Editorial Policy

Independence

No manufacturer, retailer or PR agency has any influence over what appears here. We accept no free products, no paid placements, and no payment to alter or remove a verdict. Nobody outside this site sees an article before it publishes.

We earn affiliate commission, and we disclose it on every page that carries a link.

Sourcing standards

Our source hierarchy, highest first:

1. The manufacturer’s own manual or spec sheet. Preferred for every physical and electrical specification.
2. Published standards bodies.Dolby’s published layout specification, ASTM test standards, AES, IEC, AWG tables.
3. Independent published measurements. RTINGS, Audioholics and similar. We cite them by name and link them. They did the work — taking their numbers without credit would be theft, and passing them off as ours would be fabrication.
4. Retailer listings, for price and availability only. Never for a technical spec. Retailer spec fields are unreliable, and this rule costs us real coverage: we publish no specifications at all for two Sony products because Sony blocks automated access to its own documentation and we refuse to lift the figures from a retailer.
5. Forums, Reddit, YouTube — never a source for a spec. They may be cited as evidence of a reported user experience, labelled as exactly that.

The rules that constrain every page

• Every rendered specification carries a source link. This is enforced in our data layer, not by editorial discipline — a specification cannot be added without a source URL, so an unsourced one cannot render.
• We never cite a spec we could not find.We write “Not published” instead. That is useful information and nearly nobody prints it.
• Where sources conflict, we show both.When Denon’s product page says a receiver has Dolby Atmos and Denon’s own info sheet for the same model does not list it, we print the contradiction rather than resolving it silently into a clean answer we do not have.
• Every arithmetic result shows formula, inputs and input sources. A number you cannot reproduce is an assertion.
• We flag marketing figures that are being read as ratings. Yamaha’s “High Dynamic Power” and Onkyo’s “210 W” are both real published numbers and neither is a rating. We say so.

Claims we will never make

These are not aspirations. They are prohibitions, and any one of them appearing on this site is a failure.

• That we tested, listened to, owned or measured a product. We have not.
• Any subjective sonic verdict presented as our own observation. If we have not heard it, we cannot describe it. Where a listening judgement is useful, we attribute it to whoever did the listening and link them.
• Any credential, qualification, employer or tenure our author does not hold. No degree, no certification, no “expert panel”, no “editorial team” implying staff that does not exist.
• A test lab, a listening room, a reference system or a bench. We have none.
• A price, rating or review count that did not come from a live API call.
• That a stock photograph is our gear, our room or our bench. All atmospheric imagery here is licensed stock and decorative.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. The value of this site is not that it is infallible — it is that every claim is traceable to a source, which means you can catch us. That only works if we act when you do.

How to report one: email info@valveandvinyl.com or use the contact form. Tell us the page and, if you have it, the source that contradicts us. You do not need to be polite about it.

What we do: we check the claim against the source. If we are wrong we fix it, and we note the correction on the page with its date rather than editing silently. A silent edit is how a site pretends it was always right.

We already do this in the body of articles. Our Onkyo TX-NR6100 write-up carries a note that an earlier version of the page wrongly claimed a Dirac Live upgrade path, because a page about honest specifications should behave honestly when it gets one wrong.

Target: factual errors fixed within days.

Update cadence

• Prices:refreshed continuously from Amazon’s API. Anything older than 48 hours disappears on its own.
• A pick that becomes unpurchasable: replaced or removed in the same cycle. A top pick you cannot buy is the one failure this model cannot survive.
• Roundups: human re-verification quarterly — picks, specs, availability.
• Spec sources that 404: re-sourced, or the spec is removed.

The “Last verified” date is a promise

Every page carries one. It changes only when a human has actually re-verified that page. It is not bumped automatically at build time, and it does not move because we fixed a typo.

Auto-bumping a freshness date to look current is a lie, and a worse one than an honest old date — it is a deliberate misrepresentation rather than neglect. If we have not re-checked a page since it went up, its date says so.

Why some obvious products are missing

We only write about products we have verified are currently purchasable through the retailer we link to. That is why there is no Rega, Technics or Wharfedale coverage here despite all three being well-regarded: they sell through specialist dealers.

We would rather leave a visible gap than write a recommendation whose buy button cannot exist. If you were looking for one of those and found nothing, that is the reason, and it is deliberate rather than an oversight.

AI and authorship

Every page here is edited and signed off by a human, and the byline names a real person rather than a house style. Where a figure appears, a human has read the source document it came from. We do not publish machine-generated specifications, and we do not publish anything we have not sourced — which is the same rule stated twice, because it is the one that matters most.