Regardless of the statement in question (and I've asked the author to respond), the thing that amazes me is that people somehow have the feeling that Printed Things should not be subject to the fact that humans make mistakes. Planes show up late, people go to jail for crimes they didn't commit, you misunderstand something your girlfriend said on the phone, the New York Times prints retractions, movies have continuity errors...but by golly, magazines -- which are put out on an excruciatingly tight schedule by a very limited number of underpaid people -- are supposed to be immune to human error, and if an author makes an error, the editors are supposed to always be able to catch that error.
Now think about an average issue of EQ. There are thousands of statements that could be factually inaccurate or accurate, from whether "DX-7" has a hyphen or not (it doesn't) to, say, elaborations on the 3:1 mic rule. There are also many more statements that might benefit from further explanation, although you have to draw the line somewhere ("A mic is a transducer that converts sound waves to electricity. A transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another. Energy is neither created nor destroyed so some it may be lost as heat. Heat is caused by...") Sometimes errors of omission are treated as errors of commission. It's like the people who feel a feature that's missing in software is a "bug." It's not a bug, it's a missing feature.
So the magazine has maybe 3 -4 errors in an issue, and as a result someone proclaims on a forum (that has nothing to do with the magazine) how "That magazine is crap! The editor knows nothing! What morons!" (This, of course, is presumably from someone who has never made a mistake in his life and is therefore perfectly qualified to sit in judgement of all those who have strayed from perfection )
What this person apparently doesn't realize is that ALL publications make errors. Period. This is why they print corrections and letters to the editor. There is a mechanism to make sure that any inaccuracies are brought to the readers, and it mystifies me why people don't take advantage of that. The only rationale I can think of is that if magazines DIDN'T make mistakes from time to time, that would undermine someone's feeling of superiority, so in a way, they would prefer that "authoritative" sources be doubted in order to make themselves look better. Or something like that...I'm not a shrink!!
It's like that thread in Pro Sound Web that commented on my phrase-by-phrase normalization technique. The guy who talked about what a horrible article it was and how the technique would destroy dynamic range didn't know the meaning of the word "phrase" from a musical standpoint and didn't understand how normalization works. Then there were people who said normalization is a form of compression, which of course it isn't, and that you should never normalize to 0, which is true some of the time but not all of the time; it depends to a large part on the audio engine the software uses. None of them ever wrote to the magazine or mentioned anything in EQ's forums, which would have been the appropriate venue to correct an "error"...assuming of course that someone's motivation is to help the world understand technology better, not self-aggrandizement.
No one ever did show an error in the article, either, other than repeating things like "You shouldn't normalize! Normalizing is bad!" The only substantive correction was someone pointing out that you shouldn't normalize to 0 (which I never said you should do anyway) if you're going to be using additional DSP and if you're using Pro Tools, because the plug-ins go out through a 24-bit bus. To me, though, that doesn't negate the article: It adds additional useful information for those who use Pro Tools. And it showed someone was more into advancing the state of the art and HELPING OTHERS than stroking his own ego.
It's so easy to criticize, but apparently, it's far more difficult to do so constructively. Please, WE WANT EQ TO BE ACCURATE. If you find an error, or can contribute additional information, send it to us so we can either 1) print a correction, 2) clarify something that's not necessarily wrong but unclear, and/or 3) have a reason to chain the author to a steel cage and let loose an army of hungry rats.
We don't claim to be perfect, but welcome any assistance from people who are -- or even from people who aren't perfect, but knowledgeable about a specific subject
