How to Qualify for the Core Team

The “Community Preview Program” was significantly revised a while ago, with much lower requirements for participation and a broader array of available gear.

Also, you’re not interpreting the original requirements correctly anyway. You don’t need to be on here for 50% of every day. You just need an average of one visit per day for 50 days out of each 100 (i.e. every other day). Not a post, nor a response, just visiting.

But, again, the requirements were significantly adjusted months ago, as denoted in the above link to the new program.

As it stands, most moderately active members, including those that have joined recently, already meet the basic participation requirements and only need to post impressions of one piece of gear to qualify for the program as-is. It certainly doesn’t require heavy participation much less anything approaching night-and-day activity.


The requirement for a review or impressions (which are not that involved) is so that you’re giving back to the community in exchange for access to the gear. Sending gear around is not free, comes with various risks, and isn’t practical to do without some kind of return - here that’s simply being an active member of the community and posting impressions (which has no direct out of pocket cost).

The idea being that everybody benefits.

In special cases I am sure it’s possible to have the impressions cover non-sound related aspects - or to address them in the context of the case at hand, and focus more on build quality, comfort, convenience, and what did work well for said special case.

Without that, it’d either be necessary to impose a fee to cover shipping, insurance, overhead etc. or the program would rapidly become unsustainable.

4 Likes