Every month Stereophile magazine offers authoritative reviews, informed recommendations, helpful advice, and controversial opinions, all stemming from the revolutionary idea that audio components should be judged on how they reproduce music.
I remember, though not well, when I acquired my first “10-speed” bike. My parents bought it for me at Sears. It cost about $100. It had a white frame with red and blue accents. It replaced one of those super-fun high-handlebar, banana-seat bikes some folks reminisce about. An early memory of the Sears bike is me backpedaling furiously approaching a sturdy mailbox. Ten-speed bikes don’t have coaster brakes. I’ve still got a scar to prove it. That would have been around 1978. Taking inflation into account, that bike would cost about $400 today. Sure, it was possible then to pay much more—Tour de France riders were not riding on bikes from Sears—but for regular folks at least, the luxury end of the road-bike market didn’t really exist back then. Today,…
Final delivery Please pass my compliments on to Rogier van Bakel for the masterful article “Final Delivery.” (My Back Pages, August 2025). I’ve been reading Stereophile for more than 25 years, and I don’t recall ever being this affected by something in your magazine. I went back and read some of his other pieces. The one about what happened to Ken Fritz’s million-dollar stereo was really insightful, and the funny column about fourcent cigars gave me much food for thought. Another standout is Alex Halberstadt. It’s remarkable that probably the two best writers at your magazine grew up thousands of miles from the US and didn’t learn English until later in life! Stereophile is the only hi-fi publication I know that hires writers of this caliber. They go far beyond…
ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, email Chris Vogel at vgl@cfl.rr.com. United States CALIFORNIA ■ Saturday, August 23, 2025, 2–5pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society brings back the McIntosh Amplifier Clinic to The Source AV Design Group in Torrance, CA (3035 Kashiwa St.), hosted by Jason Lord. Members and guests may bring in their McIntosh gear of any vintage and receive a free test report of current performance. McIntosh-certified technicians will perform all work. While awaiting the test results, McIntosh factory personnel will be on hand to demonstrate the latest McIntosh equipment. Complimentary lunch will be served at 2pm followed by a raffle. Parking is…
HIGH END VIENNA 2026 RESCHEDULED FOR JUNE 4–7, 2026 Mark Henninger High End Society has postponed the inaugural Vienna edition of its international audio trade show by a week, citing a scheduling conflict with the Eurovision Song Contest, which the European Broadcasting Union will stage in Austria in late May 2026. The show will now run June 4–7, 2026, at the Austria Center Vienna; it had previously been set for 28–31 May. This will be the first year for the event in Vienna following 21 years at Munich’s MOC Event Center. The Eurovision Song Contest is expected to attract some 500,000 visitors, which was likely to strain local transport and hotel capacity. “To ensure a smooth experience for exhibitors, trade visitors, and the public, we have decided—after thorough consideration—to move…
My Russian neighbor Alex forges ax heads and smokes pig chests 5' from my bedroom window. At 2:00am, shirtless, in February. One especially cold night, I woke up to the sounds of hammering and loud music. When I looked out, Alex was blacksmithing a glowing red meat cleaver blade, with Rachmaninoff plays Rachmaninoff blaring from a cassette in his boom box. I once helped him break into a white-painted chest-high office safe that he bought at auction. After grinding the tips off a dozen long drill bits, we could see inside through a little hole, and there was nothing in it. No metals dealers would haul it away, so we dug a hole by the backyard fence and rolled it in. Unfortunately, the hole wasn’t deep enough, so now, years…
I think art is the only political power,” the artist Joseph Beuys once said. If only it were true. Often, when power is wielded against an entire people with enough brutality and efficiency, it reduces the culture to a sickening silence, leaving room only for state-sponsored propaganda. Think of the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Germany during the Third Reich. But in other, rarer cases, repression is met with an efflorescence of great art, like a charred field welling up into a riot of wildflowers. Consider what happened in Brazil. In 1964, that country’s armed forces overthrew the leftist president, João Goulart. The plotters’ muscle was provided by the US Navy, Air Force, and the CIA, which aided the coup as part of a clandestine operation known as Brother Sam.…
