There’s misinformation, nonsense and pseudoscience in every technical field, but hi-fi is unfortunately one of the worst.

Opinions

Finding good advice isn’t easy. I often speak with advice seekers who’ll say things like:

“Mike, I read in a forum that I should buy XYZ, what do you think…?”

Typical advice-seeker

The overwhelming problem is that many, or even most commenters in forums can’t help you. People generally lack the understanding and experience to offer any real help and as a result, forums are often filled with subjective and conflicting opinions, technically incorrect ‘facts’ and pseudo-scientific nonsense.

I’m not talking about all forums of course. Some, like my old favourite Tektronix Yahoo group, are a literal goldmine of great people and information, but this is very different from your typical hi-fi forum. In most consumer-focused forums, you’ll find discussions about people’s opinions of things they own, technical speculation and even dangerous misinformation.

Then you have retailers, often blinded by marketing spiels and almost always heavily conflicted by the need to sell you what they sell. Again, there are some excellent retailers out there, but most don’t know which information is important, right, wrong etc, creating rabbit holes of wasted time, energy and money.

Specialists

When you need factual information, opinions are as useful as a box of hair! For the best advice, you need technically and experientially informed sources that aren’t tainted by the need to sell products. In most cases, these will be specialists working in the field rather than sitting in a basement arguing in forums.

Our advisory service is one such example, accessible via our contact page. As a specialist service provider rather than a retailer, you pay for the time you need and for that precise reason, you get a completely different type of information from a specialist, rather than a sales pitch.