As We See It

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As We See It
That Really Sucks
Jon Iverson  |  Oct 12, 2003  |  0 comments
Readers are constantly telling us that downloaded audio files suck. I tend to agree with them.
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As We See It
The Passing Parade
John Atkinson  |  Sep 14, 2003  |  0 comments
There is one date I dread every year: my wife's birthday. After nearly 16 years of marriage, I have exhausted every last iota of my spousal resources in trying to think of a suitable present. Nothing too ordinary, nothing too out of the ordinary, nothing that will trigger those dreaded words, "You did keep the receipt, right?"
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As We See It
Show Business
John Atkinson  |  Aug 17, 2003  |  0 comments
Perhaps it's the air in San Francisco, or more likely the fact that exhibitors and attendees were equally upbeat, but I came back from Home Entertainment 2003, held at the grand old Westin-St. Francis Hotel days before I write this month's column, jazzed. I was one of 15,123 consumer, international press, and trade attendees, according to the official stats, and we were treated to more than 100 exhibit rooms showing and demonstrating 225 brands of audio and home-theater gear. Stereophile's full report on what we saw and heard at the Show will appear in our September and October issues, while our web coverage can be found starting here(footnote 1).
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As We See It
Nude, Not Naked
John Atkinson  |  Jul 13, 2003  |  0 comments
The keyboard player looked at his watch. It was midnight. "Time for my break," he said. My heart sank.
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As We See It
Overcooked Floyd
John Atkinson  |  Jun 29, 2003  |  0 comments
The song ended. My friend gestured to me to remove the wads of Kleenex I had stuffed in my ears.
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As We See It
Hi-Rez Audio's Uncertain Future
Barry Willis  |  May 11, 2003  |  0 comments
"There's a flat screen in your future."
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As We See It
SACD, the Way Forward?
Jon Iverson, Michael Fremer  |  Apr 05, 2003  |  First Published: Apr 06, 2003  |  0 comments
At the 2003 Consumer Electronics Show in January—see the report in this issue—Sony and Philips held an SACD Event at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. There were trippy lights. There were the Grand Pooh-Bahs of Sony, Philips, and the record labels. There was loud multichannel Big Brother and the Holding Company. And there was Sony's main SACD man in the US, David Kawakami, supplying the pep talk.
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As We See It
Classical Music as an Act of Rebellion
Jim Austin  |  Mar 09, 2003  |  0 comments
There's a widespread myth that writers who get published are more talented than writers who don't get published, and that musicians who make records are more talented than musicians who don't make records. But anyone with any talent who has ever tried to earn a living as a writer, a musician, or any other kind of artist understands that the correlation between merit and success is, at best, loose. Some successful artists are talented, and some talented artists are successful. But for every talented artist who manages to make a living there are a dozen more, equally deserving, who have no choice but to keep their day jobs.
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As We See It
No Smiths: Matters of Taste
John Atkinson  |  Feb 09, 2003  |  0 comments
"What? What??? No Smiths?" asks reader Steven J. Wilder in this issue's "Letters" (p.9), regarding my interjection in the "Honorable Mentions" sidebar of last November's "40 Essential Albums." Hey, I think The Smiths suck—okay, Mr. Wilder? Morrissey's self-absorbed adolescent whining had no place on a list that included music from such grownups as Morrison, Mitchell, and Mingus. I'm not alone in this sentiment. Jon Iverson, www.stereophile.com's webmaster, almost stapled together the pages of Mojo magazine's April 2001 retrospective of Morrissey's and Marr's music so he could skip over it without running the risk of the veins on his forehead exploding.
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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.
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As We See It
Suicide Junctions
John Atkinson  |  Dec 15, 2002  |  0 comments
"Suicide junctions," I calls 'em. The ones with which I'm most familiar are on I-278, just north of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn, New York, and along North Mopac in Austin, Texas, but they must exist all over the US. Traffic about to enter the freeway must first cross the line of faster-traveling offcoming cars, the intersection's on- and off-ramps crossing in a shallow X.
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As We See ItHistorical
40 Years of Stereophile
John Atkinson  |  Nov 17, 2002  |  0 comments

"The monthly miracle," it's called in publishing: that magical moment when the new issue of your magazine arrives in the mailbox hot from the printer. And with this issue of Stereophile—No.274, or Vol.25 No.11—we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the start of our "miracle." With the 20 pages of Issue No.1, Vol.1 No.1, cover-dated September-October 1962, "Ye Editor & Publisher" J. Gordon Holt introduced both a new audio magazine and the philosophy that an audio product is best reviewed by doing exactly what its purchasers will do: listen to it. On that small rock of an idea was founded not only Stereophile but the entire high-end audio industry. Here, reprinted from a 1974 anthology of the first 12 issues, is J. Gordon Holt's description of the events that led up to the founding of Stereophile:

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As We See It
Selling the Benefits
John Atkinson  |  Oct 06, 2002  |  0 comments
"Ever wondered how the snowplow driver gets to work?"—Doyle Dane Bernbach TV ad for Volkswagen, 1963
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As We See It
Format War? What Format War?
Jon Iverson  |  Sep 15, 2002  |  0 comments
What if they gave a format war and nobody came?
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As We See It
Rachmaninoff, Ripping, & the RIAA
John Atkinson  |  Aug 11, 2002  |  0 comments
"My god. This was better than any hi-fi I had ever experienced—I actually had Sergei Rachmaninoff in the room, playing Mendelssohn just for me. I am not ashamed to say that I wept." I wrote those words in the January 2001 Stereophile, about hearing a piano-roll transcription of Rachmaninoff performing Mendelssohn's Spinning Song (Op.67 No.34) on a Bösendorfer Imperial 290SE reproducing piano. I was in the middle of recording Robert Silverman's cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas at the Maestro Foundation in Santa Monica, where there just happened to be a floppy disk with Wayne Stahnke's transcription of the Rachmaninoff for the Bösendorfer mechanism, which Stahnke invented.
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