Consumer forums are a great resource to get the low down on home theater gear you’re looking at, and tips and tricks to get the best from what you have. Keep in mind that these are consumer forums – regular people who have an interest in talking about home theater. Just like any conversation about home theater, they’re not always right.

It can help to know certain types of people many forums will contain so you can weed through write-up and form you own opinion of a product.

Listed below are a few of the different types of people who contribute to online forums. Below that are a few classifications for professional reviewers as well.

The Bragger
These people are responding to the consumer review or forum simply to brag about what they have. These consumer reviews can be good to see if others like that piece of home theater nirvana you’re looking into, but since they’ve already purchased the unit, they have a strong bias towards pumping up the product. The ones of most value are the reviews that detail which specific product features are great so you know to keep an eye out.

The “Mine Broke” Don’t Buy This
You can find negative and positive consumer opinions on almost any home theater product. Some people just hate a particular brand or product type due to a bad experience at some point in their lives, or downright misinformation. Every product will have certain units that simply don’t work right. Manufacturers would have to personally test each unit before shipping them out to ensure that they were in good working order.

Products can then still be damaged via shipping and handling, so there will always be that “x-factor” of the product getting damaged in shipping or just being defective. It’s when the product breaks just outside the return period that really sucks, as you then have to deal with the manufacturer’s customer service, and in many cases, lack thereof.

The higher the price, the more the pain, and saying “this happens” doesn’t make it better; it just says, “Buyer beware”.  While $2000 is a lot of money to most anyone, when you buy, for example, a Plasma TV in that price range you’re buying a Plasma that’s at the cheaper end of the technology’s price range, and thus has been cost cut by using cheaper components. Price isn’t always indicative, especially of your buying a model that’s being closed out, which you can then save $400-$1000 on a unit, which means it was actually not a cost cut, low end model.

The Generally Wise
These are among the best forum contributors. These people generally have of a lot of knowledge, and can help others fill in the blanks of their technological understanding. Usually these types of contributors can see when someone’s not quite getting it and can help them understand a topic completely.

The Misinformed
A little knowledge is truly a dangerous thing and these types contributors can really harm a user forum unless one of the savvy forum contributors counters the misinformed person.

The Non-Calibrator
Some consumers don’t know the benefits of taking the time to play with settings on any given piece of equipment to try and get the best possible performance from their home theater. Unless you have a reference, or have been exposed to properly calibrated home theaters for a while, there’s no way a normal consumer would come anywhere near close to properly calibrating their home theater.

Calibration DVDs are relatively cheap and some DVDs even come with a THX optimizer to help you calibrate your home theater.

The Pusher
Some people just have a bias towards a certain technology or brand, and think anyone else that differs from their opinion suffers from sort of mental deficiency. More often than not these types of contributors end up being the misinformed ones as there are reasons not to like any type of technology.

The Wower
These are generally the most fun consumer reviews to read. They’re so excited about the great performance of any new piece of technology that they write glowing reviews about every product, even one’s that are known to have issues that they can’t see.

They don’t know the product has issue, and since the product is introducing them to amazing technology such as HD broadcasts, the improvement is so much better than what they’ve experienced before, if difficult for them to know that other products can make the image look better.

The “wower” review is a great reality check, as sometimes we home theater tweaking nuts can get so caught up in minor performance issues with every product that we forget to enjoy what the products do right.

The Shill
Not all consumer reviews are written by consumers. Imagine that, a person who works for a company commenting on a product their company makes.

There are also professional reviewers who aren’t worth much either:

The “Everything is Great” reviewer
These guys won’t say anything bad about any product. Some of these reviews can actually be quite funny if the unit reviewed actually had significant shortcomings. The reviewer will list out a major performance shortcomings, and then actually recommend the product at the end of their review.

The “A little knowledge goes a short distance” reviewer
These reviewers tend to be contributors to a magazine or web site that has nothing to do with home theater. These are the types of reviewers that make bold incorrect statements such as “CRT is dead” when in that same year CRT sold out all the new technologies such as Plasma and DLP. These types of elitist and misinformed commentators only add to consumer misconceptions about home theater technologies.

The “Dumbass”
These are the types of reviewers that make comparisons that aren’t even fair. One review in a popular home theater magazine did a side-by-side comparison of a $400 iPod vs. a $2,500 dedicated CD player. They summarized that even though the iPod is convenient that it doesn’t hold a candle to a dedicated CD player. Essentially the reviewer wanted to establish that iPods don’t sound as good as CD, but a comparison of a $400 iPod versus a $2500 dedicated CD player is hardly a comparative analysis.

The “Out of the box” reviewer
I don’t read magazines about home theater to find out how a product looks out of the box. I can go to the store and do that. Some reviewers spend 50% of the article discussing out of the box performance. People read about home theater to learn more about products and how they perform when calibrated correctly. Not necessarily professionally ISF calibrated, but calibrated with the user adjustable controls.

The only people that should review out of the box should be general technology sites such a CNET, but they should also review how the product performed with after few tweaks.

The difference between out of the box and calibrated reviews is tremendous. With TVs it can mean the difference of a bad versus good rating. Most, if not all, TVs need to be calibrated to look good as the manufacturers jack up the settings to make the TV stand out in the store. 

Nobody would review a surround receiver without setting it up first. Imagine hearing a review state that a receiver didn’t sound that great out of the box since the surrounds were not on. C’mon reviewers, change the user selectable settings to get the best possible performance out of the unit before writing your review.

Summary
There’s many different types of consumers and reviewer contributing the wealth of online information available on home theater products. While it’s easy to get caught up on all the opinions, don’t forget to rely on the most important one... yours.