The Audio Critic

@busboy

I have every copy of Audio Critic.

Wow, that’s impressive!

A complete set must be quite rare these days

I can’t think of any other magazine that I’d want to keep as a reference. The few that I do still have are there mainly for nostalgia and entertainment.

Thankfully copies of The Audio Critic are still available online.

http://www.biline.ca/audio_critic/audio_critic_down.htm

It's posssiby the only audio magazine where the copy still rings true years later.

There’s a good write up of the audio press, including The Audio Critic, from a few years back here.

http://high-endaudio.com/magaz.html

Here’s a few choice quotes:

Stereophile is now basically a commercial marketing engine for established brands, and those rare new brands which can afford an extravagant marketing (advertising) budget, meaning hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Absolute Sound has also seriously deteriorated. Here’s one simple example: In issue # 114, they ’reviewed’ the VPI Aries Turntable with the JMW tonearm, with a total cost of $ 4,995, and the Jadis 845 triode amplifiers.

What did they compare the VPI Aries with? The Rega Planar 3 at $ 695. (Yes, I’m serious.) Guess which was better? It’s safe to say that no one (in the audio business) was upset at the result of such a comparison. More important, no prospective purchaser, of either turntable/arm combination, was enlightened about its relative audio performance and value.

"Magazines---all magazines--exist on the basis of advertising. That’s all that counts. Magazines are "sold" simply to have circulation which can then be used to sell advertising at prices commensurate with the circulation. IN FACT most magazines LOSE money on circulation. It doesn’t matter since they make their money on advertising." - Michael Fremer of Stereophile

If nothing else he opened my eyes to several truths, a coat hanger is just as good in delivering soon (properly shielded) as any $500 cable.  The electrons or wave energy do not differentiate.  Good connections only part to be concerned with.  Also its the speakers and recording quality that matter the most.

The Audio Press review disputes the "every properly built amp" sounds the same or  that solid state can be made to sound the same as tubes. Nobody but nobody, however, will ever take the challenge and do the ABX testing to disprove his claims.  

If they measure the same they will sound the same-take the test to prove otherwise.

@busboy

Nobody but nobody, however, will ever take the challenge and do the ABX testing to disprove his claims.

Alan Shaw of Harbeth once offered a pair of free top of the range Harbeth loudspeakers to anyone who could demonstrate that they could hear a difference between 2 different amplifiers.

There were no takers.

Then there was that infamous episode known as the Carver Challenge.

Bob Carver once claimed he could make a $700 transistor amp sonically indistinguishable from any high end amp.

Gordon J Holt and Larry Archibald disagreed and scoffed at this claim. After some careful thought they chose an unidentified high end tube amp that was only much later revealed to be a Conrad-Johnson Premier Four.

Much to the dismay of the Sterophile reviewers, Carver did exactly what he had claimed.

Thankfully the article is still available and it remains one for the ages.

Is it possible to make a $700 "mainstream-audio" power amplifier sound exactly like a high-priced perfectionist amplifier? Bob Carver, of Carver Corporation, seemed to think he could, so we challenged him to prove it.

The question posed above seems laughable.

....

But everyone has his limits of capability, and pride goeth before a fall; when Bob claimed, some time ago, in conversation with Stereophile Publisher Larry Archibald, that he could make his $700 Model 1.0 amplifier sound "indistinguishable from" any amplifier of our choice, we were confident that he was finally out of his depth.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/carver-challenge

A few years ago, Michael Fremer agreed to a cable challenge as long as the test would be done in his listening room, which sounds like a reasonable condition to me.  The cable manufacturer backed down that time.