Discovering J. Gordon Holt and his Stereophile magazine in 1972 changed my life. Bye bye Stereo Review and High Fidelity, but I kept reading Audio Magazine for it’s entire history. Gordon provided me with the basis tenants of high fidelity music reproduction, how components are examined and evaluated, along with the vocabulary with which that endeavor is described.
Gordon and his mag (founded in 1962) were the first of their kind (and the only of their kind for over a decade, until Harry Person started The Absolute Sound in ’73): "subjective" reviews, components evaluated by listening to them in addition to measuring them. For years Gordon was the lone reviewer in the mag, and he published plenty of negative and mixed-reviews.
Gordon sold the mag to Larry Archibald in 1982, who expanded the mag by hiring other reviewers and eventually bringing John Atkinson over from his editor job at the UK Mag Hi-Fi News & Record Review. John not only became Stereophile’s editor, but also took over from Thomas J. Norton the bench testing of the components being reviewed in the mag. Those bench tests are about the only of their kind in the world of subjective hi-fi publications, and imo are alone worth the price of a yearly subscription
Gordon eventually left Stereophile, but before doing so had hired and tutored a guy named Steven Stone, who has written for not only Stereophile but also TAS and Future Audiophile. He was and remains a credible-to-me source of hi-fi evaluation.
But there was another hi-fi figure who became an important source of opinion for me: Art Dudley. Art worked for Harry Pearson at TAS for as long as he could stand, then left and started his own digest-sized mag, the unique Listener Magazine. I have a complete collection of Listener, and though disappointed when he folded the mag, I was delighted when he signed on at Stereophile. In my opinion Art was (as you probably know, he passed away in 2020) the most interesting hi-fi critic alive, and his death created a huge hole in the hi-fi world. His good friend Herb Reichert is doing his best to fill Art’s shoes, and is himself a very interesting writer (and colorful character!).