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Comment by edgefield

3 years ago

rtings.com is very good for certain types of products like TVs, headphones, etc.

I trust their measurements, I just don't like how they score things, and people tend to just use their scores instead of looking at the pros+cons and measurements. (they weight all the different subscores, and add them up, so eg. if there was an excellent monitor except it had a 100:1 contrast ratio, it'd still get great scores despite having such a huge flaw that most people would consider it to be essentially unusable).

It's really bad for HDR monitors, where an edge lit "fake HDR" monitor can get a 7, while failing the basics that are necessary to give a proper HDR experience. Something like TFTCentral or HardwareUnboxed's HDR checklists, and just straight up failing monitors that don't meet all the requirements would be much better than their current (imo misleading) system that can give good SDR monitors high HDR scores, when they're terrible at HDR.

  • Sounds like those basic components should be weighted more heavily, then?

    • Not really. If any single category is "good enough" then the weights are reasonably correct. It's just when a single category is a deal breaker that the simple metric of adding them up doesn't work.

Agreed, minus the headphones. Their headphone reviews are a joke. It's also worth noting some products have a lot of variation due to poor QC (PC monitors) and they may get an unusually good/bad unit from time to time, skewing the review.

  • For headphones I just use Crinacle. It’s served me well so far.

    For other stuff, I usually check Wirecutter and cross-reference it with Reddit reviews.

    I also have noticed that Wirecutter seems.. less qualitative (?) since they got bought by The NY Times.

    • Crinacle is probably the best, but for headphones I think it's the kind of thing you actually need to try out yourselves: the comfort varies so much for people, as does the preference for different sound signature (and knowing how well headphones handle when they're EQ'd to your preferences).

Agree - they updated the review for Logitech G PRO X WIRELESS build quality while the SoundGuys still show build quality 9/10.