TAS. The Absolute Sound?

Tom Martin comes across to me as do the salesmen in some high end shops.

Prior to the appearance of TAS in 1973, J. Gordon Holt (who started Stereophile in 1962) was the only hi-fi reviewer assessing the quality of components based on their sound, rather than test bench measurements. How he rated components included the consideration of price-to-performance ratio. He never used the term "high end", that was introduced into the hi-fi lexicon by Harry Pearson.

Pearson and his TAS staff focused on components which advanced the state-of-the-art, regardless of the cost required to accomplish that goal. We soon saw the emergence of companies whose products cost far more than had hi-fi up to that point. Companies such as Levinson and Wilson Audio.

When in 1973 I bought my first "high end" system, the Audio Research SP-3 pre-amp sold for $595, the Dual 50 power amp $695, the Dual 75 $995, and the Magneplanar Tympani T-I loudspeakers $995/pr. Those prices were not all that much more than mass market products.

When Levinson introduced their first pre-amp, it was---iirc---priced about double that of the ARC SP-3. And the price race (to the top) was on! It seemed as if high end companies were very interested in finding out just how much audiophiles were willing to pay for gear.

It’s gotten rather out-of-hand, wouldn’t you say?

@viridian: I’m in complete agreement with your opinion and statement.

I had already been reading J. Gordon Holt’s reviews in his essentially 1-man operation Stereophile Magazine when Harry Pearson started TAS. Holt’s number one priority in assessing the reproduction of recorded music was accuracy of vocal and instrumental timbre, freedom from what he termed "vowel coloration." His second priority was transparency, the freedom from a thin gauze being introduced between the recording and the listener. JGH also addressed imaging in his reviews, but it was Pearson and the other TAS reviewers who elevated the ability to create a "sound stage" to a very high priority in their assessments of component quality.

While many recordings of Classical music contain an audible sound stage---the locations of the instruments in an orchestra to one degree or another "visible", more so in recordings made in the 1950’s and early-60’s---very few recordings of Pop, Rock, Country, etc.---particularly those recorded in studios, do. The reason for that is studio recordings have no sound stage to "capture" in the first place; in studio recordings each instrument is recorded with it’s own microphone (drumsets typically recorded employing a half dozen mics), the artificially-created imaging created during the mixing process. In many studio recordings, some instruments are recorded in isolation closets.

The late, great Art Dudley was head of reviews at TAS for a while, eventually leaving and starting his own fantastic mag Listener---and later joining the staff of Stereophile---ranked sound stage towards the bottom of his priority list. He dismissed sound stage imaging as "parlour tricks" 😆. Like JGH, Dudley considered the ability to reproduce the timbre of acoustic instruments and vocals a very high priority, but went further and introduced the relatively-new issue of "touch" (the physical playing of an instrument) in his reviews. That concept was missing from both HP’s and JGH’s reviews. That, as well as the ability of a component (or full system) to recreate the "forward momentum" of a musical ensemble. That concern may have been a result of Dudley being a musician.