AR Reviews of Interconnects and Speakers

[mystic]

Members who submitt reviews of audio components on audioreview.com are asked to rate the performance of the product on a scale of 1 to 5. These ratings are then averaged for the particular product(e.g., 4.5 for a 4 and a 5). I recently compared the reviews of main speakers and interconnects on this site expecting to find more variation in ratings for the former than the latter. I thought those who had submitted reviews likely would give a wider range of ratings to speakers because different models do perform differently, whereas different interconnects would not be expected to sound as different as the speakers. I did not find the pattern in the data, however, that I had expected.

In order to avoid the problems that can be encountered when models have a very small number of reviews, I ranked the models by the number of reviews, and to make the research more manageable, analyzed only the top 10 of each category. The range of average ratings for the 10 most reviewed speakers was 2.19 to 4.78 and the range for the 10 most reviewed interconnects was 2.51 to 4.93. The spread in the rankings reflected: low averages for some Bose models ( 4 of the 10 speakers in the group were Bose) and low averages for two models of speakers sometimes bought off vans in parking lots; and a low average for a Monster Cable interconnect.

Rather than deal with issues of Bose bashing and Monster bashing, I decide to exclude these items (and the speakers sometimes sold in parking lots) from the analysis, and expand to the 15 other most reviewed main speakers and interconnects. The average ratings for the 15 speakers ranged from 4.37 for the B&W DM 602(166 reviews) to 4.78 for the Klipsch Reference RF-3(202 reviews). In comparison, the averages for the 15 interconnects ranged from 3.78 for the Kimber Kable PBJ(98 reviews) to 4.93 for the Pure Silver Sound Quartet (41 reviews) and AudioQuest Anaconda(15 reviews). If the averages for each category are averaged, the results are 4.55 for the 15 speakers and 4.53 for the 15 interconnects, hardly any difference at all.

What do Forum members think about the comparison?