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I don't think what SVS has done is unethical at all. Mudslinging at best and even the politicians do that, but it certainly is not unethical.
We may think it is not very "honourable" but honour and ethics are two different things.



Well the poll does show that for 25% of the respondents the ethics of SVS business practice won't deter their purchase decision. There will always be a % of any group that say the ends justify the means, which sounds like your postion Chesseroo. The results are actually very close to what researchers find in other business as well. There will always be a hard core group (about 25%)where ethical considerations do not enter into their purchase decisions. I actually slanted the question the other way by giving pollsters 2 answers out of the 3 which supported a decision to purchase.

You say what SVS has done is not unethical. Interesting. Lets look at the facts.

For several years now SVS have used phony plants whom the have hired or are staff to post wonderful descriptions of how much they love their SVS subs whether they own them or not. When criticism or concerns are raised by interested parties or potential buyers they appear en masse to either intimidate or undermine the person making the criticism. They start many false threads about how the plant had sub A but sold it to buy SVS sub B and how much better it is. Every once in a while either Stimpson of Voldahal weighs in giving credence to what the plant is saying. When technical information or a competing comparison is posted the gang goes into overdrive with misinformation about the other sub by starting new threads about how they had an SVS sub and the other sub didn't cut it. When threads are started on other non-SVS subs not even mentioning SVS the marketing gang weighs in with how their SVS sub is so much better. When a forum owner tries to curtail this abusive behaviour he gets threatened that SVS will pull its advertising $$s if their plants are not allowed to disrupt non-SVS threads. I've often questioned these plants and their responses indicated they had never heard either the sub in question or owned the SVS sub they were purporting was better. When a group of honest enthusiasts gets together to do blind tests with an SVS sub and an Axiom sub SVS plants respond en masse with how the results cannot be believed and were fixed. I won't even get into the campaign they waged against Axiom in the fall of 2005 when the EP500/600 made such a splash. There is much more but you get the picture.

At the heart of this is a a lack of transparency and a concerted plan aimed at deceiving readers. I've seen many an unsophisticated first time buyer misled by such deceptive practices. I see the ethical question here as clear as night and day and so do 76% of the sample polled. I don't expect everyone to see the ethical implications of this type of business practice but I'm glad to see the mods at Audioholics and AVS do.

Like I said earlier I don't buy products of any company that condones this kind of business practice because it is all too often symptematic of a corporate culture that will also use other disreptutable techniques. For example independent testers have not been able to replicate most of FR graphs at their site which is no surprise to me. Anyway I look at it SVS marketing practices constitute one of the more blatant unethical lapses I've seen in a while. What's right and wrong was certainly clear to Clint and Gene at Audioholics.

John