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Think Pieces

Emily Tries but Misunderstands

John Atkinson First Published: Jul 01, 2006 0 comments
"At last!" I rushed to open the UPS package with the familiar Amazon logo. "It's arrived!"


"What's arrived?" My 13-year-old daughter Emily showed some uncharacteristic curiosity.


"The new Pink Floyd two-DVD set, P.U.L.S.E, which I've had on order for what seems like forever. It contains four hours of music!"


"What's that, like three Pink Floyd songs?"

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Books, Guitars, & Hi-Fi

John Atkinson First Published: May 01, 2006 0 comments
I'm still using a Mac mini as a music server, using iTunes on this host server to stream music to my listening-room system via the Apple Airport Express WiFi hub. However, as the Airport Express is limited to CD-quality music, I tend to use them for nonserious listening, when I am involved in some other activity. One of those activities this past week or so was reading a new book from erstwhile Stereophile record reviewer Allen St. John: Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument (hardcover, 288pp; Free Press, New York, $25).
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How to Revive High-End Audio

John Atkinson First Published: Oct 01, 2005 0 comments
When I became Stereophile's editor in 1986, the median age of the magazine's readership was the same age as I was then, 38; ie, half the readers were younger than 38, half older. According to our most recent reader survey, the median reader age is now 48, meaning that in the intervening 19 years, that median reader has aged at half the rate of the rest of us. A nice trick. But older that reader certainly has become, which has led to cries of doom from some quarters of the audio industry.
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I'll Take Mine Unleaded

John Atkinson First Published: Aug 01, 2005 0 comments

"It's not just it doesn't work as well, it doesn't sound as good!"


Veteran audio reviewer Martin Colloms and I were taking a preprandial walk across London's Hampstead Heath, following Cream's reunion concerts at the Royal Albert Hall last May. Martin was getting animated:


"And don't ask about the whiskers!"


Of course, I had to ask about the whiskers.

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Squeezing the Music...

John Atkinson First Published: May 01, 2005 0 comments
This essay first appeared in the May 2005 Stereophile eNewsletter. But as the opinions and comments are still relevant in 2014 and in some ways the phenomenon of over-compression in recorded music (footnote 1) is just as bad, I thought it worth republishing.—John Atkinson


I write these words mere hours after returning home from Home Entertainment 2005, the Show cosponsored by Stereophile magazine that took place from April 28 through May 1 at the Manhattan Hilton. A full report will appear in the August 2005 issue of the magazine.

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Nothing More than Lights in a Box

John Atkinson First Published: Apr 01, 2005 0 comments
"Without content, television is nothing more than lights in a box."—Edward R. Murrow, 1958


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


Those who have followed the arguments between audiophiles and home-theater enthusiasts in the pages of Stereophile—I lifted the Murrow quote from a 1996 battle between Steve Guttenberg (representing the former community) and Joel Silver (representing the latter)—will have no doubt over which side of the argument I am on.

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Painting Or Photography?

George Reisch First Published: Jan 05, 2001 0 comments

I walked through my local Best Buy recently and didn't see one stereo receiver. Boomboxes, table radios, surround-sound gear, and computer speakers were everywhere. But the hi-fi staple of the 1960s and '70s—the plain-vanilla two-channel receiver—was not to be seen. Even if one or two were lurking there, the fact remains that high-quality two-channel audio is now so disconnected from consumer electronics that it's hardly at the "high end" of anything at all. It's a world unto itself.


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