Dryfire, my point wasn't that they shouldn't try to talk about noise. It was more that the cost for
measuring noise is prohibitive. To paraphrase the
Procooling Testing Mantra: "If you're not going to do it right, don't do it at all."
Subjective noise descriptions are essentially free, and can be really useful if you can compare the noise to sources that the readers likely have. For many people saying that a fan is, "louder than a AMD stock cooler" is actually more useful that saying that it's 27.5dBa@1m. It doesn't require anything special to describe the noise, well, maybe a little literary BS-ing ability will help, but ears are ears.
The trouble with trying to do acoustic measuring cheaply is that you end up getting useless numbers that then propagate is being hard numbers. You see it all the time on hardware sites: Someone buys a $30 Radio Shack SLM, discovers that they have to stick it 1" from the fan so it will read anything, and then they quote those results like they're gospel, without ever wondering why the readings disagree with what their ears are telling them. The WC'ing equivalent would be using an aquarium thermometer floating in your res as a method for comparing WB's.
For Sin22's site the payoff for the required investment just isn't there. I'd rather see them put the effort into a kick-ass die sim, and just use their existing free god-given acoustic measuring tools for noise.
ricecrispi, you need to come over to spcr-land more often: nearly every review for the past year has included downloadable sound files for comparison, in addition to the noise measurements.