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.
Recently, I found myself in an email conversation with two colleagues on the nature of reproduced audio. How should we think about it? The conversation was provoked by a “hybrid” (live and online) presentation of the Pacific Northwest section of the Audio Engineering Society called “What Does ‘Accurate’ Even Mean?” The presenter was James D. “JJ” Johnston, a distinguished researcher in the field of perceptual audio coding and a co-inventor of MP3. Among many other honors, Johnston was selected to present the Richard Heyser Memorial Lecture at the 2012 AES convention—an honor shared by our own John Atkinson, who had given that lecture the previous year and was one of the participants in this email conversation. The other was Tom Fine—so, it was me and two sound engineers. In the…
Willie and Merle and Moscow As usual, fantastic magazine through and through. Fresh out of my mailbox was a most enjoyable Brilliant Corners by Alex Halberstadt (Vol.47 No.2, p.27)—how is it that an émigré, from Russia no less, interprets the pulse of American country and expertly depicts its everlasting mark on our culture and understanding of these great artists? Well done! Rudi LinkeRancho Palos Verdes, California Reading Alex Halberstadt’s “Willie and Merle” jolted my memory, specifically when I saw Merle’s picture with his guitar. I was serving in the US Navy, stationed in Baltimore, assigned to a ship in drydock. We were living in a hotel and had an abundance of free time, so I started hanging out at a music store/coffee shop. I became good friends with the owner…
IN MEMORIAM: MAGNEPAN’S JIM WINEY Stereophile Staff Jim Winey, founder and chief inventor/engineer of pioneering loudspeaker company Magnepan, died peacefully on January 10. Born in 1934 and raised in Iowa, Winey—before becoming an engineer and multiple-patent-holding inventor of innovative loudspeakers featuring planar-magnetic technologies—was first a music lover. “Music’s pull was so strong that, by the time he entered his teens, Jim Winey insisted on experiencing it viscerally,” David Lander wrote in the January 2003 Stereophile.1 “I was probably 13, 14 years old,” Winey recalled. “I’d come home from school for lunch, and there was a program on every day that had classical music on it. After I had my lunch, I would sit with this portable radio of my sister’s in my lap, kind of pressed to my body so…
ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, email Chris Vogel at vgl@cfl.rr.com. (Please note the new email address.) 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 evenings, 5–7pm PST: The San Francisco Audiophile Society hosts a virtual happy hour via Zoom. This is open to anyone who’d like to join us to talk about hi-fi and whatever else is on your mind. For more information and registration, visit bit.ly/3RyaqX9. ILLINOIS ◼ April 12–13, 2024: AXPONA will take place at the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel and Convention Center in Schaumburg, Illinois. For…
THIS ISSUE: Brice Marden’s art, two phono cartridges, and a headphone. It was almost Christmas, a perfect, chilly, blue-sky day to visit the Met Museum and see the Manet/Degas show before it ended. On my way, walking north on Madison Avenue, I passed the uptown branch of Gagosian Gallery and noticed a brightly lit poster behind thick glass announcing their exhibition of American artist Brice Marden’s last paintings. The title of the show was “Let the painting make you,” which sounded like an invite and a challenge, so of course I had to go in. I was in the perfect mood to ride in Gagosian’s swanky private elevator and see how a famously serious painter with a six-decade career chose to communicate his last thoughts. Brice Marden died in August…
THIS ISSUE: Some components are better than others at conveying music’s life force, but none are quite as good as a great saxophonist playing live in your listening room. Ever notice that the language we use to talk about sound can be pretty aggressive? Reviewers often write about amplifiers “taking control” of a speaker, possibly “ironfisted control,” especially if the amplifier in question happens to be a “juggernaut.” In this particular linguistic trash fire, we also find “razor-sharp transients,” “hair-raising dynamics,” and that ickiest of descriptors, “bass slam.” If words could smell like hair gel and drugstore cologne, these might. All this verbiage is describing brute force, which we might use to push open a heavy door. But there’s another kind of force that we encounter in the world, and…
