As We See It

Sort By: Post DateTitle Publish Date
As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
The Dilemma of Exotica
J. Gordon Holt  |  Apr 08, 2010  |  First Published: Oct 08, 1983  |  0 comments
A persistent complaint from some of our readers concerns our seeming preoccupation with exotic components. (Presumably what they mean are scarce, unusual, or hard-to-find components, because "exotic" really means "from a foreign country," and there is sure as hell nothing hard-to-find about a Panasonic receiver.) "Why," you ask, "do you devote so much space to reports on components we can't buy from our local audio discounter? Why can't we have more reports about products from the old, established, reliable companies like KLH, Harman/Kardon, Electro-Voice and Sansui, whose stuff we can listen to at a local dealer before we commit our hard-earned dollars to a purchase?" One subscriber even cancelled his subscription because of this, claiming that the unavailability of the products we review makes our reports "irrelevant." Well, he had a point, but not a very good one.
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Fallacy of Accuracy
Steve Guttenberg  |  Apr 21, 2016  |  First Published: May 01, 2016  |  43 comments
I was in a strange mood last January when I posted this on Facebook: "Do speaker designers strive for accuracy, or for a 'sound' they think potential buyers want?" I doubted that any designer with two working ears would even attempt to design speakers that merely measured well—there must be at least some subjectivity in their process. I also assumed that few designers would go on record about where they stand on the accuracy question, so I was thrilled when Elac Americas' speaker designer, Andrew Jones, responded...
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The First Transducer
Steve Guttenberg  |  Aug 16, 2016  |  11 comments
A recording engineer's choices of microphones to record singers, guitars, horns, bass, drums—or an entire orchestra—are absolutely crucial. Those very subjective choices are, in large part, what separate the best recordings from the also-rans. When I contacted some of the best engineers in the business to talk about mikes, I got an earful. I was told that mikes have a more profound impact on reproduced sound than does any other link in the recording chain. Yes, the acoustic of the recording venue also plays a huge role, and post-session mixing and mastering can of course improve or ruin the sound—but the choice of mikes is absolutely crucial.
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Five Dealer Rule
John Atkinson  |  Jan 05, 2003  |  0 comments
Surfing the Usenet newsgroups and the Web audio forums recently, it struck me that the old wisdom is correct: If you keep your mouth shut, you won't say anything with which anyone can disagree. A topic that seems to be of perennial interest is how Stereophile chooses the products it reviews. Yet the more I have explained how it's done, the greater the criticism that is heaped on the magazine.
Continue Reading »
As We See ItHistoricalJ. Gordon Holt
The Flexible Firms
J. Gordon Holt  |  Jul 08, 2015  |  First Published: Oct 01, 1974  |  5 comments
Some years ago, we attended a hi-fi show in New York City where one of the exhibitors was RCA Victor. Their presence there would have been forgotten were it not for the fact that their exhibit, featuring their own discs played on their own line of phonographs, was producing some of the filthiest sound at the entire show. And that, in the proverbial nutshell, is why you never see reports in Stereophile on equipment made by RCA, Philco or General Electric.
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Flip Side of Digital...
Doug Sax  |  Nov 04, 2007  |  First Published: Dec 04, 1982  |  0 comments
The following was submitted as a letter to J. Gordon Holt, in response to his Editorial "Digital Revenge," in issue #53 (August 1982, Vol.5 No.6). We are publishing it as a guest editorial, because the writer is one of the few audio people whose judgement we respect who disagrees with us about digital's merits. The feeling, it would seem, is mutual.—Ed.
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Goodness of Your Heart: A Tragedy in One Act
Art Dudley  |  May 17, 2016  |  First Published: Jun 01, 2016  |  17 comments
Note: All dialogue quoted verbatim from e-mail exchanges to which I am privy; the stage directions are imaginary.

Dramatis Personae:

bill, director of marketing for PS Audio

randy, amateur reviewer for a commercial audiophile website

dick, professional reviewer for an established audio magazine (not Stereophile)

Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Great Distortion Delusion
J. Gordon Holt  |  Jun 01, 1973  |  First Published: Sep 01, 1973  |  0 comments
Hey, kids, here's the Big News. We've been deluding ourselves all along, worrying about piddling little bits of distortion that we can't hear at all. How's your preamp distortion? 1% at 1 volt out? You have a perfect preamp—a veritable straight wire with gain! That ear-shattering shrillness is all in your mind, because it has now been demonstrated that the human ear cannot perceive distortion levels of less than 6–12% on "normally complex music." If you think you can hear 0.1%, you are deluding yourself.
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Great Wall of China
John Atkinson  |  Mar 24, 1996  |  0 comments
"A newspaper can flout an advertiser...but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence."—Walter Lippmann, 1922, reprinted in Public Opinion, New York: Free Press, 1965.
Continue Reading »
As We See ItAudiophile Essentials
The High End, Mid-Fi, & Pretend High End
John Atkinson  |  Sep 09, 2007  |  First Published: Nov 09, 1994  |  2 comments
If there's a phrase that increasingly gets my dander up, it's "mid-fi." I'm even starting to lose patience with the term "High End."
Continue Reading »
As We See ItRe-TalesThink Pieces
The High-End Review
John Atkinson  |  Sep 19, 1997  |  First Published: Sep 19, 1993  |  0 comments
"To be an influence in any society...one can be a little different, but only a little; a little above one's neighbours, but not too much."---C.P. Snow, The Masters, 1951
Continue Reading »
As We See ItAudiophile Essentials
The Holy Trinity
Jon Iverson  |  May 15, 2010  |  2 comments
In an e-mail exchange with Stephen Mejias about why the mere mention of cassette decks on www.stereophile.com can so easily inflame our readers (and John Atkinson), I began to develop the idea that the brains of audiophiles and music lovers are governed by three complementary needs, or desires, that define who we are. I joked to SM that these desires, which apparently shift over time, constitute the Holy Trinity of Audiophiledom. They are, respectively, the love, desire, and need for:
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Importance of the Small Difference
John Atkinson  |  Sep 24, 1994  |  0 comments
During a recent visit to Canada's National Research Council, I noticed stuck to the wall of the prototype IEC listening room a page of results from one of Floyd Toole's seminal papers on the blind testing of loudspeakers. The scoring system was the one that Floyd developed, and that we adopted for Stereophile's continuing series of blind tests. "0" represents the worst sound that could possibly exist, "10" the perfection of live sound—a telephone, for example, rates a "2." The speakers in Floyd's test pretty much covered the range of possible performance, yet their normalized scoring spread, from the worst to the best, was just 1.9 points.
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Joy of Music
John Atkinson  |  Apr 15, 2007  |  0 comments
"The whole band was in the hot tub. As water frothed over my bare breasts in the moonlight..."
Continue Reading »
As We See It
The Kids Are Alright
Robert Schryer  |  Mar 22, 2016  |  First Published: Apr 01, 2016  |  13 comments
It's one of audiophiledom's eternal questions: What can we do to draw more music lovers into the audiophile fold?

Of the proposals bandied about on audio forums, two seem predominant: a) sell stuff more people can afford, and b) sit your neighbor or the cable guy in front of your stereo, cross your fingers, and let 'er rip—the theory behind b) being that the experience will be so epic as to transform the reluctant participant into an audiophile butterfly. As if.

Continue Reading »

Pages

X