The future of the hi-fi press

I will say what I like and when I like within the law (and the rules of this forum) and you can mind your fffing business!

 

I know that Martin has worked as a consultant for many companies. MF, Cyrus and Quad spring to mind. Nothing wrong with that though surely so long as the interest is declared. I've seen it declared several times.

 

And

 

and nothing.

 

That just means you don't know.

 

Warning!! Warning!! RICHARD PARANOIA ALERT!!! Warning!!! Warning!!!

Chris

 

Means we don't want to be sued.

 

Warning!! Warning!! RICHARD EXPERIENCE ALERT!!! Warning!! Warning!!

 

That I fully agree with and anyway to single one person out amongst a plethora of similarity is wrong. It is an attitude so prevalent in society anyway, just look at politicians, it became acceptable, well at least to them!

 

True statements are not libel, by definition.

Of course, if the allegations are not based on evidentiary truth and therefore defamatory and actionable, I can wholly understand why the outspoken Richard Dunn would suddenly develop a bad case of coyness.

 

Going back to Ron Holt's original question: the future of the conventional hifi magazine is bleak and its demise is being accelerated by a concentration on new product reviews, written generally in a tedious style and culminating in a one dimensional scoring system based on 4 stars or ratings of 80%-90% for the vast majority of product.

What a contrast to Hifi News in the Atkinson, Messenger, Colloms and Humphreys era. If you want to read interesting magazines, read those from the 70s and 80s!

Hifi Critic makes a good stab at replacing Hifi News in its former guise. Inevitably, it can't buy £50k or £100k of new product each quarter so its reviews do have a brand bias based on what they are, generally, able to loan. So whilst they do achieve a good brand spread, there is more of Naim and Absolute Sounds kit that would ideally be the case.

It would be great to get to a "Which?" magazine reviewing model but I doubt the subscriber base is sufficient to fund anything close to that.

 

God forbid that any HiFi magazine became anything like Which? - they would be recommending the audio equivament of Kia/Hyundai cars all of the time, which is not what most audio buffs reading forums like ZG want. I am happy to be advised by Which? when looking for a washing machine, but for anything that requires a subjective opinion, forget it! If anyone wishes to explore the car analogy, then I am happy to discuss in depth!

I do agree with much of what has been said here regarding the future of the traditional HiFi magazines. I still subscribe to HFN and HiFi Critic, but like Rob, I tend only to read HiFi Critic and skim the rest. That said, I do think that HFN is doing a creditable job in trying to broaden its appeal without alienating established readers. The key is that I do look forward to each issue arriving in the post.

Whatever whinges are thrown around internet forums, many audiophools like to read about stuff that they can never afford, and I do hope that I can carry on doing that. The old (beautifully presented) HF+ used to annoy me with the extreme length of its articles, but the new dull HF+ is, in my opinion, missing the point - there is room for audioporn in the market. If you want to design a magazine around focus group type research, then HF+ appears to be the way to do it, and to go down the pan very quickly when they find out that what people said they wanted was not at all what they wanted in reality.

I wouldn't want to be running a business around HiFi magazine publishing, though.

 

Plush has become the home of lazy reviewing of late, There are so many wishy washy reviews that are utterly none committal it's untrue. I like Alan's writing and Roy's but the rest of them are just awful.

 

It's all doomed and who cares? I take plush and HFW for some of the features and an eye on what's new. Reviews have never interested me beyond providing details of what is on offer fit and facilities wise, I always try stuff at home. I agree that the writing has largely become very bland - it's an event if something has got less than four globes/stars etc. Usually means the reviewer forgot to plug it in. But to be fair the competition for fresh comment is massive these days.

The Hi Fi Critic model doesn't work for me, the guys there review elsewhere so the same constraints apply - why piss off manufacturers who advertise in other organs you review for? If I want to read Malcolm Steward's reviews I can always cut straight to Naim's marketing dept.

 

Twenty-five years ago, even the smallest hi-fi title had more readers than all of them put together can muster today. Smaller audiences means cheaper advertising means less money to reinvest in good features. So the magazines concentrate on what can make them the most money in the short term (reviews, and the advertising and reprint money they bring in) because if they try to concentrate on the long term, there will be no long term.

There's a big paradox. What Hi-Fi aside, a review in any of the UK magazines generates almost no interest among UK buyers. But put the review up on your website and it gets a huge number of hits from international customers who still rely on reviews from 'independent authorities' to form their buying decisions. So you end up with US companies keen to have products reviewed in UK magazines to help them sell their products in HK.

If you want to sell your high-end product on an international stage, get a review from John Atkinson, Robert E Green, Tom Gillette (Sam Tellig), Alvin Gold, Roy Gregory, Robert Harley, Ken Kessler, Harry Pearson, Wes Phillips or Jonathan Valin. A good review from any of these names will still guarantee a definite increase in sales in places like Moscow, Singapore, HK, etc. All the others might generate an increase in sales, but they don't really count. Also, the UK names play second-fiddle to the US ones. A good review by Ken Kessler is bankable, but still not as much as a good Sam Tellig review.

These ten names are actually just as important as the magazines they write for. They don't read a Stereophile review, they read a Sam Tellig review in Stereophile. Most magazine publishers fail to understand this and treat writers as expensive page-filler between advertisments.

 

Your not wrong there, it's the reviewer that counts for me, not the rag that pays his bill. I'd say you've missed Paul Messenger from that list.

 

Nope. He's second-fiddle on the international market. As is Martin Colloms now. I'd say Alvin Gold star is waning too. I suspect Srajan Ebaen or Doug Schneider will replace him.

 

How times change.

Always liked JMH myself, never agreed with a single word printed on any subject other than Impulse speakers but he used to be good value.

 

I spoke to Martin at the National Show and he seemed quite down on the future for Critic. He was concerned that much of the following he'd built up writing over many years for News hadn't transferred across, but then it is a different model.

 

What, you found they sounded best facing against the wall too? ;-)

Tony