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There've been some successful answers to this question by answering a more general form of the question to make a feature-comparison rather than a "shopping recommendation".

I'm not sure how to cleanup this question, but can we learn something here? I'm thinking that a good "Shopping Guidance" question should contain:

  • relevant features in question for both products (so answerers don't have to follow links to shopping sites to answer).

  • description of what it is needed for, to establish the perspective from which to evaluate the features.

Thoughts? Additions?

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2 Answers 2

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This seems to be a good place to repeat, to meta.Music, the concerns I posted to Chat room Musical Practice and Performance about heavy-handed use of the "no shopping recs" site scope rule. They are raised by my question How can I rehearse and perform with PDF scores on screen instead of paper scores?.

Right now the rule on music.SE appears to be that shopping recommendation questions are out of scope, and are summarily closed. I think that's a mistake. I believe that there are good questions which will elicit good answers, even though some may interpret them as "shopping recs". This meta.Music question presumes that some kind of "shopping guidance" questions, if not "shopping rec", will be allowed in-scope. I support that.

But, in Music.SE, technology doesn't change so fast, even shopping recs may be valid for long enough to be useful.

A further frustration: the "Let's Go Shopping" blog does admit a "what do I need to learn to do X" question is appropriate. I duly transform my initial Shopping Rec question into a "How do I do X" question, and it still triggers the Shopping Rec antibodies. So, maybe the antibodies are too active, and are smothering possible good questions along with bad?

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  • Yes. I wasn't brave enough to take it this far (though I wanted to). Very well presented. +1 Feb 3, 2013 at 23:04
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I think it may be a dupe of What to look for when buying a digital piano for a beginner?. While I agree that there are "bad" and "not as bad" shopping questions, I still don't think we want the latter. What is the point in going through a feature comparison every time someone goes shopping as opposed to having a complete question like the one I linked? Anyone should be able to go through that, decide what features are important to them, and evaluate individual products on that basis.

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  • undersood and agreed. Jan 22, 2013 at 5:35
  • Having searching around unsuccessfully, is there a list of good starts like "What to look for when buying X for Y(class,purpose)", or "How to evaluate X- vs Y- type of Z?" Jan 22, 2013 at 5:39
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    @luser droog I don't think so, but we could start one.
    – user28
    Jan 22, 2013 at 5:54
  • I'd like to help get that started. But I'm not sure of the best way. Would a wiki answer to this question work pro-tem as a sandbox? Jan 22, 2013 at 20:08
  • @luserdroog I think it could work as a main site question similar to this Android question -- a generalized overview with things you need to consider regardless of instrument, and then links to per-instrument concerns.
    – user28
    Jan 22, 2013 at 22:18

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