Stereophile Nov-13

The Death of an Audiophile Thanksgiving will mark two years since Charles died. I still miss him. I first met Charles in the 1990s, around the time I began to review recordings and audio equipment. I had just left my apartment and was driving slowly down the street when I spied a somewhat bent-over, wizened-looking man carrying a copy of Stereophile under his arm. My astonishment at discovering another Stereophile reader whom, it turned out, lived just two buildings away, brought my car to a sudden halt. I opened my window. “You read Stereophile?” I exclaimed. “Why, yes, I do,” replied Charles, with that curious mixture of intellectual engagement, hauteur, and combative distance that I was soon to know too well. So began our friendship. One of the many things…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR Matters of faith Editor: Just as there are “science-driven” know-nothings, there are also faith-driven ones. If you don’t have measurements of some double-blind testing, it’s faith (or maybe expectation) that drives what you think you hear. Subjectivists have turned audiophilia into a faith-based religion. Also, the name-calling by one of the magazine’s senior writers (“Analog Corner,” September 2013, p.27) is juvenile. —Harold Lay hlay37@hotmail.com Matters of proportion Editor: Was the photo of the Bowers & Wilkins 804 Diamond loudspeaker on the cover of the September issue purposefully altered to exaggerate the tweeter? If so, that’s pretty lame. If not, you owe B&W an apology, and all of your readers a new cover with a photo of the speaker in proper proportion. When I first saw this,…

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO John Atkinson It saddens me to write that Debbie Starr, Stereophile’s managing editor from March 1996 through March 2000, died Sunday, August 25, at her sister Ellen’s house, near San Diego, after a brief fight with cancer. Debbie did much to make the magazine what it is today; she even wrote all the new text that we published in the April and October 1999 and April 2000 editions of “Recommended Components.” Perhaps because she wasn’t distracted by being an audiophile, she excelled at extracting the meat of an equipment review in the fewest words. Music did play an important role in Debbie’s life—the Austin Lounge Lizards were her favorite band—but her first love was plants and gardens. Before joining Stereophile, she had been the executive editor…

ATTENTION ALLStereophile website devoted to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@vcable.us. Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless this is associated with a seminar or similar event. ARIZONA ▪ Wednesday, November 27, 7pm: The Arizona Audio-Video Club will hold its Beautiful Sound of Analog event at Record High in Phoenix (4242 E. University Drive, Phoenix). For more info, visit www.azavclub.org, or contact Adam Goldfine at (602) 524-3974 or goldfineam@aol.com. CALIFORNIA ▪ Sunday, October 20, 2–5pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting at Weinhart Design (2337 Roscomare Road, Los Angeles). Featured gear will include Harmonic Technology’s newest line of cables,…

I’m Back! Did you miss the Berlin Radio Show of August 1963? I did, too. That’s when Philips introduced the Compact Cassette, aka the audio cassette.1 The man who led the development team, Lou Ottens, is still very much alive at 87. The Compact Cassette caught on quickly for business and education. Journalism, too. On campus, language labs latched on to the high-quality cassette decks made, ever so briefly, by Wollensak, a US company then owned by 3M, who made audiotape. Few foresaw that the audio cassette might morph into a serious hi-fi format that would almost lick the LP. People used cassette machines to record concerts and bootleg tapes. Students recorded lectures. Teachers had the players read to their kids while they nattered among themselves. Hi-fi pioneer and populist…

Rega’s RP8 turntable aims for mass extinction Rega Research sold more turntables last year than in any of its previous 40-odd years of business, and is on target to do so again this year. How many turntables is that? I know but can’t yet say. Rega, along with most major makers of audiophile turntables, is participating in an ongoing project I’ve undertaken that I hope will reveal the true depth of the vinyl resurgence by counting the production of turntables, cartridges, and vinyl records industry-wide. So far, on the hardware side, only the purveyors of plastic turntables have balked. And while those sales numbers are high (probably higher than all of the audiophile manufacturers’ sales combined), the aggregated numbers so far reported are impressive, and beyond my most optimistic imaginings.…