What hi-fi+ stands for
At the heart of any magazine lies its Review Policy. How it selects the products that it writes about, and how it treats them once it gets hold of them. Needless to say, our policy at hi-fi+ is rather different to the norm.

For a start, we don’t just review every new product that we can lay our hands on. So many of them are variations on the previous model, or "inspired" by someone else’s market leader, that if you aren’t careful then you spend all your time trying to make increasingly small differences sound important and exciting.

At hi-fi+ we select review products for two reasons:
The unit does its job in a genuinely new or different way. (What does the designer hope to achieve by his approach, and do the results justify the means?)
The unit has been around for a while, and continues to survive in the face of more recent competing models. (Clearly it’s doing something right. How and why?)
Once we’ve selected a product we make sure that we send it to a reviewer who will appreciate its virtues. There’s no point in sending an electrostatic loudspeaker with limited bass extension to someone who listens to a diet of Black Sabbath and grunge. In fact, our whole approach is based on making sure that we’ve got the best out of a product before we start making judgements, and part of that process is to include the manufacturer or designer. That way we know what his intentions were and what he was trying to achieve. We also know what kind of equipment he reckons will get the best out of his baby, and this is critical. As well as ensuring that we are achieving the intended results (as well as any others we discover!), it means that the product’s performance is always placed in an appropriate context.

That context is what tells you whether this product is actually going to work for you if you get it home. The "Best Speaker In The World" award is utterly meaningless if you don’t have the appropriate amplifier to drive it properly! Which is why we tell our reviewers to concentrate on assessing a product in terms of its strengths and weaknesses, providing specific musical examples to illustrate them. You need to know what a product does well (and badly), not whether someone else thinks it’s the best. After all, you wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, no matter what Top Gear said about it.

We also send our review copy to manufacturers before publication. That way they can correct any basic errors in either the technical description of the product, or our description of their aims.

The result of all this is that you, the reader, get more useful reviews. More useful if you are thinking of an upgrade, because we narrow the field for you, and when you do listen, you’ve got a few pointers to watch out for. And more useful if you’re just keeping abreast of developments, because we separate the really innovative designs from the marketing and advertising hype.

Finally, you’ll notice that we provide "desert island" sketches of our reviewers. That’s because they’re people not machines, and pretending that they are all seeing impartial beings is as stupid as it is pretentious. We all have our prejudices, and the name at the top of a review is your only protection against ours. This way, you have a better idea of where our writers are coming from, which once again, makes it easier for you to decide how important their conclusion are to you. I well remember reading the mags when I first got interested in hi-fi, and realising that if a certain reviewer trashed a product, the chances are I’d love it. It all helps.