You think email is bad, I know a guy who gave his mom a fax machine some years ago. She'd fax him the printed version of this crap multiple times per day.
Pxtl: Zed-ex: Pxtl: I often go by consumer opinions posted online, simply because they're often the only source of information. Go buy an appliance, search the model number... if you're lucky, you'll be able to pay Consumer Reports for the opinion they gathered after four hours of exhaustive testing and reading the company PR. Or you can just read the opinion of somebody who actually owns the damned thing.

The problem, of course, is that "somebody" may not exist.

Ya before I buy I usually look at what people have to say about the product.

I make 4 assumptions.

-People who are gaga fan boys will praise it regardless.

-The company may be posting fake reviews.

-People who are upset or disappointed will post the most due to them feeling shafted.

-People who are satisfied are the least likely to post as they just aren't motivated enough to go online and say "yep it does it's job".

So I mostly look at the bad posts and see what their complaints are. See how many freak accidents there are, how many are the purchasers fault, how many are the companies.

If most of the complaints are due to purchaser stupidity then I will assume it is a good product

Precisely. I don't buy anything with a product ID that I can't Google and follow your process.

Annoys the hell out of the wife though, since her opinion is that everything's Chinese crap anyways and you may as well just buy the cheapest one with the specs you need.

I'm sadly starting to think she's right.

What, how can you distrust reviews like this (new window):

A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the "directional markings" on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews.

I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile - I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance.

Needless to say, I returned the cable and wrote an angry letter to the so-called engineers at Denon.