People of my generation have learned that change is certain. You can't know what the change will be, but you can bank on the fact that there will be serious change over the next ten years. Look at the historically most important change in ten years: microcomputers.
Now that Stereophile's reporting on the 1985 Summer Consumer Electronics Show has ended (I hope!), I would like to express strong dissent with its style and content. In fact, I believe that most of it should never have appeared in print.
Stereophile is happy to start off another year, only one issue behind our published schedule. For most magazine subscribers, this would seem a confession of weakness; underground aficionados will, however, know what I'm talking about. We did in fact publish eight issues last year, but the first one happened to be Volume 6, Number 6 (the last issue in that volume), so that puts us still one behind. Ambitiously, I predict we'll get out nine (count them, 9) issues in 1985 and catch up with our schedule.
Some time ago I wrote about the need for high-end audio companies to constantly reinvent themselves: You may be receiving accolades for your latest and greatest product, but you'd also better be well along the path to developing its replacement. High-end audio is a field of constant change; no product remains supreme for long.
"Be like my friend Frank. He imagines that he's purchased certain products—right now he's imagining that he bought a pair of hard-to-get English speakers which he has read a review of but hasn't heard. This is ideal, since the speakers can sound better and better as Frank imagines more and more. When he tires of these speakers and gets excited about something else, he doesn't have to trade them in. He only needs to start imagining the next product." That was Sam Tellig's friend Frank, back in March of this year. No one could have said it better, but I have a followup.
Ralph died last week (September 11, 1991), his great and faithful heart stopped in the aftermath of an affliction not too uncommon for older, larger dogs—a gastric torsion. He was approximately 12 years old.
I sometimes do crazy things to experience live music. In my late teens I met a woman—a friend of a friend of my girlfriend—who was a flautist attending the Mannes School of Music in New York City. She was a classic New Yorker, from a classic New York family. Though apparently demure and retiring, she had fearlessly ridden the city subways since childhood, taking the Broadway line at any hour of day or night (her stop was Dyckman Street, above 200th). All of her parents' money and energy, such as it was, had gone into their daughter's musical career, and I was so inspired by this level of focus and devotion that I hitchhiked from Boston to New York and back in order to attend her first concert, a performance of the two Mozart flute concerti. My presence was remarked upon as the act of a true friend, but I was the beneficiary: It was a great concert, and a good start to a life of experiencing the "call" of live music.
It's not often that you get a chance to have extensive discussions with the horse's mouth, but we recently had that opportunity. Since July of this year there has been extensive discussion in the audio community, particularly the high-end segment, of Larry Greenhill's article on speaker cable listening tests in the August, 1983 issue of Stereo Review (footnote 1). From recent talks with author Greenhill we've learned that the most interesting story was not in Stereo Review; instead it can be found in the varying reactions from different quarters, and what they say about the high-end industry in general.
Larry Archibald
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