Why No Bad Reviews?

This is a question that pops up every so often, like a mole in the Whac-A-Mole game —why aren’t there more reviews of bad products?

I’m going to stick to speaking for myself in my answer and here it is: I get to choose what I review and this process involves research and interest. And my interests are to review gear that seems to be worth a closer listen based on research which can involve prior first-hand experience, prior experience with the company, word of mouth recommendations from friends and colleagues, and other reviews. You could say I curate the gear I review.

In other words, my working process for selecting gear pretty much negates the possibility that I’ll encounter crappy gear, gear so bad that no one in the known universe would enjoy listening through it. In my 10+ years as a reviewer, I’ve encountered exactly one such product, a pair of active monitors back in my AudioStream days, that hissed so loud I could not recommend buying them. And I said so in the review. Other reviewers didn’t mind the audible hiss and they said so in their reviews. Comme ci, comme ça.

Of course, the idea that there’s tons of crap gear floating around is an interesting point of view that flies in the face of my experience. Here’s the thing — we all have preferences and budgets but that doesn’t mean that products we don’t like or that cost more than we would spend are necessarily bad products. This good/bad way of looking at things is an ancient construct that can go awry when applied, willy-nilly, to things. But that’s a longer story.

The reason there aren’t more reviews of bad products here at Twittering Machines is due to the fact that I haven’t encountered any.


If you are interested in reviews of crappy products, start your own site! It’s cheap & easy and I have a deal for you — I own the domain crappyhifi.com (I really do) and you can have it, for free, if you write 50 reviews of crappy products (2000 minimum word count per review). When you’re done, send them over and if they fit the mold, so to speak, you can be up and running crappyhifi.com in no time.