what's your opinion on the magazine 'stereo review'??

My dad had a subscription to the rag when it was still Hi Fi review, and I read the thing religiously from about age eight to my late teenage years. But yes, it was a total revelation when somebody turned me on to The Absolute Sound.  Wow, they're actually discussing the fidelity the components rendered, not just giving the specs!  I think it was TAS that lampooned the Hirsch-Hauck test report style with the closing line, "Of all the components we have tested, this has certainly been one of them."

HiFi News and Record Review -- Yeah!  I ran across it one evening while cruising a newsstand near where I lived.  Superb, subjective reviews of both classical LPs and hardware.  Loved Ken Kessler.  Not much later, I became buddies with Kevin Conklin, a regular customer at the classical records department where I worked at the time.  Kevin turned me on to The Absolute Sound.  Later, of course, he started writing for Harry Pearson's rag.