Though his magazine was always The Audio Critic (with the same typeface), Peter Aczel had two very different lives as a consumer audio journalist. Initially, from 1977 through early 1981, The (small-circulation ) Audio Critic was in thrall to, and catered to, the commercial consumer ’high-end’ audio business, based on casual subjective listening to audio systems and components. The high circulation consumer audio press (High Fidelity, Stereo Review), on the other hand, based their judgments on engineering and physical measurements of the components.
In early 1981 Aczel dropped, or, as he would later say, suspended, the publication of The Audio Critic to go into the loudspeaker business. His speaker company, Fourier Systems, attracted some positive attention for a few years, but eventually closed for lack of interest.
Aczel became friends with Bob Carver,founder of Carver corporation, producer of inexpensive audio electronics. Aczel followed Carver’s dispute with Stereophile, in which Carver claimed he could make a transistor power amp whose sound the editors of Stereophile would be unable to distinguish, under blind listening conditions , from a tube power amp of Stereophile’s choosing.Needless to say, Carver won the dispute. This impressed Aczel to the extent that he had a ’road to Damascus’ conversion to the engineering side of consumer audio, replacing casual listening tests with double-blind ABX comparisons.
In late 1987, his attempt at being a speaker manufacturer having ended badly, Aczel revived the The Audio Critic magazine, but this time he would stick to hard-nosed detailed physics-based analysis and evaluation of audio components. He wanted to establish a special niche where he would subject ’high-end’ consumer audio components to rigorous tests and engineering analysis and compare them with garden-variety mass-produced audio components. Aczel’s specialty was loudspeaker reviews, where the listening tests would still be subjective (because double-blind listening tests of loudspeakers were impractical without large-cap corporate support), but Aczel would trace the deficiencies and strengths he heard back to the measurements. He associated with the best audio engineers he could find and delighted in exposing the ignorance and superstition of the ’high-end’ audio business.
Love him or hate him, he couldn’t be ignored, because, most of the time (following his conversion), he was right.
