Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

As an Amazon Associate, Valve & Vinyl earns from qualifying purchases.

That sentence is required by Amazon and we are glad to print it. The longer version is below, because a one-line disclosure at the bottom of a page is technically compliant and practically useless.

The legal basis

This disclosure exists to comply with the US Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR Part 255 — the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. Those guides require that a material connection between an endorser and a seller be disclosed clearly and conspicuously.

We have a material connection to Amazon: they pay us. So we tell you, on every page that carries a buy link, above the first link rather than below the last one.

How the links work

Every product link on this site points at a URL on our own domain beginning with /go/. When you click it, our server looks up the destination and forwards you to Amazon with our affiliate tag attached.

We do this for a practical reason worth being upfront about: it means the destination for every product lives in one configuration file rather than being typed into hundreds of articles. If a product moves, or we change retailer, we change one line instead of rewriting content.

The cost of that convenience is that you cannot see where a link goes by hovering it, and that is a real cost to you. So we pay it back a different way: every buy button on this site names the retailer. You will never click a link here without knowing where it lands.

Those links carry rel="sponsored nofollow", which tells search engines they are commercial, per Google’s link-spam policy. Our /go/ paths are blocked in robots.txt for every crawler.

What a commission costs you

Nothing. The price you pay is identical whether you use our link or type the product name into Amazon yourself. The commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your wallet.

Why commission does not decide our picks

Every affiliate site says this. Almost none of them give you a way to check it, so here is ours.

Our criteria are published in full and are reproducible. How We Pick states, per category, the exact specifications we select on. They are specific enough that you can apply them yourself and arrive at our list. If commission were steering the picks, our list would diverge from what our own published criteria produce — and you could catch it.

That is the structural answer. Here are the ordinary ones:

• We accept no free products. Nobody sends us units. We could not be influenced by a review sample because we do not receive any.
• We accept no paid placements. No manufacturer has ever paid to appear on this site, and none can.
• We accept no payment to remove a verdict. Every roundup on this site names at least one product we would not buy, with the reason. Those verdicts are not for sale.
• We recommend against buying things. Our DAC hub opens by telling you that if you already have a working DAC, a better one probably will not change what you hear. That is not the behaviour of a page optimised for commission.

Prices

Prices come from Amazon’s API and are stamped with the date they were fetched. They change constantly, and the price you see at checkout is the one that counts.

If a price on our site is more than 48 hours old, it disappears automatically and the button reads “Check price on Amazon” instead. We would rather show you nothing than a stale number. There is no price on this site that a human typed.

Who we are and are not affiliated with

At the time of writing, Amazon is the only retailer we have an affiliate relationship with, and every buy link on this site goes there. If that changes, this page changes with it.

We are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any manufacturer whose products appear here. Brand names and product names belong to their owners and are used for identification.

Product images and specifications

Product photographs come from Amazon’s catalogue via their API, as their Associates programme requires. Specifications come from manufacturers’ own published documents and are linked to their source on every page.

We are a publisher, not a retailer

Valve & Vinyl does not sell, ship, or warranty anything. If you have a problem with an order, it is between you and the retailer, and we genuinely cannot help — we never see your order, your name, or your payment details.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think we have fallen short of it, write to info@valveandvinyl.com or use the contact form. See also our editorial policy and selection method.