As We See It

On mornings when I can get up early enough after a late-night listening session, I take the last express bus from my Brooklyn suburb to Stereophile's Manhattan office. An inveterate people watcher, I notice that while my fellow travelers and I don't form a traditional queue at the bus stop, preferring instead to mill around in something that resembles a jelly donut, we still enter the bus in the order in which we arrived at the stop. The balance between individualism and social necessity is thus preserved.

Attacking the compact disc has lately become almost a blood sport among audiophiles and audio writers. Not a month goes by that I don't read—often in Stereophile—some vehement statement about how CDs are a musical abomination.

On Friday morning, March 25, 2005, my friend Maura Rieland, Stereophile's show coordinator through the second half of the 1990s, e-mailed me to say that she had just learned of the passing of Ken Nelson.

Please let me explain. Because I've never been especially adept at making lifelong commitments and irrevocable decisions, when it came to naming this new column, Managing Editor Debbie Starr and I decided that we would gather the passionate (and supremely efficient) minds of the Stereophile production staff, add a near–life-threatening amount of margaritas, and put the question to them.

In his "From the Editor's Desk" in the March issue of Stereophile's e-newsletter, John Atkinson recounts how, years ago, "erstwhile audio scribe Enid Lumley" demonstrated her pizza-box-tripod tweak at a hi-fi show. Lumley, JA writes, "placed the tripod atop a CD player and convinced her audience—including me—that the sound was better."

"When it comes to video, most audiophiles are insufferable snobs."—J. Gordon Holt, 1984

These days, too many audio stores are like hushed mausoleums. Audio gear is displayed like dead art, and the sales staff, unless you're known as a regular customer, either greets you with a predatory gleam or, certain that you've wandered in by mistake, ignores you.