on the board compared to a Creative Labs product sold by the containerload for $30, but the performance of that high-quality card justifies its place.
So, you could build the product in 30 minutes. Could you design the circuit in the same time? Could you afford to kiss off the thousands you need to spend to get the product safety tested, and then do it again for international sales?
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com
The box was almost empty....nothing in it....how much did all that extra sheet metal cost? I understand the idea of economies of scale...but is there a difference in selling 10 preamps at $1600 each or 100 at $7-800 each? One can make the same profit but more folk get the thing. It is like pretending putting a little horsey on a cotton pullover shirt makes the shirt worth 3 times the price of the same shirt without the horsey....in this case we have a very small number of components in a big box, nicely wired, and sellng for a big premium.
Would you buy a car if you knew there were only $10,000 parts and labor in the thing but the sale price is $30,000 or more...I suspect you would negotiate or go elsewhere. I believe a reviewer has a duty of sorts to note gear that might sound great, be completely competent, but contains a parts and build cost vastly lower than the price. Are there no $800 preamps that can match the performance for half the price? One of your competors, when they find a situation like that, drags out a few other items in comparison including gear with much lower cost and notes the fact. Then the customer can make up their own mind if they want to pay so much for an almost empty box.
That is the bottom line...there was almost nothing in that thing.
I don't think you can directly look at what it costs to make something, and then determine what it should cost to sell based on that. Should the markup be based on a certain percentage above the fixed part costs, or an amount above that? Not to mention all the other factors you need to take into consideration:
- How long did this take to develop? Did they have a team of 5 people working on this for a year before they managed to sell a single unit? That could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs, to say nothing of prototypes.
- How many are they going to sell? I can't imagine that any phono preamp, which you use in this example, is going to sell 10 times as many units at $800 as it would at $1,600, the market for phono preamps at that price is pretty small, all things considered.
- What are people willing to pay for an item that you feel is of similar quality? Perhaps they feel the next best preamp to theirs is $2,500, so they are selling you something that is comparable for $900 less, so that's a bargain, when you consider everything.
- Even if something lists for $1,600, the manufacturer is probably selling it to the initial distributor for half that. That distributor will then sell it to the stores for something above that, and then sell it to you for a bit above that. So perhaps they are selling that box with $500 in parts for $700-800, just to the distributor initially and not directly to consumers.
Amazon's new Kindle sells for $489, and the breakdown cost for all the parts inside of it (from iSuppli) is only $185.49. That's a large difference as well, but if you look at the breakdowns of almost any consumer product, you'll find it's the same thing as there are so many overhead expenses (R&D, Assembly, Advertising, Shipping, Distribution, etc...) that need to be accounted for beyond just parts, that you can't just sell it for a 20-30% profit above parts and expect to survive. I imagine if you looked into the price to make a car compared to what they sell for, you would find it's a huge gap as well, as they have even more overhead to account for than a HiFi manufacturer would of course.
Problem is, you won't sell 100 cheaper preamps. You'll be lucky to sell 10, because the market for cheaper preamps has pretty much disappeared. No amount of 'if you build it, they will come' thinking will bring it back.
Interestingly, although I've not spent that much time with the pre/power, from brief exposure not only does it perform better than surviving $800 preamps I've heard, it also sounds better than many $3,000 preamps, despite the more expensive products having nicely filled cases and lots of components inside. It lacks a remote control, which hampers the product's ultimate salesworthyness, but not its sonic performance. So which one wins, the high worth of the sonic performance or the low value in terms of parts?
As to our rivals, they will look at the product in terms of its performance, not its parts list.
A Lancia Stratos was $10,000 of Fiat and Ferrari parts for $50,000. And if you've asked anyone who owns one, it's worth many times that much.
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com
So mentioning the disparity between the parts cost and eventual price is what....gauche? That is all I am trying to note...we have folk reviewing a few hundred dollars in parts selling for many times more and that goes unmentioned....If you tell me it is not mportant, then the horsey on that cotton $15 shirt really is wortj an additional $50.
I'm not saying that it's gauche. I'm saying that both of these statements following aren't correct:
- "Product X costs Y to build, so it should sell for a max of Z% over the cost of parts". You're not taking into account far too many factors in that situation. Assembly costs, research and development costs, advertising, packaging, shipping, warranty and repair costs, return costs, etc... The cost of the parts in any item make up a smaller percentage of the total cost of the item than you might think.
- "I understand the idea of economies of scale...but is there a difference in selling 10 preamps at $1600 each or 100 at $7-800 each? One can make the same profit but more folk get the thing." In this case, if they are selling 10 times as many of the product, shouldn't they make more of a profit than if they had sold 1/10th that amount? You seem to think they should be OK with making the same profit as they would if they weren't as successful, which really would give them very little reason to try to be successful (since far more could go wrong if they sold 10 times as many, and the headaches of running that business could be far worse). Perhaps had you said they could drop the price to $1,300 each, and sell 3 times as many, to make more than twice their original profit, it would have more logical footing.
- "It is like pretending putting a little horsey on a cotton pullover shirt makes the shirt worth 3 times the price of the same shirt without the horsey." If that little horsey cost you far more money to license, design, and manufacturer, and you had a smaller market for that shirt as you did for the plain shirt, and people were willing to pay for that look, than I can say that yes, it would be worth 3x as much.
If you don't feel it is worth it, than there is no one forcing you to make a purchase, but declaring that someone's pricing structure is wrong because you think it is worth less, when other people obviously seem to be willing to pay that much, doesn't make their pricing unfair.
Chris, still, the box is almost empty and the cost is around $1600....Capitalism says the seller should be able to sell for whatever he thinks he should get. It does not preclude reviewers from noting the diparity between what oe pays and what one gets....The reviewer has a dut to be fair to both the manufacturer AND the reader and note wide disparities between price and cost to build. I am not saying the price is 'unfair', but the the box is about empty. The relationship between cost and sale price is of more than passing interest to some folk looking to buy.
I'm saying that the reviewer would have no way to determine the actual cost of what they are reviewing. They could open it up and look at the parts, and even price out every single component inside, but there's still far too many unknowns for them to take an educated guess at what it might cost them in total. The only cost that matters is what the consumer is going to wind up paying for it. If the reviewer feels that a $1,600 component is inferior to a $500 component, their job is to let us know that, not that the $1,600 one cost $500 for the parts and the $500 one cost $250 for parts, as that has no effect on me. Anyway, if I pay $1,600 for a piece of gear, than I'm getting a $1,600 piece of gear, whereas if I pay $500 for a piece of gear, I'm getting a piece of gear worth $500, since that's what the market will pay for it. If the $1,600 one is just a $500 one with a new badge on it, someone is going to notice that and point it out.
I agree witht that, when one opens the box and see's something like this:
http://www.ultraaudio.com/equipment/pics/200805_pbn_amp_600w.jpg
When one sees a nearly empty box, but a hefty price, the cost v price issue is clear. How does a reviewer determine something is way overpriced? If that is not part of his job, then how can one take any comments about value seriously?
Simple, he determines if it's a value by comparing it to the list prices of other similar components. Those are actual, tangible numbers that we are likely to pay for equipment. The cost of the parts in the box has zero relevance to us, since it's all just a guess, and it doesn't matter. Let's look at an example:
Phono Amp A: $2,000 list, parts: $700
Phono Amp B: $1,900 list, parts: $1,000
Phono Amp C: $1,800 list, parts: $1,250
Now, going from what you have said, I'm guessing you're going to see Amp C as the better value here, and the one you are likely to buy. And perhaps it's the best one out of them. However, say you have a review comparing all 3 that says that C is good, very well made, but just good. B is just OK, not quite as good as C, but close. Amp A, though, it's fantastic. It sounds much more natural to the listener, it seems to better reproduce the sound in their environment. Are you going to still buy C just because you know the parts inside cost more?
What if Amp C uses a ton of great parts, top of the line, has a nice, cheap assembly location in China, and sells direct online to cut out the costs, and so that's how they keep the price low. Perhaps, however, on Amp A, they might not use as "high end" of parts, but they spent a lot more time researching and building prototypes to find what parts worked well together, and resulted in the sound that they were after, even if this took a lot longer to do that just buying the best. Then, when they build these amps, they match the parts to other parts that work well together and hand-tune them to make sure that they sound as close to the sound that they are looking to produce. Sure, that's not as cheap as the mass assembly in China, but it gets them what they want. Finally, they sell to a network of dealers that they have a good relationship with, and will provide fantastic support for in case something goes wrong with the parts, from giving a loaner amp while it's being fixed, to having trained dealers that might know how to do the repairs themselves.
If you look at that, then you can see why, perhaps, once company is charging more while not having the same price of goods inside of their equipment, but still getting out better results than the company where you have tangible evidence of where your money went. Unfortunately, while a reviewer can talk to the company about the equipment, they probably won't know everything that went into it. No one is going to admit to cutting corners, or using a very basic design to just get something out there and making a profit. But when you look at this and see that one costs only 10% more than the other, but sounds far better, that to me is a better value, even though it might not have as expensive of parts inside of it. This is why I don't want my reviewers guessing what equipment might have cost to assemble, since it has no impact on me. I want to know how it sounds, and how it compares to other similar products, with a similar price that I would pay.
What when it is the other way around...the cheap one has the best sound...if a reviewer reviews the one and then later reviews the more expensive one and both sound about the same, shuld not the reviewer note it?
They should note that they liked the $1,800 one about as much as the $2,000 one. That's it. How they arrive at those prices doesn't matter (wether it's from parts, R&D, etc...), all that matters is what they actually cost us, and the performance of them, that's the point I am trying to make.
I am really surprised to fing such a vigorous defense of WAY inflated margins and prices. If the empty box is really worth the price, then is the pricing structure not also a filter to insure the riff raff stay out of the hobby, sort of like a audio gated community.? How dare we peasants aspire....
Er, I think we are getting really off topic, here. Whether a product review should discuss the component count inside a product is one thing, but discussing business practice like margins is pushing the envelope. If you have insider knowledge of Renaissance's margins, this is not the place to discuss such things. If you don't, I'd rather not see this thread descend into idle speculation.
In truth, I'm reluctant to make value judgments concerning the amount of 'air' inside a product. I have heard products with a tiny component count that wipe the floor with stuffed-board products (and vice versa). Were I to criticize the first product for being materially poor value, even if I praise it on all other counts, it would then be deselected from many people's audition list.
I accidentally killed one of the best preamps of the early 1990s by doing just that. "It may be just a few chips in a box, but it sounds remarkable," I said as a relative newbie in the reviewing business. Every other review was glowing praise and skipped over the component count issue, but the damage was already done. You can guess the rest. You could say I helped eliminate an overpriced component - I think I helped destroy a $1,000 preamp that sounded better than $10,000 models.
IMO, that is ultimately unfair to the end user, because that product may well be the very one that best suits their system. It also means amplifier design could take a step backwards; if better sounding products prove to be the ones with the fewer components, haven't we just placed a price ceiling on them? That then means to make a 'better' preamp (above that price ceiling) means a more complex design, irrespective of what that does to sound quality. And that is really poor value for money.
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com
I'll agree this went way off topic as well, and I helped with doing that. I just want to make clear that I wasn't arguing for inflated profit margins, I was just arguing that you can't look at the insides of a product and assume you know the total costs of a product, or it's value, from that, as there is more that goes into it than just parts.
I don't see what the big deal is. I subscribe to TAS and frequently buy HiFi+ off the stands. Car magazines do the same thing between publications that are US and UK based, as is the case here. It would bother me if TAS and Stereophile did this, but there's little chance of that, right?
There's zero chance of that.
Why on the font page are there 30 replies, however when I look at the thread there is only a few.
have they been deleted???
Why on the font page are there 30 replies, however when I look at the thread there is only a few.
have they been deleted???
None of the threads have been deleted, they are all still up.
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com
Having bought HiFi+ on the newsstand and read Roy Gregory's review, I was excited when my TAS came in the mail to gain another reviewer's perspective on the Focals. Finding the same text verbatim was a real disappointment, especially as it: a) deprived TAS readers of hearing about the speakers from the perspective of a regular TAS reviewer; and b) was--notably--not up to the objective, measured, carefully considered standard of TAS reviews. "Turntable's" characterization of it as an advertorial doesn't feel too far off; at the very least, it didn't bear a reread as AHC, JV, RH, and WG's reviews regularly do.
Having the Grande Utopia on the cover may have given TAS a stateside scoop, but it did little service to the magazine's regular readers who choose TAS for the integrity of its editorial perspective--of which RG's review did not feel a part.
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