Stereophile Oct-17

THIS ISSUE: Might the recorded music business be in better shape? THERE ARE AS MANY OPINIONS AS THERE ARE EXPERTS Digital audio forever disrupted the way music is recorded, mixed, and mastered—and, to even greater extents, how music is distributed, sold, played, and consumed. Music unmolested by zeros and ones is now nearly extinct. There’s no going back, but what if, in 1983, the Compact Disc had bombed? What if music lovers worldwide had rejected the shiny new digital format because they thought LPs sounded so much better? And what if later attempts at digital formats with higher resolutions also shriveled and died, due to lack of interest by recording engineers and consumers? What if, to this day, music had remained all-analog? The digital juggernaut laid waste to much of what had been that…

Art Dudley’s video Editor: I very much enjoyed Art’s video about his listening room (www.stereophile.com/ content/reviewer-video-profile-art-dudley). I wish all you guys would do one. —Steve Underwood junderwood6569@charter.net Our editorial coordinator and videographer Jana Dagdagan is working her way through the writing team. As well as Art Dudley’s profile, you can find Herb Reichert’s at www.stereophile.com/content/reviewer-video-profileherb- reichert, and Steve Guttenberg’s at www.stereophile.com/content/steve-guttenberg-i-amaudiophile. By the time this issue hits newsstands, you will also be able to find online video profiles of Michael Fremer and Kal Rubinson.—John Atkinson Art Dudley’s insights Editor: Regarding Art Dudley’s insights on enjoying one’s music listening, it occurred to me: As music lovers, audiophiles can gain greater enjoyment of what they listen to by pursuing insights beyond the immediate visceral impacts they experience while listening. I often pursue the following to enrich…

EUROPE John Atkinson As you can see from the logo on our Staff page (p.8) and reproduced here, Stereophile has accepted an invitation to be inducted into the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA), as the exclusive US member of the EISA’s Hi-Fi Expert Group. (At the same time, our sister magazine Sound & Vision was inducted as the exclusive US member of the HT Video Expert Group.) The categories of US and European may seem mutually exclusive; but last May, at the EISA Convention in Antwerp, Belgium, the members supported Paul Miller, EISA president and editor of the UK’s Hi-Fi News magazine, in an initiative to take the Association worldwide. EISA (www.eisa.eu) is the biggest and, at nearly 40 years, the oldest general consumer-electronics awards association in the world; its members include…

INSIDER VIEWS ON EVERYTHING VINYL The death of a company founder, whether sudden or expected, often produces trauma. Whoever was tapped to replace the visionary Steve Jobs would be handed a thankless task, but at Apple, timid Tim Cook’s so-far unimaginative performance as caretaker demonstrates the difficulties of succession. As Jobs beat Sony to the iPod, Cook let Amazon beat him to the Alexa. Apple missed the lead on streaming audio, playing catch-up by buying the MOG music service, which was transformed into Beats Music in 2014. Apparently, Cook doesn’t think it’s worth pursuing high-resolution audio for iTunes. He’s obviously got the resources and the audio talent, but he’s going to let others lead in that area while he plays catch-up with other already-developing technologies. In our little corner of the business…

THIS ISSUE: Moving angst, LP storage options, and a unique horn-loaded speaker. IN SEARCH OF THE EXCEPTIONAL Even at full strength, my family didn’t need 3000-plus square feet of living space, let alone four acres of outdoor frolicking space, much of it wooded. But in 2003 that’s precisely what we bought, partly because our deal fell through on another, very different house, partly because living next to a dairy farm was an appealing novelty, and partly because the hill on which the house is poised seemed defensible. On our very first morning in our new home—a Saturday in early June—we awoke to gunfire and puffs of smoke coming from the field below our hill. The hubbub turned out to be a reenactment of a Revolutionary War battle, which instilled in me the…

Frequent attendees of US audio shows know Gordon Burwell’s copious handlebar mustache and cheerful demeanor almost as well as his Burwell & Sons loudspeakers. Dedicated to building his own interpretations of Altec Lansing’s iconic A-7 Voice of the Theater speakers for his top-of-the-line Homage series of products, Burwell travels the US in search of Altec and JBL drivers, then installs those vintage components in horns and cabinets crafted from and veneered with salvaged, high-quality woods. Burwell’s speakers are some of the most striking audio components I’ve ever seen. Burwell delivered the review pair of Mother of Burl speakers (“Burl” indicates the cabinet’s veneer) to my raucous Manhattan block, and set them up in my listening room. Each Mother of Burl cabinet contains a horn-loaded, 15" Altec woofer and a 3.125" JBL…