All the old issues of Stereo Review are online!!

We must be about the same age, @millercarbon. Discovering Gordon and his little digest-sized, bi-annual Stereophile in early ’72 changed my life. Seriously! I subscribed and ordered all the back issues, and after reading them all cover-to-cover bemoaned the fact that I had not discovered him and it sooner.

Harry Pearson liked to take credit for creating the "High End", only begrudgingly acknowledging that it was actually Gordon who pioneered professional, published, subjective reviewing. Gordon also knew his way around a circuit schematic, while Harry was completely technically ignorant. I witnessed Bill Johnson recounting the story of getting a call from Harry, to whom ARC had sent a new pre-amp for evaluation and review. Harry told Bill the pre was defective, but after some investigation Bill discovered that Harry had inserted shorting plugs into, not the unused input jacks of the pre, as are shorting plugs intended to be used, but into the pre’s OUTPUT jacks! Anyone that ignorant has no right to be expected to be taken seriously as a professional reviewer.

I finally saw Julian Hirsch in the flesh, at CES Vegas in the mid-or-late 90’s. He had his wife with him, and was walking the halls, looking rather sheepish and embarrassed. I got the distinct impression he was very aware of the contempt with which he was viewed by the other CES attendants, myself included.

@crimsoniter, I saw the Jeff Beck Group live in late-68, at either The Carousel Ballroom or Fillmore. I was stoked to finally hear Nicky Hopkins live (I later met and spoke with him in L.A. in ’81. Sweet guy, and one of the best English musicians of them all), not to mention Beck. I had loved Jeff’s playing in The Yardbirds, though some of the playing I liked was actually Eric Clapton, uncredited on the For Your Love album.

Anyway, as Jeff took off on a solo in one song, Rod Stewart wandered back to the rack of spare guitars, picking up one and strapping it on. He meandered back toward the front of the stage, strumming the guitar. Jeff noticed him, and immediately stopped playing. He watched Rod for a moment, a look of contempt crossing his face. Jeff then walked up to his mic and said, in a voice dripping with disgust, "The thing isn’t even plugged in. Bloody wanker." I couldn’t agree more. After The Jeff Beck Group, Stewart went on to ruin The Small Faces. Helping him with that endeavor was another wanker from The Jeff Beck Group, Ronnie Wood.

I grew up with and subscribed to Stereo Review, High Fidelity, and Audio magazines, and avidly read Stereophile, TAS, IAR, Sensible Sound publications, etc. when they arrived on the scene.  I have, for years, heard and read many vilifications of Julian Hirsch and other reviewers that based most of their reviews on technical measurements - and now read that they ruined audio for years.  In my opinion, the position of those that unbendingly criticize the approach are no more (and likely less) accurate in their assessment of these reviews than H-H Labs was of the reviewed equipment.  See, for instance, the quote below from Stereo Review's review of the Philips RH 532 speaker in the March, 1975 issue. 

LarryRS

"We are aware that even experienced listeners can become accustomed to the specific sound idiosyncracies of any speaker that overall is reasonably accurate - and then to accept its particular qualities as the "norm." We are also aware that among experienced listeners judgments may differ when they are asked to select "the best" among a number of excellent, but slightly different-sounding, speakers. Since the audible bass quality of the Philips speaker is distinctly different from that of the other fine speakers we had at hand, we solicited the reactions of other members of STEREO REVIEW'S technical staff. By and large, there was general agreement that the overall sound from the RH 532 was as smooth and uncolored as anything any of us had ever heard. The disagreements, as expected, centered almost entirely on the quality of the system's bass performance. Whereas H-H Labs found the Philips to have an accurate, tight, and absolutely boom-free bass, other members of STEREO REVIEW'S technical staff, auditioning the system in different acoustic environments, judged the bass to be clean, but thin and lacking robustness or warmth. (H-H's view is that the "lack" of bass warmth is simply an absence of spurious upper -bass resonances.) There was, however, general agreement that the speaker did not deliver much output in the very lowest bass octaves, nor could it play rock at discotheque sound levels. 

In summation, there is no question that the Philips RH 532 is a high -quality, high -accuracy reproducer with a particularly smooth, flat, and extended mid-range and high -frequency response. The quality - not quantity - of the bass may particularly appeal to some listeners (as it did to us) and perhaps disappoint others. The choice then becomes a matter of taste. But if your taste in bass performance agrees with that of H-H Labs, you'll love the Philips RH 532." 

Hirsch was a member of the WWII-generation electronic engineers, working in the field right at the dawn of the high fidelity boom of the 1950’s. That generation of engineers operated under the presumption that low measured distortion was synonymous with high fidelity sound. Ergo, the lower the measured distortion, the better the component. And the numbers race was on!

Design engineers had as early as the late-40’s discovered that applying negative feedback to a circuit would reduce it’s measured distortion specs, and the more feedback that was applied, the lower was the measured distortion. Again, the presumption was that lower measured distortion resulted in better sound. But did it? Is not that presumption a form of subjective reviewing? ;-)

In the 1970’s, Finnish researcher Matti Otala identified a "new" form of distortion, one he named T.M.I. (Transient Modulation Distortion). He discovered that, while negative feedback reduced the measured harmonic distortion in an amplifier when it was fed a static signal, that feedback actually INCREASED its’ T.M.I. stats, especially with a dynamic (non-static) signal. Which sounds worse, harmonic distortion, or T.M.I.?

Is has long been said that if a component measures good but sounds bad, it is bad. How can a component which measures good sound bad? Ralph Karsten has been telling us all here that different distortion envelopes exhibit different sound characteristics. Julian Hirsch, trained in traditional electronic measurement techniques, didn’t know what to make of the findings of Matti Otala’s research, so simply ignored them. As Bill Johnson was saying way back in the 1970’s, "They’re measuring the wrong things".

J. Gordon Holt was working as Technical Editor at High Fidelity magazine, doing their measurements and describing in his reviews in the mag the sound of the components he was measuring. Unlike Julian Hirsch, who was trained only in traditional electronic lab work, Gordon was not just an ee, but also an avid concert-goer, and a recording engineer. When his comments critical of the sound he heard coming out of the products he was evaluating for High Fidelity were published in the mag, the companys that made those products complained to the mag’s owners, who relied on the advertising revenues generated by those companys to make the mag profitable. Gordon was told to "go easy" (basically to leave out anything "wrong" he found in any component), so he quit High Fidelity and started Stereophile. And so was born the High End!

Gordon measured the products he reviewed in his new magazine, but those measurements did not supersede the sound quality provided by them. He knew measurements only reveal certain aspects of a products sound quality, those measurements far too crude to reveal what a trained ear can hear. And Gordon’s ears were VERY trained. Julian Hirsch’s ears, not so much. He was a traditional electronic engineer (pejoratively labeled "meter readers"), not an audiophile critic, those trained and experienced at detecting subtle differences between competing components. My God, Hirsch gave a rave review to the Bose 901. Gordon panned them. Harshly. He reserved his praise for the Quad and KLH electrostatics, and was the first to review the products from a small new company owned by the designer of its' products, Audio Research Corporation. Bill Johnson, the man who started the high end revolution! As celebrated in Stereophile, and ignored by Hirsch in Stereo Review. Tubes? In 1971?! You gotta be kidding! ;-)

and then the Benchmark AHB2 came along; Julian is looking down and smiling........... "i told ya".

Stereo Review, a business model that speaks more to people who do not buy hi-fi, then to those of us who do. Their dry objectivist approach is exactly what HEA buyers don’t want.

Yours in music,

Ted Denney III

Lead Designer/CEO Synergistic Research Inc.