As We See It

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As We See It
It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Schwing
Corey Greenberg  |  Oct 09, 2005  |  First Published: Jul 09, 1992  |  0 comments
Epiphanies only come when you stop looking for them, and mine came in a room full of preschoolers watching cartoons at a Pizza Hut. I was taking my little nieces Alix (4) and Casey (1) out for dinner, and the last thing on my mind was audio; we wanted to PARTY! So my girlfriend Dara and I bundled them up in their car-seats and we high-tailed it over to the Hut, with visions of continuous-loop Tom'n'Jerry and cheap buffet pizza dancing in our heads.
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As We See ItAudiophile Essentials
It Takes More than Martinis, Mister!
John Marks  |  Aug 12, 2008  |  First Published: Aug 13, 2008  |  0 comments
In the 1970s, a small black-and-white ad sometimes ran in the pages of Playboy magazine. The ad pictured an attractive young woman with lots of disheveled hair and a crooked grin. There was little else to the ad other than the headline, which the reader would assume was being spoken by the model: "It takes more than Martinis to build an image, Mister!"
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As We See It
It's Only Hi-Fi!
Robert Harley  |  Mar 22, 2009  |  First Published: May 22, 1993  |  0 comments
When I taught a recording engineering program at a California college, one of my first responsibilities to new students was to clarify for them what recording engineering was really about. Many of them entered the program with the impression that recording was nonstop glamor, with a significant part of the job devoted to partying with their favorite rock bands. It was my job to tell them the bad news: Recording was more about lying on your back underneath a recording console on a dirty studio floor with hot solder dripping on your face.
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As We See ItAXPONA 2024
It's Showtime!
Jim Austin  |  Apr 08, 2024  |  13 comments
Photo: Jason Victor Serinus

Though I'm writing this in early March, this As We See It column will be published in the May issue, which is the issue that will go to AXPONA, America's largest audio show, held each non-pandemic year at the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center near Chicago. This year's show takes place Friday–Sunday, April 12–14. The show opens each day at 10am and closes at 6pm Friday and Saturday; Sunday's closing time is 4pm. If you're going to the show, don't forget to stop by the Stereophile booth, Location 9213 in the exhibit hall.

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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
It's the Real Thing!
J. Gordon Holt  |  Oct 22, 2014  |  First Published: Oct 01, 1980  |  36 comments
We are aware that much of what we have to say about reproduced sound in these pages goes completely over the heads of a lot of our readers, simply because they have not heard live, un-amplified music recently enough (if ever) to relate their own listening experiences to our observations. These are the people who tend to have developed a strong mental image of what hi-fi ought to sound like, and it is not surprising that that image should bear little if any resemblance to reality. In most cases, this image of hypothetical perfection involves a broadly sweeping sense of spaciousness, awesome power, floor-shaking low end and silky, velvety highs—rather similar, one might say, to the sound of a Magnificent Magnavox with a couple of extra octaves at each end.
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As We See ItHistorical
J. Gordon Holt, 1930–2009
Larry Archibald  |  Oct 12, 2009  |  0 comments
"What about coming over for a little bit of din-din?"
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As We See It
Jump'n'Jive & the Absolute Sound
John Atkinson  |  Jul 14, 2002  |  0 comments
Although I was trying to earn a living playing in rock bands in the early 1970s, I occasionally used to drag my Fender bass over to a school canteen in the next town for an after-hours session with what used to be called a "rehearsal band." (I have no idea what the derivation of that name is, except that, with the exception of a couple of veterans of the Ted Heath Orchestra, we were certainly in need of all the rehearsal we could get.) I would set up my Marshall stack the other side of the drummer from the pianist and sit behind a set of trumpet players, a brace of trombonists, and a scrum of players of the common saxophone flavors—a couple of altos, three or four tenors, and a baritone wielded by a gentleman with the magnificent moniker of Albert Bags. We played Glenn Miller and Woody Herman charts, and, on one memorable night, a Stan Kenton arrangement. Our technical chops didn't match our musical ambitions, but the feeling that welled up inside us when we all reached the final measure at the same time couldn't be beat.
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As We See ItAudiophile Essentials
Just What Is High End?
Robert Harley  |  Jul 29, 1991  |  0 comments
A man who had just looked through his very first Stereophile---April's "Recommended Components" issue picked up at a newsstand---recently called to ask my advice on a certain inexpensive CD player made by a large mid-fi company. I told him I hadn't auditioned the player and thus couldn't comment on its worth. The man then proceeded to read me the player's specifications, finally informing me that the player "had the new 1-bit thing"---all in the belief that I could make a recommendation based on what he'd just told me. He apparently had been conditioned to believe that not only was "the 1-bit thing" superior, but that choosing a CD player was merely a matter of evaluating technical specs.
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As We See ItHistorical
Ken Nelson 1928–2004
Laura LoVecchio  |  Jun 12, 2005  |  0 comments
On Friday morning, March 25, 2005, my friend Maura Rieland, Stereophile's show coordinator through the second half of the 1990s, e-mailed me to say that she had just learned of the passing of Ken Nelson.
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As We See It
King Kong vs Spotify
Art Dudley  |  Sep 11, 2018  |  36 comments
"No one's buying music anymore: They're renting it."—John Atkinson, keynote speech, AXPONA 2018

Streaming music isn't new. US companies have been doing it since the 1920s, when it was discovered that multiplexing—the then-new practice of combining multiple signals over a single conductor—could be used to send live or recorded music over public power lines. The first of those companies was Muzak LLC.

File that away.

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As We See It
Know Thyself: Audio Existentialism
Herb Reichert  |  Jul 21, 2014  |  First Published: Aug 01, 2014  |  7 comments
Playing recorded music in the home is a complex, coded, cultural experience: We sit, we listen, we think and dream—and, when it feels just right, we admire. We admire who we are and how we arrived at this beautiful moment. This simple act of admiration is usually a happy sort of self-congratulatory expression of our basic desire to have meaningful as well as enjoyable experiences. We are proud of our good taste and love of music. But this type of listening can also provoke anxiety and self-recrimination. We ask ourselves why we like this music and not some other kind. What would my friends think if they knew I was listening to "truckin' wit' th' doo-dah man"—or Deodato?
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As We See It
L'Affaire Belt
J. Gordon Holt  |  Dec 25, 1987  |  0 comments
When I attended Britain's Heathrow Penta hi-fi show in September 1987, I had hoped to come back with big news about some breakthrough cartridge or preamp or loudspeaker system. I didn't. No, the talk of the Penta show was something called the "Belt Phenomenon," which may possibly be a breakthrough of some kind, but then again, it may not.
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As We See ItHistoricalJ. Gordon Holt
Late Again!
J. Gordon Holt  |  May 28, 2015  |  First Published: Aug 01, 1976  |  3 comments
Editor's Note: In Stereophile's second decade of publication, things were starting to unravel, with long gaps between each issue. There were just seven issues published between January 1974 and January 1978. The late Harry Pearson has gone on record that he founded The Absolute Sound in 1973 part because he was tired of waiting for the next issue of Stereophile to reach his mailbox. In this "As We See It" essay from the "Surface Noise" issue in August 1976, founder J. Gordon Holt owns up to it appearing 8 months late!
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As We See It
Let rolling streams their gladness show
Jim Austin  |  Feb 20, 2020  |  29 comments
In the 1980s, the CD nearly pushed the LP to extinction. Nearly. For all the claims of "Perfect Sound Forever," the main thing offered by the CD was convenience.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the MP3 and the Internet made it easy to extract and distribute the information encoded on a CD. Secret websites raced to be the first to distribute free MP3s of new recordings, sometimes even before they were released. This went on for years, undermining record-company profits, before Napster came along and gave the record industry a high-value lawsuit target: no more suing widows and small children.

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As We See It
Let's Face the Music and Dance
John Marks  |  Mar 12, 2000  |  0 comments
Does high-end audio have a future? High-end audio most definitely does have a future. So do the Latin mass, chess, leather-bound books, and wooden boats. But the future will not be like the past, and I think we must face the fact that high-end audio's future, both for hardware and software, will be as a minority enthusiasm. We should plan and act accordingly.
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