Ideally videos should be used as accompaniment to other comments and experience. They do show some things and some not. Like Ruprecht said, you read forum comments on component A vs B from some online guy. Unless you know that guyās listening and preferences pretty well, many such comments can be misleading. Thatās how people end up with dCS and Wilson and Krell like stuff, based on reading words. And listening to club house music.
People are short listing without listening. Videos are a better tool than this to evaluate and shortlist - not buy, but shortlist. Also, if you go to hifi shows you will mostly get equipment not properly set up, and a lot of equipment that is good will not be at the show. On videos you might come across some proper set up. Neither of these approaches is going to replace listening to a well set up stuff yourself, but it is the best of the above alternatives.
The reason I prefer to stick to phones to record is it keeps a consistency across people. Adding in good recorders will add another complication. Everyone has a smart phone, just point and shoot, and upload. very good lead. The ālow quality digitisationā is a good facsimile. You cannot know otherwise until you have tried. I first did them at Munich 2019 and was surprised by how many friends I whatsapped them to judged the room quality correctly. It also made many appreciate the western electrics, they would otherwise have no exposure to it and would not have believed that a 100 year old system could be the best at show. The videos got them thinking.
The Cessaro Gamma owner has now moved to Klangfilm Eurodyn, based on videos he heard. Of course he had trusted comments to go with the videos,t. You can study videos of a system over time so while the first video might sound random, over time and across tracks it gives a very good picture.
We have been doing videos for 4 years on whats best forum. It shifted a few guys to SETs horns, and Wilson and Magico type systems sounded the worst. Digital was worse than analog, so most of the videos ended up being SETs horns analog. what I assume from that is the Wilson Magico owners were recording their own video, playing it back, realized it was too sh*t to post.
At the end, the only way to convince non-believers is they should shoot and play back some systems, and also if they hear a video of a system they can visit, they should do so. Only feedback of checking video vs real will tell them if I am the crazy one or if they are incorrect (easy choice there)