As We See It

As Jim Austin wrote in this space in the December 2024 issue, following a medical procedure that he had in mid-October, he needed to take several weeks' leave to recuperate. He delegated the magazine's production to Managing Editor Mark Henninger, AVTech Editorial Director Paul Miller, and myself. The three of us worked with copy editor Linda Felaco and longtime art director Jeremy Moyler to produce the issue you hold in your hands.

As readers probably know, I was Stereophile's editor for 33 years until my retirement at the end of March 2019 (footnote 1). However, they probably don't know that for the 10 years prior to my joining this magazine in 1986, I was first an editorial assistant, then Deputy Editor, then, in 1982, Editor of British magazine Hi-Fi News. (In a twist of fate, Paul Miller is now Hi-Fi News's Editor.)

I have thus been working in publishing for almost half a century, and as I started work on this issue's content, it struck me that I had forgotten how my life used to be dominated by monthly publishing schedules. Need to take a vacation? Only if the time taken doesn't conflict with the demands of the schedule. In June 1997, I wanted to tour Italy, starting and finishing in Rome, with stops in Florence, Venice, and Milan. (If you ever find yourself in Milan, you must visit the Leonardo da Vinci museum.) The only way that I could take the necessary two weeks off was that a year before the trip, I worked with the printer on the magazine's schedule and managed to get six weeks instead of the usual four–five for the August 1997 issue's production.

Other than accommodating the schedule, something that was a constant during those decades was the joy I got from listening to recorded music. When I joined Hi-Fi News in 1976, I had a Thorens TD-150AB turntable, a Shure phono cartridge, a Sony integrated amplifier, and Wharfedale loudspeakers (footnote 2). I've never been a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses kind of audiophile, but I have purchased many products over the years that impressed me with their ability to involve me in my music (footnote 3).

I still have the Rogers LS3/5a's that I bought in the late 1970s, and I measure one of these every time I measure a loudspeaker to check that I'm not making some kind of systematic error. I still use the Krell KSA-50 amplifier that I purchased in 1983 and the Audio Research SP-10 preamplifier that I purchased in 1984, each following my review in Hi-Fi News. I bought the B&W John Bowers Silver Signature loudspeakers that I reviewed for Stereophile in 1994, and recently sold them to a friend who had lusted after these speakers since his father had owned a pair. I have bought many other products over the years, all of which I still have (other than the Silver Signatures), except almost all of them now live in my storage unit.

The exceptions are my Roon Nucleus+ server, NAD M10 integrated amplifier, original KEF LS50 loudspeakers, Audeze LCD-X headphones, Linn Sondek LP-12 turntable with Ekos tonearm and Arkiv B cartridge, Channel D Seta L phono preamplifier, and Ayre C-5xe^MP SACD/CD player and QA-9 A/D converter. (I started ripping all my LPs to 24/192 needle drops with the QA-9, but as I approach my 77th birthday I realize that I'm not going to live long enough to finish ripping the thousands of LPs I have acquired over the years. So while I still digitize the Channel D preamp's output with the Ayre, I stream the data either to the DAC of the day or to the NAD amplifier's digital input—heresy to vinyl lovers, I am sure.)

Since the start of the pandemic, I settled into a routine of starting my listening every evening by streaming BBC Radio 3's Night Tracks program. Even though the Night Tracks stream is AAC at just 96kbps, it is a great way of discovering new music, transporting me into a world of musical imagination. And although the Roon ($2559 when last available), NAD ($2749 before being replaced by the V2 version), and KEFs ($1499.99/pair before being replaced by the Meta version) can't compete on sound quality, dynamics, or loudness with the multimegabuck products that are reviewed in Stereophile, they still take me places that I wasn't quite expecting to go, given the affordable prices of the components.

The week before this issue started production, I was driving to Rogier van Bakel's place in Maine to measure two very large, very heavy, very expensive loudspeakers, one of which, Estelon's X Diamond Mk II, is reviewed in this issue. On the 1000-mile round trip, I started thinking about the fact that so much of what we experience in high fidelity is large, heavy, and expensive. In the past few years, I have reviewed speakers from Wilson, Tidal, Magico, Göbel, and YG, all of which weighed at least 160lb and all of which produced some of the finest sound I have heard in my listening room. But, as the late Spencer Hughes, founder of Spendor, once told me, "Big speakers can have big problems." These big speakers avoid big problems with heroic engineering, which equates to equally heroic prices (footnote 4).

That got me wondering, at what point does the law of diminishing returns set in? While it is true that a $25,000 digital processor, a $100,000 amplifier, or a $150,000 pair of speakers can excel in both measured performance and sound quality, the percentage improvement compared with affordable equivalents is relatively small for that hefty difference in price.

This is the question that all of us audiophiles must face. At what point do we decide that yes, even if we could afford to buy a 10×-the-price component, would the extra 10% of quality we get be worth it when the money could instead be spent on concert tickets or recordings?

Back in the day, I did an analysis of Stereophile reviewers' systems. The common factor was that all the reviewers' collections of LPs and CDs cost a lot more than their systems. The same is true for me, even in these days of streaming.

Isn't that the way it should be for all music-loving audiophiles?

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Footnote 1: Following my retirement, I continued my relationship with Stereophile by writing reviews, providing the measurements to accompany its reviews, and preparing and posting the magazine's content to its website.

Footnote 2: You can see the 50-year evolution of my system at youtube.com/watch?v=NdjO9ZIx8ag.

Footnote 3: A manufacturer's accommodation price for members of the audio press is almost always the same as the price paid by a retailer. There is therefore no special favor involved. In addition, I never buy a product I am writing about until after the review has been published.

Footnote 4: There are other factors involved. See stereophile.com/content/price-event-horizon/.