Stereophile Jan-18

“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.” —Claude Shannon Since its announcement at the end of 2014, Master Quality Authenticated, the MQA encoding/decoding system, has spawned outspoken criticism. Some of the more thoughtful negative reactions have come from engineers such as Dan Lavry, Bruno Putzeys, and Daniel Weiss. Others have been expressed by manufacturers of digital products: Charley Hansen at Ayre Acoustics, for example, along with Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffat at Schiit Audio, John Siau at Benchmark Media Systems, and Jim Collinson at Linn Products. Most vociferous have been anonymous website posters. As Jim Austin remarks in his examination of MQA’s decoding of impulse-response data on p.127, “the nastiness online is unprecedented.” Typical of the nastiness…

David Manley Editor: This December marks the fifth anniversary of the death of David Manley, founder of Vacuum Tube Logic. His achievement was a line of superb audio gear with prices “everyone can afford”—his words. Value for your money? Sounds like an antique concept now, doesn’t it? I still own and use some of his terrific gear. Not for David a membership in any coterie catering, Fabergé fashion, to the rich. Not for him the fatuous price-raising race where price impersonates excellence, rounded up to the nearest $10,000. Hats off to David’s memory. —Bruce Moss Santa Fe, NM brucemoss@earthlink.net Astounding science Editor: I’m thinking you should change the name of your magazine to Amazing Stereophile Stories. You’ve got a travelogue/review of speakers that look like Dr. Zarkov’s rocket ship (“Devialet Diary,” November 2017). You’ve got turntables straight…

UK: LONDON Paul Messenger Although getting a new high-end audio show up and running is no easy task, you’d think that a city as large and important as London would have had at least one such event every year since the mid-1950s. But for several years of the last decade, it didn’t. That situation may have changed with the second annual Indulgence Show: The Luxury Audio & Lifestyle Exhibition took place Friday–Sunday, September 29–October 1, 2017. One of Indulgence’s biggest strengths was its location, the Novotel London West, at the Hammersmith International Centre—essentially the same hotel as the Cunard International, which in the 1970s was the venue for the hi-fi shows organized by Don Quillan. The organizers claim success for the Indulgence’s “difficult second album,” claiming a 20% increase in attendance over the…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website dedicated solely to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@XLinkAudio.com. Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless this is associated with a seminar or similar event. CALIFORNIA ❚ Sunday, January 14, 1–4 pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society, in concert with the San Diego Music and Audio Guild, will hold a joint meeting at Manley Laboratories, in Chino (13880 Magnolia Avenue). Made in Chino, Not China! Once again, Manley Labs will open its factory doors to Society members for a day in which everyone will get to see the intricate details and processes that go…

It was great fun having our editorial coordinator, Jana Dagdagan, shoot a video profile of me in my listening room. As I write this, it’s had more than 88,000 views. While the ratio of thumbs up to thumbs down has remained consistently around 10:1, some of the negative comments, particularly about our industry and about this magazine, do enrage me. Being called a “snake oil peddler” and a “haberdasher to emperors” is bad enough, but having high-end audio characterized as “the biggest shill industry ever to hit humanity since the age of alchemy,” and as one based solely on greed, sets me off. I don’t know anyone who got into this business to become rich. I get angry when people write that they prefer science to observational reviewing, and that I “lose…

The company appears to be long gone, but throughout the 1970s, virtually every Sunday, there was an ad in the New York Times Magazine for a manufacturer of whole-house music systems—I recollect the name as Bolton, but that gets no hits on Google, so perhaps I’ve misremembered—with a headline that went something like: “ENJOY MOZART IN THE DINING ROOM, BEETHOVEN IN THE LIVING ROOM, AND THE ROLLING STONES IN THE CHILDREN’S ROOM.” I remember wondering even then, as a distinctly unworldly teenager in upstate New York: Who in God’s name would want such a thing? Why squirt background music everywhere—and make no mistake, any system in which the user has less than complete, hands-on control of playback media is a background-music system—when, for a lot less money, you could fill…