Why not horns?

Thanks for the info Kiddman.

I was never under the impression that HP or JGH ever claimed that they were the first to use these terms, I felt that they were the ones who picked them up and started using them consistently and made efforts to let us know how they were using them and if HP ever bragged about it, it wasn't about inventing the terms, it was about using them consistently in his reviews. In other words, they were the first who started drilling into the readers a point of view stating "hey, here's how we listen to equipment and these are the terms and definitions of the words we use."

There is no question in my mind that people were talking about image placement or soundstage concepts before the first issue of Stereophile or TAS. I remember being a kid and my father playing records and pointing out the placements of the different sections of the orchestra while the record was playing.

Before JGH and HP, I can't remember any reviewer who was consistently describing what they were hearing from audio equipment in terms imaging, depth, soundstaging and transparency and if there was someone consistently reviewing this way before HP and JGH, then they should be given credit.

My memory of reviewing before HP/JGH back then was that it was all about how everything measured on the bench and then at the end of the review there's be a few generic sentences about how the sound was clean and fine, just as it measured, or if their was an anomaly in the measurements, a statement about the sound to support that anomaly.

What do you think; were HP and JGH the first mainstream writers to consistently review this way, or were others reviewing like this earlier?

Seikosha,
Nicely put! I don't intend to overstate the influence of HP and JGH but they did bring subjective opinion/reviewing to a wide audience of readers. They weren't "all knowing gurus" but I'll give them their due credit.
Charles,

03-06-14: Kiddman
Aczel criticism overblown? I don't know that this would be possible.

Here's a guy who never published a particular issue, but write a bogus review for Carver saying that Carver had exactly duplicated the sound of a well known, very expensive amplifier. Nice little arrangement, Carver reprinted the excerpt from the non-existent issue and supplied them by the load to Carver dealers. Nice little bit of fraud on both sides. The amp, by the way, was very poor sounding compared to one Aczel said it was identical to, and took out many a tweeter of relatively easy to drive speakers at way less than its stated output power.

The aforesaid review was in fact eventually published, in Issue 10 in 1987. That was the first issue Aczel published following the nearly seven year hiatus I referred to earlier. The 1983 review "preprint" to which you refer was extracted from what Aczel indicated in Issue 10 had been an almost complete, mostly set in type issue which was not published due to the hiatus, which occurred for unrelated reasons. Carver requested and was granted permission to issue the preprint.

Also, I recall some seemingly credible speculation that the close transfer function match between the aforesaid amplifier, the Carver M400t, and the transfer function of the Mark Levinson ML2 it was designed to emulate, may not have been maintained in production to anywhere close to the same degree as the match that was measured by Aczel on Carver's prototype.

Also, I'll mention that I owned an M400t for about 20 years, alternating it with other much more expensive amplifiers. It sounded surprisingly good, driving 90 db speakers having easy to drive impedance characteristics. (Its predecessor model which I VERY briefly owned, the M400a, which pre-dated Carver's attempt to match the transfer function of the ML2, did sound very poor). The M400t had no trouble whatsoever cleanly producing 100 to 105 db peaks at my 12 foot listening distance playing classical symphonic music on labels such as Telarc, Sheffield, and Reference Recordings. It never clipped once in my extensive experience listening to those kinds recordings having exceptionally wide dynamic range. The amplifier, btw, is still going strong in the home of a relative, after 30 years.

Regards,
-- Al

Correction to my previous post: Looking at Issue 10 of "The Audio Critic" I am reminded that the Carver amplifier which was the subject of the preprint was the M-1.5t. The M400t was released subsequently, and was claimed to have been similarly matched to emulate the transfer function of the ML2, but was not the subject of Aczel's preprint.

Regards,
-- Al