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Magic Picture Shows
Herb Reichert  |  Apr 06, 2022  | 
Axiomatically, audiophile audio is about quality of reproduced sound. Experientially though—for me at least—it's about visions in the mind's eye. The older I get, the more attentively I listen to recordings, the more importance I assign to the myriad moving pictures I see between my speakers.
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On creaks and coughs and candy wrappers
Rogier van Bakel  |  Mar 03, 2022  | 
The advantage of a highly resolving music system is that you can hear deeper into recordings. The disadvantage is that you can hear deeper into recordings.
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Forget about the sound of the recording
Jim Anderson  |  Feb 10, 2022  | 
Hello, and Happy New Year! I'm greeting you in October 2021—just before Halloween, in anticipation of Stereophile's publication deadline—but by the time this magazine arrives in your mailbox, it'll be after the holidays.
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Ray's Scream
Tony Scherman  |  Jan 04, 2022  | 
Back in the mid-1960s, I was the unusual white, suburban preteen who, for reasons I've long pondered and never fully understood, was drawn much less powerfully to the Beatles than to blues and R&B. I was a bit of a jazz snob, too. Given these leanings, it's no surprise that one of the half-dozen or so albums that fried my impressionable young brain was that seamless blend of blues, R&B, and jazz, Ray Charles at Newport.
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A Wolf Howled in Chicago
Larry Birnbaum  |  Dec 01, 2021  | 
In the early 1970s, my hometown—Chicago—was a hotbed of blues. I discovered the blues in high school via the Rolling Stones, and I began to frequent the city's blues clubs as a college student, at first while still underage. From Theresa's, the South Side tavern where Junior Wells performed, I progressed to the West Side, where on weekends I would head down Madison Street to see Howlin' Wolf at Big Duke's Blue Flame Lounge.
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Listening Deeply
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Nov 02, 2021  | 
Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.—Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations

The one activity that distinguishes audiophiles from other music lovers is our practice of sitting in solitude and listening closely to music reproduced on a finely tuned playback system.

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Lou Reed's Dirty Boulevard of Dreams
Kurt Gottschalk  |  Oct 05, 2021  | 
New York City is a dream you can't have—glitz, glamor, grime, too much to take in from within, too much to understand from afar. It's a metropolitan manifestation of the Heisenberg principle, its nature changing with how you look at it. No matter how you try, you can't see the forest for the skyscrapers.
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My journey to hi-fi
Rogier van Bakel  |  Sep 08, 2021  | 
Step 1. When I was in my mid-20s, an older editor at the Dutch current-affairs magazine I worked for told me he wanted to write a piece about audiophiles: He had been bitten by the audio bug himself. Because I often wrote about rock and pop music, he asked if I had a quality hi-fi system, and if so, would I be willing to be interviewed for his article
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Alive at the Cafe Au Go Go
Jeff Weiner  |  Jul 27, 2021  | 
I grew up in a household that didn't have a record player and was pretty much devoid of music. In high school, I got a little stereo and began collecting records. By the time I entered Brooklyn College, in 1963, my "main man" was Trini Lopez; I also had a couple of Jack Jones albums. In New York, I discovered the Cafe Au Go Go.
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The Beatles: Liverpool Fantasy
John Swenson  |  Jun 29, 2021  | 
Last week, I had a puzzling dream. When I woke, the vision remaining from the dreamscape was of a single thread of conversation, almost oracular, with no context. Ringo was telling me, "That was actually John singing on that one, mate."

I searched for a hidden message. Maybe it was one of those naked-in-public dreams, the Beatles drummer chastising me for misidentifying the singer in some review I wrote. I soon forgot about it.

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Fun with Moose and Squirrel
Jonathan Scull  |  May 26, 2021  | 
'Cause it's hard to say what's real / When you know the way you feel—Flaming Lips, "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21," from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

In a recent Zoom meeting, some friends got into a dust-up about how "real"-sounding high-performance audio systems can be. The consensus was that there was no chance at all of real, live sound. A label owner waved it off as impossible: "Fuhgeddaboudit," he said. He's from New York, like me.

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Goodbye to the house Mike Kay built
Jay Jay French  |  Apr 12, 2021  | 
By the time this issue of Stereophile arrives in your mailbox (and on newsstands), Lyric Hi-Fi & Video, the legendary symbol of male-dominated, uber-luxury hi-fi retail, will be closed forever.

This makes me sad. I wasn't just a client of Lyric; I worked there.

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Death Row Discs
John Swenson  |  Mar 16, 2021  | 
My music is keeping me alive.

I have terminal cancer, which is like Bergman's chess match with the Grim Reaper: You know you're going to lose, but with skill, determination, and luck, you can delay the inevitable, move by move. Determination is key, because it's all too easy to give up. My music—a collection I've amassed over the last 60 years—inspires me to keep going, to keep listening.

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Remembering live music in Europe
Thomas Conrad  |  Mar 02, 2021  | 
I wrote an article for the March 2017 issue of Stereophile called "The Permanent Jazz Festival: The Rise of Europe and the Future of Jazz." It presented two theses: that much of the energy in jazz now comes out of Europe, and that the best place to feel that energy is in the crowd at a European jazz festival. There are hundreds of them throughout the year.
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Landscape into music
Sasha Matson  |  Feb 03, 2021  | 
It says something about the power of music that some individuals fading into dementia can still recognize the music they knew earlier in their lives. Not to denigrate new music, or music one hasn't heard before, but our mental jukeboxes award top chart numbers to music that we have lived with over time. Those DJs making their playlists in our brain are the toughest of critics. They don't care what anyone else might think, "Close to You" is staying in the rotation. Music and memory are linked.
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