The term "High End" needs to die. Long live Hi-Fidelity!

bdp24

Audio magazine was great, the only U.S.A. "news stand" hi-fi mag during the 70's and beyond I had any use for ...

Audio was a great magazine and had an excellent staff, including Edward Tatnall Canby, Joseph Giovanelli and Bert White. Later, Dick Heyser and Tony Cordesman. Editor Gene Pitts now edits The Audiophile Voice. White was exceptionally good and very much on the leading edge of subjective audio reviewing - the very opposite of the Julian Hirsch/Stereo Review model. Even then, he slayed a few of the classic audio canards - such as that all bass is mono - and he helped expose the poor engineering and marketing behind early quad audio. He also made his own recordings and encouraged others to do the same. (Of course, few audiophiles do make their own recordings, and that often explains their enduring dissatisfaction and confusion about what at audio system can do.)

But changing the word won’t eliminate the snobs!

The term also associates with the 70s. Panel speakers and (the slow) return of tubes. In short, backwards technology.

Yes, solid-state had problems. But if more people tried to figure it out (like Quad and Pass), instead of going the easy-path of retro, audio would have advanced much faster than it did.

Horns too were not perfect. But why go backwards with flimsy membranes, that radiated all over the room ? Panels are not truly-directional as many believe.

Pearson hurt us even more, with his (totally) anti-science magazine. More known for his editorials, tiffs with reader’s letters and pictures of New York than hard audio-science.

Audio is advancing faster today because we keep moving further and further away from the 70s....

@jonnie22, a plausible argument but are you sure that,

“Audio is advancing faster today because we keep moving further and further away from the 70s....”?

I would argue that it’s more of a merry go round. What comes around.. goes around. I don’t believe that there can be any advance until the recording industry decides that recording fidelity matters.

Currently there is no indication that fidelity matters more today than it did back in the fifties. Recordings today benefit or suffer from far more jiggery poker than they ever did back in the days of those wonderful ‘50s Capitol recordings. Fidelity is not even an issue today, it’s all about effect.

So you can play your mainstream music on any million dollar system you want but all you’ll hear better are what effects were used.

For most purposes, as things stand, chasing audio fidelity is a fools errand. True mainstream audiophile quality recordings are desperately thin on the ground, as any visitor to a show will readily discover.

I'm clearly referring to playback...