Interviews

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John Atkinson  |  Sep 07, 2010  |  First Published: Dec 07, 1987
Someone, I forget who it was, once wrote a perceptive essay on how in any field of human endeavor, apparent perfection is attained only when that field is in the process of being superseded. The Palace at Versailles was built when the power of the French monarchy was well into decline; Wagner's "music of the future" was in fact the end of a particular line of development; the nuvistor was developed almost simultaneously with the silicon transistor which would render tubes almost obsolete; and six years after the commercial introduction of Compact Disc, with record shops increasingly filling up with silver discs, to the detriment of black, turntables exist which render LP playback pretty much on a level with CD technically (many audiophiles, of course, feel that the LP has always been musically ahead).
Mike Mettler  |  Feb 06, 2025
Photo © Travis Shinn

If there's one word that best describes the sound of the Boston-bred alt-rock quartet known as Pixies, it has to be "dynamics." It's a musical milieu Pixies have deftly presented for 37 years and counting, right from the outset of the sinister janglefest known as "Caribou," the opening track on their inaugural September 1987 EP on 4AD, Come On Pilgrim.

From there, short, sanguine, sweet, succinctly titled songs like "Debaser," "Velouria," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Gigantic," "Here Comes Your Man," "Gouge Away," and "Where Is My Mind?" have all served to cement the bedrock of Pixies' planet of sound. Chief Pixies songwriter and vocalist/guitarist Black Francis—born Charles Thompson—recently described it in an interview for Stereophile as this: "Let's be quiet. Now, let's be loud. Let's be whispering. Now, let's be explosive." That's a precise four-sentence descriptor not only of their entire prior CV but also of Pixies' latest, and ninth studio album, the forebodingly titled The Night the Zombies Came, which was released by BMG in October 2024.

John Atkinson, Richard Lehnert, Denis Stevens  |  Sep 03, 1989
Why had a high-end hi-fi magazine felt the need to produce a classical LP when the thrust of real record companies in 1989 is almost exclusively toward CD and cassette? Why did the magazine's editors think they had a better chance than most experienced professional engineers in making a record with audiophile sound quality? Were they guilty of hubris in thinking that the many years between them spent practicing the profession of critic would qualify them as record producers?
Rogier van Bakel  |  Mar 12, 2025
Summers photos By Rogier Van Bakel

"That's pretty odious," Andy Summers says to me. "An odious comparison." His blueish eyes darken. Roughly an hour into our 90-minute face-to-face interview, I'd asked if it bothers him that in terms of reach and staying power, his solo oeuvre will never match his work with The Police.

To me, the observation seemed factual and uncontroversial, like saying that the sun rises in the east. The Police sold more than 75 million records and played some of the largest venues in the world. The night before our interview, I'd watched Summers perform a show in a 400-seat theater in rural Waldoboro, Maine.

Jim Austin  |  Nov 01, 2018
Virtually all of the active components in your system—DACs, preamplifiers, power amplifiers—work by modulating the DC output of their power supplies with an AC music signal. Surely, then, the more perfect your household AC is, the more perfect your audio system's output will be. Analogies abound—to dirty water used in distilling good whiskey, to inferior thread used to weave fine fabrics—and all amount to the same thing: you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
John Atkinson  |  Feb 28, 2018
Earlier this week, we posted a video blog with PS Audio's founder and CEO Paul McGowan giving Jana Dagdagan and me a post-CES tour around the Boulder, Colorado company's factory. Following the tour, I sat down with Paul in Music Room One and in a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about amplifiers and loudspeakers, DACs and audio systems, and the state of high-end audio.
John Atkinson  |  Feb 25, 2018
Immediately following the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, our resident videographer Jana Dagdagan and I visited PS Audio in Boulder Colorado. The company's founder, Paul McGowan, gave up his Saturday to give us a tour of the factory.
Tony Scherman  |  Mar 08, 2023
As Vilray Bolles marched down Manhattan's Second Avenue on a rainy afternoon late in 2014, participating in a demonstration against police brutality, he slipped on the wet pavement, fell hard on his right hand, and broke his pinky. For a guitarist, a broken finger can be a major, if not catastrophic, setback. But the gods were smiling on Bolles. He was, in fact, a lapsed guitarist, having all but abandoned hopes of a musical career, and the universe was giving him a nudge, not just back into music but into a collaboration with Rachael Price, one of contemporary pop's great vocalists, who, when she isn't singing cabaret jazz with Bolles, fronts the headlining rock band Lake Street Dive.
Julie Mullins  |  May 22, 2023
Even if Darren Myers's name isn't familiar, you still may have heard—or at least heard about—hi-fi components he designed, including the PS Audio Stellar phono preamp, which garnered Stereophile's Analog Product of the Year Award in 2020.

After working on projects for Classé and Bowers & Wilkins, Myers was hired by PS Audio, where he ended his tenure as senior analog design engineer. Myers recently joined Parasound (footnote 1) following the company's acquisition by David Sheriff.

Robert Baird  |  May 06, 2014  |  First Published: May 01, 2014
Making a recording is always a personal journey—everyone has a story to tell. Jazz violinist Regina Carter's latest, Southern Comfort, is an eloquent musical expression of Carter tracing the roots of her paternal lineage back five generations. For the project's sound engineer, Joe Ferla, it's the final project of a engineering career, and the beginning point of his new life as a practicing musician. The entwining of these journeys gives the album's music and sound a rare honesty.
Robert Baird  |  Dec 30, 2024
The return of vinyl, which has stayed popular and profitable since its resurgence, has now developed a surprising nuance. Pierre Markotanyos, the owner of the reissue label Return to Analog and Montreal record store Aux 33 Tours (which refers to the speed at which an LP spins), has noticed a distinct change in the makeup of who's buying vinyl these days. "In the late 2000s," Markotanyos reflects, "it was mostly 55-to-70-year-old guys who were coming in, buying records to play on their high-end stereos that they bought at the audio show in Montreal." [Sound familiar, Stereophile readers?] "They were the purists and the true believers."
Larry Greenhill  |  Jul 02, 2008  |  First Published: Jun 02, 2008
Determined to find out more about Revel's Ultima Salon2, I tracked down designer Kevin Voecks late on the second day of the 2008 Consumer Electronic Show. I persuaded him to step outside the demonstration suite of Harman International Industries, Revel's owner, high atop the Las Vegas Hilton. We spent an hour chatting about Voecks's design goals for Revel's new flagship. I asked Kevin what had led his team at Revel to develop a new Ultima Salon loudspeaker after 10 years?
Jana Dagdagan  |  Mar 09, 2017
When we released the "Thoughts on CES 2017" video, we received an overwhelming amount of feedback from readers who were pleased to finally be able to associate faces to the writers they had long read and revered on paper.

This video attempts to capture the essence of Stereophile writer and audio industry veteran Herb Reichert—at least as much as is possible in a 10-minute, streamed video.

John Atkinson  |  Aug 30, 2010  |  First Published: Apr 30, 1988
Way back in the mists of time, around 1980 to be exact, the Marantz company in Europe introduces a range of ostensibly cost-no-object solid-state electronics under the "Esotec" banner. Manufactured in Japan, but apparently designed in the USA, these ruggedly constructed components are noteworthy in that the power amplifiers are capable of being operated with the output stages running under class-A bias as well as class-B. The relatively expensive Esotec amplifiers sell in small numbers in the UK—remember that this is before the rebirth of the British high end—and pass into the history books. I am reminded of them, however, when I visit my friend Ivor Humphreys of Gramophone magazine at Christmas 1987; he is using a pair of the 30W mono class-A Marantz amplifiers to drive KEF R107s—and making very nice sounds.
David Lander  |  Apr 26, 2009
Richard Sequerra was born in 1929 and raised in various parts of the US by his mother, who worked for the Department of State. By the time he was 20, he had launched a freelance career that has since spanned a wide range of technologies. During a stint at Marantz in the 1960s, he worked with Sidney Smith on that firm's famed Marantz 10B tuner, which was sold from 1964 through 1970. Subsequent products have included the Sequerra 1 tuner and the Metronome 7 loudspeaker, originally produced by Sequerra's firm Pyramid and now hand-assembled by its creator, who offers the most recent version via his website, for less than half what it cost through retail channels when Sam Tellig praised it in the July 2007 Stereophile. Sequerra's newest transducers—a self-amplified nearfield speaker and matching subwoofer designed for Internet music listening—remain in prototype form; he hopes to sell or license the designs rather than manufacture and market them himself.

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