A topic that gets a lot of ink spilled on it in this issue is the High End's limited market penetration. Michael Fremer covers the subject in "Analog Corner" (p.59); Mondial's Tony Federici reveals some strong ideas on it in my interview with him (p.83); and a number of readers—including Steven R. Rochlin, who harvests a number of ideas posted on CompuServe's CEAUDIO forum—get heavily into…
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"Everyone I know used to sit in front of the stereo and listen to music...Now no one I know, except for us lunatics, listens to music the way one would watch a movie on TV."—from The Audiophile Network
Steven R. Rochlin's letter from May 1996
Sharing our love...enjoy the music!!!
Editor: My love of music began at the ripe ol' age of five. That's when my dad, an avid music lover himself, took me to hear the 1812 Overture performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra live (including blasting caps to substitute for the cannon blasts!). Since then, my love for music has continued to this very day. So what can we do to improve the visibility of higher quality music reproduction?
In a roundabout way, I posed that question to others on CompuServe's CEAUDIO forum. Here are a few…
Sometimes, taking what looks like the easy route turns out to be a bust. The line for cabs outside the Alexis Park Resort Hotel in Las Vegas, home of the high-end audio exhibits at the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show, must have been at least 50 people long. So much for the post-9/11 forecasts of doom that had preceded the convention: last fall's Comdex may have been a bust, but the official CES visitor count of 100,307, if a little lower than the past two years' attendances, still seemed respectable (and surpassed 1999's total of 97,370).
I had wanted to go to the newly opened Tuscany…
Letters
Substantial damage?
Editor: It is my opinion that Stereophile's "Recommended Components" is both doing substantial damage to the audio industry and completely misguiding consumers. I feel this is so for the following reasons:
1) There simply is no way, given Stereophile's oft-stated and self-righteous policy of subjective reviewing, that components can be classified according to the startlingly arbitrary, pseudo-objective, five-tier classifications. The editors discussing a reviewer's recommendations before listing the component many months after the component was…
Editor's Introduction: Stereophile's "Recommended Components" feature is, as I am sure you will have guessed, produced by a committee. The reviews are studied, the reviewers polled to verify the continued validity, the merits and demerits of specific pieces of equipment are discussed or, rather, argued over at length by JGH, JA, and LA, and out of the whole business emerges the "truth." But, as with the findings of any committee, what is presented as a consensus will have significant undertows and countercurrents of opinion; if these are very strong, a "Minority Report" is often also…
That said, however, I would like to express my growing personal distaste for small monitor speakers and for the dishonesty with which they are advertised and reviewed. I can see a limited need for such units in the field and in very unusual listening conditions. I do not, however, see a need for such speakers in most listening rooms. I see no valid design reason for producing them, and feel they deserve far more criticism than they now get.
Let me begin by summarizing my reasoning in nontechnical terms:
• Whether a speaker is large or small, unless designed to be used adjacent to…
The Fletcher-Munson curves show that both low frequencies and overall listening levels must be relatively loud to hear natural bass; anyone who has conducted practical speaker tests becomes aware of the fact that the ear is very sensitive to changes of even a few dB at low frequencies.
This means that when a speaker is placed in a home listening room, and you are discussing bass below about 150Hz, the "rolloff" point should be measured at an spl of at least 95dB, and at 100dB for a really good high-end system (footnote 2). The tendency to measure bass response at lower signal levels is…
No One Stole The Bass
By Martin Colloms
By Martin Colloms
Martin Colloms responds to Tony Cordesman's recent dismissal of small loudspeakers, from Stereophile Vol.10 No.5, August 1987
I must take issue with AHC and the results he presented in "Who Stole the Bass?" in Stereophile Vol.10 No.3. While accepting that his outright condemnation of small monitors was presented as a minority report and that the article essentially concerned personal taste, it was nevertheless backed up by a technical argument in support of his opinion. Moreover, he misuses anechoic data from my own reviews to aid his…
Letters in response appeared in Vol.10 Nos.5 & 8, August & November 1987
Who stole the bass?
Editor:
In response to AHC's ridiculous comment regarding small monitor speakers in Vol.10 No.3: "virtually all of today's small monitor speakers are reasonably incapable of high-fidelity reproduction, and have no place in a decent audio system," I say that AHC is measurably incapable of listening to and reviewing high-fidelity reproduction and has no place writing for a decent audio magazine. I therefore suggest that Mr. Cordesman stick to reviewing for Audio magazine, where…
"Gotta get my hands on these!"
Before the 1999 CES, I had never heard of the Soliloquy 5.3, but "this slim, 38"-high obelisk was among the most open- and transparent-sounding speakers at the Show," as I said in my April '99 Show Report. As I slogged from room to room, never able to spend enough time with things (and people) that entertain and inform, and rarely able to avoid exhibits of even minimal interest, it was absolutely wonderful to stumble on something both novel and satisfying.
Skimming Soliloquy's website, I learned that Dennis Had of Cary Audio Design put about four…