Would it be fair game to throw Jude into the mix? His video reviews, he looks like he is getting an erection from the gear he talks about. I remember him talking about that binaural test CD for about 10 minutes like it was the cure for cancer.

Of course, I don't expect him to be an "objective" reviewer by any means ($$$), so not sure I would count him.

Ah, okay, Headphonia is somewhere I had a bad suspicion about. You can tell from the writing they are trying to toe the line, while trying to favor certain pieces (they have a thing for Woo gear I've noticed). I stopped reading them a long time ago. Same for 6moons, but they are sometimes entertaining and cover some obscure gear at times.

As for Jude, I'm very anti-censorship so seeing him try to shut down arguments on the forums is a huge no-no flag. But that Binaural CD review...*shudder* It literally gave me the creeps.

NO HARM, NO FOUL

• Steve Guttenberg sorta comes off as a clown. He writes for CNET. No harm.
• Mercer is honestly passionate about the stuff. I get where he is coming from.
• Fremer has done good things. The cartridge test get's him a get of out jail free card.
• Macedonian Hero isn't deaf and certainly isn't a shill. The problem is that he is about two years behind everyone else, hasn't been exposed to a lot of different top notch stuff (he's in Canada on the East Coast and doesn't go to meets), and he gets super excited when he hears new stuff. He came off as extremely annoying in the past because he would crash HF appreciation threads pull off crap like T1 > PS1000; or T1 > HD800; or WA22 is awesome; so I think that stigma of extremely annoying guy stuck with him unfortunately. If you give him time to upgrade his gear and build a good setup, he eventually figures it out.

• What Hi-Fi is a site for wankers. Part of the British Hi-Fi industrial-media complex. No product gets less than four stars and everything from Chord gets five.
• Srajan Ebaen. Only moderately dangerous because he doesn't make any sense / no one knows what the fuck he is saying.
• Skylab. People didn't know his preferences, which he never clearly stated. More than a few peeps on Changstar were stupid enough to buy the Leben CS300 piece of shit that Skylab rated #1 in his top 10 list (It was always top X lists, never descriptions of sound). Shit, I bought a Darth Bayer and LCD2r1. That was enough for me.

• John Grandberg. I think he's local in the Bay Area, but I have never met him. Don't think he's ever shown up to meets. I have strong suspicions about him. Seems to have a lot of craptastic China gear and some higher-end OK items here and there. I know the Chinese MoTs will give people free or heavily discounted gear if you can assure them a positive review. I wonder about anyone who thinks the Yulong DA08 is a listenable DAC. On the other hand, I don't he has actually heard anything we would consider great sounding gear, so maybe he is totally earnest. In the end, too hard to read between the lines, but he does leave clues. To be fair, maybe just a different focus. Most Pyrates don't want a stack of mid-fi craptastic gear that costs slightly too much for what it is.
• Headphonia is harmful. A lot of people don't realize that he sells shit in his store. There have been a couple of instances were comparative reviews on his site favored the shit that he sold. He's also said shit like the HD700 was awesome sauce that as was good as the STAX 'stats.  I dunno if that was Sennheiser obi-wan'ing him or he wanted to be obi-wan'd. Really makes no difference. At one time, he even said he would trade his HD800 for an HD700. Anaxilus tried to do the trade, but Headphonia backed out. It's sad because he started well out enough. Also, anyone who likes RSA Darkstar has shit for ears. Heck, even Warren publicly wrote on HF that the Darkstar was a POS, albeit a very powerful sounding POS.

• Jude Mansilla is probably the most dangerous person to the hobby. Mainly because of the level of control that he has. He definitely plays favorites based on who is paying him or who might have the potential to pay him. You can sell a lot of stuff if you pay him enough and his the ring on his hand. Independents like us to have no room to run big meets because Jude now runs three or four big meets in California (after he realized that the meets we ran got bigger and bigger, and that there was a shitload of money to be made). The problem with the HF meets is that they are no longer me ets. They are now tradeshows where normal people can't afford anything shown. You don't meet people with really fantastic sounding cheap or moderate priced rigs anymore. Warren tried to have featured hobbyists at the last CanJam, but it ended up like a stupid afterthought or joke.

DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

- Steve Guttenberg is CNET so he's in the audio biz and I understand that. I'm not expecting any fair review from CNET since I got a shit ton load of adware/unwanted plug-ins from that site.

- I dislike Macedonian Hero in particular (OK, he's the "one particular contributor on HF that I really, really dislike") . He gets on the hype train and he doesn't make valid arguments IMO. Most important of all, I feel he is so self-important that he thinks his experience counts all and doesn't seem to accept arguments.

- +65535 on Headphonia and WHF. Wankers and wannabes will get huge erections from them.

plus, 6moon is for amusement purpose only - that level of seriousness is really, really amusing

plus plus, you've forgot about amos - what he pulled about Dita the Answer absolutely destroyed my last bit of personal respect to him as an audiophille.

Techpowerup and Tomshardware occasionally post headphone reviews. Please don't! Those amateurs don't know what they're listening to and only look at the price tag.

Yep. Toms has said that all DACs are the same, and the 57 cent Realtek chip on your motherboard is just as good as anything.

and the 57 cent Realtek chip on your motherboard is just as good as anything

Most DAC chips are pretty cheap, you know?... It's not just about the DAC.