Richard Pennycuick:

>I have a strong dislike of magazines which use star systems to rate
>performance and recording.  I wonder how others feel.

I prefer little hearts over stars, too.  And seriously, I find the star
rating (or distributing points as www.classicstoday.com does) quite
useful.  It gives a short, easy to understand summary of the review if
you just want to sample they opinion on a given recording.  For this it
is much more effective, I feel, than a verbal summary, which oftens ends
up with something like "A curious release" which doesn't tell anything
at all about the quality of the disc.

Jan