As We See It

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As We See ItHistorical
Deeper Meanings
Robert Harley  |  Jul 19, 1990  |  0 comments
As a card-carrying member of the Audio Engineering Society and an avid audiophile, I was particularly disturbed by the ideas expressed at the 1990 AES Conference entitled "The Sound of Audio." (A report on the papers presented appears in this month's "Industry Update" column.) The tone of the three-day session in May was set during the Conference Chairman's opening remarks. He said that an AES conference on the sound of audio was "unusual" and "out of the mainstream." Further, he expressed a common underlying attitude among the AES that "audiophile claims" (of musical differences between components) have been "nagging us" and are "an annoyance."
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As We See It
Despite What You've Heard, Jazz Lives
Thomas Conrad  |  Dec 01, 2011  |  6 comments
On this page in the May 2011 issue of Stereophile, Steve Guttenberg became the latest in a long line of prophets of doom who periodically announce that jazz is deceased. Guttenberg argued that "Digital audio mortally wounded recorded music's creative mojo in 1982" and was "stifling creativity in rock and jazz."

I bring glad tidings to Stereophile readers. When it comes to jazz, Guttenberg is dead wrong. The jazz art form today is rich, diverse, deep, and international.

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As We See It
Different Strokes
John Atkinson  |  May 12, 1997  |  First Published: May 12, 1994  |  0 comments
In last month's "As We See It," I examined how I decide upon ratings in Stereophile's biannual "Recommended Components" listing. This leads me to talk about who writes our equipment reports. Stereophile currently has a team of 16 active reviewers. The core are professional: J. Gordon Holt, Robert Harley, Thomas J. Norton, Corey Greenberg, and Martin Colloms. The others—Sam Tellig, Jack English, Robert Deutsch, Don Scott, Jonathan Scull, Larry Greenhill, Dick Olsher, Guy Lemcoe, Lewis Lipnick, and Steven Stone—may be enthusiastic amateurs, but they are amateurs only in the sense that they don't earn their livings from writing. I'm the team's catcher, both calling the game and keeping the stray balls from getting away. Why, then, is it this cast of characters (footnote 1) who gets to cast judgments in stone in my magazine?
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As We See It
Digital Data Compression: Music's Procrustean Bed
Robert Harley  |  Feb 06, 2009  |  First Published: May 06, 1991  |  0 comments
Procrustean bed: a scheme or pattern into which something or someone is arbitrarily forced.
Procrustes: a villainous son of Poseidon in Greek myth who forces travelers to fit into his bed by stretching their bodies or cutting off their legs.—Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary
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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
Digital Revenge
J. Gordon Holt  |  Nov 04, 2007  |  First Published: Aug 01, 1982  |  0 comments
Many audiophiles will look back on the summer of 1982 as the year the creeping cruds invaded their hallowed halls of hi-fi. In the Conrad Hilton hotel, where most of the high-end contingent gathered at the June 1982 Consumer Electronics Show, one exhibitor was featuring a videodisc presentation with wide-range audio and insisting that this was the way of the future. And at least three others had managed to smuggle in digital tape recorders (all Sony PCM-F1s), and were giving many CES visitors their first taste of real, unadulterated, digital reproduction.
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As We See It
Digital Sound
Robert Harley  |  Jul 04, 2004  |  First Published: Dec 01, 1990  |  0 comments
Everybody, including myself, was astonished to find that it was impossible to distinguish between my own voice, and Mr. Edison's re-creation of it.—Anna Case, Metropolitan Opera Soprano, 1915
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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
Directional Questions
J. Gordon Holt  |  Dec 29, 2006  |  First Published: Jan 29, 1986  |  0 comments
As I write this, I am recuperating from four days of frenzy at the 1986 Winter CES in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am also pondering why I was so unexcited by most of what I saw and heard of the high-end exhibits; high-end audio may have reached a developmental plateau of sorts.
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As We See It
DisConcerted
Jim Austin  |  May 12, 2020  |  44 comments
On Sunday, March 22, at 8pm, the state of New York shut down, governor's orders. Here in the Big City, most stores are closed—even Starbucks, or at least the ones near me. In my neighborhood, up on Broadway, a grocery store is open, and a drugstore, a hardware store, and a couple of bodegas. Some bars and restaurants are open for takeout only, some advertising COCKTAILS TO GO in big black letters painted on bedsheets—New Orleans comes to NYC. (Meanwhile, New Orleans itself, also a coronavirus hotspot, apparently is desolate, the bars closed, a hard thing to picture.)
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As We See It
Dispatches from the Other Portland
Jim Austin  |  May 29, 2012  |  4 comments
Portland, Maine, my hometown for the better part of two decades, is a pretty hip place. We are not, for the most part, innovators in fashion, but we are early adopters of the more interesting latest styles.

For years now, what I take to be a Brooklyn style has been prevalent among the local twentysomething crowd. The hipper restaurants are full of pretty young women and bearded men in plaid shirts who, on the one hand, seem ready for the woodlot but who, on the other hand, seem too skinny to lift a decent-size chainsaw. Likely as not, they arrived on single-speed racing bikes converted for commuter use. Nifty machines.

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As We See It
Dispelling a myth (?) about phono-cartridge loading
Jim Austin  |  Dec 12, 2023  |  39 comments
In the midst of his December 2023 Gramophone Dreams column, Herb Reichert presented the results of an experiment. He was listening to the most recent version of Zu Audio's Denon DL-103, installed on his new-old Lenco. He hooked it up to the moving coil input of his SunValley SV-EQ1616D phono preamp, which apparently is intended for use with low-output MC cartridges since it loads them down with a 50 ohm shunt resistor—a heavy load for all but the lowest-impedance MCs. The rough rule of thumb for loading an MC cartridge, as many readers are aware, is that the load resistance should exceed the cartridge's internal impedance by about a factor of 10.
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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
Do It Yourself!
J. Gordon Holt, Edward T. Dell, Jr.  |  Nov 29, 2016  |  First Published: Apr 01, 1967  |  3 comments
Editor's Note: in the main, Stereophile has steered clear of DIY audio projects, leaving them to magazines like The Audio Amateur, which was published by the late Edward T. Dell. But one of the exceptions was this 1967 article on the "Brute," a tube amplifier design by none other than Ed Dell. Note that the DIY competition mentioned by Gordon Holt is long closed to entries.—John Atkinson

There's a platitude to the effect that the road to Hell is strewn with good intentions. Well, we don't see ourselves as headed for perdition, but we must admit that we are surveying a rather impressive-looking junk pile of good intentions at this point.

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As We See ItThink PiecesAudiophile Essentials
Do Musicophiles Enjoy Audio?
Denis Stevens  |  Dec 24, 2008  |  First Published: Apr 03, 1990  |  0 comments
Paul Gowan's letter in the October 1989 Stereophile hinted that, whether or not audiophiles enjoy music, it should be true that the emotional experience we derive from music is what really matters. There, barefaced, lies the problem: who are "we"? A well-known Latin epigram affirms that in matters of taste there is no point in discussion. And a Greek epigram (coined in fact by Max Beerbohm in his Oxford novel Zuleika Dobson) suggests that "for people who like that kind of thing, that is the kind of thing they like."
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As We See It
Dog Legs and Feet: the Marginalization of High-End Audio
John Atkinson  |  Jan 14, 2006  |  0 comments
"What?"
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As We See It
Dolby Atmos: a Bleak Shadow?
Jim Austin  |  Jan 17, 2024  |  97 comments
Morten Lindberg of Norwegian music label 2L.

On this page in Stereophile's December 2023 issue, contributing editor (and mastering engineer) Tom Fine and I described a press event at which Apple Corps (the Beatles umbrella corporation) presented the news about the (at the time) forthcoming new Beatles single and the forthcoming "remixed" reissues of the "Red" and "Blue" Beatles compilations. Tom attended the event—which, notably, was held at Dolby headquarters here in New York City, reflecting, apparently, Apple Corps' interest in Dolby Atmos. At the event, demos were presented in the Atmos format only—no stereo.

A key point of that column was that Apple Corps, at least—and who knows how many others in the music industry—are abandoning high-quality Atmos in favor of that streamed by Apple Music. Tom and I criticized this development in no uncertain terms, concluding that if Apple's lossy-compressed version of Dolby Atmos is what we're being offered, "we should hope for its demise."

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As We See ItJ. Gordon Holt
Don't Just Sit There!
J. Gordon Holt  |  Nov 09, 2016  |  First Published: Aug 01, 1964  |  2 comments
Like every sensible publication, The Stereophile keeps track of the questions raised by readers who write to us, so we can get some idea of what most of you would like to see in future issues of the magazine. To date, the list looks like this, in order of diminishing interest: transistor amps and preamps, loudspeakers, pickups, tape equipment, tuners and, way at the bottom of the list, recordings. We are devoting most of the August 1964 issue to a discussion of commercial recording practices.
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