At some point, you are going to be buying some gear online, and you are going to look at the ratings and reviews.

(I very nearly typed “rantings” instead of ratings, which would have been funny and also somewhat accurate.)

There are times when the various missives, epistles, and sometimes even novellas written by your fellow purchasers are very helpful. There are times when they are blatantly unhelpful. There are also times when their prose SEEMS helpful, but actually isn’t.

The thing to look out for is subjectivity – and when scanning for that subjectivity, recognizing that unverifiable information can be very sneaky.

An easier example to start with is a, say, 2-out-of-5 rating with a statement like, “It doesn’t sound like a [x] watt speaker at all.”

Okay, all right, so…what does a [x] watt speaker sound like? I’ve been doing this for quite a good while, and I really couldn’t tell you what a [insert watts here] speaker sounds like. I could give you an estimate of how loud I think a loudspeaker with, for example, 2 kW of input might be able to get in these modern times, but my assumptions might be very different from that of the reviewer. That is, when I see a loudspeaker advertised as “[x] watts,” my immediate assumption is that I’m looking at an instantaneous number and not anything that could be sustained. Is that what our unhappy reviewer thought? Maybe that was a continuous number in their mind. How do we know?

Since we don’t know, we can’t put too much stock in the person’s dissatisfaction.

Then there are the folks who say, “It has no headroom.” Again, what are they expecting? Are they even using the thing the right way? There are people running around out there who don’t know how to read a dBFS meter, and are blasting the converters of digital consoles thinking that 0 dBFS is treated the same way as 0 dBu. Some folks will clip the input side of a powered loudspeaker and raise a ruckus, never realizing that a master volume control got bumped down.

Another wrinkle can be found in, “The stupid thing died after one gig.” This one is more tricky, because a device absolutely can, objectively, die after one round of serious use. Manufacturing and post-manufacturing defects can and do happen. You have to ask yourself, though, about what the preponderance of evidence shows. If there are a squazillion instances of that unit out in the wild, and a handful of cases of swift death, is that really a disqualifier? The more copies that are made and shipped, the larger the absolute number of failures that can occur. Furthermore, who’s the most likely to raise their voice about something? There are a lot of satisfied folk who say nothing, but disappointed people have a higher tendency to complain.

So, with reviews, it’s good to be generally suspicious, read between the lines, and look for themes. For one person, a product will be amazing, and for another their expectations won’t have been managed correctly. If a person has a bad experience with a piece of gear, and you don’t get the sense that they know what they’re doing, don’t put too much weight into what they say. You shouldn’t totally discount it, of course, especially if the review basically sounds coherent, but don’t give it more credit than it deserves.