The man had great power, folks followed him blindly like many follow Fremer blindly today for analog stuff, or how they followed Parker and his ridiculous wine ratings system. When one guy, not a do-er, but a reviewer, gains too much influence it can really muck up an industry. |
The above reference to Art Dudley's article on sucky bass is a valuable post referencing one of the great articles that I have read on the state of speakers as well as the psychology of audiophiles and their speaker choices (that has led to some truly overrated and overpriced speakers nevertheless sell. |
"05-22-10: Shadorne
The very best horn designs run at about 3% THD when played loud and this will distortion is audible and in treble."
Now where did that come from? The best horns are a lot lower than that figure. Please document where "the best horns" are this high in distortion.
|
Why not horns? Because the USA press killed them for the US market over 30 years ago and most audiophiles are naive enough to believe what they read. In the Far East they never gave up on horns and I can assure you, it's not because they are deaf. Far from it, they never took several horrible wrong turns that the USA audio market did, following the magazine founders, and then the sycophant reviewers they hired, like they were gods. |
Ralph, way wrong. There were great horns when Harry hated them.....Tannoys have been great for a long time, various JBLs were, horns were all over in recording studios sounding great.
And Harry would still say today that they are bad. Lack of correctness never stopped Harry from being religious about his audio beliefs.
Macrojack, you are so right. |
Aczel criticism overblown? I don't know that this would be possible.
Here's a guy who never published a particular issue, but write a bogus review for Carver saying that Carver had exactly duplicated the sound of a well known, very expensive amplifier. Nice little arrangement, Carver reprinted the excerpt from the non-existent issue and supplied them by the load to Carver dealers. Nice little bit of fraud on both sides. The amp, by the way, was very poor sounding compared to one Aczel said it was identical to, and took out many a tweeter of relatively easy to drive speakers at way less than its stated output power. |
I had never heard of Stereophile, TAS, J. Peter goofball, or any of the high end when I went stereo shopping after college. I told the salesperson "I want to hear jazz, classical, pop, but jazz and classical instruments have to sound real". She (yes, she) asked if I ever heard a violin. I said "of course" and she played a string quartet album. Then jazz.
Point is, I wanted to hear music and knew what it sounded like, all without some rag telling me just what to listen for, how to listen, and what albums to listen to.
When I found TAS (which was inevitable) it did not mean a thing to me. The notion of individuals blessing or not blessing equipment based solely on their tastes in their rooms with their listening biases struck me as something that might be entertaining to read but not to take very seriously.
Point is, great equipment existed before any of those cult mags, plenty of folks used the simply logic that good speakers should make an insturment sound like it does in person, and they CERTAINLY did not "found" the industry. SME existed way before them. How about Peter Walker's original Quads? How about the BBC monitor work? All based on good research as well as listening. AR loudspeakers and turntable. We could go on and on. It is completely self-reporting that has HP and others in the press claiming they "founded" high end. Hell, HP even claims he invented the term "high end" - and not just as it applies to audio. That bit of self-reporting is also false.
I appreciate HP's wit, love of music, love of audio, and he certainly had very strong influence in some of the directions it went after he and others in the high end press became powerful, But any thoughts that high end audio would not have flourished without him and his high end reviewing contemporaries is totally false. |
This is not bashing, just a dose of reality. HP wrote about remaining true to the music, but a lot of his equipment did not reflect that. He's as much of a gear head as anyone, and the gear took precedent many times, as did politics. And anyone in the industry in his hayday knew that well.
The systems always could play loud, and usually did, could go deep in the bass and with a lot of volume, and threw big images. But to get those traits they often veered quite a bit away from truth in tonality.
Readers loved the dream of his equipment and sound, but reality was often not as good as the verbal dream he conjured in readers' heads.
His great gift, truly, was writing in a very provocative way. Nobody could touch that in his prime, and his is still closely chimped in that regard, especially by one print writer in particular.
Harry could have been a great writer in the wine industry, camera industry (especially about Leicas), or many other subjective industries for which he had a love.
But one thing should really be clear: he was far more of a columnist and editorialist than unbiased reviewer.
Part of the bias was an extremely strong anti-horn sentiment, which is how this diversion about writers started. Many folks who would have loved compression drivers coupled with horns missed out on them, and the joy they could have had by listening to some of the great ones, due to reading how they were not true high end products in the opinions of biased opinion shapers in the high end digests. |
Frogman, you are suffering from a bit of hero worship and unfortunately don't really know the real scenarios that played out. Neither do you know the sound there over those years, obviously. |
Ah, history is so easy to swing to your position when you are doing the reporting.
Harry claimed he pioneered the use of many words as related to audio and they certainly were not all true.
"High end" is the most ridiculous one.
As for "soundstage", I have used, and heard others use, words like "placement", "positioning", "3d" before we ever read HP or Holt. Many of us identified the lack of 3 dimensionality of CD before HP ever reported on a CD player.
To really believe we (the industry) would not care about such things without his specific words is ludicrous. Before HP or Holt ever took pen to paper stereo was long since out there....gee, how did they get the placement so correct on records pressed in 1959 without having Harry tell them that there was such a concept as center, left, right, or a sense of depth possible? How did they ever get a soundstage before HP "invented" the word? Do you think that the fabulous mic placement on RCAs that HP so lauded years after they came out was just luck? That the placement just happened to serendipitously be there to be discovered by HP?
All the greats that MADE it happen, who knew what they were putting out long before HP came on the scene, are shortchanged by the revisionist history that says HP taught everyone about such matters as imaging, depth, etcetera.
HP and many reviewers are great at taking credit for what they are critiquing, as if they were the cause of the advances. That's just not reality. |
Setting the record straight is all. Folks so often give HP credit for "founding the industry", "inventing the language that allowed us to talk about what we hear", and implying the industry would not have flourished without him. I am offering an alternative take, the reality that although the exact same words might not have been used, the phenomena were recognized and discussion and awareness of great equipment would have occurred without HP. Great journalists do not create industries, they report on them. That they often take credit for products, or "discovering" certain products, or even an entire industry, more reflects on the type of individual drawn to telling folks "how it is" than the reality of the situation.
No more, no less, no agenda. |
Who invented terminology to describe what we hear?
One more entry to dispel the myth that this was anyone associated with TAS, Stereophile, or any such magazine.
Below you will read the words and phrases "auditory perspective" (I think that word describes imaging enough to suffice as an equal substitute for "imaging"); "an illusion that causes the listener to seem to hear a specific sound from the point at which it originates" (sounds like another description that fully describes imaging and focus";
"audience in Washington had no difficulty in telling just where on the Philadelphia stage the brasses, tympani, bass viols, and so on were placed" (now we see the word "placed", so the concept of "placement" is introduced.
Folks, the proceeding article was in 1933!! I think we can see we did not need modern reviewers to introduce the concepts of imaging, placement, stage, illusion, and "auditory perspective."
1933!
Now the Article:
----------------------------------------------------
NEW ELECTRICAL SYSTEM GIVES VAST TONE TO Full Orchestra on Empty Stage
Conductor, 150 Miles from Musicians, Controls Expression with Master Key
ORCHESTRAL music such as never before had been publicly heard, poured from the apparently empty stage of Constitution Hall, Washington, D. C, a few nights ago when Dr. Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, demonstrated before the National Academy of Sciences, a new electrical system of musical reproduction and transmission developed by engineers of the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
The source of the music was the stage of the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, 150 miles away. There the hundred musicians of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra played a program of standard orchestral numbers. In front of the Philadelphia stage stood three sensitive microphones, one in the center and one at each side. Each was connected separately by telephone lines with a loudspeaker that stood behind a sound-porous curtain on the stage in Washington.
In the rear of Constitution Hall sat Dr. Stokowski, before him a small oblong box, not unlike a midget radio receiver, with a front panel equipped with three dials and a pair of switches. Manipulating these devices, the conductor controlled the music of the far-away orchestra, hushing the sounds issuing from the loudspeakers until they were barely audible, and then making them swell to twenty times the volume produced by the actual orchestra.
At no time was there any suggestion of distortion, nor any hint, in the quality of the music, of the electrical transfer it had undergone. For the new apparatus (microphones, amplifiers, electrical filters, transmission lines, and loudspeakersreproduces with absolute fidelity all sounds that the normal human ear is capable of hearing.
Moreover, the location of the microphones in reference to the source of sound and the placing of each loudspeaker in a position that corresponds with that of the particular microphone with which it is connected brings about an effect that the Bell Telephone engineers call auditory perspective, that is, an illusion that causes the listener to seem to hear a specific sound from the point at which it originates. For example, the audience in Washington had no difficulty in telling just where on the Philadelphia stage the brasses, tympani, bass viols, and so on were placed. Hum and the other noises are only one three-hundredth of those heard from moving-picture theater sound equipment.
-----------------------------------------------------
This took me 5 minutes to find on the computer. Guaranteed I could come up with a reference to "depth" and the other concepts that folks, listening to HP's self-reporting, believe he invented.
I remind you, this article was a full FOUR DECADES before TAS was founded. |
Who invented the terminology: more evidence it was not who you think it was.
One of HP's favorite words/concepts, which he claimed he coined, and wrote a long essay about: "Transparency."
From 1960, a Shure ad: "Shure announces a stereo arm and cartridge that recraates sound with an incredible fidelity, transparency,....."
There goes another concept and word that did not need inventing.
--------------------------------------------------
Then listen to any of the 5 Fischer stereo perfectionist systems and you will hear hitherto unattainable tonal purity, STEREO DEPTH (my caps) and realism, a PANARAMIC SWEEP (my caps) of living sound......"
There we have both depth and width imaging concepts clearly described, 13 years before the founding of TAS.
--------------------------------------------------
Go to this video and forward to 12 minutes 30 seconds and you will hear the phrase "....to create an illusion of depth and width....."
There we have it: the concepts of imagine, but going by the name "illusion"...I would submit that this is as good a word as "maging". But further, the words "width" and "depth": all that is needed to describe imaging. I suspect that I will also find the words "focus" and "space" used if I search a bit more.
The date of this video: 1957!!!!!
-----------------------------------------------
The above is simply to support my original premise that it was not any individual reviewer who invented the concepts and vocabulary, about stereo, and to show that the concepts and vocabulary to describe depth, imaging, transparency, "closest to the live event" were in use before the 70's, when the magazines many think of as having defined high end stereo were founded.
The language and concepts were being developed decades before most readers of this forum assume. |
My point is that folks were using the terms, so whether they were in reviews or not they were in the lexicon. Therefore, they most certainly would have been used in reviews even if there were never an HP. Actually, first piece I quoted was a news story, not an ad, so we can say that the press indeed used the concepts and words in the 30's. And that press piece compared the sound of the hi-fi to that of a symphony....which is "real, live, unamplified instruements".
So there we go: words and concepts, including using unamplified instruments, goes right back to the 30s. |
The 1.5t was nowhere near the ML2 (itself not my favorite amp)and making "transfer function matches" between 2 totally different amps with different components and topologies is entirely preposterous.
This was "an inside job", nothing less. Should surprise nobody familiar with the Fourier shenanigans. |
