John Atkinson

It was an audacious demonstration. For the launch of Aerial's 20T loudspeaker at the end of 2002, Aerial's head honcho and designer, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/467">Michael Kelly</A>, had arranged to compare the speakers reproducing the recorded sound of virtuoso violinist Arturo Delmoni with the <A HREF="http://forum.stereophile.com/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/467">real thing</A>. The setting was the ornate dining room of one of Newport, Rhode Island's many mansions, and, given the inevitable differences&#151;due to the facts that a violin has a very different radiation pattern from a loudspeaker and thus excites the room differently, and that the recording inevitably gives the listener a double dose of the room's acoustic&#151;the demo was successful. There was much subsequent argy-bargying between <I>Stereophile</I>'s reviewers about who would review the Aerial 20T, but it was Michael Fremer who eventually <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/404aerial">wrote about it</A> in April 2004.

"Check it out." Music editor Robert Baird handed me a CD. "He's 70 years old, it's his 13th album, he got Don Was to produce it, and it's his best yet."

"Turntable Wars" was the phrase used by Anthony H. Cordesman to head his review of the Oracle, SOTA, and VPI turntables in Vol.9 No.4. To judge from the reaction of the manufacturers at CES to this innocent phraseology, you would have thought that Stereophile had been warmongering, rather than publishing what were actually pretty positive opinions of the products concerned. So enraged was Jacques Riendeau of Oracle, and concerned that the record be put straight, that he insisted on a "right to reply" to AHC's review; as it happened, Ivor Tiefenbrun and Charlie Brennan of Linn (right in photograph, footnote 1), and SOTA's Rodney Herman (center in photo, footnote 2), also wanted to contribute to the debate, so a small crowd of illuminati gathered in Room 417 of the Americana Congress to commit opinions to tape. I held the microphone and clicked the shutter; Larry Archibald (left in photo) was there to lend the proceedings a businesslike air.

One of the great divides in high-end audio concerns the question of how much bass is <I>enough</I> bass? The decision facing a speaker designer about how much low-frequency extension is appropriate is a fundamental one, so to speak: every extra 5Hz of bass will dramatically increase the retail price, as the speaker must be correspondingly bigger. Furthermore, the larger the speaker, the larger its problems, which in turn requires throwing more money at the design to solve those problems.

One of my best sounds at RMAF was the room organized by Colorado dealer Audio Unlimited featuring the Emperor speakers from Canadian manufacturer Hansen Audio that had so impressed Jason Serinus at the 2008 RMAF. The three-way speakers were driven by Accuphase monoblocks sitting on Critical Mass Systems platforms, with the front end based on a Trans-Rotor turntable. I was drawn into the room by the full-range sound of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" and didn't leave for quite a while. Wes Phillips said it best in his CES 2009 coverage of the Emperor: "the music had me melting in my chair."

Bob O'Neill sold advertising for <I>Stereophile</I> in the early 1980s and also contributed record reviews to the magazine. He became a firm friend of J. Gordon Holt's and gave a moving eulogy honoring Gordon's memory at RMAF.

When I last met Charles Holt in 1991, he was a teenager. But I had no problem recognizing him at RMAF&#151;he looks just like his Dad. And, as you can see in Jason Serinus' photograph, in which Charles is flanked by his girlfriend Melissa and me, Charles is wearing the infamous "<A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/the_finger_button/">finger button</A>," which was Gordon's favorite image of himself.