what's your opinion on the magazine 'stereo review'??

I read Stereo Review for years and really learned a lot. Most of which unfortunately turned out to be wrong. At the time it seemed I was learning. Only years later did I come to understand just how great a disservice the Stereo Review philosophy had done. 

Julian Hirsch was just dead wrong to say all you need to know about wire is gauge. Wrong to say measurements like watts matter. Wrong about one thing after another. Which J Gordon Holt came along and corrected. The listener is the final arbiter of performance. Stereophile won. Stereo Review, RIP.

The one thing I did learn was the distinction between the music, the performance, and the recording. Three very different yet closely related and easily conflated things. To this day this eludes many audiophiles. Yet it was a regular feature of all their music reviews. So on balance not as bad as it could have been.

It is funny though that a magazine whose primary duty is evaluating stereo equipment did so poorly at that but then did much better at the side gig of reviewing music. But that's the thing I guess about nostalgia- we get to decide to view it clearly, or through rose colored glasses.

I'll end on a positive note: great cartoons.

My dad had a subscription to the rag when it was still Hi Fi review, and I read the thing religiously from about age eight to my late teenage years. But yes, it was a total revelation when somebody turned me on to The Absolute Sound.  Wow, they're actually discussing the fidelity the components rendered, not just giving the specs!  I think it was TAS that lampooned the Hirsch-Hauck test report style with the closing line, "Of all the components we have tested, this has certainly been one of them."

Julien Hirsch who reviewed all the equipment in Stereo Review said openly that all amps that measure the same, sound the same.  Let that sink in.  He did more to damage our hobby then help it because of his narrow minded beliefs. 

I kind of agree with Julian Hirsch now that I think about it. Most amps sound equally bad. Am I allowed to say that? I also think he was probably open-minded. Just because someone expresses an opinion you don’t agree with doesn’t necessarily make that person narrow-minded. 

Julian Hirsch who reviewed all the equipment in Stereo Review said openly that all amps that measure the same, sound the same. Let that sink in. He did more to damage our hobby then help it because of his narrow minded beliefs.

Right. Because of this one dim old POC I missed out on years and years of audio improvement. Even when I finally built my Listening Room, because of him it took me a good two years to figure out just how dead wrong he was.

Because of him I brought my Magnavox CDB 650 to Definitive to compare, because he had told me they all sound the same. Because of him I did the same with a Dynaco ST400. And do you have any idea how much work that was, dragging that thing around? But I take my sound quality seriously. When I did the same with a patch cord and heard how much better even a cheap interconnect can be that was it.

Even today, just look how many poor misguided souls still don’t get the importance of wire. The importance of listening- and of learning to listen! Even today, just look around, all the poor lost souls, mindless as any zombie, trudging blindly along only instead of brains brains their vocabulary is full of equally vacuous tech word salad. This is all the legacy of Julian Hirsch. Haunts us to this very day.

I kind of agree with Julian Hirsch now that I think about it.

The final nail.