Disclosure
Affiliate links
Some links here earn us a commission if you buy through them. They’re marked,
and they carry rel="sponsored" so search engines know what they are.
The commission doesn’t change with the verdict, nobody here sees a per-product rate before writing, and a link only gets added to a review after the verdict is written. If you’d rather not use them, every product is named plainly enough to find on your own.
Loaned and supplied gear
Every review says how we got the unit, next to the verdict rather than at the bottom of the page. Review units go back. If a distributor sent us something to keep, that sentence says so.
We do it there because of where the FTC says it has to be: “very close to, or — even better — part of, the endorsement”. A disclosure that only lives on a page like this one isn’t enough. So this page is the backstop, not the disclosure.
A loan buys a review. It doesn’t buy a good one, and it doesn’t buy sight of the review before it goes up.
Sponsored content
We don’t sell reviews and we won’t. A review somebody paid for is an advertisement, and an advertisement dressed as a review costs you your reason to trust any other page on the site.
Bench time can be bought: a maker can pay us to run a product through the same measurements everything else gets. The results publish unedited, without approval, including when they’re bad. Anything produced that way is labelled at the top.
Our own conflicts
This site is run by Voximus Audio, which sells plugins as Vox Samples. We don’t make hardware, so we’re not competing with most of what’s reviewed here — but you should know who’s holding the meter, and there are three places the overlap is real.
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Gear that comes with software. An interface or a microphone bundled with plugins is partly competing with what we sell. Where that’s true the review says so, in the same block that says how we got the unit, and we put a value on the bundle instead of talking around it.
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Hardware we’ve modelled. Some of our plugins are deliberate recreations of specific units. Where the thing in question is the unit one of ours recreates, we don’t review it — we can’t be a fair judge of something we copied. We’ll say that’s why it’s missing rather than leave a gap.
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Our own software never appears here with a score. It can appear in a first-party engineering piece, in the same columns as everything else, and it can lose. It’s never rated or ranked on this site.
And the one that matters most on a bench: nothing here comes from taking someone’s software or firmware apart. Everything we publish was measured by putting signal through the product, the same way you would.
Analytics
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