LATEST ADDITIONS

The title of this month's column is the legend <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/194/">Sheffield Labs</A> 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.

Almost 30 years ago, Columbia records issued a unique disc called <I>The Art of Jonathan and Darlene Edwards</I>. Darlene sang and Jonathan played piano, and the jacket notes rhapsodized about the depth of feeling they brought to their duos, despite some imperfections of technique.

<B>Editor's Note: </B><I>In 1985 and 1986, an argumentative thread ran through </I>Stereophile<I>'s pages, discussing the benefits or lack of double-blind testing methods in audio component reviewing, triggered by J. Gordon Holt's <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/121/">review of the ABX Comparator</A>. As this debate is still raging nearly 15 years later, we present here the entire discussion that bounced back and forth between the magazine's "Letters" section and features articles. It was kicked off by a letter from C.J. Huss that appeared in Vol.8 No.5.</I>&mdash;<B>John Atkinson</B>

One of the things that distinguishes a dedicated audiophile from Joe Q. Public is that he has some notion of what audio fidelity is all about.

A number of recent letters have accused us of snobbishness and elitism because we devote so much space to reports about components that "common folk" can't afford. We are "snobbish" because we seem to look down on anything less perfect than a Wilson WAMM speaker system or an Audio Research SP-10 preamplifier. And we are "elitist" because we seem to show little interest in any components which fall short of state of the art. Far from being chastened by these letters, I am proud, to declare that they are right on target.

The sound, of course, but here's a checklist of 16 specifics to consider when evaluating your own or somebody else's live-recording efforts.

101 years ago, the tinfoil cylinder started it all. Within 22 years, its heyday was done, and public support swung to favor the then-new wax-mastered disc. 1948 saw the switch to a slower speed and a finer groove, but the flat disc, traced by a stylus, has held sway for almost 80 years now. Even today, people with multi-speed turntables and a couple of arms (or plug-in cartridges) can reproduce from a single phono unit the earliest or the latest discs merely by the flip of two switches (for speed change and cartridge change). All that is about to come to an end.