Your Editor, Revealed 

An Unprecedented Interview

Editor’s Note: The following interview was conceived, produced, and edited by a longtime subscriber to The Audio Critic who wishes to remain anonymous. It was conducted by e-mail over a period of a few weeks in March/April 2006. The questions were entirely the interviewer’s choice; your Editor merely answered them as best he could.

In 1977 I came across an advertisement within the pages of the erstwhile Audio magazine, an advertisement for a new audio publication promising reviews of high-end gear based on a kind of technical competence not found elsewhere. The price seemed high, but who could resist? I sent my check never expecting that, almost 30 years later, I’d still be reading. Over the years I purchased equipment based upon the Editor’s recommendations, never dissatisfied. And over the years, although the format changed, editorial standards set forth for all to read in Volume 1, Number 1 were maintained. Equipment reviews were factual, and presented with a unique and literate flair not found elsewhere. As time passed I often wondered about the man responsible for The Audio Critic. I knew what he thought about audio but I never really knew much about him as an individual—that is, his background and the thinking leading him to publish The Audio Critic. In any case, my own thinking evolved as I read the Editor’s writing, and the writings of his contributors.

After reading his musings on the audio scene as he reflected upon what it all meant, especially in anticipation of his 80th birthday, I decided to track him down. My idea was that, to commemorate his birthday, he ought to put down in his own words his personal story for the benefit of his readers. Once I’d caught up with him he told me he was, frankly, not interested. His view was that The Audio Critic’s purpose was to highlight the audio scene. It was about music, the equipment we use, and the technology. It was not about him. Nevertheless, I was persistent—more persistent than I had a right to be—and he finally decided to give it a go. Thus it is, after all these years, we finally have our Editor, Peter Aczel, the man, in his own words, and within his own pages.

Finally, a brief disclaimer regarding what you are about to read: I am no technologist, nor am I associated with anything or anyone related to the audio industry. I am simply a longtime subscriber. The questions are my own, and the Editor had no input or foreknowledge about what I asked. However, he candidly answered whatever I put to him. The questions cover a variety of topics and, while they may not be questions you would ask, they were questions that, for me, I always wanted to ask.

Q. Some time ago you published a very funny cartoon that, in many ways, captured the irony of the hi-fi scene. It featured an audiophile with a very expensive “high-end tweako” system demonstrating it to a music-loving acquaintance. After the listening session ended, the gearhead wanted to know his friend’s opinion. The music lover thought a minute, then replied, “He conducts it a lot faster than Bernstein, doesn’t he?” Since oftentimes the music seems to take a back seat to the equipment, but since the music is really what our hobby is all about, I thought it might be best to begin by asking you about your early musical influences.

A. When I was eight years old, in Hungary, my mother decided I should have piano lessons. She sent me to a minor-league concert-pianist lady (the mother of one of my elementary-school classmates, actually), who turned out to be an unpleasant and unpersuasive teacher. I hated every minute of it. I was then switched to an amateur pianist lady, who was on the other hand a wonderful teacher. She had me playing simple pieces by Schumann and Bartók (this was in the mid-’30s!) in no time. She even took me to a children’s concert where a women’s chamber orchestra played Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Béla Bartók himself played some of his Hungarian folk-song arrangements on the piano. No big deal, just one of the two greatest composers of the 20th century noodling around on the piano to entertain the kids. (The other, Igor Stravinsky, was I am sure too stuck-up to have done the same. Besides, Bartók was also a world-class pianist; Stravinsky wasn’t.) By then I was hooked on music for life. By the time I left Hungary for the USA at the age of 13, I had been to the opera numerous times and tried to catch every classical-music broadcast on the radio. In the USA I started to collect 78-rpm shellac records, sporadically paid for out of my very meager allowance and played on an absolutely miserable portable phonograph with steel needles. At 16, my favorites were Wagner’s “Magic Fire” (Philadelphia/Stokowski) and Beethoven’s Op. 132 string quartet (Budapest Quartet). From there on, my musical development was more or less inevitable.

Today, a child not only attending the opera but enjoying it, is a bit out of the ordinary. Was this kind of “classical education” typical at the time? Also, were there any particular performances that made a lasting impression on you?

It wasn’t altogether typical, but there were a lot more kids who enjoyed classical music than in today’s hip-hop generation in America. Among the performances I remember, there was a Rigoletto with the almost forgotten world-class tenor Kálmán Pataky singing the Duke, and of course the Béla Bartók concert I have already talked about.

You came to the US in the late ’30s? Was this due to the political situation in Europe?

Yes and no. My father was the managing editor of a liberal daily newspaper in Budapest (not excessively left-wing, actually). When Hitler occupied Austria in 1938, he said, “This is it, it’s all over for Europe.” We had a good life and could have stayed there for a number of years, but he decided, with a good deal of prescience, to take the family to the United States, where he had sisters living since the 1920s. In 1944, after the Germans had occupied an insufficiently cooperative Hungary, the Hungarian Nazi thugs had free reign and turned the country into a nightmare. The entire staff of my father’s not-very-left-wing newspaper, without exception, ended up in a concentration camp. It wasn’t a death camp, and they all came back after the war, but most of them were walking skeletons. So my father ended up having been right, and how!

Most audiophiles recall the first time they heard hi-fi sound. It is usually a defining moment and one that sets in motion a desire to pursue the hobby. Can you tell us about the first time you experienced high fidelity sound, and what impression this had on you?

It was in 1948, when I was 22. I went to an electronics show in New York and heard an early Magnecord tape recorder play a live recording of the Air Force Band through an Altec Lansing theater speaker. I was blown away. The sound had real-life dynamics and harmonic detail. I hadn’t thought until then that this was possible. Again, the consequences were inevitable.

What about your first stereo system?

I go much further back than the dawn of stereo. My first mono system was assembled in 1948 (shortly after the New York show experience) and consisted of an 8-inch Altec Lansing full-range speaker in a bass-reflex enclosure, a 10-watt all-triode amplifier designed by Consumer Research (the now-extinct rival of Consumers Union), a Meissner FM tuner (ever heard of it?), and a cheap record changer with an Astatic crystal pickup. I tried to figure out whether the dimensions of the ready-made bass-reflex enclosure were correct for the Altec Lansing driver; they seemed to be close according to the rudimentary Novak formulas (Thiele-Small came much later).

As a kid, were you an electronic tinkerer? Did you take things apart in order to see how they worked?

No, I was into chemistry. An 11-year old kid could walk into a pharmacy in those days (at least in Hungary) and purchase concentrated sulfuric acid or pure sodium hydroxide. If my mother had known what I was concocting in the bathroom, she would have had a fit.

Early on it seems that you were interested in the art (or should I say, science) of speaker design theory, and from your writing it’s evident that you’ve a pretty solid grasp of electronic theory. Are you self-taught? Did you learn all of this on your own, in your “spare time,” as they say?

Not quite. At Columbia College of Columbia University (Class of ’49) I majored in physics and mathematics, getting a good foundation in the scientific fundamentals. The specifically EE-oriented information I absorbed gradually on my own, prompted mainly by my interest in audio, but I knew from the start what an ohm and a volt and an ampere were, and I even had an adequate entry-level knowledge of calculus. The finer points of speaker design I became aware of only after getting involved with Ohm.

How did you become associated with Ohm Acoustics?

A self-taught audio engineer by the name of Marty Gersten had been fired by Rectilinear (a loudspeaker company that no longer exists) and needed a job. I was doing Rectilinear's advertising (on the side, not through my ad agency) and knew Marty from there. He had some interesting ideas about speaker design and persuaded me to make a small investment in a new loudspeaker company, along with a number of other partners. It was I who actually named the company.

You later reviewed the Ohm F. At the beginning of the review you stated up front that you had been, but were no longer, associated with the company. You came down pretty hard on the speaker, even though you admitted respect for the Walsh design theory. From a personal standpoint, was it difficult to show the kind of candor found in your review (that is, your highlighting all the speaker’s shortcomings), given your prior professional association with the company?

Not at all. By the time I was divorced from the company it was entirely owned by Tech HiFi, and the divorce had been rather unpleasant, although in the end I got a reasonably fair deal. Years later, when I did the review, I had no emotional ties to the company; furthermore, the Ohm F design ended up with huge compromises I had nothing to with.

When The Audio Critic arrived, there were three widely circulated audio magazines—Stereo Review, High Fidelity, and, to a lesser extent circulationwise, Audio. Of the limited distribution “undergrounds,” Gordon Holt published Stereophile, and Harry Pearson had founded The Absolute Sound. The contrast between the first group and the second was quite pronounced. When did you first get the idea that a new publication was necessary?

A friend suggested it. Underground audio journalism was in the air, an emerging phenomenon, and the existing undergrounds did seem a little bit fantaisiste. I was fed up with my career as an ad agency creative director, so I tested the waters. I ran a half-column ad in Audio with the headline “The Audio Critic is coming!” The ad promised equipment reviews based on measurements, not opinions. I got 1200 advance subscriptions before anyone saw the first issue. I quit my job and retired from Madison Avenue.

A friend first suggested you start The Audio Critic, and this seemed to you like a good idea? Forgive me if your answer sounds like you are glossing a bit. Surely there must have been more to your decision by way of background than simply picking up on a friend’s suggestion? After all, going from Madison Avenue to audio equipment reviewing is not a casual career decision.

I was fed up with Madison Avenue. I was looking for an excuse to quit. Initially I thought I would do The Audio Critic on the side, but when those 1200 subscriptions came in without anyone having even seen the first issue, I decided to take the plunge. At first it was exhilarating, but then in the 1980s, when the whole audio scene had slowed down and not much was happening, I actually tried to get back to Madison Avenue. I went to see my former boss, the great adman Ed McCabe (of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, later absorbed by the ever-larger corporate structures of the ad world), who said he considered me a very good copywriter but the business had changed and good writers were no longer needed. (He was right, too; look at today’s TV commercials). All in all, I think I had a better life sticking with The Audio Critic.

In your first issue you began a review of two dozen preamps. Most were paid for out of pocket—your pocket. How long did it take to actually get all of this gear together, and how long was it from your initial purchase until you could get the first issue out the door?

I started assembling the preamps in October 1976, and the first issue was mailed February 1, 1977.

What the hell did you do with all those preamps once you were finished with them?

I had an arrangement with a Long Island hi-fi store. I bought all the preamps from them, and they committed themselves to buying them all back at a reduced price. The spread wasn’t particularly great, but when multiplied by 22 it was still very good business for them.

After the public had digested the first few issues of The Audio Critic, you had pretty much polarized the audio scene. It seemed as if people either loved what you were doing, or they reacted with a kind of visceral animosity towards you, personally. Did you expect this kind of reaction, or were you surprised?

I always knew that audiophiles were emotionally challenged, but the intensity of their reactions did surprise me. After all, it wasn’t about the honor of their wives or the talent of their children or their next salary raise, but a freakin’ preamp, for crying out loud.

When it comes to hi-fi, most people usually think only of the end product—that is, how the music sounds in one’s living room. However, it was clear from early on that your interest was not merely one of end results but the entire recording chain. For instance, from day one you featured Max Wilcox as an associate editor. When did you first become interested in the back-end process, as opposed to the mere recreation of the recorded event in a domestic setting?

I was always aware of differences in recording technique, even in the shellac days, but did not give them too much thought until I had fairly high-resolution playback systems. It was a gradual process. Actually, it is only now, listening to my Linkwitz Lab “Orion” speakers, that I realize just how much better Lewis Layton was in the 1950s than nearly all recording engineers with their fancy equipment in the 21st century. It’s kind of depressing. By the way, I think the three greatest recordists of the modern audio era were Lew Layton, John Eargle, and Max Wilcox. There is a serious quality difference between their recordings and just about all others, to this very day. Some of the others are pretty good, but as Voltaire said, the best is the enemy of the good.

It is interesting that you quote Voltaire, a figure from the French Enlightenment, and a thinker who reacted strongly against the old scholasticism. If we view scholastic thinking as a way of holding up prevailing ideas based on faith, then we can contrast this with a new method where scientific thinking displaces a more naïve view of what has come before. The key, I think, is in method. You were always interested in formulating a precise methodological approach to reviewing equipment. In 1977 you discussed in print how listening tests should be conducted. For example, you wrote, “...you can’t compare the sound of something like, say, the Mark Levinson JC-2 and the DB Systems preamp by testing one unit in August and the other in November.” You then went on to discuss A/B testing in detail. Would it be wrong to conclude that, over the years, methodology has been your overriding concern in audio reviewing?

Audio reviewing comes down to method and not much else. Audio is in itself a method, a means to an end (which is reproduced sound in the listening room), and to evaluate a method without a methodology is an absurdity. What audio journalists without a methodology are engaged in is mere opining, not reviewing or evaluating. (Stereophile is a special case because they have a methodology but exhibit a total disconnect between their methods and their opinions.) I must add that all this was much more important in the early days of audio, when electronic signal paths were significantly different from one another and required a rigorous methodology for meaningful evaluation; today there is a convergence toward a single standard that makes comparative methodology more or less moot. I find myself using the ABX double-blind comparator much less often than I used to, because in most cases I know exactly what the outcome will be; of course, I still have to measure everything to make sure that I am not overlooking significant differences.

Long before you embraced A/B testing, it was clear that you had been seriously thinking about this as a means of comparing gear. Indeed, in the early days of The Audio Critic, you probably devoted more words to discussing this methodological approach than anyone in the audio press—and all this before you were actually conducting level-matched tests. Once you began precise level-matched testing, did you immediately come to a conclusion that all previous thinking had to be revised, or did your conclusions develop in a more gradual manner?

Actually, it was a coup de foudre, or almost. Someone had lent me a simple A/B switching box, without the possibility of level adjustments. I was trying to compare the sound of two completely different preamps which, by a huge coincidence, happened to have exactly the same gain. I couldn’t hear a difference! At first I firmly believed that the A/B box was covering up the difference, but upon further reflection that appeared most unlikely—totally passive, extremely short signal paths, no inductive or capacitive elements to speak of. It dawned on me that the two preamps must actually sound exactly the same. Paul on the road to Damascus... Of course, Mark Davis had told me years before that this is precisely the case, but I made fun of him in print. (Many years later, I met him at an Audio Engineering Society convention and apologized profusely. He didn’t even remember what I was talking about!)

Mark Davis used a pair of AR-11 box speakers and a Shure M-91E cartridge. You were using gear such as the Harold Beveridge electrostatic speaker and more expensive moving-coil cartridges. So at least there was a reasonable presumption that differences in results could have been related to source components. At the same time Davis was matching levels to within 0.3 dB; you indicated that you had level matched to about 1 dB. At the 0.3 threshold he claimed that “differences” were moot. Most audiophiles have absolutely no means to level match components, and hi-fi dealers are not going to do it for obvious reasons. So even though the psychoacoustic literature is clear, the average audiophile is left only with his or her experience. When presented with all the marketing baggage that comes with the territory, it is no wonder that things have not really changed much in the typical audiophile’s thinking. That leaves the burden of getting the message out to the press. You have written about this many times and offered your own reasons for the current state of affairs in audio journalism. Other than the fact that it is often difficult to change one’s way of thinking, is the bottom line simply that it would be bad for business if the truth were known and accepted?

Of course it would be bad for business, at least for the business of Halcro, Mark Levinson, Pass Labs, et al., whose astronomically priced products sound the same as a $200 Pioneer receiver. It wouldn’t be bad for Pioneer, but they don’t absolutely need the publicity of the high-end press. You are mistaken, however, when you say that most audiophiles have no means to level match. A very simple (and superbly ironic) method suggested many years ago by Larry Klein requires no instrumentation and no special expertise. Just play with the level controls of A and B until you can hear absolutely no difference between them. At that point the levels are matched within ±0.15 dB, guaranteed! I still groove on that one.

Your reviews were always different in style than anything else out there. The undergrounds often wrote pages and pages of mind-numbing verbiage. The major publications seemed like they couldn’t wait to finish a review, and they all pretty much read the same. Your style was a mix ranging from humor (the Janis subwoofer) to shock-and-awe total devastation (Infinity QLS). For the subscriber it all made good sense and interesting reading. Do you consciously try and mix your reviewing style for overall effect?

It depends on how I feel. Some audio components elicit from me the utmost seriousness, others contempt or pity, still others laughter. I don’t try to be consistent in my reviewing style. As Bismarck said, konsequent ist ein Ochs—an ox is consistent.

You often had at your disposal gear many audiophiles had heard of but had no reason to own. I’m reminded of your Levinson-modified Studer A-80—a deck one typically finds in a professional recording studio. In a response to a letter from a subscriber you mentioned you once owned Pearl microphones. I take it that over the years you’ve experimented with live recording?

Just a little, on a very few occasions. I don’t consider myself a recordist. That fancy equipment appealed to my gearhead side; the Studer/Levinson was mainly for playing borrowed master tapes. Anyway, nearly all amateur recordists are totally outclassed by the top pros, and I don’t like to be outclassed.

Nothing set apart The Audio Critic from the “undergrounds” like its contributors. I remember reading an issue of The Absolute Sound—it was an article by Enid Lumley. I actually thought it was Harry Pearson writing under a pseudonym in an effort to share some humor at his own expense. I thought he was just being funny... his way of telling everyone not to take it all so seriously. Only later did it occur to me that Ms. Lumley was an actual person, and that she was serious about whatever buffoonery she was writing about. The Audio Critic, on the other hand, offered writers like Richard Modafferi, David Rich, and guest articles by folks like Bob Adams. Occasionally, Stereophile will run an article by someone who knows what they are doing, but it all seems a bit out of place given their editorial slant. Now that your format has changed, do you foresee a place for third-party contributors?

Yes, Tom Nousaine and David Rich have already contributed, and I’m ready for others. The blog format, however, is much more casual and spontaneous than the print format, and I have less patience than I used to with the endless back-and-forth occasioned by contributors. As for Enid Lumley, I actually met her once on some audio occasion, and to my great surprise she treated me with the utmost deference.

No technology has created more misunderstanding and, frankly, more plain weirdness on the part of audiophiles than digital recording. We all agree that many of the first digital releases (both analog vinyl and CD) were not very good, sonic-wise. But time marches on and things change for the better. At the same time, some voices seem to have never recovered. To cite one example, Mark Levinson once went around (maybe he still does?) telling anyone who would take the time to listen to him that not only does PCM-encoded music sound bad, but it is bad for your physical health. This is clearly moonbat territory, and to a thinking person is clearly an embarrassment. On Mark’s Red Rose website (since removed) he was once thinking of hawking compact cassettes, clearly an inferior medium, inasmuch as, in his opinion, they sound better than CDs. Where do you suppose this disconnect from reality, among people who should know better, comes from?

There are people who are unable to change their opinion once they commit to it, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Originally it may have been snap judgment, but then stubbornness sets in. Also, how do you know what Mark Levinson really hears? You’re not inside his head. He may have funny ears. I sometimes have the feeling that one particular person or another hears something totally different from what I hear. Of course, most of us hear pretty much the same thing and are able to come to an agreement, but some people... Do you think Rimbaud, with his dérèglement de tous les sens, would be an antidigital, CD-hating cultist today?

You are correct that no one can, strictly speaking, “get into another’s head.” But Mark, unlike Rimbaud before him, hasn’t abandoned his own poetic quest—the quest for good musical reproduction—and as long as he doesn’t take up gun running, I am fine. On the other hand, it seems to me that the idea of methodological investigation into the listening experience can determine, if not what the other feels inside, at least what the other can show on the outside—that is, what can be proved experimentally using controlled listening tests. To make a blanket statement that all PCM recording sounds bad, and that this is due to the PCM process, is strange. All it takes is one good recording to demonstrate that it is not the process that is at fault, but the application of the process. Does his musical city exist on the plain, and can he not find one good recording? When people confuse a general recording method with specific examples, a fallacy occurs. It seems that what Mark, and the others, are actually saying is simply that it is not pleasant to listen to a bad recording. And it is easy to fool oneself in these matters. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of listening one day and thinking all is well, and listening again another day, and thinking something is, if not quite right, at least different. But has anything really changed externally, or is it just the vagaries of our moods?

I agree with you totally that one good recording exonerates the process. There’s nothing wrong with Red Book, 44.1/16 CDs. When properly implemented, they can render absolutely lifelike sound. Some early 1980s CDs perversely incorporated LP-type equalization, which made them sound zippy. Mark Levinson appears not to have noticed that things have changed. As for things sounding good one day and not so good the next day, it’s probably due to volume changes. Peter Walker proved long ago that with a given recording played in a given room through a system with a given gain, only one setting of the volume control results in genuinely lifelike reproduction. Observing that rule could eliminate a lot of grief.

In the letters section, you once told the story of a man married to a lovely movie star, perfect to look at, but a woman he was unable to really get physical with. So, instead, he wound up consummating some hot action with a less visually attractive woman, but one he could definitely get his hands on. He was then happy. In a similar way, digital takes the audiophile out of audio; that is, one can hear, but one cannot touch. With records you can really fool around. You can change cartridges, adjust tone arm settings, worry about damping mechanical resonances, and so forth. Then, once done, you can actually see the thing spinning around in your living room. Due to the LP form factor, you can actually read liner notes and, at least in the old days, maybe hang a poster on your wall. It was all so interactive. Unfortunately, the sonic problems associated with vinyl remain. With CD you just plop the disc inside a black box and watch it disappear. There is nothing more to do. To a certain degree, could antidigital reaction simply be a tactile/psychological problem?

First, I have to correct you on that story (which of course was a fabrication to illustrate a point I was trying to make). The problem of the Hollywood sex symbol’s husband was that he could not concentrate on his pleasure while making love to her because, in his mind, he was constantly congratulating himself on his number one ranking on the erotic status scale. It had nothing to do with the tactile vs. nontactile issue. As for your question, I suppose some people need something to fuss with in order to love the whole process, but are these music people? I don’t think so. A genuine music person (and I consider myself to be one) would gladly just clap his hands and have superb music reproduction appear out nowhere without any equipment. And I say that even though I admittedly have a gearhead side.

I’d like to share an experience. Once, while listening to the Levine/Met Ring, I immediately became aware of something unusual, something I’d not really thought about before. The sound coming from my speakers had absolutely no background artifacts. With records, there is always something extraneous going on in the quiet passages. At a live performance there is always something in the background, even if it is just audience noise. On the various Bayreuth live recordings one hears stage artifacts, most notably within quiet passages. However, the sound of my “studio” Ring, while pristine, seemed almost artificial—artificial not because of what was there musically, but because of what was not there. Also, with, say, an LP record, dynamics are compressed. Yet, with the DGG Levine Ring I can listen at relatively loud levels in order to enjoy quieter passages. As the music grows louder, I must adjust the volume down. You speak of this latter situation in your review of Mr. Alexander’s recordings for Water Lily Acoustics. Could it be that PCM technology is, in a strange way, too good? Or is this maybe just an argument for more “live” recording, and recordings where the engineer, to use your words, employs a “judicious raising of the dynamic floor and lowering of the ceiling”?

Your Levine/Met recordings of the Ring sound a bit sterile because they were made in Manhattan Center (New York), which is an acoustically rather dead venue. In 1989, Max Wilcox produced a wonderful-sounding recording of the Mahler 5th (Mehta/NY on Teldec, released 1990) in that same Manhattan Center. He added some very subtle artificial reverb, which is not at all perceptible as such but makes the sound come alive. Now, compression is a highly complicated issue. The dynamic range of the human ear is more than 120 dB. The dynamic range of 16-bit digital recording is theoretically 98 dB. The difference between the absolute softest audible music in a concert hall and the loudest climaxes is of the order of 60 to 70 dB because of the ambient noise floor. Let us say you need 1 milliwatt of amplifier power, in a given installation, to play the softest passages (I am just guessing), then 70 dB above that would come to 10,000 watts. Any domestic loudspeaker would go up in smoke with that kind of input. With extremely high-efficiency horn-type theater speakers the numbers change; it is actually possible to produce levels of 110 or 115 dB or even more in a single installation, and here’s the remarkable thing—you can tolerate it because the distortion is low. We tend to judge loudness by the amount of distortion we hear, not by SPL! You wouldn’t adjust the volume control if you heard no distortion. So, you could have your “too good” 98-dB balls-to-the-wall digital recording without compression, if the efficiency and power-handling capability of your system were adequate—which they generally are not.

In a blog on the Bob Adams website he has an interesting but brief discussion of live sound versus recorded sound, our perceptions of the differences, and what this means for designers. When discussing what a recording ought to be, it is impossible to approach this question without having a model, or an idea of the form that the musical event should take in a domestic environment. There are those who argue that the goal of hi-fi is the recreation of the actual event in one’s living room. Setting aside the question as to whether this is even possible, I’d like to ask whether you think this is desirable? Let us not think right now about a symphony orchestra, but, even on a small scale, does anyone really want John Coltrane in their living room actually playing the saxophone? Inasmuch as the dynamics of just one instrument can be overpowering, should we not simply admit that what we really want is just a small—a very very small—illusion of reality, and not the reality?

Yes and no. I don’t mind at all having John Coltrane life-size in my listening room; my equipment can handle it. Single instruments, single voices, and very small instrumental/vocal groups can be reproduced as an actual event in a domestic environment, as long as the equipment is good enough. Of course, the illusion is still only 95% and not 100%, for reasons too numerous to discuss here. There is still the problem of whether the acoustics of the recording venue or of the listening room will prevail; in large listening rooms such as mine a somewhat dead recording can pick up the local acoustics; in small listening rooms there are problems with all but the “smallest” music. As for recreating a symphony orchestra or an opera-house performance in anything but a comparably large listening space, forget about it. The best we can hope for is an unobstructed window on the music, as if we were outside the concert hall or the opera, looking in through an enormous opening. (That model corresponds more closely to stereo than to surround sound, but for classical music a proper surround-sound recording is mostly stereo, anyway.) Also, don’t forget that a very good recording reveals more detail than one can hear from most seats in a dreadful concert hall like Avery Fisher Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center!

Have there been any particular items you wanted to review but, for whatever reason, never had the chance?

The latest incarnations of the Quad ESL (Models 988 and 989) have somehow eluded me; I never had a look at the famous Ionovac tweeter; I would have liked to test the Audio Artistry “Beethoven” speaker before it disappeared from the market because it was the largest-scale execution of the principles on which Siegfried Linkwitz based the “Orion,” my present reference speaker. It would also have been fun to look at the insanely priced power amps and preamps that Boulder switched to a number of years ago, because of the near-zero distortion, but I know that they wouldn’t have sounded different from “normal” equipment.

Thinking back, what three or four groundbreaking components changed the course of hi-fi, or your thinking about hi-fi?

The earliest Ampex and Magnecord tape decks because they demonstrated for the first time just what genuine high fidelity sounded like. The Dynakit 60 of the early 1950s because it was the first adequately powered high-quality amplifier at an affordable price. A. Stewart Hegeman’s Lowther-Brociner corner horn (c. 1951, also its plaster-of-Paris-and-plywood prototype) because no loudspeaker ever sounded as good before. The original Quad ESL, for obvious reasons. Bob Carver’s “Amazing Loudspeaker” because it was so amazingly clever (why did it have to disappear?). And, in a more fundamental sense, the Westrex stereo cutter head because it made stereo sound easily available in every home.

When The Audio Critic began, hi-fi was in its heyday. The Japanese offered relatively inexpensive gear for the masses, and there was a real excitement coming from the smaller “high end” manufacturers. In the mid-’70s the Pioneer Electronics company offered a wide range of integrated amps, FM tuners, even more receivers, and everything else in between. Their current lineup consists of six receivers and one modest integrated amp. Today, Yamaha makes only one integrated amp, and only one tuner. The market has definitely changed. On the other hand, in 2006, the emerging audiophile’s component of choice is likely to be the personal computer and whatever pocket appliance Apple comes out with. Home theater and television appear to have captured consumer imagination. In many respects those topics that were once so important, topics The Audio Critic wrote about, seem, now, to be surrounded in nostalgia. Do you think that the desire among consumers for the recreation of music in a home environment is waning? Are audiophiles as a distinct group becoming extinct?

I discern a distinct graying of the audiophile community. I think your 60-year old audiophile dentist still dreams about his next speaker system and is willing to spend money on it. The 20-year olds who used to build Dynakits are extinct. Between the computer and the iPod, their electronic thirst is quenched. The kind of music they favor doesn’t require very accurate reproduction, in any case. An altogether different trend, of course, is the home theater. When it comes to video with sound, I think the interest is at an all-time high.

Given what you describe, along with what you have written over the years, I guess we must conclude that the two most important people in hi-fi today are the recording engineer and the loudspeaker designer. As consumers, the former is really out of our reach. But, as you said, many audiophiles still think about their next set of speakers. At the same time, you’ve written that you’re a bit unenthusiastic when dealing with box speakers, yet this design remains most prevalent. I think I can speak for your subscribers in hoping that you have not “given up” reviewing more loudspeakers—even if they remain, to use your description, “monkey coffins.”

I think ordinary forward-firing dynamic drivers with a passive crossover in a closed rectangular box are boring! I can guarantee that no transcendent sonic experience can possibly be delivered by such “monkey coffins.” Decent sound per dollar, at best. Powered loudspeakers with electronic crossovers and DSP correction are another matter. I’m looking forward to testing that type of equipment, as well as electrostatics, ribbons, and other unconventional transducers.

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