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Road Trip!
Jonathan Scull  |  Feb 11, 2011  |  First Published: Jan 11, 2011  |  7 comments
Illustration: Jeff Wong

John Atkinson and I were On the Road, whistling down I-95 in a big, Kona Blue Metallic 2011 Ford Edge Ltd with voice-command everything. To paraphrase Raoul Duke at the very beginning of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, we were somewhere around Princeton, New Jersey—not quite the edge of the desert—when the drugs began to take hold. Just as in the original text, "there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car . . ." I decided that there was no point in mentioning the bats to JA. He'd bought the Criterion Collection DVD of Terry Gilliam's film version of Fear and Loathing at Princeton Record Exchange. He knew about the bats.

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FeaturesInterviews
Sisters in Sound
Steve Guttenberg  |  Oct 29, 2002  |  First Published: Oct 30, 2002  |  0 comments
We all know that women generally have better hearing than men and enjoy music at least as much as men do, but women are conspicuously absent from every segment of the high-end audio scene. The vast majority of high-end companies are owned by men, and any head count of female designers, retailers, reviewers, or consumers will yield a pitifully small number. High-end audio is a man's, man's, man's world.
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FeaturesThink Pieces
Snake Oil: A Short History
Jim Austin  |  Dec 04, 2018  |  17 comments
If there's one thing audiophiles agree on, it's that snake oil is bad—even if they can't agree about what snake oil actually is.

In audio, snake oil means fake science or fake technology—anything that's claimed to improve the sound of a system but that looks like an obvious rip-off. For some people, expensive speaker cables and interconnects are snake oil. A few objectivists consider AC power treatments snake oil: most modern audio components, after all, can correct for AC line-voltage flaws and reject "ripple" in a power supply's output. A handful of hard-core objectivists maintain that every new digital technology since the advent of the Compact Disc is snake oil.

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ReferenceFeaturesJ. Gordon Holt
Space...the Final Frontier
J. Gordon Holt  |  Mar 17, 1994  |  0 comments
High-end audiophiles are space freaks---we relish the warmth and spaciousness of a fine, old performing hall almost as much as we do the music recorded in it. But my attendance at a series of orchestral concerts held last summer brought home to me---as never before---the sad fact that our search for the ultimate soundstage is doomed to failure: we're trying to reproduce three-dimensional space from a two-dimensional system, and it simply can't be done.
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FeaturesProducts of the Year
Stereophile's Products of 2017
Art Dudley  |  Nov 16, 2017  |  9 comments
The mice in the walls call summer to close while nets come down and leaves turn dead red, but by the time you see this there'll be holiday music in the air . . . and some generous soul might, just might, sneak a few looks through this issue of Stereophile to see what gifts to buy before the tree goes up and presents are opened—and all will be nice!

And what better way to serve those possible givers of audio gifts—and, at the same time, honor our hobby's most deserving designers and manufacturers—than with our annual Product of the Year awards?

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FeaturesProducts of the Year
Stereophile's Products of 2018
Art Dudley  |  Nov 21, 2018  |  47 comments
Since fake news is on everyone's minds these days—I would say it's been in the news a lot, but that kind of reasoning is too circular even for me—it's worth keeping in mind that there's also such a thing as fake praise. You see it every day, whether it's a fake Google review—an alarming number of businesses seem unaware that real people don't actually say things like "the team at New Hartford Chevrolet really listened to all of my needs"—or fake trophies handed out to all 20 co-captains of your child's soccer team.

Then there are fake awards.

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ReferenceFeatures
Super Audio CD—One Year Later
John Atkinson  |  Nov 15, 2000  |  0 comments
In his very English way, Sony's then managing director for the UK, Tim Steele, was getting a touch, er, desperate. His oh-so-cultured voice rose a smidgen as he resorted to a direct selling of the benefits of what he was talking about. "Look, you're all sitting on riches," was his fundamental pitch. "You can sell music-lovers your entire back catalog all over again—at a higher price!"
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ReferenceFeatures
Super Audio CD: The Rich Report
David Rich  |  Nov 15, 2000  |  0 comments
Although Philips invented the Compact Disc, it was only when Sony got involved in the early 1980s that it was decided—at the prompting of conductor Herbert von Karajan, a close friend of Sony's then-president Akio Morita—that the CD should have a long enough playing time to fit Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on a single disc (footnote 1). Even if the conductor was using very slow tempos, and even given the minimum pit size and track pitch printable at the time, the 16-bit data and 44.1kHz sampling rate they settled on gave them a little margin.
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FeaturesThink Pieces
Survival Tips For Living With An Audioholic
Linda Tasker  |  Oct 28, 1990  |  First Published: Oct 29, 1990  |  0 comments
PO/SSSLQs (footnote 1), SOs (footnote 2), & Spouses of audiophiles: Linda Tasker (aka Mrs. Kevin Conklin) has some advice for you!
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ReferenceFeatures
Take Me to Your LEDR!
Bob Katz  |  Dec 09, 1989  |  0 comments
"My system has great imaging!" "I can hear sound coming from beyond my speakers." "The depth image in my system goes back at least 20 feet." Yes, we audiophiles are proud of our imaging (footnote 1), and we've worked hard to get it. My back is still aching from the last time I tweaked my speakers until the image was just right.
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FeaturesProducts of the Year
The 2002 Products of the Year
John Atkinson, Stephen Mejias  |  Dec 08, 2002  |  0 comments
For more than a decade now, Stereophile has recognized components that have proved capable of giving musical pleasure beyond the formal review period by naming its "Products of the Year."
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FeaturesProducts of the Year
The 2003 Products of the Year
John Atkinson, Stephen Mejias  |  Dec 15, 2003  |  First Published: Dec 01, 2003  |  0 comments
Since 1992, Stereophile has recognized components that have proved capable of giving musical pleasure beyond the formal review period by naming its "Products of the Year." These are the components that can be recommended without any ifs or buts, that will grace any system in which they used.
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ReferenceFeaturesAudiophile Essentials
The 2011 Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture: "Where Did the Negative Frequencies Go?"
John Atkinson  |  Dec 19, 2012  |  First Published: Oct 21, 2011  |  144 comments
In the summer of 2011, Stereophile's long-time editor in chief, John Atkinson, was invited by the Technical Council of the Audio Engineering Society to give the Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture at the 131st Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York, October 21, 2011.
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FeaturesMusic and Recording Features
The Rhapsody Project
John Atkinson, Hyperion Knight, Wes Phillips  |  Jun 11, 1997  |  0 comments
Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Recording Session (with apologies to Wallace Stevens): Wes Phillips
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ReferenceFeatures
The Analog Compact Disc
Robert Harley  |  Dec 25, 1994  |  1 comments
Nothing quite new is perfect. —Marcus Tullius Cicero, Brutus
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