Every month Stereophile magazine offers authoritative reviews, informed recommendations, helpful advice, and controversial opinions, all stemming from the revolutionary idea that audio components should be judged on how they reproduce music.
I’m writing this one week after returning from Schaumburg, Illinois, where I attended my first real audio show since the Florida Audio Expo in early 2020, just as the pandemic was starting to gain momentum. Everyone I talked to was hopeful, but no one could predict what attendance would be like or what people’s attitudes would be. There were a few glitches, mainly logistical: Shipments didn’t arrive or arrived damaged. One exhibitor had to carry an integrated amp to the show on his lap, first on a bus and then on a plane. (I didn’t think to ask: Did the amplifier fit in the overhead bin?) Another exhibitor had to find a new pair of loudspeakers to demo with—quickly—after the first pair arrived with pieces rattling around inside the box.…
Live vs Memorex As a longtime reader and subscriber to Stereophile, it was interesting for me to read Jim Austin’s As We See It essay in the May 2022 edition. My partner and I booked a concert from Australia for the Musicverein in Vienna, with great anticipation of at last going to this famous concert hall. So there we were, dressed appropriately and really looking forward to a Mozart evening. Imagine our dismay to encounter a large contingent of tourists whose only interest was to take as many photos as possible on phone or tablet all during the performance, many of them standing up to collect their photos. We were staggered that the ushers made no attempt to keep them quiet and seated. Maybe we chose the wrong night, but…
US: SCHAUMBURG, ILLINOIS Jason Victor Serinus Exciting. Engrossing. Exhausting. Enjoyable. Nothing but e-words from me. I could go on, but not without breaking out the thesaurus. —ROGIER VAN BAKEL, Stereophile’s newest Contributing Editor Numbers are one thing. According to statistics provided by the show, AXPONA 2022 attracted 7498 unique visitors plus 98 incontrovertibly unique members of the press. The show hosted 138 active demo rooms plus many Ear Gear and marketplace exhibits representing a total of more than 500 companies. Approximately 220 showgoers attended Friday’s 8pm “Blues Night with Toronzo Cannon,” and 300 defied Expo burnout to enjoy Lori Lieberman’s performance Saturday at 8pm. But numbers mean only so much. This AXPONA was all about emotion. “I’m no writer, but it was as if we all rose up out of…
ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: Stereophile maintains a page on its website devoted to organizations like yours, at stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. To have your audio-society information posted on the site, send an email Chris Vogel at vgl@cfl.rr.com. (Please note the new email address.) Note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless it is associated with a seminar or similar event. CALIFORNIA ◼ Friday–Sunday, June 10–12: T.H.E. Home Entertainment Show of SoCal is now being held in a different Orange County locale: Long Beach—specifically at the Hilton Long Beach (701 W. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, CA 90831). In addition to hi-fi exhibits, the show will host T.H.E. Headphonium and Happy Hour appearances by André Darlington, author of Booze & Vinyl. Additional T.H.E. events are expected…
Lublin, Poland, is about 130 miles from Lviv, Ukraine, a town that has been in the news lately. That’s about the same distance as Hershey, Pennsylvania, is from my desk in northern New Jersey, where I’m writing this. They are close. Russian missiles struck Lviv on March 18, 2022, and today Lviv is preparing for more intense bombardment. J.Sikora manufactures turntables and tonearms in Lublin, Poland. Concentrating on something as frivolous as audio reviewing and not thinking about what’s happening in Ukraine is difficult enough. Lowering the stylus onto a record spinning on J.Sikora’s top-of-the-line Reference turntable, manufactured in the Allmet metal fabrication factory, which is so close to the mayhem, amplifies feelings of helplessness. Those feelings are further intensified by having met and spent time at more than one…
I am an artist by trade. Saws and brushes and cameras are some of the tools I use. The aesthetic quality of the things I make is determined not by my skill with tools but by the dynamic relationships I establish among space, color, tone, and shape. Of those elements, shapes are the most important because they are the first thing a viewer notices and the chief vehicles for transmitting sentiment and artistic intent. Stylized shapes, like those in popular art, may induce superficial responses in the viewer. Taut, Euclidian shapes suggest their author is of a higher mind; the Parthenon and Pantheon exemplify this type of shape making. But mysterious, previously unknown shapes that resist categorization—shapes that make the viewer wonder why or how or what in hell…
