Music and Recording Features

We started issuing recordings on the Stereophile label at the end of the 1980s, both to make available some of test tracks that we were using in our reviews and to enable readers to have access to recordings where the provenance was fully documented. That way the "Circle of Confusion" that Bob Katz discussed on the Stereophile website in 2017, where the sound quality of an audio component couldn't be judged using a recording with unknown sound quality potential, could be avoided. As Bob wrote, "How can any reviewer make a judgment about a transducer without knowing what a recording is supposed to sound like?"

Was it something in the air, something in the water? Cosmically inspired by the stars and the moon? Or maybe the devil was finally claiming his own as rock music in all its variants was unassailably ascendant.

It is perhaps the most cherished tale from hi-fi's primordial past: In 1951—when music was first being recorded on magnetic tape, when the use of much-improved microphones became a mix of science and art, and when Stereophile's founder, J. Gordon Holt, was still a little nipper, years away from his first martini (though I wouldn't swear to that)—the team of Robert (Bob) and Wilma Cozart Fine began to build a legendary catalog of recordings of classical music. It eventually included the work of conductors Rafael Kubelik, Antal Doráti, and Frederick Fennell; the Chicago and Minneapolis symphony orchestras; the pianists Byron Janis and Gina Bachauer; and the cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and János Starker—all released with often wildly colorful covers under the still-evocative title of Mercury Living Presence.