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Speaking of Worms...

Posted by joerosen1 (A) on September 29, 2014 at 20:45:28

In Reply to: Perhaps I might open up a can of worms, but... posted by Dman on September 26, 2014 at 06:06:15:

Hearts of Space was a New Age "Audiophile" label, and as I look at my CD rack, I realise that I have FOUR of the damned things! Three of them by an artist named Raphael (Music to Disappear In, Pt.II, & Angels of the Deep) and one by Constance Demby.
All AAD's, with a whiff of gold-plating on the aluminum foil. Every one a superb sounding Audiophile delight. Of course there's a catch: You have to be a fan of New Age music, or at least tolerant of the best examples of it, which I believe these four are anyways...
I thank Mike Kuller for pointing me in the direction of HP's current project, High Fidelity Report. He did a piss poor job of making people aware that he'd abandoned HP Soundings, and I'm on both e-mail lists!
There's an article he's written posted as of 9/26/14, the third in what started out as a rather dreadful and typically HP-centric History of modern Hi-Fi. You'd have thought there was no such thing as High Fidelity prior to stereophonic technology, or that HiFi 78's ever existed either. Lo & Behold, the latest installment shows HP much sharper & correcting for past omission, actually mentioning the Decca ffrr 78's!
I don't believe that Mr. Pearson would EVER write for anyone else as an employee in this point of his life, and Stereopiles would be a worse fit for him The Absolute Trash is at this point.
I found his pathetic essay "Why I quit from TAS" to be rather too much of the Pot calling the Kettle black; all he could really say for himself was that TAS's current practice of exchanging (positive of course; are there REALLY ever more than 1% of the other kind?) reviews for advertising was a bit much for him!
Funny, but when I thought we'd really lost HP for good I was compelled to think about his "legacy"; what it REALLY amounted to. And then, another idea hit me that I was surprised that I'd really not thought about before: how incredibly self-centred & self-serving the man was, a typical American Man of Commerce, sucker of relentless self-promotion & service.
Look: The guy starts his magazine "supposedly" not to compete with JGH's Stereophile, but rather in some sort of "protest" with JGH's erratic publishing schedule habits! But he always did have a mildly charming flair for being disingenuous (a nice way to say that he couldn't help himself not being full of s*** when it served his purposes, which was fairly often!), and he really can't accuse Tom Martin of being a whole lot different in motivation than he ever was.
OK, except perhaps when it came to building his "Reference System"; all in the name of Subjective Audio Science, of course!
Reading the guy over the years, certain things became achingly clear.
The guy didn't give a tinker's cuss for his readers or THEIR quest for the "Absolute Sound", as he calls it. Rather, it was always all about HIS quest for the best, most expensive, most unobtanium stereo in the world. You, humble reader, were just there for the ride. To bulk up subscriber numbers, to woo advertisers, and most importantly: to attract the best & brightest audio designers & builders to permanently loan, or better yet, flat-out GIVE, their best efforts to Sea Cliff in the hope that by satisfying this self-serving, spoiled CRANK they'd also boost their reputation & of course, $$$ale$$$.
But first things first. Or rather, FIRST Harry, FIRST!
We, the not-so-great & highly-unwashed subscribers, were supposed to live the High-Life vicariously as we read about HP's quests to find the largest & most expensive record decks, the rarest & most expensive Moving Coil cartridges (the lower the output, the higher the tracing force, and the older the Japanese bugger in a tiny Quonset hut next to the Shinkansen tracks, the better!), the tallest & most-overdrivered loudspeakers with the lowest efficiency & most ridiculous bass boost (to go with the most ridiculously overpowered valve amp that could boast the greatest number of 6550's!), the better.
Harry gave me many great things from his self-serving musings, such as his great audio vocabulary & the best expression of the correct audio philosophy with which to pursue excellence in audio reproduction.
Most people, even the second-rate reviewers that he almost deliberately seemed to surround himself with so as not to dim his brilliant lights, don't understand the significance of Harry's otherwise seeming overweening preoccupation with soundstage "correctness".
I'm not sure that even Harry understood that there was a bit more to it than he knew. Reviewers like Mike Fremer think it's a frivolity in evaluating audio gear, Mr. Atkinson seldom mentions it & doesn't seem very concerned about it either.
The point is, those soundstaging aberrations, the distortions of soundstage perspective that components exhibit from one recording to the next (such that we know POSITIVELY that they belong to the component under evaluation), are the "Rosetta Stone" that point the careful ear towards the rest of the egregious performance quirks of that component. No truly neutral, honest amplifier or preamplifier distorts soundstage perspective. Find one that exaggerates height, and you'll often find one that robs music of "body" and often has difficulties extracting the lowest-level signals (and for that, you get a lack of depth!). For example!
Blurry soundstaging, imprecise localisation, is often an indicator of excessive interchannel crosstalk. And/or poor power supply regulation, or inadequate power supply filtering, or just plain poor larger-signal performance as a consequence of lousy design...for example!
So whether Mr. Pearson REALLY understood this, or just had some unerring instinct to guide him, it is THIS concentration of his attentions that truly distinguishes him from the lesser reviewers. Which is to say; ALL of them, save maybe Jonathan Valin...on a good day!
The missing link, for me, was that HP NEVER truly understood the supremacy of "Transparency" in equipment performance.
A component that is TRULY transparent trumps all; it is the component that, of its type, best commands your attention & respect and keeps you listening the most intently & for the longest time.
I say, TRULY transparent, as is TRULY ACCURATE, which is THE most abused audio term of them all! "Accuracy" in AudioDweeb-speak connotes exaggerated/peaky transient responses, elevated trebles, MIA bass fundamentals (to leave the ear to preternaturally focus only on what's left), and any & all the other lovely things such as a strong odd-order harmonic signature or the presence of excessive IM Distortion products, blah blah blah...LISTENING FATIGUE INDUCING.
Well, true accuracy CAN'T be that, nor should it!
And Harry, hapless stereotypical Ugly American Audiophile that he was, simply compensated in his quest for accuracy BY TURNING UP THE VOLUME TO 11.
The great American Audiophile expedient! Welcome to Dave Wilson's world!
Those Infinity IRS's were the epitome of opaque, ditto the "Bass mushen-lushen" ARC valve CRAPOLA that HP loved so much.
"Bass mushen-lushen", HP would say lovingly of his ARC D-150.
Well, a good friend of mine was one of the "lucky" few that had the big turd, and a quick look at the schematic shows the ugly & opaque D-75/76 with a just an extra set of 6550's (mounted incorrectly on their sides to ensure the screen grids would get too close to the control grids & go BLAM!, because Bill Johnson was sooo clever, although the esoteric $35 front-panel fuses "usually" saved you, even if they were twice the price of the 6550's and even harder to find!) and a trio of noisy fans to keep this ball-busting & back-breaking symbol of idiotic Yankee excess from setting your house on fire...
And the D-76 sounded like crap, even then; although then as now reviewing superior vintage gear like Marantz 8's & 9's (never mind 2's & 5's!), Dynaco Stereo 70's & MkIV's, McIntosh MI-200's or MC-225's, etc. etc. was NEVER to be countenanced! CERTAINLY on the premise that we didn't want to see a naked Hairy Person, even in the flower of his (relative) youth back then in the 70's!
So much volume, so much bass, so little sophistication!
I had an ARC SP-6B, nice preamp back in the day save for the boulderous grain of its nasty transistorised PSU's, and Fletcher-Munson overblown bass. I think I once worked out the time constants for its RIAA & came up with a bass one of between 4000-5000 microseconds. The target is 3180uS. In plain english, this meant the SP-6B (and most of its ARC phono preamp brethren, both well before & long after) was still boosting bass down at 30c\s when it was supposed to stop at exactly 50c/s. In plainer english, this means that EVERYTHING between 30c/s and the next RIAA turnover point of 318uS (500c/s) was woefully exaggerated, albeit to a decreasing degree, before yielding to an otherwise tonally accurate midrange & treble!
This was no simple engineering mistake, perpetuated as it was for YEARS after Stanley "The Loudmouth" Lipshitz published his landmark paper in the JAES, and milked his 15 minutes for all it was worth!
Such was the influence of HP, here for worse as much as for anything better, that Bill Johnson would massively WOOF! up the bass response of the phono stage in his flagship preamp to better ensure the rapture of his most influential critic & salesman!
But he quit TAS in 2012, because they're (openly?) taking advertising in exchange for (un)reviews. Yes, I think Tom Martin is scum, but it's his money & not mine & John Atkinson knows what he needs to do to boost his 5%, John Crabbe's advice about the supremacy of the subscriber's interests be damned.
So HP is made of better stuff, see. He ONLY takes eternal-term loans & pithy buy-backs (if ever, I'm still wondering if he paid more than a $1 for his IRS V's when that utterly ridiculous situation finally was dealt with) in exchange for advertising/product placement.
If any of you are experiencing blurry vision trying to see out of that dark tunnel of delusional self-rationalisation, I welcome you to HP's world of audio excitement...
It never occurred to him (I'm sure he brushed it out of his mind with the same annoyance we have for contemplating a raging case of piles) to try to grow, that there was another way, a BETTER way.
And that way might democratize the whole audio process, which may also have contributed to his fearfulness & lack of interest (let alone excitement...).
TURN THE FRICKING VOLUME DOWN! TURN THE FRICKING "LOUDNESS" (Bass boost, that is) OFF!
He ever so GRUDGINGLY ventured, so dejectly & half-heartedly, in the world of the Acoustical/QUAD electrostatic, but NOT in his "main" listening room. It was like they were there, like Sol Rosenberg would say in a Jerky Boys prank call, "So that I have them".
I well remember when the "threat" of listening at anywhere near realistic volumes knocked ominously at his door; the great Audio Impressario Peter Qvortrup forged a trans-Pacific alliance with the equally great Japanese Triode-Crank Hiroyasu Kondo, and wowed the English HiFi press by loaning them the ridiculous Ongaku amplifier, for which they all went completely bonkers about.
Whether it was the mere idea that someone either thought so much of them as to trust them with the loan of a $60,000 amplifier, or that it sounded 180-degrees opposed to the "scratch & sniff" sound of Nasty Naim & Lame-Arse Linn, it's hard to say exactly. Probably both!
If this 17W/ch. triode thingee was cluttering up listening room floors all around the world with mounds of dropped jaws, then at some point it had to end up in the clutches of another importer who'd put it in the offices of the greatest HiFi reviewer in the Free World. So of course that happened, and there was no way in Heck that HP was gonna listen to no 17W/ch. amp when he was BARELY getting along with the 300W ones that just ran his tweeters!
In one of the lowest stunts TAS ever perpetuated, the task of reviewing the Ongaku was shifted onto the biggest Tin-Ear (No! Stainless-Steel! 634 inches thick!) HP had on staff, "Dr." Robert Greene. A guy who, if he had shaved the top of his head, would be a Dead-Ringer for Julian Hirsch...
Needless to say, a guy who thinks that only loudspeakers have a sound and amplification doesn't matter, isn't going to notice the difference between shit & shinola no matter how hard or how long you rub it right in his face. Perfect! Just the guy for the hatchet-job!
I'm sure that HP hoped that with just that little bit of sleight-of-hamfist, this pesky SET thing would just PLEASE GO AWAY. But we all know how that "fad" turned out, don't we? So, EVENTUALLY (Aarrrrrgh! Mooooo!) HP drags a poor little pair of FRED's into "Listening Room 4" (a.k.a. an unused hall closet...), at one point mating it to a Celestion subwoofer which he promptly BLEW UP (not the QUAD's, or at least that he'd admit. And the QUAD's do have a protection circuit. No, the subwoofer!).
It takes a special kind of OAF to blow a subwoofer, just as it takes a special kind of Neanderthal to think that you need 600W/ch. of tube power just to run your mids & tweets. Never mind that you have 2200W/ch. to run your subs, and that your room is...what? About 20'x14'. To paraphrase "Mikey" Fremer's Vitus review: "Are you f***ing kidding me???"
For HP, the democracy of expanding the dynamic range DOWN by exploiting the magic of Transparency in home listening was beyond his limiting range of audio interests. I mean, he could have had it both ways to some extent, maybe make a 4x4 QUAD array, PER CHANNEL, like Mike Oldfield did during his "Tubular Bells". world tour. But that would require a listening room bigger than the nice Master bedroom that he listened in (or perhaps it was the smallish "living room" of his older home?). And to hear ALL those incredibly subtle things that he claimed that he did (and I do, at least, believe that he DID actually hear all those things & wasn't making them up; I hear virtually all the things he claimed about the gear that I also had the opportunity to audition), with gear that was ridiculously overblown in the bass & so incredibly veiled & opaque...he must have been sitting VERY close to those crappy speakers and needed all that hundreds & hundreds of tube watts to play it so incredibly LOUD! that he could tease those incredibly minute subtleties into his ears...
I admire the fortitude, just not the sheer VULGARITY of it!
And in the end, what did all his pithy observations about $100,000 turntables, $10,000 phono cartridges, $100,000 LOUTspeakers, and $50,000 amplifiers mean...to ME? Or 99.99% of the readership, never mind 99.99999999999% of music lovers at large?
What TRULY transformational, instructional, system-building knowledge did HP pass on to us during this lengthy 40-year "remarkable" career of his? I have most of the issues of TAS, pretty much from Issue 1, and NONE of them have any landmark, timeless, transcendental articles that you'd keep for any sort of reference purposes. The closest he got was when he hired Walt Bender of Audiomart to give his synopsis of the greatest vintage gear ever made & how it sounded. THE END.
No, TAS was not so much a repository of technical or musical information as it was a Component-of-the-Month Club buyer's guide for "Follow-The-Leader" types who chased after the LESSER dross that HP's junior reviewers wanked about. And as I've said previously, they weren't very good. Nor was the scheiss they raved about: Grado's defective cartridges (absolutely identical after all these years: they still hum due to improper shielding, still do the spastic unhappy-dance on even the most mildly warped records, still suck compared to $30 Shures), Dayton-Wright's LM-301 op-amp based miasma preamps & 70db efficient exploding electrostats, PS Audio and B&K's astonishingly dreadful preamps & amps, Marantz 500 & Fuzz-Linear firestarters, etc.
All eminently forgettable, none collectable like TRUE vintage is, and best forgotten when heard again...
Even Robert Harley, that epic schmuck & boundlessly-enthusiastic fountainhead of never-ending mindless hyperbole, who writes EXACTLY the one same review he's ALWAYS written since his tenure at Stereopiles back in the 80's, at least has written a book on putting a HiFi set together. Regardless of how bad or stupid it is (I haven't read it, my loss), at least he reached out to his readership to impart his supposed knowledge, such as it is (or mostly, is not...). And last I checked, he was intricately involved in writing a series of epic coffee-table books on the history, character & gear that was the beginnings of that term that HP himself thinks he invented, "The High End". Actually, Art Dudley's term "The Hind End" is far more apt & to the point, especially in HP's case. Only retailers need rejoice...
I believe that HP has passed no knowledge "down" to his readership in the last 40 years besides his huge pile of ephemeral product reviews PRECISELY because he doesn't, and never did, give a toss about any of his readers. They were, and continue to be, merely the vehicle to provide him with the hardware he could never otherwise afford, and the software collection that he bullshitted his way into vastly increasing by his deceptive drama of faking the damage done by the suspicious fire that consumed Sea Cliff all those years ago. LEST WE FORGET.
ALL his "precious" Shaded Dogs & Mercuries, DESTROYED by the fire!
Yeah right! First you settle the insurance claim (They're all a dead loss! I even said so in print so it MUST be true!), then what? An entire YEAR later, when all the cheques have been cashed, and all the gullible subscribers, with badly-misplaced sympathy, have over-replenished your stock of personal favourite "S(t)uperdiscs" many times over; and with multiple copies that are also in superior condition to the ones he EVER had, ONLY THEN do we learn that he never actually threw his poor, warped, fire-damaged collection away...no, it sat in his garage!
And somehow, we are supposed to believe that in that ENTIRE intervening year, he never pulled even ONE album out from any of his plastic sheet-covered racks, and all of a sudden...lo!
Many of the albums weren't damaged at all, and alot of others just suffered some water damage (and an even smaller number, some smoke), and the rack kept all the middle ones from warping from any(?) heat, and another pass through the record-cleaning machine fixed that!
Whoda thunk, hey?
And we gave Peter Aczel a hard time over his whole Fourier speaker fraud (never mind his rave-review of the Carver amp from the subsequent non-existent issue that dealers handed out to their customers).
As far as HP working for Stereopiles, I can see why JA wouldn't think it's a good idea. Too many crooks spoil the broth!
Oh, did I just say that?
Larry Archibald gives a bitter old drunken crank $5000 for his baby, brings in some dull-as-dishwater Englishman to hijack the Editing and turn his subjectivist & highly individual & heartfelt magazine into a modern parody of Julian Hirsch's Stereo Review (only with a better Audio Precision test equipment perpetual loan that might even embarrass HP with its stupendous duration), and JA...you REALLY don't think that might have had juuuuust a wee bit to do with why the little bastard was such a handful?
HP wouldn't work out because he's already been through having the editing hijacked from him, too. And he won't necessarily get all the audio toys he wants, and there probably isn't enough 0.5% of JA's 5% to go around for another editor-at-LARGE who's continually looking to hog the megaphone. And what an ignominious end to his career it would be. Imagine...HP writing for the newly-reinvented Stereos UnReviewed! No accident, that parent company Snorts Interstink, a.k.a. Zenith Acme Dishwater, also owns the Loud TV Sound...I mean, Home Theatre magazine that once was Julian Hirsch's alumnii?
Other than that, incest is best!
Why should the two surviving Hind-End Fraudio ragazines hire new writers when they do so well swapping their refugees from the Galloping Senility Ward back & forth with each other? We wouldn't want to break up the "Old Boys Club" now, would we? Har dee har har! Oh, was it really that long ago that Robert Harley was doing his best Wes Phillips BS over at 'Piles? Or that Robert Reina & Mike Fremer were doing it at the Absolute Slut? You're all so old now, who can remember?
And when all else fails and you can't get anyone to make that crosstown commute, give the mailroom staff a brief course is highly creative writing & then promote them(Neil Gader)?
Now where was I...
Do we really still care what happened to HP???

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