From: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu (Don Gillies)
Subject: Re: Surround speakers--Out of phase vs. traditional
Keywords: surround dolby prologic pro logic speaker dipole 
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 04:25:55 GMT

Re: Somebody's Radio Shack Speakers (the ones rated highly in Consumer
  Reports) are not working well as center-channel speakers.

Radio Shack makes total garbage; most likely your problem is all Radio
Shack's fault.  I would never buy a Radio Shack product.  Nearly all
of their stuff is either discontinued, or junk from the far east that
never sold on the home market.  The one consistent thing about Radio
Shack products is that there is no Quality: Radio Shack makes GM look
like Toyota!  In the case of their integrated circuits, they once sold
factory rejects (cosmetic or otherwise) that were touted as
top-quality stuff, just to increase profits.  A friend once bought a
walkman and it broke in 2 weeks.  You get the idea.  I have seen more
broken Radio Shack equipment than working Radio Shack equipment in my
lifetime.

The bozos at Consumer Reports use weird science; no matter what they
publish it is usually wrong.  There are at least 6 reasons why
Consumer reports publishes utter garbage:
	(1) There is no statistical evaluation to test if a
manufacturer builds products of consistent quality.  For instance, the
time of year and/or production batch determines the quality of
spaghetti sauce more than anything else.  The idiots at CU never even
dreamed this might be true.
	(2) They almost always have a major goof, i.e. forgetting to
test if a speaker is directional, forgetting to test the quality of
slow-motion effects on hifi VCR's, etc.
	(3) Whenever they test something you REALLY know a lot about,
the results are appalling.  Example: When they tested bicycles for the
first time, they tested models in the $100 to $300 range.  Guess what?
With bikes you get what you pay for!  They ended up ranking the
bicycles according to price.  The next time, they tested bikes with
radically different wheels, and of course, rated the bikes with
lighter wheels as superior.  This is not a controlled experiment.
	(4) CU's ratings are about as subjective as subjective can be.
Consider the original rating on the 1979 plymouth Horizon.  CU decided
to do a hatchet job on this car.  To murder it, the report contained
all sorts of crap, "We thing these control stalks on the steering
column are a bad idea, every car should have pushbuttons on the
dashboard."  Five years later, same car: "We liked the control stalks
on the steering column, and are glad that these controls have taken
over the industry."
	(5) You'll notice that they never publish actual measured
values.  This allows them to get away with outright scientific fraud.
If they published actual values (i.e. measured s/n, measured THD,
etc.) rather than rating circles, then someone could actually sue them
for fucking up in the lab.  So they have no scientific responsibility
whatsoever.
	(6) Nowadays, they sample less than 20% of the electronic
products on the market of a given type (receivers, radios, vcrs,
speakers, etc.)

The only thing CU is good for is to get a rough feel for what brands
you should be looking at / listening to.  That's IT!

That's my diatribe on Radio Shack and Consumer Reports.

Don Gillies - gillies@cs.uiuc.edu - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


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