How high do you want your fi?
Would you really want a perfect hi-fi?
How Many Hilary Hahns?
Hilary Hahn must be a chameleon. At least, that's how it seemed at the 2004">http://www.stereophile.com/news/010704ces">2004 Consumer Electronics Show.
I Am an Audiophile
I was fortunate enough to be raised in an environment where music of many kinds was played often. I lived with my mother in small apartments in Washington, DC, in the 1960s and '70, and most of the time, music was playing. Chopin, Wagner, Beethoven, Coltrane, Miles, Sonny Rollins, Streisand, Baez, Dylan, Miriam Makebaeven the Doors, Hendrix, and Janis Joplin.
I Have Heard the Future...(DSP Room Acoustics Correction)
Dateline—Chicago, May 30, 9:00pm. Exploding fireworks lit up the sky above the Chicago river as 200 leading high-end designers gathered in the Hotel Intercontinental for Stereophile's 30th Anniversary banquet. After a repast of four gourmet courses and five wines, the time came for after-dinner speeches to celebrate Stereophile's past and high-end audio's future. Publisher">http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/593">Publisher Larry Archibald described his adventurous transition from the high-end car business to risky publishing. Introducing J">http://www.stereophile.com/historical/712">J. Gordon Holt, he praised JGH's uniquely lucid writing and his unflinching insistence that equipment designed to reproduce music should be judged on its ability to do just that—the unconventional view that launched high-end audio.
I Say It's Television...
"When it comes to video, most audiophiles are insufferable snobs."—J. Gordon Holt, 1984
I Say It's Video!
A couple of months back (March">http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/393awsi">March 1993, p.7), I wrote that as far as I was concerned, video was television dressed up in fancy dress, thus there was no place for coverage of the medium in Stereophile. As the magazine's founder, J">http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/66">J. Gordon Holt, has been a committed videophile for many years, I sat back and awaited a reaction from him. One was not long coming. I am running his response as this month's "As We See It" feature.—John Atkinson
I'd Love to Turn You On
For over three decades, I have felt compelled to turn people on to music. Throughout my career as a DJ, all of my endeavors have been linked by the desire to spread the joy of listening to records, in the hope that people would feel something like the emotional resonance I feel. My Classic Album Sundays adventuresee www.stereophile.com/content/classic-album-sundays-bellwether was born from this lifelong dedication to musical curating, and propelled by a eureka hi-fi moment.
If Either of These Amplifiers is RIGHT . . .
It was January 1986. Stereophile's then publisher, Larry Archibald, and I were driving in his diesel 'Benz sedan from Las Vegas to Santa Fe. We had shaken hands at the just-concluded Consumer Electronics Show on my replacing J. Gordon Holt as the magazine's editor, and now, during the 750-mile drive, we mapped out the strategy to take what was then an "underground," digest-format, somewhat irregularly published magazine to the position of dominance in audio publishing it still enjoys.
In Defense of the CD
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.
In My Room
Listening rooms are real, imperfect places. Their character arises from their defects. I like real, imperfect things (footnote 1).
Not that there's such a thing as a perfect listening room. Every domestic listening room shares the same basic problem: Its most fundamental natureits size and shape, the amount of space it carves outresults in resonances that can profoundly alter the sound of reproduced music, especially in the bass.