After I decided to join Stereophile as its editor in the spring of 1986, I took a road trip through Europe. The ostensible reason for the trip was to attend a hi-fi show in Lucerne, Switzerland, but the reality was that, faced with the transatlantic dislocation, I wanted to touch base with places that had meant much to me over the preceding years. I took the train to Paris, where I spent a day taking what might have been my last look at the Impressionist paintings (then at the Jeu de Paume gallery, now at the Musée d'Orsay), then drove the rest of the way to Lucerne with KEF's then marketing manager David Inman.
KEF was premiering the Reference 107 loudspeaker at the Swiss Show, sharing a room with McIntosh. The morning of the set-up day, once the system was up and running, David took a box of CDs out of the trunk of his car and started playing a track from each. Each CD went into one of two piles, one large, one small. At the end of the process, the large pile went back in the box.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Tweaking the system," David replied.
While the other exhibitors were messing with ancillaries and accessories, David was selecting the musical tracks that would work best with the system and room acoustics.
This methodological approach to demonstrations was typical of David. Back in 1977, I had attended a hi-fi show in England and, happening into the Celestion room, sat through a fascinating dem, in which the presenter played many different recordings, of different kinds of music, all of which sounded superb. After the dem, I spoke with that presenter, David Inman, who explained that a Show gave an exhibitor a unique opportunity to allow its products to perform at their best—if the exhibitor took the care to choreograph a musical program that told a story that resonated with the listeners, and most importantly, played to the system's strengths.
"Too many forget that a Show is a show," David would say. "Exhibitors must make the time people spend in their rooms memorable and enjoyable."
As far as it is possible for a magazine writer and a manufacturer, on opposite sides of an essential divide, to become friends, David and I became friends. David's knowledge of classical music was encyclopedic, the result of his having worked in record retailing in his native Liverpool; his knowledge of the audio industry was equally deep, and he readily shared that knowledge with this then-neophyte audio writer. David was also one of the first industry people to draw attention to the great work being done by Tony Faulkner, now an A-List classical recording engineer but back in the late 1970s, just starting to make a name for himself.
I stayed in touch with my mentor after I moved to the US, and it became a tradition that, after the January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, David (and other industry people) would accompany Stereophile's staff on the 700-mile drive back to Santa Fe, New Mexico. We would overnight at the historic El Tovar hotel on the Grand Canyon's South Rim, where, after an evening spent drinking, laughing, and telling tales, we would watch the sun rise over the Canyon in the sub-zero morning.
On one of these drives back, my wife and I were motoring through the desolate Hopi Reservation in south-eastern Arizona when we were pulled over for doing 65mph in a 55mph zone. The Hopi policeman blinked when he heard my accent.
"You're the second Englishman I've pulled over this morning!"
David had been the first!
I owe David a great debt of thanks for helping me grow as a music lover and as an audiophile. I am ashamed to admit that I have not been very good at staying in touch with him the past few years. I am deeply saddened this holiday weekend, therefore, to have to write that David died at 3pm, Thursday, June 29, after a fight with complications resulting from prostate cancer. "The end was very peaceful," wrote Ivor Humphreys, once my deputy at Hi-Fi News and for many years technical editor at Gramophone, and a close friend of David's, "with his sister Rosemary, son Peter, daughter-in-law Louise, and [companion] Maureen with him."
In accordance with his wishes, David's funeral will be private, for family only, in England's East Anglia region, where he spent many happy years and where Peter, Louise, and his grandsons still live. A memorial service celebrating David's life and achievements—"which so typically he always underplayed," adds Ivor—will be held in a few months' time.
Thank you, David. Rest in Peace.
