Hardware wise I generally only read the end bits of stereophile with the price, details and graphs,
Music reviews: because I do not put much faith in the florid prose of writers and journalists, especially these days when I realised either due to me getting better or writers getting more inane, my knowledge of the structural underpinnings of music now outstrips the writer's (even if I cannot express it well); it seems to me okay for modern hifi journalists reviewing music to either invent words or use technical musical terms (as in specific items of musical terminology regarded as canon) so inappropriately or incorrectly that it might as well be free verse...
Hifi Plus' music reviews were toe curling, it is a waste of space, its so wrong in some of the copies I read a few years ago at Bub's that it actually made me not like reading. That is a tremendous achievement. As Philip Glass advises all composers (and I paraphrase) don't read the content of the review, just check the column inches.
It's hard to write accurately about the technicalities of music when you have no real musical training and if you have no musical training then you are left with fumbling in the dark and a hand-waving style of writing that epitomises hifi music journalism.
This trend of writing bollocks is spreading
I read a boomkat review of a friend's recent release because he could not stop laughing and it could have been about anything. I used to read Gramophone and thought some of the write-ups were pretty good, but I read it (past tense) for the musical backstory and some conductor insights; these days it is actually faster just to pull up the piece of music in question or see if you can order the sheet and read/hear for yourself rather than rely on the blatherings of someone with patchy, limited, self-indulgently wrong or limited knowledge of music because all people have is writing only about intangible emotional attachment-y type things.
It's very depressing really.
Would you like to write music reviews for the magazine? I mean this quite seriously. The pay is lousy, and music companies have reacted to the blogosphere by not sending out review copies anymore, so you'll probably end up losing money on every review you write, but it means you could join the ranks of the hated.
Our contemporary, audiophile, and jazz sections are the easiest to cover (and consequently the ones with the most writers), because the readers of those sections are entirely disinterested in the music theory. In the case of contemporary, it's all to do with the discovery of new music, but in the audiophile and jazz sections, it's more about the back-story of the recording and its reissue.
i.e.,
"Sam 'Sidewinder' Brent played alto sax with the Tad 'Polaris' Hammersmith Big Band from 1946 until he was spotted by Chad 'Redstone' Balanitis, who signed him to Nike Hercules' legendary Hound Dog label in late 1957. Brent was a natural bandleader and on
Let Me Fill Up Your Silo, his first (and only) outing with the label, he was joined by the then unheard of Milt 'Titan' Croydon on piano, Benny 'Pershing' Merton on bass, and Big Joe 'Minuteman' Redbridge on sticks.
"Despite sinuous reworkings of standards like, 'Is It Meant To Look Like That?' and, 'If You Loved Me, You'd Swallow It',
Let Me Fill Up Your Silo was not destined for success. Panned by critics at the time for being 'a musical war crime', Brent responded by dying from a self-introduced rectal obscenity explosion on New Year's Day, 1959. Just four copies of the album were thought to be still in existence (three of which are still being used in urban pacification programs), making the album priceless. As a result, the master tapes were recently discovered in a clogged sewer, and thanks to Clem 'Tomahawk' Phimosis and Bud 'Trident II' Chancroid of the Crap Music Reissue Company, this long forgotten 'classic' is now available on 45rpm triple 200g virgin vinyl. Despite being unlistenable, it sounds better than ever."
Print a review like this every month and you are guaranteed an audience.
Classical is a lot harder. I sort of agree about the previous reviewer from a few years ago, but in fairness he was extremely well liked by the readers. Many ask for their classical reviews to be written from the viewpoint of a collector, rather than a musicologist. Since our previous reviewer stood down due to ill health, we have struggled to fill his shoes. Paradoxically, using music graduates doesn't work well here, because they read like they swallowed a Grove and they tend to refuse to leave their comfort zones. So, you end up with singers writing about choral, lieder and opera, pianists writing about piano music and so on. Unless you have a large and varied pool of musicians willing to write for less money than they have to spend to buy the music in the first place, the problem simply doesn't go away.