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.
In last month’s As We See It, I offered some reminiscences of my almost half-century of being involved in audio magazine publishing, as well as some thoughts on the Law of Diminishing Returns as it applied to the prices of hi-fi products. As I was compiling this issue’s Records 2 Live 4, it struck me that my interest not just in audio but in recording live music started 10 years earlier, when my parents bought me a mono Grundig tape recorder for my birthday. I first used the Grundig to record the high school rock group in which I played bass guitar, then replaced it with a stereo Sony tape recorder as my opportunities to make live recordings expanded. Although I excelled in the sciences at school and university, music…
The audiophile’s dilemma Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed reading David Fisher’s comments in December’s My Back Pages. He has a delightfully wry style, and many of us can identify with the pernicious condition of “upgraditis” that he discussed. I laughed out loud when he wrote, “The wheels turn. My fingers graze the plastic card.” We all know the symptoms so well, and I needed a good laugh. Robert Wood Little Rock, Arkansas In his wonderful essay (My Back Pages, December 2024), David Fisher describes himself as a character that could just as well have been me. Our stories match very well. My interest in all things audio stems from a friend whose taste in music and audio I looked up to from the age of 12.…
BOSE CORPORATION ACQUIRES MCINTOSH GROUP Mark Henninger Bose Corporation recently announced in a press release its acquisition of McIntosh Group, parent company of high-end audio brands Sonus faber and McIntosh, from Dallas-based investment firm Highlander Partners, L.P. With this move, Bose apparently seeks to expand its reach into the high-performance and luxury audio markets as well as developing more advanced automotive audio—and presumably, to increase their earnings. The acquisition marks another ownership change for McIntosh Group, which has undergone various such changes over the last couple of decades, including the latest Highlander Partners owners as recently as in mid-2022. “Over the last six decades, we’ve delivered the best premium audio experiences possible. Now, with McIntosh Group in our portfolio, we can unlock even more ways to bring music to life,”…
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 ❚ Sunday, February 16, 2025, 2–5pm: The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society (LAOCAS) will hold its second annual Society LP event at AudiophileUSA in Los Alamitos (10572 Calle Lee #126). This store is home to over 50,000 rare and special vinyl LPs of all types and genres for the collector and audiophile. Host and owner Mark Hoover will discuss the vinyl industry and how…
The day I visited Stereophile Senior Contributing Editor Kalman Rubinson, I arrived back home with a headful of new understandings, but before I could ponder those things, I made a cup of tea and sat down to read a few New York Times obituaries. While Kal and I sat chatting on his couch, he told me that reading obituaries was not only fascinating but had actually helped him find out what happened to a few people he had lost touch with. I told him I hadn’t read Times obits in years but when I did, I did it to enjoy the quality of writing. We agreed that the Times’s obituaries (as well as their Sports, Food, and Arts & Leisure pages) are good places to find inspired bits of pure…
Arriving in Japan from the United States is like being turned upside down. This condition lasts for much of the first week. When I visited in November, the time difference between Tokyo and New York was 14 hours. “The floating world” is a term for the pleasure-addled urban culture of Edo-period Japan, but it’s also an apt description for the twilit and not-entirely-unpleasant weirdness of first arriving in Tokyo. Everything seems slightly unreal. I’d come to Japan for several reasons, one of which was simply to spend more time in what for me is the most enjoyable place on the planet. Another was to explore the country’s distinctive listening spaces, which I’ve been thinking and occasionally writing about over the past few years. During that time, listening bars and cafés…
