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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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In Reply to: RE: LOL posted by Satie on March 5, 2011 at 16:21:38:
My take on HP is much like yours. I subscribed to TAS with Issue 2 after seeing the ad in the back of Audio -- in those days I had a subscription to Stereophile and Audio and was a student member of the AES so got the journal, not sure if I still subscribed to Stereo Review or High Fidelity at that point. I soon learned that HP was an astute observer who heard what I did on equipment that I owned and with which I was intimately familiar, as well as someone who had tastes similar to my own. And like Gordon Holt, he was frank. I really dislike the Julian Hirsch "read between the lines to discover what I really think of this" business: I read reviews to find out which pieces of gear are worth a listen, not to hear everything praised. But even more than that, I've never bought the notion that audio is a matter of taste and that there's no "absolute sound." What I'm looking for is equipment that reproduces the original performance as accurately as possible. And HP, like JGH, took that as his core philosophy.
I have the same problem you do with the absence of measurements in TAS. But that, curiously, didn't bother me back in the day, perhaps because the then-underground concept of actually listening to the equipment under test was so compelling to a kid who was just discovering that there was more to good sound than response curves. Arguably, today's Stereophile, with its mix of subjective reviews and measurements, hits the right balance here.
Agree with you about the value of used equipment. Progress is incremental. Arguably, in the case of preamps and amplifiers, it has been some years since there was real progress at all. Still, I understand the desire of some people to have the latest and greatest. I certainly feel it myself, and sometimes succumb.
On the other hand, I think the high end audio community has pretty assiduously rejected some of the real improvements that have come along, particularly surround and digital speaker and digital room compensation and crossovers. And I think we have to look seriously at the cost/benefit ratio of much of what we do in high end audio, because our priorities are askew. We throw thousands of dollars at tweaks that produce results that are so subtle that their very existence is controversial, while ignoring technological changes that have major and obvious sonic benefits. Not that I can hold myself up as an example, or exception: I experimented with four and even heard 16 channel sound 35 or 40 years ago, and still, after all these years, I'm listening to two.
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