3. What the Mouthpiece Says After talking to the manufacturer, I reach out to the public-relations folks. A good PR team greatly aids the review process, since it can arrange shipment of the product, line up tech support, schedule phone interviews with key company personnel, provide high-resolution images, and more. Also, they often have press releases that detail the product's features and reviewer guidelines that point out specific things not to be missed. These help me find out what the manufacturer thinks is cool and unique about the product and what new technologies they feel make it perform better.

4. What the Manual Says I always read the manual all the way through. (Yes, really.) This is essential to figuring out how to configure the product, and I sometimes stumble across unique features. It also allows to me hear from the techs who designed the product and can make their reasons for implementing a certain feature more apparent.

5. Setup Since I review many multiroom audio systems and servers, I spend a lot of time behind my rack, doing things like plugging and unplugging speaker cables, swapping out interconnects, and stringing Cat-5 control wire around the house. Because many components offer network connectivity, I have two wireless routers and six hardwired Ethernet ports in my house. Thank God for DHCP - automatic network configuration. Without it, it would take me countless hours to get the components playing nice with each other.

Another crucial part of setting up audio distribution and control systems is programming. Sometimes companies send a tech out to walk me through this, but usually it means learning that manufacturer's software. With remote controls, this process can take many hours before everything is working correctly.