Stereophile Aug-12

After all this time, I think I finally get it. I was recently reunited with an old friend from high school. My best friend from high school, in fact. Our families got together, everyone got along, and as the dust of conversation settled toward the rug of companionable silence, talk turned to work. And when the inevitable happened, and my old friend and his wife—classical-music lovers both—asked how much a person had to spend these days in order to get a good music system, I answered their question with a question—a question that, crazily enough, just popped into my head: “Do you want an appliance that’ll get the job done, or do you have faith that a good system can transform listening into something special?” My friend looked at me…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR Stereophile & the iPad 3 Editor: I subscribe to Stereophile via Apple’s newsstand, and have been hoping each month that you upgrade the resolution of your publication to match that of the new iPad 3. No luck, even for your June publication. It’s basically unreadable, and an unpleasant reading experience. I subscribe to several other publications, including Photoshop and Photography and Wired Magazine . . . all perfect. When will Stereophile be fixing this? —Russ Gittleson Johannesburg, South Africa russ@lightkinetics.com I understand that the iPad 3’s Retina display takes longer to fully render a pdf than the earlier iPads, depending on the complexity of the page. If the magazine first comes up with ragged text and you zoom it out and back in again, it does…

AUDIO NEWS & VIEWS GERMANY: MUNICH Paul Messenger Western economies might still be in the doldrums, but specialist hi-fi is alive and well and living in southern Germany. That was the strong impression I gained from a couple of days spent struggling to get ’round the High End Society’s High End 2012 show, held in Munich’s M.O.C. on May 3–6. It’s already Europe’s leading annual audio event, and the increasing strength of the high-end sector means that this show is becoming the most important gathering of hi-fi people on the international calendar, arguably more so than the annual Consumer Electronics Show, held each January in Las Vegas. Despite some off-site exhibitions in Munich hotels, High End continues to grow steadily, in numbers of both exhibitors and visitors. Nearly 15,000 people…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@vcable.us. Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless this is associated with a seminar or similar event. CALIFORNIA • Sunday, August 19, 12–4pm: The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting in the Penthouse Ballroom of the Buena Park Holiday Inn (7000 Beach Boulevard). With a special focus on affordable audio equipment, the event will feature Dynamic Design cables, ModWright amplification and source components, and Van L. SpeakerWorks loudspeakers. Representatives from each company will be on hand to discuss their products. Eastwind…

“No [other] subject produces a literature so anxious, expressed not so much in its grandiosity as in its defensive jokiness and regular-guydom.” Adam Gopnik was writing about wine in his latest book, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011; p.178). It comes out in paperback on August 21. We met up with Adam in last month’s column. Most of the book originally appeared as essays in The New Yorker, where you can swallow your Gopnik in small gulps. For a taste of the tome, you can savor Chapter 10, whose title asks “In Vino Veritas?” Gopnik pegs wine critic Robert Parker as a quintessentially American number cruncher. Parker’s newsletter, The Wine Advocate, grades the chateaux of France on a 100-point system: “What…

AnalogPlanet.com has gone live. Allan Toussaint should title an album. Elvis Costello should write a song. I’m running the website, and will continue to write this monthly column for Stereophile, as well as equipment reviews (though fewer of the latter). The new site also includes reviews of analog components originally published in Stereophile, and will shortly feature all 200-plus installments of “Analog Corner,” almost none of which has ever been available online. Let the hunt for contradictions begin! I’ve gotten letters that say, “You know, back in the April 1996 issue you wrote blah-blah-blah, but in April 2012 you wrote bleh-bleh-bleh, which is a complete contradiction. What gives?” My answer, as always, is “You tell me!” AnalogPlanet.com also incorporates more than a decade’s worth of content from my own website,…