Peter W. Mitchell

I want to talk about the acoustics of live music and recordings. As I write this I'm back in Boston for a week, re-calibrating my ears with (excuse the expression) the "absolute sound" of live music in various concert halls. On Friday the Boston Symphony played symphonies by Mozart and Shostakovich, producing (as always) magnificent sound with the aid of Symphony Hall's near-legendary acoustics.

When you graduate from mass-market hi-fi to high-end audio, one of the first things you notice is that audiophile gear dispenses with the gadgets and gimmicks that clutter up the front panels of most stereo receivers and integrated amplifiers. The dominant philosophy in mass-market design is that features sell products: the more functions a product has, the more desirable it will seem in the store. High-end designers, on the other hand, prefer the KISS approach: Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Editor's Note: In the 21st Century, lossy audio data compression, in the form of MP3 and AAC files, Dolby Digital and DTS-encoded soundtracks, and YouTube and Spotify streaming, is ubiquitous. But audiophiles were first exposed to the subject a quarter-century ago, when Philips launched its ill-fated DCC cassette format. What follows is Stereophile's complete coverage on both DCC and its PASC lossy-compression encoding from our April 1991 issue.—John Atkinson

I once told Larry Archibald it might be worth, say, a 10% loss in sound quality with CD not to have to jump up and turn over the damned record. Sometimes a CD saves you from popping up twice—Mahler's Fifth or Bruckner's Seventh on a single disc instead of three LP sides—or three times—Mozart's Magic Flute on three CDs instead of 6 LP sides. That might be worth a 15% sacrifice.

Editor's Introduction: In 2013, lossy compression is everywhere—without lossy codecs like MP3, Dolby Digital, DTS, A2DP, AAC, apt-X, and Ogg Vorbis, there would be no Web audio services like Spotify or Pandora, no multichannel soundtracks on DVD, no Bluetooth audio, no DAB and HDradio, no Sirius/XM, and no iTunes, to quote the commercial successes and no Napster, MiniDisc, or DCC, to quote the failures. Despite their potential for damage to the music, the convenience and sometimes drastic reduction in audio file size have made lossy codecs ubiquitous in the 21st century. Stereophile covered the development of lossy compression; following is an article from more than two decades ago warning of the sonic dangers.—Editor

I had a wonderful chuckle while reading the reviews of the Finial Laser Turntable in the May 1990 issue of <I>HFN/RR</I>. Perhaps I should preface this by saying that, in the entire quarter-century since I became intensely involved in audio, I have always found the LP an unsatisfactory playback medium for music. As a regular concert-goer in Boston and an addict of WGBH-FM's simply miked, virtually unprocessed live broadcasts of BSO concerts direct from Symphony Hall, I never learned to ignore the many anti-musical distortions endemic to LPs&#151;the ticks and pops, the inner-groove congestion and tracing distortion, the harsh mistracking of high-level climaxes and overcut grooves, the persistent static in dry winter air, the constant slight wow due to off-center spindle holes, the muddy bass due to resonances and feedback, the universal cutting engineer's practice of blending low bass into mono (which wipes out low-frequency hall ambience).

<I>Dateline&#151;Chicago, May 30, 9:00pm.</I> Exploding fireworks lit up the sky above the Chicago river as 200 leading high-end designers gathered in the Hotel Intercontinental for <I>Stereophile</I>'s 30th Anniversary banquet. After a repast of four gourmet courses and five wines, the time came for after-dinner speeches to celebrate <I>Stereophile</I>'s past and high-end audio's future. <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/593">Publisher Larry Archibald</A> described his adventurous transition from the high-end car business to risky publishing. Introducing <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/historical/712">J. Gordon Holt</A>, 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&#151;the unconventional view that launched high-end audio.