Editorial Standards

Most “editorial standards” pages are a wall of corporate throat-clearing nobody reads, written so a brand can point at it later and say “see, we have ethics.” This isn’t that. This is the actual deal — how Supermarket Sound decides what to tell you, what we’ll never do, and how to call us out when we get it wrong. Because the whole point of this site falls apart if you can’t trust the guy talking to you, and trust is earned by being specific, not by posting a badge.

Who’s actually writing this

The reviews, guides, and brand explainers here are written and edited by Marque Hersh, with research help and the occasional fact-check from people who know more than he does about specific corners of this hobby. When something is hands-on, we say so. When it’s a research-based overview of a brand or a category we haven’t personally lived with for months, we say that too. The fastest way to lose a reader is to fake experience you don’t have, so we don’t.

How we evaluate gear

The bias of this site is simple and we’ll state it plainly: we care about value and honesty far more than about prestige. A $400 pair of speakers placed correctly will embarrass a $4,000 pair shoved in a corner, and we’ll keep saying that no matter who’s advertising. When we praise expensive gear, it’s because the engineering genuinely earns it — not because the box is heavy and the logo is fancy. When we think something is overpriced, snake oil, or a solution to a problem you don’t have, we say that, even about beloved brands.

We try to separate three different things every time: what a piece of gear measures, what it sounds like in a real room, and what it costs relative to what else that money could buy. All three matter. None of them alone tells the whole story, and anyone who tells you measurements are everything (or that they’re nothing) is selling you something.

Money, affiliates, and who pays us

Some links on this site are affiliate links, which means if you buy something after clicking, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Here’s the part that matters: a commission has never bought a good review and never will. We recommend the thing we’d actually tell a friend to buy, and if the best answer in a category is the cheapest option that pays us nothing, that’s the answer you’ll get. If that ever stops being true, this site isn’t worth running.

We don’t accept payment for positive coverage. If a manufacturer loans or sends gear for review, we’ll disclose it in the piece, and it doesn’t buy them a kind word — plenty of loaned gear has gotten a lukewarm verdict here and gone back where it came from.

Corrections

We get things wrong sometimes. Specs change, a unit turns out to be faulty, a fact gets garbled, or we just plain blow a call. When that happens and someone points it out, we fix it — and if the error was substantive, we note the correction rather than quietly editing and pretending it never happened. If you’ve spotted something that’s flat wrong, tell us. A site that won’t admit mistakes isn’t being careful, it’s being insecure.

The meta part, since you’ll find out anyway

Supermarket Sound is the audio blog from inside the world of Supermarket Music, and Marque Hersh is the character who runs it. We’re not hiding that — honesty about what we are is the first editorial standard, and pretending to be something we’re not would violate every other one on this page. The opinions about gear are written to be genuinely useful regardless. The voice just happens to belong to someone having a conversation with you over a beer.

How to reach us

Spot an error, disagree violently, want to suggest something we should cover? The contact page is right there. We read everything, even the unhinged stuff.