As We See It

What do New York's Lincoln Center and the typical Stereophile reader have in common? Both have recently made large investments to achieve sonic excellence.

I doubt that very many Stereophile readers have spent as much as Lincoln Center did on the renovation of Geffen Hall: $550 million. But then few audiophiles' systems are supported by the likes of David Geffen, a $100 million contributor to the Geffen Hall project, or Joseph and Clara Wu Tsai, who gave $50 million.

I have a confession, one I'm hesitant to make for reasons that will soon become clear, but my conscience compels me to make it.

I have a new dog. A puppy. Her name is Ella Wren.

For years, Audio Advice Live has been an annual event, drawing enthusiastic audiophiles to the dealership's showrooms on Raleigh's Glenwood Avenue, next to Virgin Cigars. This year, Audio Advice Live was different. It was a fully fledged audio show, held like most such events at a conference hotel: the Sheraton Raleigh Hotel in that North Carolina city, with rooms sponsored and presented by a wide range of hi-fi and home-theater manufacturers and distributors.

It was September 1962. In the UK, the Beatles were recording their first single, "Love Me Do," at London's Abbey Road Studios. And in the US, a young journalist, J. Gordon Holt, born in North Carolina but raised in Australia from 1935 to 1947, had become dissatisfied with the advertiser-friendly atmosphere at High Fidelity magazine, for which he had been the audio editor. Holt quit High Fidelity and, after a brief stint with phono cartridge manufacturer Weathers, published the first issue of what was then called The Stereophile.

'm writing this column on the long flight back to New York City following High End Munich, the big hi-fi show that in regular times takes place each May. Because these are not regular times, this was the first Munich show since 2019. This show was smaller than other recent Munich shows: COVID in the Far East limited involvement by people and companies from East Asia, and German government–mandated attendance caps limited the number of people who could enter at any one time. Even so, it was a big show, with some interesting product introductions and prototypes.

I wrote about the music industry's impressive recovery in the February 2022 AWSI. Robust LP sales were a headline item of that report, but they're a sideshow: Paid-subscription streaming is what is bringing the industry back.

When I wrote that, 2021 wasn't quite over, so year-end financials weren't available. They're available now.

There's a notion among audiophiles that we must be regular consumers of live music, especially live acoustic music. It's the only way, the thinking goes, to calibrate our ears to the sound we should all be aspiring to at home.