In common with the mood of our times, there seems to be an increasing amount of bad temper in the High End. There are more people around who, in Jonathan Scull's timeless phrase, have a "level of audiophile rage very close to the surface." Witness, for example, the "cancel my subscription" letter from Professor Daniel H. Wiegand in this issue: he obviously feels a line has been crossed.
Hitting newsstands this past weekend, the <I>2008 Stereophile Buyer's Guide</I> is bursting with technical specifications for more than 5000 audio components. Loudspeakers, amplifiers, CD players, turntables—every component category is listed in full, and we worked extra hard this past summer to make sure that the products of every manufacturer were included in its 228 pages.
<I>"All great editors are men able to see how stories, episodes, and personalities flow and merge one into the other to reproduce the pattern of a world that only their own inner eye perceives.</I>—Henry Robinson Luce, Founder, <I>Time</I> and <I>Life</I> magazines
<I>"Rave on down through the corridors,<BR>
"Rave on words on printed page!"</I>—Van Morrison, "Rave On John Donne"
It was eight years ago that I first met Aalt Jouk van den Hul. I was visiting Ortofon in Denmark, and, with a group of hi-fi journalists from all over Europe, was traveling by bus to visit the cartridge-production facility in the far south of that country. Bus journeys are not my ideal way of passing time; naturally I gravitated to the rear of the bus, where bottles of Tuborg were making their presence felt. One journalist, however—a pixieish fellow hailing from The Low Countries—resisted the blandishments of the opened bottles. Producing a sheath of black-and-white glossies from his briefcase, he announced that he had just developed the ultimate stylus profile!
In recent months, <I>Stereophile</I>'s "Letters" column has been filled with complaints about the equipment we choose to review. "Too rich for my pocketbook" is the universal sentiment. This puzzles me, considering that <I>Stereophile</I> does review many "affordable" components. In part, I think this reaction is due to the high profile invariably associated with very expensive gear. Although we did put both speakers on our cover, one review of a Wilson Grand SLAMM or a JMlab Grand Utopia seems to outweigh 10 reviews of more realistically priced products. Our writers love to cover the cutting edge of audio—witness Martin Colloms's report from HI-FI '96 in this issue—because progress is more easily made when a designer is freed from budget constraints. But without the Grand SLAMM or Utopia, would Wilson have been able to produce the $9000/pair WITT, or JMlab the $900/pair <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/">Micron Carat</A>, to name two high-value, high-performance designs recently reviewed in the magazine?
The invitation looked intriguing: "We are happy to welcome you to The Netherlands in September for the offical introduction of the Siltech Pantheon Loudspeaker." <A HREF="www.siltechcables.com">Siltech</A> introducing a loudspeaker? I was well familiar with the Dutch company, celebrating its 25<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary next year, as a cable manufacturer. Indeed, some of the first high-end cables I had found to sound better than what I had been used to were Siltechs, back in the mid-1980s. Paul Bolin had been impressed by his <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/cables/1004siltech">auditioning of more recent G5 models in 2004</A>. And Siltech's founder, Edwin van der Kley, is married to the irrepressible Gabi van der Kley, principal of Crystal Cable with whom I had had a rather intense breakfast meeting with during last May's <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/he2007">Home Entertainment 2007</A>. (<I>All</I> conversations with Gabi are intense.) But loudspeakers?