Stereophile complains it's readers are too informed.

jpwarren58,

For normal people yes, but we’re audiophiles.

We don’t mind paying exorbitant prices for those loudspeakers that will be guaranteed to induce headaches.

There is a belief that beyond a certain price loudspeakers can start to sound very odd.

In my experience, large expensive loudspeakers tend to impress with huge dynamics and scale (Avantgarde Trio XDs!), but sometimes at the expense of a homogeneous sound.

Even worse, some of them can have what appears to be serious treble/sibilance issues.

You only have to look at the numbers of bad reports regarding some of the Magico and Wilson models.

Everything suggests that they must be excellent transducers, (years of R&D and cost no object materials) yet they seem do something that some folks cannot stand.

Assuming that those people are voicing genuine concerns, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t, either those speakers are doing something seriously wrong, or it may be they are simply too revealing in laying 'poor' recordings to waste (by poor recordings we mean 95% of released output between 1950 and the present).

More to the point perhaps, recordings that were made using entirely different loudspeakers to the ones being played back on.

Some people believe that you need similar speakers for playback as to the ones that were used in the original recording.

Not an option for most of us when we look at all the different loudspeakers used for monitoring in different studios around the world.

You only have to think how different vintage Tannoy studio monitors sound to vintage JBL studio monitors to realise the problem of audio's notorious circle of confusion.

Hence the need to find an acceptable compromise between the hardware and the software. 

@erik_squires,

Thanks for posting.

The entire article smacks of a desperate retreat against the vanguard forces of increasingly shared communal knowledge. Looks like Stereophile must have gotten complacent after all these years of churning out piffle on top of piffle.

However thanks to sites like this and others, (can I mention ASR?) an increasing number of today’s readers are far better informed than their brethren of yesteryear. The tide of knowledge has turned and there’s no putting the internet genie back in the bottle. The piffle must stop or else...

How about this for an initial plea for understanding?

’As the late Art Dudley wrote in one of his last columns, "From its acoustical beginnings, when two incompatible forms of physical media—Edison’s cylinders and Berliner’s flat discs—slugged it out for primacy, domestic audio has attracted an almost incalculable number of iconoclasts, heretics, mavericks, nonconformists, lone wolves, enfants terrible, and hidebound kooks.

Because the above are among my favorite people, I don’t have much of a problem with that state of affairs.’


No, of course you don’t, since your main directive in attracting as many advertisers as possible you can wallow in as much subjective twaddle as your readers will, sorry, used to permit.

Those intending to pay out large sums of money in search of sonic performance might have a lot of problems with this.

The article then goes on expound upon the crux of the matter here, the issue that’s bugging them the most as referenced in its title - ’Hoisted on your own petard?’


’It’s especially disheartening when narrow-minded online critics use one aspect of our coverage—our measurements—to attack the other side: our subjective judgments.’

Ouch! That’s what really hurts, isn’t it?
The fact that savvy readers are ignoring your subjective ramblings and obfuscations and using your own measurements to reach their OWN conclusions!!

To finish with, the author Jim Austin, offers up a final plea bargain to the reader.

’We’re providing a complete picture; the two halves make a whole. You don’t get that from our competition.

Broaden your mind. Seek perspective. Look at the big picture.’


He just forgets to add ’please, and pretty please!’

Face it Jim, the game is up. The broad picture, at least your version of it, has clearly very little value in today’s informed market.

Either you tell it like it is or dispense with what has been your main selling card for years - a decent set of technical measurements.

Not the final word in analytical data by any means, but as you say, more than some of your opposition.

Exactly how you will go about keeping your friends (and paying advertisers) happy in the future is not our concern. You need to keep in mind that your loyalty must primarily be to your readers who frequently place their trust in your words.

We understand you’re in a hard place now, having to chose sides (advertising revenue versus sales revenue), but that’s not the readers dilemna, is it?

Every audio journalist's dilemma must be whether to tell the truth, or to 'wriggle around' in the hope of being entertaining whilst not getting slapped by the advertising department. Sometimes they might even manage to do all three, but alas not every product can be the outstanding one.

If Austin does decide to go further and dispense altogether with those pesky technical measurements, which can only get in the way of good fiction writing, then he could also risk sinking the ship. I've no doubt that those measurements are the main, perhaps even only reason why many still subscribe.

It would no doubt be a big gamble, but then again the magazine's founder J. Gordon Holt was not averse to taking a few risks himself. However, as Austin points out, these are different times, and Holt's philosophy of subjectivism is under increasing pressure now.

On the other hand, "Holt's Law," the theory that the better the recording, the worse the musical performance—and vice versa, sadly still seems relevant today. 

We all know Stereophile only exists for marketing purposes, pushing products to potential buyers, thus keeping dealers and manufacturers happy. But marketing demands readers. Lots of them.

Austin's predecessor, John Atkinson was more like an oiled up wrestler, slippery enough to ever avoid being pinned down or forced to submit in the face of hard evidence or fact. Deception by omission and obfuscation was simply a way of life for him.

It now seems as if Austin, like his predecessor, also has no intention to protect, inform, or steer customers away from bad products or manufacturers. By his own words, the opposite is more likely in fact.

Good work Jim. But hey, you don't need to get too despondent, there is a way out here. It's rather simple too.

Instead of all this schizophrenic contortion trying to please incompatible demands, why not just drop the act and admit to all and sundry that your magazine is very little more than a work of pure fiction? 

That way you won't hurt any newbs, and since most of the long timers already know, you might even sleep easier.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/hoisted-your-own-petard