Solid State Preamp Reviews

Sidebar 1: The Reviewer Reviewed, or, There's Nothing New Under the Sun

I reviewed the original Quad solid state amplifiers in the early 1970s, a time when my reviewing style was considered too outspoken and confrontational by the established old guard of UK hi-fi publishers and manufacturers. At Hi-Fi News, its editor, the great John Crabbe had inherited an industry-friendly policy of not discussing the sound quality of audio electronics. In the US, this situation had started to change in 1962, when J. Gordon Holt launched Stereophile guided by the notion that hi-fi reviews ought to focus on the sound, but in the UK, change came more slowly. Most in the UK audio establishment still held that if an audio component measured well, it must sound fine, and that was the final word on the subject. Subjective comments were censored. At an unsighted amplifier listening test I hosted, Crabbe entered the same median score for every test presentation, on principle (footnote 1).

I fought for the right to critically review sound quality. Some members of the audio establishment, including Quad founder Peter Walker, fought back, staging events to prove it could not be done with well-designed amplifiers because their electrical specifications were below then-accepted levels for the audibility of errors—hence, they all sounded alike. I was challenged to a blind test to prove that my subjective observations were not imaginary. I had to agree that Quad test my ability to discriminate between two technically benchmarked and nominally matched amplifiers, one chosen by Quad, the other by me. Both were pretested by Quad to ensure that they were free of defects and so could be expected to sound identical.

The Quad team were dispatched with the amplifiers to be compared to an adjacent room, linked to my studio only by speaker cable. Presented randomly with music samples of calibrated loudness, I did not attempt to identify A or B but rather scored each trial on whether a given presentation was more musically communicative than the alternative.

After many tests, they departed. When I enquired as to the results, they reluctantly admitted that they had failed to prove that I could not hear amplifier differences, which had been their goal. Consequently, they agreed to discontinue this fractious public dispute, which by then had spilled over onto the pages of the prestigious electronics journal Wireless World, edited by Tom Ivall. It was a harrowing experience.

Working weekends as a demonstrator at an audiophile retailer, I found it difficult—impossible, really—not to hear sound-quality differences among a wide range of audio amplifiers when I listened in a relaxed and familiar setting. Never mind complete amplifiers: I was able to show that almost every component of an amplifier had identifiable characteristics and could be ranked for sound quality.

Paul Messenger, who became the magazine's deputy news editor in 1975, pioneered Stereophile-style listening-based reviews in Hi-Fi News. Other UK publications, including Hi-Fi Answers and Practical Hi-Fi & Audio, also started reviewing subjectively during the 1970s.—Martin Colloms

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Footnote 1: John Atkinson participated in a similar trial around the same time; JA was responsible for collecting and tallying listeners' scores. He reports that an engineer named Reg Williamson did exactly the same thing, entering the median score for every trial. JA says Williamson "went ballistic when I refused to include his, not the least because I saw him filling in the non-identifications on his score sheet before the blind tests started."