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In Reply to: HP is an easy taget... posted by mkuller on February 24, 2007 at 11:14:46:
Hi Mike:I believe it was J. Gordon Holt. Gordon started Stereophile years before TAS. He was the first to focus reviews on high end products, i.e., those seeking faithful music reproduction, as opposed to general consumer audio products. He also created the initial lexicon of high end product reviewer's language. From what I remember reading, Pearson once acknowledged his debt to Holt. HP's objective in starting up TAS was to produce a better and more frequent publication. It's interesting the paths both publications have taken since then.
Also, the concept of creating high end audio begs the chicken VS egg question. Was it writers like Holt and Pearson or designers/manufacturers like Klipsch, Villchur, Marantz, McIntosh, etc.?
Follow Ups:
...where did you first hear about:
Infinity Speakers
Audio Research Corporation
Magnaplanar
conrad-johnsonHP claims he coined the term 'high-end' and has it copywrited/trademarked.
> I believe it was J. Gordon Holt.>
He was the first to publish 'observational listening reviews' and to begin developing a vocabulary to describe what he heard.
> Also, the concept of creating high end audio begs the chicken VS egg question.>
.
"...where did you first hear about:
Infinity Speakers
Audio Research Corporation
Magnaplanar
conrad-johnson"In hi-fi stores.
The term "high-end" is typical market-speak bullshit and if HP coined it he did us no favor.
I think old HP is a very perceptive and interesting writer on movies. When he stopped writing in Perfect Vision I stopped buying it.
Listen to track 5 of stereophile Test CD #1 where Holt reads his article published in Stereophile way back in 1963.
I was a charter subscriber to TAS and for the first few years I read and enjoyed it as an addition to Stereophile.However, your "test" looses on at least 3 out of 4 counts. I happen to have a duplicate copy of Stereophile, #2-71, identified as Late Summer 1971, with my handwritten note I received it in July '71 (unfortunately I sold my first several years' issues some time ago). The Recommended Components list in that issue includes:
Audio Research SP-2c preamp
Infinity preamp
Audio Research Dual-50D amp
Infinity SS-I speakers
Infinity 2000A speakersIn addition, "Quickies" reviews include the Infinity 2000A, and Audio Research SP-2C and Dual-50D with full reviews promised for the next issue. Under "Miscellany", there is discussion of a new Audio Research speaker, a magnetic system that behaves like an electrostatic and uses large-area ultra-light-weight Mylar sheets as radiators. Many of us elder audiophiles know the original Magnaplanar speakers were distributed by ARC and sold under their name. So, here is J. Gordon reviewing or introducing three products out of four from your evidence list two years prior to Volume 1, Issue 1 of TAS. I'm not certain but I don't believe C-J existed at that point in time.
While I will acknowledge that HP initiated many factors of high end product reviewing, I will not concede that he created high end audio - except perhaps in his own mind.
...Infinity 2000A speaker in Stereo Review in about 1972.Julian Hirsch gave it an A-.
That doesn't mean he had anything to do with the creation of High End audio.
Perhaps 'raising audiphile's awarenes of High End audio' is more descriptive of what HP and TAS did.
I knew about Audio Research long before the Absolute Sound started publishing. I owned one of William Johnson's modified Dynaco PAS-3xs (wish I still had it) when he was still operating as Electronics Industries (I think I am remembering that correctly). And I heard the Maggie T-1Us at my local dealer, Douglas Dynamics, before the Absolute Sound mentioned Magneplanar. As has been noted J Gordon Holt did cover much of this stuff first.
HP may want to believe that he invented high-end but it just isn't so.
I can't claim to have heard them all at the time of their original release but to me high-end started with the Quad ESL-57, Marantz 7/8B/9/10B series, the KLH 9s, HK Citation 1 & 2, etc. The dance had already started long before The Absolute Sound started publishing.
HP claims he coined the term 'high-end' and has it copywrited/trademarked.
And in TAS' copyright notice, it used to say " Not one word " of The Abso!ute Sound may be used without permission...
You can't copyright a simple word of prhase, and he wouldn't be able to trademark it unless he'd say, named the magazine High-End or used it as an advertising slogan or somesuch.
"Bullshit" --Used without permission of The Abso!ute Sound
se
Good for you! I have always thought that phrase 'not one word' was totally nonsensical.
I dunno, Mike. First time I saw "Stereophile" was 1969.Was TAS in business then? Obviously, if it was, I didn't know about it; not that that means a whole lot.
...until about 1973.So what?
Did you read about any of those brands in Stereophile in the 1970s?
So what? Those of us reading Stereophile in the early days learned plenty--plenty--that we never heard in the existing mags of the day AND that we never really saw discussions of in the AS when he did start it. No comparison.
At the time, I was also an avid reader of Stereo Review, High Fidelity and, occasionally, "Audio."By and large, the equipment reviewers for those magainzes focused exclusively on "the numbers." If "the numbers" were good, these guys said, "Wow! Terrific numbers! Sounds good, too." There was a tremendous reticence, a distrust really, by those reviewers to use their own ears. They used their ears, if at all, to validate the measurements. I think that's backwards.
JGH and the boys, of course, started out without any numbers at all; they just listened.
If you want a great illustration of what I'm talking about, compare JGH's review of the Bose 901 with Julian Hirsch's. (I've read both.) Here's a really unorthodox approach to speaker design but, frankly, Hirsch tells you very, very little about how it sounds say, in comparison to an AR-3A, a "conventional" speaker of good reputation at about the same price. And even he admits that his "numbers" don't mean much. JGH does a good job of describing the speaker's sound. (Yeah, I also heard the 901 in 1968 or 1969; although it was "ahead of its time" in that its aggressive equalization in the bass range required more drive than the amplifiers of the time could deliver.)
I do like the fact that Stereophile measures things. But I think they have their priority straight; listen first, then measure.
I'm really uninterested in whether HP first "discovered" Audio Research Corp., Magnepan, etc. BFD. For one thing, if TAS didn't start until 1973, I beat them to the punch on those brands. First time I knew about Magneplanars (driven by ARC electronics) was when I heard them in 1972, in Baltimore where I was a TA at Johns Hopkins. And yes, they were a "revelation."
nt
Usually one of the ways for grad students to earn money.
Your 'simple test' is confusing. But my 'answers' are that I first heard of those mfgs in Stereophile, but I didn't read TAS at its beginning. Holt started the whole thing. Who cares who coined the term 'high end'. Pearson used Holt as a model in part because Holt couldn't hold to a steady publishing schedule and, I believe, Pearson came out of the publishing business.
> ...I believe, Pearson came out of the publishing business.>IIRC, HP was the environmental reporter for Newsday on Long Island before he left to found TAS.
As I've mentioned before, it was Dick Hardesty, ironically, through his high end boutique in Huntington Beach,CA who first showed me high end audio and introduced me to TAS in about 1976.
I subscribed to TAS with issue #7 (and ordered back issues) and read Stereophile from time to time. They were very different publications.
Stereophile was nearly a one man operation. Holt wrote interesting stuff but in comparison his magazine seemed very amateur.
TAS on the other hand wrote about the High End equipment and their designers - Nudell, Johnson, Winey, Dahlquist, Marantz, Levinson and the rest - and really made it all come alive. HP and his writers had strong personalities, just like the designers, and it made for compelling reading and many times drama.
So it was TAS that first really exposed me - and many other audiophiles to High End audio in the mid to late 1970s, when it was beginnnig to become a force.
Just because your particular individual experience may have been different doesn't change what HP and TAS accomplished.
Well, there's YOUR personal individual experience and MY individual experience and how it is that your PIE defines anything about what HP "accomplished" is a mystery to me in light of the last sentence of your post. JGH was there first and best. Neither mag is what it used to be, but HP is still writing in the back pages of the AS and I think the only way he can do that is to totally ignore what's in the rest of "his" former mag.
< < I think the only way he can do that is to totally ignore what's in the rest of "his" former mag. > >
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