Bookshelf Speaker Reviews

The subwoofer photoed in the article is not the SUB-1000 from Dayton Audio, its the Dayton T1004A (Titanic MK 4). Perhaps this is why it sounded so good.....its a $580.00 sub, not $119.00

Rob Sabin's response to a letter ("The Value Quotient") in the January 2018 issue of S&V flatly contradicts the review of the Dayton Audio B652-AIR Speaker System here. Sabin's reply to the letter writer states "Our Performance rating reflects (or should reflect) only the audio or video performance of a product, irrespective of price." But the reviewer says instead, "our ratings generally measure a product’s merit relative to other products on the market in its price range, not in absolute terms. Compared with other monitor-size speakers in our Top Picks at all prices, the B652-AIR would win a solid three and a half to four stars. But relative to speakers that sell for $60/pair, which don’t make our Top Picks at all, they are five-star champions".

If the ratings are to have any value to readers, S&V should have a consistent policy. Either all of the performance ratings should be relative to other components in its price range (as the reviewer claims), or they should all be "absolute", that is with only top performing, state-of-the- art components receiving 5 star performance ratings (per editor Sabin), with the Value rating expressing the price/performance ratio of the component under review. Sabin's view makes more sense to me, otherwise one or other of the separate Performance or Value ratings are redundant. As it is now, with each reviewer deciding what the ratings mean, they have little value to S&V readers.