As We See It

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As We See It
The Restorative Power of Music
John Atkinson  |  Dec 16, 2001  |  0 comments
It was an unusually fine day for a New York September. The W train crept from the subway tunnel into the sunlight of the Manhattan Bridge—"My God, the World Trade Center's on fire!" came the voice of the woman driving the train. I vividly remember what I did the rest of that day—the day the world terribly changed.
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As We See ItAudiophile Essentials
The Search for Musical Ecstasy
Barry Willis  |  Nov 18, 2001  |  0 comments
Every once in a while, some mainstream journalist discovers the audiophile underground.
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As We See It
One Small Step...
Jon Iverson  |  Oct 21, 2001  |  0 comments
Screeeeeeech, thump, thump, vroooooom...
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As We See It
RIP Dr. Gizmo
John Atkinson  |  Sep 09, 2001  |  0 comments
My dogs were killing me. It was the end of the second day of the 1985 Summer Consumer Electronics Show, which I was visiting on behalf of English magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review. I had been dutifully tramping the capacious corridors of Chicago's McCormick Center and the rooms of the (now demolished) McCormick Inn, looking for signs of musical life amid the huge promotion for the 8mm tape format, which was being heavily touted at CES as the future of both video and audio (!) reproduction. Even trade-paper headlines shouting "Audio: Not Just Video Peripheral!" failed to lift my spirits as I took the shuttle bus over to the Americana Congress hotel on South Michigan, where most of the high-end audio companies were hanging out.
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As We See It
Drums in the Rear Channels?
Jon Iverson  |  Aug 02, 2001  |  0 comments
"He's putting the drums in the rear channels?!?"
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As We See It
We Are What We Are
John Atkinson  |  Jul 08, 2001  |  0 comments
As I write these words, it is exactly 15 years to the day since I left the English magazine Hi-Fi News (then Hi-Fi News & Record Review) to take the editorial helm of Stereophile. What has driven my editing of both magazines (and, Carol Baugh, p.10, I certainly do "edit" them) has been the view that the traditional model of a magazine—that it dispense and the readers receive wisdom—is fundamentally wrong. Instead, I strongly believe that a magazine's editors, writers, and readers are involved in an ongoing dialog about their shared enthusiasms. Stereophile's involvement in Shows stems from this belief, and it is in this light that its "Letters" column should be regarded as the heart of each issue.
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As We See It
Surround Sound & Cognitive Dissonance
Kalman Rubinson  |  Jun 26, 2001  |  0 comments
Listening to multichannel music with the new SACD and DVD-Audio players has produced equal parts contentment and consternation. The contentment is easy to understand: Here are media that can reproduce music with better-than-CD resolution and, for the first time, re-create a believable illusion of the entire acoustic space in which the performance was recorded. The consternation is related to those same two issues: 1) maintaining the resolution and tonal balance relished with high-quality stereo, and 2) making the psychological transition from two-channel to multichannel listening. Both of these are barriers to audiophile acceptance of multichannel music.
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As We See It
Trumpets to the Back of Me?
John Atkinson  |  May 26, 2001  |  0 comments
As part of this issue's coverage of the recent Consumer Electronics Show (see Sidebar), I report on my dissatisfaction with almost all the surround-sound demonstrations I experienced in Las Vegas. As a music-lover, the last thing I want is to have trumpets and drums attacking me from behind, yet almost without exception, that is what record producers seem to feel is an essential part of the DVD-Audio and SACD experiences.
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As We See It
Music Before Numbers?
John Atkinson  |  Apr 12, 2001  |  0 comments
This letter from Mike Pageau appeared in the April 2001 issue, and triggered the following "As We See It" essay:
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As We See It
"Where's the Real Magazine?"
John Atkinson  |  Feb 12, 2001  |  0 comments
The affair started quietly enough, with the following exchange that appeared in Stereophile's January 2001 "Letters" section, following my decision to put the Digital Audio Labs CardDeluxe high-end PC soundcard on the cover of our September 2000 issue:
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As We See ItHistoricalJ. Gordon Holt
Down with Dynagroove!
J. Gordon Holt  |  Dec 31, 2000  |  First Published: Jun 01, 1963  |  1 comments
Editor's Introduction: In 1963, Stereophile's founder J. Gordon Holt published attacks on what he saw as the single largest step backward in high-fidelity sound reproduction at that time: RCA's introduction of "Dynagroove" LP records, where the recorded signal was pre-distorted and dynamically equalized to compensate for the poor performance of cheap phonograph players. "Issue 5...revealed most of RCA Victor's 'revolutionary' new system as nothing more than a sophisticated way of bringing higher fi to record buyers who don't care enough about hi-fi to invest in a decent playback system." Ten years later, Gordon wrote that, "As of 1974, the best we can say for Dynagroove is that there is no audible evidence of it on current RCA releases." (These articles were reprinted in June 1992, Vol.15 No,6, as part of Stereophile's 30th-anniversary celebrations.)—John Atkinson
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As We See ItHistoricalJ. Gordon Holt
Audible Wallpaper
J. Gordon Holt  |  Dec 31, 2000  |  First Published: Feb 01, 1968  |  0 comments
We're not really sure who coined the term—it is usually attributed to Alistair Cooke, former host of the "Omnibus" TV program—but "audible wallpaper" is an apt term for something that is of more than passing concern for the serious music listener.
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ReferenceAs We See It
Upsampling or Oversampling?
John Atkinson  |  Dec 06, 2000  |  0 comments
Charles Hansen said it best, in a recent e-mail: "People have been holding back from criticizing this technology because they weren't certain that some new discovery hadn't been made." Ayre Acoustics' main man was talking about "upsampling," whereby conventional "Red Book" CD data, sampled at 44.1kHz, are converted to a datastream with a higher sample rate. (Because of its association with DVD-Audio, 96kHz is often chosen as the new rate.)
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As We See ItHistoricalJ. Gordon Holt
Sellout!?
J. Gordon Holt  |  Nov 30, 2000  |  First Published: Oct 01, 1972  |  2 comments
Alicia Holt, aged 18 months, devours her father's magazine

After much searching of soul and of bank account, we have reached an earth-shattering decision. The Stereophile is going to start taking ads.

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As We See It
Convergence...not just for breakfast!
Jonathan Scull  |  Nov 19, 2000  |  0 comments
Not too long ago, the word "convergence" had everyone in the High End ready to duck'n'cover. Asia was on the ropes, and a shakeout was thinning the ranks of high-end audio manufacturers. Some US companies were marketing and selling most of their output to the Pacific Rim. The writing was on the wall: High-end was dead, and we'd all just better get used to listening to music on our computers.
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