As We See It

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As We See It
Squeezing the Music 'til the Bits Squeak
John Atkinson  |  Jul 07, 1994  |  0 comments
In this space last January, I enthused about the sound of linear 20-bit digital recordings which, I felt, preserve the quality of a live microphone feed. "I have heard the future of audio—and it's digital!" I proclaimed, which led at least a couple of readers to assume I had gone deaf. Putting to one side the question of my hearing acuity, 20-bit technology has been rapidly adopted in the professional world as the standard for mastering. The remaining debate concerns how to best preserve what those 20 bits offer once they've been squeezed down to the 16 that CD can store. Sony's Super Bit Mapping algorithm and Harmonia Mundi Acustica's redithering device have been joined by new black boxes from Apogee Electronics, Lexicon, and Meridian; it appears likely that, in next to no time at all, all CD releases will be offering close to 20-bit resolution—at least in the upper midrange, where the ear is most sensitive.
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As We See It
Start Making Sense
Steve Guttenberg  |  Jun 23, 2014  |  First Published: Jul 01, 2014  |  20 comments
Record-business profits peaked 20 years ago, just before Napster and other file-sharing sites turned their world upside down. There have been occasional surges, but the future of the Compact Disc looks bleak, and while income from downloaded files is still climbing, the shift of profitability from à la carte music sales to unlimited streaming on demand seems inevitable. The realignment is already underway—the vast majority of today's music listeners, young and old, haven't bought a CD, file, or LP in years. It pains me to admit it, but after hearing, at the 2014 Midem music exhibition, a presentation by Marc Geiger, of William Morris Endeavors, I was convinced that music-streaming companies are poised to reboot the industry. If Geiger's predictions are accurate, the music business will be more profitable than ever, and swell to $100 billion in 20 years or less (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcNsAR_FM5M&feature=share).
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As We See It
Starting Over
Jim Austin  |  Aug 15, 2023  |  16 comments
In the excellent My Back Pages essay that closes this issue, Londoner Phil Brett writes, "I bought my first albums in my teens for £2 then sold them off years later for 50p each."

Why did he sell his records? "[I]n those days, most vinyl had the thickness of a butterfly wing without the quality. As I grew older, I went through—ahem—several relationships hence several changes of residence. The hassle of carting boxes of records around grew wearisome; CDs were so much lighter, and often, they sounded better."

Phil predicted Stereophile readers would be horrified by what he did those many years ago. Maybe so—but for many, the horror will arise from regret—at the memory of doing the same thing themselves back in the day. As I did.

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As We See It
Starting Over Again for the First Time
Richard Lehnert  |  Oct 20, 2015  |  First Published: Nov 01, 2015  |  35 comments
"There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind," Duke Ellington is famously supposed to have said. But that doesn't tell us how to recognize "good music," and it doesn't define good. Nor will this essay. Many have described the music of, say, Mozart or J.S. Bach with such phrases as the music of heaven or the mind of God or—especially Bach's music—that it embodies the basic structure of the universe/existence/reality. I've said such things myself.
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As We See It
Staying in Touch
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Sep 17, 2006  |  0 comments
"The trouble with some reviewers..."
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As We See It
Stereo & the Soundstage
John Atkinson  |  Jan 04, 2008  |  First Published: Dec 04, 1986  |  1 comments
The accuracy of a hi-fi system's "soundstage" reproduction seems to be of paramount importance these days, just as a component must now have "transparency" to possess hi-fi righteousness. If the system in which that component is used doesn't give good soundstage, then the system's owner has definitely fallen by the wayside. But what defines a good soundstage? Stereo imaging must have something to do with it, I hear you all cry. (I would have said stereo imagery until Larry Archibald pointed out that imagery has far less to do with hi-fi than with good writing, something I'm sure we agree has no place in a hi-fi magazine.) OK, what defines good stereo imaging?
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As We See It
Steve Guttenberg's 116th Dream
Steve Guttenberg  |  Oct 19, 2016  |  6 comments
I'm at Dan D'Agostino's house listening to his triamped Apogee full-range ribbon speakers. It's 1985. His listening room is immense, easily 30' by 45', and we're rocking out to Led Zeppelin and Bonzo Dog Band records. The sound is light-years better than anything I've heard—dynamic as hell, beyond vivid, and the soundstage has infinite depth—and Dan's obviously loving that I'm blown away by his system. We get to talking. He has three pairs of Krell KMA-160 monoblocks and Reference KRS preamps for me. Thanks, I say, but how can I get them home? No problem—Dan has a van.
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As We See ItJ. Gordon HoltHistorical
Stop Digital Madness!
J. Gordon Holt  |  Dec 03, 1985  |  0 comments
The title of this month's column is the legend Sheffield Labs emblazoned on a T-shirt a couple of years ago, to promote their jaundiced view of digital audio. Since then, even Sheffield's reactionary perfectionists softpedalled their anti-digital crusade, perhaps because of the number of CDs they've been selling! Their personnel no longer wear those T-shirts at CES, which is unfortunate. Although most people in the audio field no longer see digital audio as madness, digital denouncing is still very much with us.
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As We See It
Strawberry Fields: Auditory Objects & Bad Science
John Atkinson  |  Apr 16, 2006  |  0 comments
Getting a name check from the mainstream press can be a good thing. But as Wes Phillips wrote in his blog on February 5, "to paraphrase Mason Williams on winning an Emmy Award, 'It's like being kissed by a girl with bad breath—you appreciate the honor, but...'"
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As We See It
Streaming Nomenclature and New People
Jim Austin  |  Feb 15, 2024  |  7 comments
A different kind of stream: Route 140 Wrentham at Pendleton Road Eagle Brook; image by Ernst Halberstadt, 29 March 1973, Wikimedia Commons

I recently received a letter (not yet published) suggesting a need for a glossary of newer hi-fi terms. Some audiophiles raised on physical media, it seems, are perplexed by descriptions of the new streaming landscape. Just yesterday, all we had to worry about was DACs and transports. Today we have servers, streamers, players, streaming DACs, and all that. That immediately struck me as a good idea, allied with a second reason: To avoid confusion, it makes sense for the industry to standardize the nomenclature. When we see the word "streamer," for example, we should all be thinking about the same thing.

So, here's a brief glossary of streaming-related devices.

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As We See It
Struck by a Tornado?
John Atkinson  |  Jul 27, 1999  |  0 comments
It was the road signs alongside I-44 that first caught my attention, each with its twin supports neatly snapped halfway up. Then I saw the outlet center east of Oklahoma City, smashed flat as if struck by the mother of all baseball bats swung by a careless god.
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As We See It
Subjective Fact or Objective Fantasy?
John Atkinson  |  Aug 26, 2008  |  First Published: Aug 08, 1991  |  0 comments
Blame the Puritans! say I. The high end has always had an ostinato accompaniment of grumbles from those who appear to feel that it is immoral to want to listen to music with as high a quality as possible. In a recent letter, for example, Fanfare and Stereo Review contributor and author Howard Ferstler states that "the audio world has more products of bogus quality and shills promoting them than any other industry, bar none," and trots out the old saw that audiophiles "end up spending an excessive amount of money on equipment or tweaking techniques of surprisingly dubious quality."
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As We See It
Suicide Junctions
John Atkinson  |  Dec 15, 2002  |  0 comments
"Suicide junctions," I calls 'em. The ones with which I'm most familiar are on I-278, just north of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn, New York, and along North Mopac in Austin, Texas, but they must exist all over the US. Traffic about to enter the freeway must first cross the line of faster-traveling offcoming cars, the intersection's on- and off-ramps crossing in a shallow X.
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As We See It
Surrealistic Sound
Michael Zeugin  |  Oct 21, 2008  |  First Published: Nov 22, 1993  |  0 comments
Toward the end of the 1992 Summer CES in Chicago, J. Gordon Holt ambled into Audio Influx's demonstration room. He was curious about which PDQ Bach CD we were playing, as a fitting end to the show. We chatted about PDQ Bach live concerts and the grand-spoof entrances made by Professor Peter Schickele. Suddenly he said, "You know, these speakers sound real," going on to mention that he hadn't heard many real-sounding systems. I told JGH that most of what I heard at shows and in dealer showrooms nowadays was surrealistic sound.
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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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