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The stars are matter. We are matter. But it doesn’t matter.—Don Van Vliet
Only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.—T.S. Eliot (writing about Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood)
In the 17th century, steam engines began appearing throughout Europe and Asia, ushered into existence by any number of different inventors. More recently, multiple inventors conceived and cooked up the atomic bomb, the jet engine, and the solid-body electric guitar. Virtually every race of Homo sapiens has invented the bow and arrow, and people on at least three different continents invented the crossbow, all by themselves. Every culture with dairy resources has come up with cheese of some sort; every culture with a written language has created things that anyone could identify as books; and almost every culture has created potable alcohol. (The most sophisticated of these have also created drinking games.)
And here’s my favorite: Every culture that has created wheeled or water-going vehicles has come up with something very like a tiller, for use in steering them. And as those inventors became more mechanically sophisticated, and as they saw the need to alter the steering control’s range of motion and mechanism’s ratio between input and output forces, they added intermediate gears or pulleys—which likely influenced those inventors to use wheels rather than levers as steering controls: first as ship’s wheels, then as steering wheels for automobiles. Literally all automobiles.
Good ways of doing things—one could go as far as to say the right ways of doing things —are irrepressible: They make themselves known (footnote 1) and they endure. This is true in the vast majority of human endeavors.
But it isn’t true in the world of hi-fi, which by comparison looks like a weed-choked lawn full of old toilets and abandoned washing machines. 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. (The only heresy I can’t tolerate is that which fails to recognize the superiority of the volume-control knob —an apparatus so natural that even youngsters who have never seen or used one persist in saying “Turn it up” or “Turn it down” —over such clumsy, counterintuitive junk as pushbuttons and bars.) Indeed, that the reproduction of music should attract such disparate types is not just forgivable: It is inevitable. Just as no single type of music satisfies everyone, no single means of reproducing it —no single prioritization of the many facets of musical sound —could ever rule the roost. Period. End of discussion.
And when it comes to criticism, no single voice could address the hobby’s desire for insight or guidance or the simple pleasures of a good read on a well-loved topic.
One less egg to fry
These thoughts came to the fore during a pleasantly long conversation with Editor Jim Austin. One of us —I forget who —asked the other: Are we failing our readers if we publish a measurement that doesn’t matter to them? The example in play was that of the single-ended triode enthusiast to whom power-output numbers have no particular relevance, but one could substitute any number of other points of contention.
Consider: Manufacturers and journalists have long been compelled to measure the performance of domestic audio gear, albeit for different reasons, and that’s a fine and fair and potentially insightful thing to do. Is it regrettable that some of the tests that endure today favor one or another particular technology over others? Not necessarily —although when any such set of tests becomes the law of the land, it’s easy to see how proponents of competing technologies could feel put out.
But even that’s a bit silly—like bemoaning the fact that Mississippi’s public school teachers, who earn an average of $43,107 per year, aren’t fluent in at least three languages, or that the Gap doesn’t stock jeans in everyone’s size. There’s just so much one can do.
So here we are: Stereophile is both the largest circulation domestic-audio magazine in any language and the one that devotes the most ink per issue to audio-equipment measurements. Yet from time to time, we suffer one of two interrelated shortcomings: We fail to publish measurements that fully predict the audible performance of the product at hand, or we publish measurements that, to a portion of our readership, don’t appear to matter at all. Are such failures inevitable? In a world where there remains little agreement as to what technical characteristics must go into, say, a good-sounding amplifier, then Yes: It’s impossible for any suite of bench tests to retrieve all that we need to know. That’s not to say we mustn’t keep trying—and indeed, as you’ll note from his comments on digital-audio sources in particular, Technical Editor John Atkinson has from time to time added to his test regimen.
And as I’ve noted before in this space, that regimen’s greatest strength is its consistency: Readers can, directly and usefully, compare today’s Stereophile reviews with those published 30-plus years ago. Thanks to John’s efforts, we have a reliable database of technical measurements.
Can we say the same of our listening comments? No —and nor should we: If our writers aren’t free to use all of the art at their disposal to describe what it’s like to experience music through this or that device, then we’ve lost the race before we’ve even left the gate.
During our conversation, Jim and I characterized the reviewing approaches of everyone who contributes equipment reports to these pages: myself, Jim, John Atkinson, Michael Fremer, Herb Reichert, Jason Victor Serinus, Ken Micallef, Kal Rubinson, Larry Greenhill, Jon Iverson, Sasha Matson, Tom Norton, Bob Deutsch, and Brian Damkroger (footnote 2). We looked, lovingly and unflinchingly, at each one’s strengths and shortcomings, the latter as they might be perceived by readers who don’t share that individual’s point of view.
And that’s the key right there: Most of our writers have one.
As Anton Chekov has said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass”—and 14 different writers will come up with 14 different ways of doing just that. So there remains the inevitable inconvenience of trying to square, say, a Herb Reichert review published in 2020 with a Tom Norton review of an ostensibly similar product, published in 1990. Note that Jim Austin and I invest considerable effort in working with our writers to ensure that, disparate styles notwithstanding, their reviews communicate something of worth to our readers.
Footnote 1: I’m reminded of this delightful quote from Robert Fripp: “Music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice.”
Footnote 2: I know what you’re thinking: If only Stereophile could find a few more middle-aged white men.