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After 27 years, yesterday was the final day AVTech's webmaster Jon Iverson was responsible for overseeing the company's websites, including this one. Now in his mid-60s, Jon felt it was time for him to retire while he still had the energy to explore his other interests.

Jon was a successful audio retailer in California's Central Coast region in the 1980s (footnote 1), though he took a year off to study gamelan music in Bali (footnote 2). After selling his business, he contacted Stereophile's then-publisher Larry Archibald and myself in the spring of 1997 with a vision for the magazine's website. Larry and I had been trying to come up with an appropriate web strategy for a long time, but without any success. But when Jon visited us in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and outlined his ideas, we were sold. Jon joined our staff as our self-styled "web monkey," and the result went live on December 1, 1997.

Stereophile's site grew rapidly both in terms of page views and reader engagement. Jon subsequently developed websites for our other magazines and ventures, as well as contributing informed and informative essays, reviews, show reports, and the occasional interview. After Stereophile and its sister publications and sites were acquired by AVTech in early 2018, Jon applied his expertise to designing and developing websites for the company's UK-based magazines.

Jon is one of the very few people I have known who think strategically. Most managers are tactical thinkers—they concentrate on how best to do something. By contrast, a strategic thinker's focus is on what will be best to do. Jon served as my consigliere from 1997 through to my retirement as Stereophile's Editor-in-Chief at the end of March 2019. For every one of those 22 years I paid careful attention to Jon's take on what the magazine was doing and how it could be done differently or better. Even when we disagreed about something, it was reassuring to know that Jon had thought about it as deeply as I had.

May 31 was also the final day for Jon's partner, Corrina Jones, who played a major role in preparing and posting our website content. Our websites will still be in good hands, however. Our new webmaster is Len Porcano, who has been working with Jon for many years.

Thank you for all those years of working together, Jon. Enjoy your retirement!—John Atkinson

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Footnote 1: Although I didn't know Jon back then, he took part as a listener in the blind tests of amplifiers that I organized at Stereophile's High End Hi-Fi Show in San Mateo, California in April 1989. Jon was one of the listeners who could distinguish the two amplifiers, a solid-state Adcom and a tubed VTL, by ear. See his comments on the tests, which were published as a letter in Stereophile, here.

Footnote 2: Alternesia, an album of Jon's compositions for gamelan, was originally released by a small Japanese label but is now available as a free download under a Creative Commons license; see alternesia.com/about.html. You can read Jon's notes on composing and recording the works on Alternesia here.