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Does anyone know where this J. Gordon Holt comes from?

Interviewer: “Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?”

JGH: “Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.

Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.“

fusian

Showing 1 response by bdp24

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bdp24
9,465 posts
 

 

@viper6: Have you read Stereophile editor Jim Austin's As We See It column in the current (May) issue? It's a good one. In the column Jim makes quite a few points, some of which you may disagree with, or perhaps not. Here are a couple of them:

 

".....an album shouldn't sound like live music unless it was recorded to sound like that." I have many times here made the case that Harry Pearson's ethos of the job of a hi-fi system being to make reproduced music sound as close to the sound of live unamplified acoustic music as possible---the "absolute sound"---is, simply put, a gross over-simplification. Sure, that goal is of course appropriate when any given recording was made in such a fashion as to make that even possible. But 99.99% of Pop studio recordings will NEVER sound---couldn't POSSIBLY sound---like live unamplified acoustic music. Austin goes on to say "Every album should sound like itself." The way most music is recorded, that is the only realistic, sensible way to view the situation.

Another: "Great-sounding recordings form a tiny fraction of all recorded music, and they rarely intersect with the very best music." That was one of "Holt's Laws", seen in print way back in the 1960's. Gordon said "The better the music, often the worse the sound. And visa versa." Nothing has changed in the intervening years.

 

Jim Austin is---in my opinion---doing quite a good job of filling John Atkinson's shoes.  

 

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