As We See It

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As We See It
A Clash of Values?
Robert Harley  |  Aug 27, 1992  |  0 comments
In the April 1992 Stereophile, reader Hilary Paprocki expressed his belief that recording engineers are unconcerned about sound quality. Indeed, he went so far as to allege that engineers intentionally use inferior miking techniques so that they can bill clients for additional time spent trying to fix the sound. The example he used was the engineer who places a microphone directly in front of a guitar amplifier, a technique Mr. Paprocki felt captured only "4%" of the sound. Mr. Paprocki also likened recording engineers to "featherbedders."
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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
A Dolby In the House
J. Gordon Holt  |  Jun 28, 2016  |  First Published: Sep 01, 1967  |  0 comments
By the time you read this, in the fall of 1967, the "Dolby system" will probably be old hat to you. Every other audio publication has been describing it, discussing it, and hailing it as the greatest invention since sex.

We've seen that kind of press ballyhoo before, about such significant advances as the Edsel, the 16-rpm LP and the "thin-profile" loudspeaker, so our first inclination was to be a wee bit skeptical of the Dolby. It seemed too good to be true.

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As We See It
A High-End Audio Horror Story
John Marks  |  May 14, 2006  |  0 comments
Tom Swift is a talented young loudspeaker designer. Tom believes that he has never been able to prove exactly how talented he is, because the company he works for refuses to build the cost-no-object loudspeaker he's been doodling designs for (on company time).
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As We See It
A lifelong passion
Jim Austin  |  Mar 17, 2021  |  7 comments
This gig has many perks—but the best one without a doubt is the cool, interesting people I get to "meet."

I should explain the quotation marks. Since starting this job, in April 2019, I haven't gotten out much. Even before the pandemic, I was too busy to do much of anything except edit the magazine. So, many of the interesting people I've "met," I've still never seen in person.

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As We See ItHistorical
A Matter of Dimensions
John Atkinson  |  Jun 05, 1989  |  0 comments
I have been reading a lot of late. Whether it is due to the reduced appeal of recorded music owing to the ever-decreasing shelves of LPs in our local specialty record store (the owner explains that he still wants to sell LPs; it's the record companies that make it increasingly harder for him to do so with punitive returns policies and deaf ears to back orders), or the fact that it's Spring, I don't know. But the fact remains that I have recently found myself devouring a shelf-full of titles sometimes only vaguely related—horrors!—to high fidelity. Stuart Chase's The Tyranny of Words, for example, first published in 1938 and a finer examination of what came to be called semantics you wouldn't want to find, should be essential reading for anyone involved in writing articles that are still intended to communicate some meaning.
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As We See ItHistorical
A Matter of Measurements
Robert Harley  |  Mar 25, 2009  |  First Published: Sep 25, 1989  |  0 comments
Beginning with this issue, Stereophile readers will notice that more of the subjective equipment reviews are augmented with technical reports describing certain aspects of the component's measured performance. Although test data have lately been increasingly included in reviews, Stereophile has recently made a major commitment to providing readers with relevant measurements of products under review. We have just finished building an audio test laboratory featuring the Audio Precision System One, a sophisticated, computer-based audio test measurement system.
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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
A Measurement that Says Something
J. Gordon Holt  |  Nov 12, 2015  |  First Published: Dec 01, 1966  |  0 comments
When we first heard rumors that Shure Brothers was about to unleash something called "trackability" on the audio world, our reaction was mainly one of indifference. We already had loudspeakers with listenability, tape recorders with portability, and amplifiers with stability and dependability. Trackability, we figured, was just another clever sales gimmick; a catchy word that the advertising department had thought up to describe what everyone wanted in a pickup.
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As We See It
A new listening companion
Jim Austin  |  Nov 15, 2022  |  18 comments
I have a confession, one I'm hesitant to make for reasons that will soon become clear, but my conscience compels me to make it.

I have a new dog. A puppy. Her name is Ella Wren.

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As We See ItAudiophile Essentials
A Passion For Music
Wes Phillips  |  Jul 21, 1998  |  0 comments
I was watching Mr. Holland's Opus on the tube the other day and was surprised to find myself teary-eyed, even though the film lost me by subjecting me to Michael Kamen's atrocious "symphony" in the finale. Why had I become all choked up? Because I had a Mr. Holland of my own.
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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
A Plague Upon Our House
J. Gordon Holt  |  Jun 16, 2015  |  First Published: Aug 01, 1975  |  6 comments
The summer of 1975 will be remembered by us, with no fondness whatsoever, as The Time the Roof Fell In. Or the Murphy Months, or the Period of the Plague Upon Our House.

Ye Editor can recall from the days of WWII hearing and reading about the depredations of some mischievous sprites called Gremlins, who would cause aircraft hatchcovers to jam and control cables to get hung up at the worst possible moment, but I don't think I ever really did believe in Gremlins. I think I sensed somehow that the mishaps attributed to their malevolent machinations were too capricious to be the work of thinking, calculating little spirits. But I was not clever enough to put my finger on what was going on. That had to wait for a gentleman named something-or-other Murphy, who was (to my knowledge) the first person to put a tag on it, and to formulate a basic law about it. The tag was "the perversity of inanimate objects," and the law was "If anything can possibly go wrong, it will."

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As We See It
A Pure Vision
Stephen Mejias  |  Jun 28, 2012  |  First Published: Jul 01, 2012  |  2 comments
A few years ago, while on vacation in Puerto Rico, I found myself sitting at a nearly empty beach bar, discussing music with Cassie Ramone, singer and guitarist for one of my favorite bands, Brooklyn's Vivian Girls. (I was as surprised as anyone by the strangeness of this chance encounter, but that's another story.) When the conversation turned to the topic of so-called "lo-fi" bands, Cassie's tone became critical, almost bitter: "No one wants to make 'lo-fi' records," she said.
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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
A Question of Reliability
J. Gordon Holt  |  Jul 05, 2009  |  First Published: Jun 05, 1988  |  0 comments
A letter in the April 1988 issue (Vol.11 No.4) from reader Harold Goldman, MD, decried the seemingly appalling failure rate of high-end products, citing a $10,000/pair power amplifier, an $11,000 turntable, and a $1500 CD player which had all been reported in recent issues as having failed during or shortly after testing by Stereophile. And Dr. Goldman's list was far from complete. We have also experienced during the past couple of years the failure, or inoperation upon delivery, of two $2500 solid-state power amplifiers, a $1700 subwoofer, a $5000 hybrid amplifier, two pairs of $1200 loudspeakers, several pairs of under-$1000 loudspeakers, and many CD players costing over $1000 each, mainly those based on Philips transports.
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As We See It
A Question of Scale
Peter W. Mitchell  |  Sep 03, 1990  |  0 comments
I've been wondering whether we who write about audio will ever agree on a sensible way to express the scale of the differences we hear. If magazines like Stereophile and The Abso!ute Sound lack credibility among the broader audience of music lovers and hi-fi shoppers—and we do—one important reason may be our habit of greatly exaggerating the importance of differences that in fact are very small. A subtle improvement, one that most people wouldn't notice except in a carefully arranged comparison, is often described by audiophile reviewers in language that makes it seem like the contrast between a whisper and a thunderclap.
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As We See It
A Reviewing Life
John Atkinson  |  Feb 26, 2013  |  First Published: Mar 01, 2013  |  8 comments
It's been 30 years since I began work on my very first equipment report, of the Goldbug Brier moving-coil phono cartridge, for Hi-Fi News & Record Review. That review appeared in the British magazine's May 1983 issue; I have lost track of how many equipment reviews I've written since then, but my review of the Vandersteen Treo loudspeaker in this issue is at least my 500th.
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As We See It
A Script for a High-End Audio Demonstration
John Marks  |  Jul 16, 2006  |  0 comments
High-end audio is not a rational construct. It is a sensory experience that leads to emotional engagement. In slightly different words: High-end audio is not about a concept, but about the experience of having our emotions engaged. The difference between reading about a high-end audio system and hearing great recordings played on one is almost as big as the difference between reading a love poem and falling in love.
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