I feel privileged to have followed the remarkable evolution of digital processors over the past four-and-a-half years. Since my first digital review—a survey of three modified CD players back in August 1989—I've been fascinated by the developments that have inexorably improved the quality of digitally reproduced music.
<I>A couple of months back (<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/393awsi">March 1993, p.7</A>), I wrote that as far as I was concerned, video was television dressed up in fancy dress, thus there was no place for coverage of the medium in </I>Stereophile<I>. As the magazine's founder, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/66">J. Gordon Holt</A>, has been a committed videophile for many years, I sat back and awaited a reaction from him. One was not long coming. I am running his response as this month's "As We See It" feature.—<B>John Atkinson</B></I>
<I>"When it comes to video, most audiophiles are insufferable snobs."</I>—J. Gordon Holt, 1984
"Some say it dates back to 1927, when <I>Gramophone</I> magazine's editor thundered that electrical reproduction was a step <I>backward</I> in sound quality," said the promotional copy for Home Entertainment 2005's opening-day event, "The Great Debate: Subjectivism on Trial." It continued: "But whenever it started, the Great Debate between 'subjectivists,' who hear differences among audio components, and 'objectivists,' who tend to ascribe such differences to the listeners' overheated imaginations, rages just as strongly in the 21st century as it did in the 20th." On April 29 at the Manhattan Hilton, <I>Stereophile</I> editor John Atkinson and one of the Internet's most vocal audio skeptics, Arnold B. Krueger, debated <I>mano a mano</I> where the line should be drawn between honest reporting and audio delusion.
As I walked through the corridors of HE2005, I kept hearing audiophiles asking one another, "Have you heard Mark Levinson's demo yet?" Yes, that was Mark Levinson, the man, and the Burwen Bobcat was possibly <I>the</I> most discussed item at the Show.
This year's Home Entertainment Show in New York has just ended. If you had the chance to attend, what caught your ear?
I've been thinking about women. All weekend long. While that, by itself, is nothing unusual for me, here at Home Entertainment 2005, I''ve been thinking particularly about the small number of female enthusiasts within the hobby of high-end audio.
If you missed <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/105kh">Part 1 of this article</A> (<I>Stereophile</I>, January 2005), or it has faded in your memory, here's a résumé. (Readers who recall Part 1 with crystalline clarity, please skip to paragraph four.) The accurate measuring of loudspeakers requires that the measurements be taken in a reflection-free environment. Traditionally, this has meant that the speaker be placed atop a tall pole outdoors or in an anechoic chamber. Both of these options are hedged around with unwelcome implications of cost and practicality. To overcome these and allow <I>quasi-anechoic</I> measurements to be performed in normal, reverberant rooms, <I>time-windowed measurement</I> methods were developed that allow the user to analyze only that portion of the speaker's impulse response that arrives at the microphone ahead of the first room reflection. MLSSA from <A HREF="http://www.mlssa.com">DRA Labs</A> is the best-known measurement system to work on this principle, and both John Atkinson and I use it in the course of preparing our loudspeaker reviews.
I used to be an audio cheapskate even worse than Sam Tellig. Anytime I saw an interesting device for sale, I immediately began to figure out how I might build it for myself for a fraction of the cost.
It's not unusual for a high-end audio company to originate in another segment of the high-tech electronics world, but it <I>is</I> a bit unusual when the spin-off is a cable company. That's the case with Empirical Audio, whose founder, Steve Nugent, spent 25 years as a digital hardware designer for Unisys and Intel. The key is that, in addition to standard design work, he chased "the more esoteric sides of design, namely grounding, shielding, ESD (electrostatic discharge), EMI (electromagnetic interference), transmission-line effects, and power delivery." <I>Voilà</I>—cable design.