One of the most popular - and in truth, most valid - ways of comparing two products is to, well, directly compare two products. A battle royale, two-enter-one-leaves style of head-to-head competition where it's clear which product is the victor.
Done correctly, direct A/B comparisons are by far the most accurate ways of determining product superiority.
The problem is, they're often not done correctly. Sometimes, they can't be done correctly. In those cases, the results couldn't be further from accurate.
I am not a woman. This may come as a shock, given my sleek and slickly stylish dome and ratty Scottish-highland-wannabe beard.
However, I am lucky enough to know many intelligent and erudite people who happen to be women.
My question to them, as folks of the female persuasion, was if the simplistic marketing tactic of "It's pink, women will buy it!" annoyed them as much as it annoyed me.
Sleep is not a topic much discussed around these parts. After all, "Sound" and "Vision" are two things not usually conducive to slumber.
But the company AcousticSheep has come up with an interesting product: SleepPhones, a soft fleece headband with embedded headphones, meant for comfortable listening while slumbering.
With the above picture in mind, how could we not review?
Paradigm isn't a big company, only 250 people or so. It doesn't have the immense marketing budget to assault the airwaves like Bose, or the R&D budget to make every manner of gadget like Sony.
These are good things, because instead this Canadian company goes about making some solid products, loved by reviewers, and beloved by customers.
Invited to check out their factory just outside Toronto, I dusted off my American Flag jacket, trucker hat, "W" belt buckle, and headed north of the border.
There are few things I loathe more than triteness. Every time I hear a slogan, headline, or witticism that I’ve already heard countless times before, I die a little inside. Change the words around at least and make it your own. How often have you read “trickle-down technology,” “game changer,” or other such things in a product review?
It's amusing to think that just a few years ago, a projector like this would have been 10x the size and 20x the price.
Actually, a projector like this couldn't have existed a few years ago, as it's got LEDs, which only recently have been bright enough for projector use.
It's an interesting thing, this. A tweaky audiophile program that strips away all the junk your computer could be doing while playing back your digital audio files.
The idea is to give each file as good an environment for playback as possible, minimizing jitter and maximizing sound quality.