Stereophile September 2022

60 Years! It was September 1962. In the UK, the Beatles were recording their first single, “Love Me Do,” at London’s Abbey Road Studios. And in the US, a young journalist, J. Gordon Holt, born in North Carolina but raised in Australia from 1935 to 1947, had become dissatisfied with the advertiser-friendly atmosphere at High Fidelity magazine, for which he had been the audio editor. Holt quit High Fidelity and published the first issue of what was then called The Stereophile. Cover-dated September 1962, its 20 pages contained one equipment report (with four graphs), five record reviews, five feature articles, one classified advertisement, and an editorial leader1 in which JGH, as he was to become known, wrote: “The Stereophile isn’t a showcase for advertisers. It is the readers’ own publication. ……

Quackery, etc. Mr. Bakel’s “Quackery, gullibility, and open-mindedness” raised troubling issues. Mr. Bakel seems to rely on a personal anecdote and Ross Douthat, a noted conservative and devout Roman Catholic, for the proposition that personal anecdotes constitute data worthy of reliance. Maybe for the reporting population of one, but the plural of anecdote is not data. Bakel writes, “Maybe it’s okay to approach these things as a whole human being and not as a scientist.” I have no idea what that statement means, even after rereading Bakel’s essay. More importantly, in these tortured times of broken epistemologies where the subjective supplants truth (QAnon, politics, etc.), there is such a thing as truth (albeit that’s a discussion we can pursue). Reliance on sound thinking has never been more critical or more absent.…

JAPAN: TAKATSUKI, OSAKA PREFECTURE Julie Mullins The industry has lost another luminary. Atsushi Miura passed away peacefully on May 25, 2022. He was 88 years old. Miura’s name may not have been as familiar as some, but audiophiles know his companies and products, from Luxman to Air Tight, solid state and tubed. Miura was an accomplished audio-electronics engineer who rose to prominence at Luxman, where he began his tenure in 1956, when Luxman was still a family business. Miura married the eldest daughter, Mari, of company head/co-founder K. Yoshikawa. Miura’s audio-engineer father later led Luxman. By the early 1980s, Miura had risen to prominence at Luxman, eventually following in his father-in-law’s—and his engineer father’s—footsteps and running the company. When Alpine acquired Luxman, soon after, Miura founded A&M Limited with designer/co-founder Masami Ishiguro, in 1986.…

The Acoustical Systems AXIOM Reference tonearm The AXIOM tonearm from acoustical systems—the company prefers lowercase—has been on my To-Review list since I spotted it at Munich High End more than a few years ago, but for one reason or another, that never happened. Until now. The understated, “lab-grade” AXIOM holds its own visually even when paired with designer D.D. Brakemeier’s enormous and equally lab-looking APOLYT turntable. You can take the turntable tour on AnalogPlanet or on Brakemeier’s website.1 That turntable’s scale makes even the TechDAS Air Force Zero appear diminutive. Brakemeier, who describes himself as the “chief design officer, so to speak,” says his goal for the $24,995 AXIOM was to produce an infinitely adjustable “universal” tonearm capable of precisely adjusting every setup parameter you can think of and maybe a few you…

Psychedelic visions I have a peephole in the door to my first-floor apartment. It looks down a straight hall to a glass wall framing the front door of my building. For 13 years, its job has been to let me see who is ringing my buzzer and who is making a racket in the hall. Over time, however, the peephole’s lens turned amber-yellow and frosted-foggy like those headlight protectors on cars. In recent years, it became so clouded that all I could make out were unidentifiable Sasquatch figures moving in a blurry space. I was startled one day when I peered through the peephole and recognized my UPS person. The view was still blurry, but it was much brighter and clearer than before. Then I realized: I was spying with my right eye.…

LOUDSPEAKER It seems as if I have been waiting for these all my life. Not in any existential sense, but in a literal, practical way: The arrival of the Blade Two Meta is the culmination of a lifelong fascination with KEF. As a teenager, I was introduced to founder Raymond Cooke and his innovative “race-track” woofer, Mylar tweeter, and Bextrene cones in Bud Fried’s IMF Newsletter. Shortly thereafter, I commenced decades of building loudspeakers, mostly with KEF drivers, and, beginning with the 104 in 1973, pining for their Reference speakers. They always seemed to strike the right balance of intelligent engineering, solid construction, and domestic suitability. Regrettably, they were always priced out of my reach. The project Cooke started has been sustained by a succession of notable designers and engineers (Laurie Fincham;…