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In Reply to: RE: My New Years resolution: stop writing for Stereophile. posted by samtellig on December 31, 2014 at 12:25:21
Let me join the other well-wishers.
If I may, in wishing Tom well, I would like briefly to comment from my own personal perspectives (that were first, as an entertained reader and then as a collegial colleague), upon a couple of obvious things, and a couple of perhaps not so obvious things.
Obviously, Tom is a great writer. He developed not only a persona but also an authorial tone that was extremely effective in holding the reader's attention and bringing him along for the ride.
Perhaps it was Tom's background as a direct-mail-copy writer, but Tom's columns usually had a sense of pacing--of knowing when to give the reader a little break--that very very few audio writers have ever had.
Pedestrian or pedantic, Tom was not. More like a really interesting and funny fellow guest you meet at a wedding, and are glad you did.
Obviously, Tom cared greatly about audio. Was he 100% "right" all the time? Nope. He was not re-engineering Solomon's Temple; for Tom, an audio system was not just a destination but also a journey.
He retained the ability to show a boyish enthusiasm over offbeat gear. He defeated the temptation to rise ever higher into the price stratosphere. His emotional connection to audio and its role in his life was not a put-on. Anyone who ever heard him talk about his having his nose pressed against the glass outside Providence's McIntosh dealer on North Main Street realized that.
Not so obviously, Tom's tastes in music, and the music he wrote about and used as evaluation material (thereby promoting it), were not only cultured but small-c catholic. He loved Bunny Berigan and he loved Sibelius.
Tom was not interested in devoting ten years of his life to squeezing the last little gasp out of Jennifer Warnes' "Famous Blue Raincoat" 's title track. He'd rather hear all sorts of unfamiliar music and unfamiliar recordings than keep going back to the same worn place in the carpet--a lesson almost all of us could do a better job of applying to our own listening.
Related to the immediately above, and again not obviously, Tom was an unlikely but for that reason an even more effective advocate for non-physical means of music access--and it is no surprise that he plumped for democratic streaming, rather than elitist, expensive, and perhaps fetishistic highest-res downloads.
So, end of an era for Stereophile.
I have put in a formal request that the all-expenses-paid Festschrift take place at Scores Gentlemen's Club in NYC.
Make mine Veuve Cliquot.
Hail Brunonia!
john
Follow Ups:
"Was he 100% "right" all the time? Nope"
ST/TG was right far more often than wrong.
John, Now we know it's official. Times sure are a changing.
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