Welcome to the Skeptical Audiophile
The short answer is that our reviews aren’t based on reasoning at all.
The full story follows. The comments you see below were left on our listing for the Rhino pressing of The Cars’ first album.
The grievances the writer lists are long and mostly unserious, but I think they have some value, just not the value the writer intended, so of course I am happy to reproduce them here and take a crack at explaining the mistaken audiophile thinking they represent.
If you’ve ever stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for logical fallacies, you will have no trouble recognizing all the shortcomings this writer has called us out for in our review of The Cars on Rhino, as well as, we assume, the hundreds of other Heavy Vinyl disasters we take to task on this blog.
Rather that attempt to rebut the individual charges, which seem to be grounded in issues of logic, semantic hair-splitting, a deep misunderstanding of the unwritten rules of criticism, what does and does not constitute an ad hominem attack, my use of injudicious language, and who knows what else, I have an answer that I believe gets to the heart of why none of this matters, which you will find below in my reply to his comments. [Bolding added by me,]
Ad Hominem Attack: The author attacks Kevin Gray personally, suggesting that his work is consistently poor without addressing the specific issues with the remastering process.
Appeal to Authority: The author mentions Steve Hoffman and his successful remastering of The Cars’ first album on Gold CD, implying that because Hoffman did it well, Kevin Gray should have done the same. This disregards the possibility of differences in approach and technique between the two engineers.
Appeal to Popularity: Popularity does not equate to quality.