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Book Review: <I>Flowers in the Dustbin</I>

Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977
by James Miller
New York: Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1999. Paperback, 8.5" by 5.5", 416 pp. $15.00. ISBN 0-6848-6560-2.

This book is a tremendously valuable complement and counterpoint to Jim Cogan and William Clark's Temples of Sound, which I reviewed in the July issue. That book did a marvelous job of laying out the what and the how of the golden age of recording popular music in the US. This intriguing and at times provocative book tackles the thornier questions of what difference it all made, and why.

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A Babel, a Babble . . .

Twice a year, Stereophile brings some of its writers out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to discuss the compilation of the magazine's "Recommended Components" listing, the most recent of which appeared in the October issue. Following a comment from Will Hammond, John Atkinson's collaborator on the recent amplifier blind listening tests, that the magazine's readers would love to eavesdrop on the conversations that take place on these occasions, it seemed a good idea to tape (footnote 1) some of the discussions and publish the transcript as this month's "As We See It" (footnote 2). Accordingly, Lewis…

A Babel, a Babble . . . Page 2

Richard Lehnert: That's sort of been happening within each review. What Robert Harley's been doing is to add a closing paragraph of measurements after the main body of the review.

Holt: But the thing is, if you leaf through the review section the way it is now, you see...

Lehnert: ...the graphs...

Holt: ...all the way through it. And as Tom said, I have the feeling that's probably turning off some people.

Mitchell: One of the problems of presenting technical information, especially in graphical form, is that graphs have a way of taking up a lot of space for the…

A Babel, a Babble . . . Page 3

Norton: The technical results are going to have to be separate from the main body of the text for most of us anyway because the measurements are going to be done here in Santa Fe. There's no way we can mesh these two together.

Balgalvis: I'm glad you brought that up—there are three writers here who used to work with High-Performance Review (footnote 5). I have to confess that whenever I had to do the technical section of a review, it was just a tedious thing. The graphs were there, and you tried to put them into in words, which was kind of nice. But I never felt that it was really…

A Babel, a Babble . . . Page 4

Olsher: Then let's change the measurements that are done. Your opinion shouldn't change.

Galo: I agree with Lew that what the product sounds like is most important. How I see the measurements is helping both the reviewer and the reader understand why the product sounds the way it does.

Holt: But I don't think most of our readers give a damn as to "why." Other manufacturers do.

Lipnick: You have a responsibility to explain your findings. The technical stuff obviously has to back up the subjective description.

Holt: I think the main function of measurements in the…

A Babel, a Babble . . . Page 5

Lipnick: Of the sound, but there's also an emotional impact to buying components...Let's face it, that's not peanuts. This is a religious rite, going out and buying this stuff, you know. The actual spending of the money is a big deal. And if you start doing this one-voice kind of thing you're talking about, I think you'll lose a lot of that.

Holt: At shows I've had a number of people come up to me and say, "Why don't you people work together on each review, so you can come up with a consensus?" And I said, "Well, for one thing, it would probably take us six months to get a review done,…

A Babel, a Babble . . . Page 6

Balgalvis: I agree. As it happens, I happen to have the same Lazarus amps that Dick reviewed, plus an additional pair that Lazarus sent me because the guy felt that I should drive them balanced into the Divas, two per side. Again, just to emphasize what was heard, I have to say I heard not much difference on the Divas from what Dick heard on the speakers that he used, which were the Quads. But the point is that you have to play with an amplifier with cables. And we get into an area that for me is really like a snake-infested area and has nothing to do with what Dick did with his review,…

A Babel, a Babble . . . Page 7

Atkinson: Bob, you wrote in the September issue that because somebody carries out a measurement it inherently implies that he feels that that measurement means something.

Robert Harley: And I said we're not going to print a laundry list of meaningless specs, only if they're relevant to the review or to the product. We're not going to print every amplifier's THD...

Norton: We'll have that data available, though it won't necessarily all be printed, right? We can correlate it as we go along...

Lehnert: I'm going to go back to something that Gordon said quite a while ago,…

A Babel, a Babble . . . Page 8

Greenhill: Having seen a zillion reviews that end "This might be the right amp for you but you'll have to go and listen to find out for sure," your whole feeling about the review just goes zzziit! Because the guy is copping out from taking a stand. As a reviewer, if I like a product I'm going to say, "If I were in a position to buy this, this is the product I would buy." And if I don't, I'm not trying to tell other people they must do this. On the other hand, I believe what I'm saying. Okay? And I'm not going to qualify it to the point where it's meaningless.

Lipnick: At the end of the…

A Babel, a Babble . . . Page 9

Holt: I think the stress must be on the state-of-the-art stuff.

Norton: I think the mix we've had over the past couple of years has been fine.

Atkinson: Peter [Mitchell] has offered to write a column on inexpensive equipment and I think that that's something we should definitely publish.

Mitchell: I do think Stereophile needs a clearer focus on the middle of the market than it has at present. Since we lost the Audio Cheapskate column, you need to replace it with something. Because an occasional review of an Adcom preamp is not sufficiently visible emphasis on the…