As We See It

In the four years since our last readership survey, Stereophile's circulation has grown by one third, from 45,000 to over 60,000 (footnote 1). We thought it time, therefore, to commission new numbers, from specialists Mediamark Research Inc. (footnote 2). Table 1 shows the demographic breakdown of the magazine's readers. While the launch of CD did bring more women into the audiophile fold almost 10 years ago, the proportion of Stereophile's female readers has not changed since 1988, at just over 1% (footnote 3). At one of the panel sessions at the 1992 High End Hi-Fi Show in Los Angeles, a man in the audience asked why high-end audio was so testosterone-bound when women were just as interested in music as men? The answers given by some of the many women at the show ranged from the fact that women only earn 47 cents on the dollar compared with men to conjecture that women are turned off by the hobby's tweak aspect. Certainly dealer Andrew Singer felt last October (footnote 4) that the high-end industry is hobbling itself by ignoring half the US's population.

My topic today is not the hardware that we use to reproduce sound, but the delicate precision instruments we use to detect it: our ears. Our enjoyment of musical sound is important enough to justify spending thousands of dollars on recordings, electronics, loudspeakers, and concert tickets. What is it worth to preserve your hearing so that you can continue enjoying great sound 10 or 20 years from now? I've been conducting an experiment for the last 30 years, at a cost of less than a penny a day. It began when I was 17.

The audio community's "Great Debate" has reached an amazing level of absurdity. On one side are the Objectivists, whose rationalist argument insists that all human auditory experience is the result of electro-physical phenomena which can be measured and mapped using established scientific methods. On the other side are the Subjectivists, romantics who believe in the synergistic interplay of music, room, equipment, and listener, and whose attempts to describe their experiences tend toward the florid and metaphorical.

"Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about."---John Lennon

I grew up with a healthy disrespect—almost a dislike—for rich people. Though my home town, Winchester, Mass., is one of Boston's wealthier suburbs, and my father and grandfather were officers in a Boston-area company, my father grew up on a farm and I seemed to inherit his farm-grown distrust for those who have money.

Every summer, I invite a representative sample of Stereophile's equipment reviewers to the magazine's Santa Fe HQ. For the third successive year, I decided to tape some of the free-for-all discussion that takes place and offer readers the opportunity of peeking over the participants' shoulders by publishing a tidied-up version of the transcript.

"Phonograph, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises."—Ambrose Bierce (in The Devils's Dictionary, Dover, 1958)