July 26, 2016, 3:50 p.m. -  Luix

#!markdown Perhaps the issue lays in the way the message is delivered. Aside from marketing yada-yadda and trend impositions, each brand tried to take a differentiating approach to a given bike segment. I recall when the showdowns/shootouts were regular features in the printed media, and how the highs and lows of each model -relative to each other- floated to the top, even when they weren't explicitly written by the journalists. I know some brands are much less adept to criticism (who really is?) and sometimes the media risks getting banned from future press releases (this happened a few years ago to the Spanish magazine Solo Bici, after a negative review of some Cannondale model), but gosh how do I miss those comparative tests…. Now each bike model/brand gets its own separate media feature, and they are all a breaktrhough, but we as readers don't have a commond ground to base those scores on. I wonder if the testers shouldn't state at the very beginning of their writings what were they looking for when they took the bike for a spin, and how did the bike fit those expectations. I know the testers do have their own base level -their home trails set it, but for us who never rode them, it's hard to quantify the riding quality sometimes. I'm not saying it's a piece of cake for the reviewers, but that would at least give us something else to take into account besides the cold numbers in the geometry chart.