Originally Posted By: Adrian
Kind of reminds me of the shootouts you see when they compare automobiles in magazines. You have a group of people who are interested in track times, another who is interested in bang-for-buck, others who's main focus is reliability or ride quality or economy....It always irks me when you read comments like "The xxxx blew everyone away on the track, so it should have won..."

In a subwoofer shootout, the reviewer imo would need to make it very clear what things they are judging/looking for...outright spl, accuracy, value, quality/reliability....otherwise you will get someone sending a Bugatti Veyron to a family sedan shootout.


Absolutely, other than maybe learning about a new product, I have, in recent years, pretty well ignored these comparisons. The problem always is who is setting the parameters and what will they be to make it fair and accurate to all the participants and do the parameters really mean anything? I learned the folly of this back two or three years ago when one of the major publications was doing a so-called "shoot-out" with about half a dozen newly introduced television monitors viewed by four "experts" all gathered in the same room at the same time and when they summed up all their findings at the end, what was a perceived flaw in one particular model by one "expert" was pleasing to another! So what was the point?

Same old story, in the end you make your own decisions and just do what is right for you.