Interviews

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Aural RobertInterviews
Vince Mendoza's Learning Laboratory
Robert Baird  |  Aug 02, 2023  | 
Photo by Reinout Bos

Audio engineers never get the credit they deserve. The same is true for music arrangers, who are also an unheralded but hugely fundamental part of any musical success. As a composer, conductor, and inventive arranger of popular music, the modest but multitalented Vince Mendoza says he's most focused on enhancing the song he is arranging and the story it is trying to tell.

"Young arrangers are very concerned with their own voice and spinning their own melodies and turning things upside down and backwards, and they forget what a song really is about," he told me in a recent Zoom conversation from his home in Los Angeles. "You could be writing about heartbreak, and there are a million and one ways to tell that story, but the listener still has to feel it."

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InterviewsJana Dagdagan
Vivid Video: JA Interviews Speaker Designer Laurence Dickie
Jana Dagdagan  |  Feb 17, 2017  | 
This past weekend, John Atkinson and I attended the debut of Vivid Audio's new flagship speaker, the G1 Spirit, at a private home in Itasca, IL (to the west of Chicago.) The event was hosted by concert pianist and audio retailer George Vatchnadze of Kyomi Audio. Prior to the event's start, JA and Vivid speaker designer Laurence Dickie had a stimulating conversation about speaker design, focusing on the G1 Spirit loudspeaker.
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Interviews
VTL's Luke Manley
Jonathan Scull  |  May 24, 2013  |  First Published: Jun 01, 1996  | 
Luke Manley at Manhattan's Innovative Audio (Photo: John Atkinson)

Jonathan Scull: How long has VTL been in business, Luke?

Luke Manley: My dad, David Manley, and I co-founded VTL in June of 1986. We started small on the East Coast, and soon after we moved to California.

Scull: Is it because you're really a West Coast kind of guy?

Manley: [laughs] You bet! There's a lot of supporting industries out there; a big base of electronics manufacturers, for example.

Scull: What, in the San Francisco area?

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Interviews
Walter Sear's Analog Rules
Steve Guttenberg  |  Mar 27, 2005  | 
The first thing you notice about Walter Sear's legendary Manhattan studio is that it feels so darn comfortable. Sear Sound doesn't have a wall of gold records, gleaming million-dollar consoles, or the latest high-resolution digital workstations, but a quick stroll around the three studios reveals a treasure trove of tube and analog professional gear: a pair of Sgt. Pepper–era Studer recorders plucked from EMI's Abbey Road studios; an early Modular Moog synthesizer Sear built with Bob Moog; and a collection of 250 new and classic microphones.
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InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Wayne Shorter: How the Future Would Be
Ken Micallef  |  Dec 11, 2018  | 
Wayne Shorter is 85. His mind moves at warp speed, a million miles from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, who rescued him from Newark, New Jersey—or the Miles Davis's second great quintet, for which the saxophonist wrote the compositions that would establish his genius. Shorter's constellation of classic Blue Note recordings from 1964–67—Night Dreamer, JuJu, The All Seeing Eye, ETC, The Soothsayer, Adam's Apple, Speak No Evil, Schizophrenia—is now but a dim cluster of stars in his ever-expanding musical galaxy.
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Interviews
What's His Naim? Julian Vereker
Ken Kessler  |  Mar 22, 2012  |  First Published: Mar 01, 1988  | 
Editor's Introduction: One of the big industry stories of 1985 was the split, both personal and commercial, between the British Linn and Naim companies. Led by Ivor Tiefenbrun and Julian Vereker (footnote 1) respectively, both companies had started up in the early 1970s. Both men held similar views, both about the fat-cat complacency of British designers (which had led to a grievous sound-quality slump in the mid '70s), and about the system rethinking necessary for what some writers, unaware of the rigors of thought required by followers of that spiritual descendant of Fowler, William Safire, would term a "quantum leap" forward in sound reproduction.
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FeaturesInterviewsRe-Tales
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Steve Guttenberg  |  Feb 03, 2002  | 
There's one phrase a Ferrari dealer never hears from a potential customer: "Ferrari? What's a Ferrari?" Marques such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati are so embedded in mainstream culture that their dealers never have to introduce an unfamiliar but exorbitantly expensive set of wheels to their prospects.
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InterviewsThink Pieces
Why John Atkinson Believes Measurements Matter
John Atkinson  |  Mar 13, 2021  | 
Back in 2013, I took the train to Stamford to give a presentation to the Connecticut Audio Society to help celebrate their 30th anniversary. On March 6 I returned to the CAS, but this time via Zoom. I talked about a subject close to my heart: measurements and their connections with accuracy and/or musical enjoyment. The video is now posted to the CAS YouTube channel—it runs for 2+ hours but I think Stereophile readers will find what I had to say stimulating, perhaps even sometimes controversial.

My presentation takes up the first 21 minutes and is followed by a Q&A with the CAS members. (Great questions, guys!) At 1:18:00 I give a tour of my listening room, where two of my cats decide to make a cameo appearance.

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Interviews
William Z. Johnson of Audio Research: High Definition
Robert Harley  |  Jan 03, 2008  |  First Published: Aug 03, 1994  | 
"You've set the audio industry back 20 years!"
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HistoricalInterviewsNews
William Zane Johnson 1926–2011
John Atkinson, Paul Messenger  |  Dec 17, 2011  | 
We were saddened to hear of the passing, on December 10,of Audio Research founder William "Bill" Zane Johnson. Bill, who founded Audio Research in 1970 and became its Chairman Emeritus in 2008, is survived by his wife Nancy (left in photo) and family. We are preparing a tribute to Bill, to be published in the March 2012 issue of Stereophile, but meanwhile, we are reprinting here an interview Paul Messenger and I conducted with Bill that was originally published in the June 1983 issue of Hi-Fi News. (My thanks to HFN editor Paul Miller for permission. Stereophile's 1994 interview with Bill can be found here.)—John Atkinson
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Music and Recording FeaturesInterviews
Willie Nile: Places He Has Never Been
Robert Baird  |  Nov 02, 2007  |  First Published: May 02, 2006  | 
Before I even turn on the recorder, Willie Nile is telling me his theory of how the granite under Manhattan Island conducts electricity, which accounts for the perceptible charge that many people feel makes New York City so special. It's also what draws artists like flies, none more passionate than singer-songwriter Nile, who's personally contributed a few volts during his years in NYC.
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Music and Recording FeaturesInterviews
Willie Nile: the Bard on Bleecker
Robert Baird  |  May 09, 2013  |  First Published: May 01, 2013  | 
"You see that empty space?" says Willie Nile, motioning toward a lot between buildings on Bleecker Street, an impish Irish grin flickering across his face. "They haven't built anything there yet because Anna Wintour lives around the corner. And that red-brick house over there, the one with the white door? That's where Dylan lived. I used to see Bob around the neighborhood now and again."
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InterviewsNews
Wilson Audio: From David to Daryl
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Nov 13, 2016  | 
On November 11, 2016, Veterans' Day, Wilson Audio Specialties announced that Daryl C. Wilson, 38, son of David Wilson and Sheryl Lee Wilson, has just succeeded his father as CEO and President of one of the world's leading high-end loudspeaker companies. Daryl, along with COO Korbin Vaughn, will now actively manage all aspects of Wilson Audio.
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Interviews
Yves Beauvais
Robert Baird  |  Apr 09, 2013  | 
"While the selection and fine tuning of exhilarating-sounding vintage audio equipment is an exciting, often life-long search, let's not forget it's ultimately the music that matters—mankind's mysterious mastery of making air move in esthetically & emotionally thrilling ways. Most importantly, remember to ask yourself the age-old question: Can I dance to it?"
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Interviews
Yves-Bernard André: Kind of Blue
Jonathan Scull  |  Jul 07, 2013  |  First Published: Feb 01, 1997  | 
Jonathan Scull: You say your YBA CD-1 Blue Laser CD player makes use of Stochastic Resonance, Yves-Bernard?

Yves-Bernard André: Yes...in adding some noise to the signal, we can actually get more information back.

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