Why not horns?

Some of the criticism of Peter Aczel in this thread is overblown. In a changing environment for someone to alter their position can be considered a sign of an inquiring/flexible mind. "All amplifiers sound the same" is not an accurate statement of his position, it should read "all amplifiers should sound the same". If amplifiers are designed to be accurate to the input signal, then they should sound very much alike. Stereophile considered this issue when they put a Cary 805 tube amp on the cover with a Krell and asked, "If either of these amplifiers is RIGHT...the other is WRONG." Aczel believes that he had a methodology for determining if an amplifier was "right". Whether or not his methodology was correct or even useful is a tangent I won't pursue, but at least he was asking the question about accuracy. I believe that the real legacy of HP and his followers is that we are no longer concerned with high fidelity reproduction, or accuracy, but instead pursue good sound. The end result of this type of thinking is that we now talk about "the sound" of fuses, outlet covers, resistors and binding posts.

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.

what is a horn?

Thanks for the info Kiddman.

I was never under the impression that HP or JGH ever claimed that they were the first to use these terms, I felt that they were the ones who picked them up and started using them consistently and made efforts to let us know how they were using them and if HP ever bragged about it, it wasn't about inventing the terms, it was about using them consistently in his reviews. In other words, they were the first who started drilling into the readers a point of view stating "hey, here's how we listen to equipment and these are the terms and definitions of the words we use."

There is no question in my mind that people were talking about image placement or soundstage concepts before the first issue of Stereophile or TAS. I remember being a kid and my father playing records and pointing out the placements of the different sections of the orchestra while the record was playing.

Before JGH and HP, I can't remember any reviewer who was consistently describing what they were hearing from audio equipment in terms imaging, depth, soundstaging and transparency and if there was someone consistently reviewing this way before HP and JGH, then they should be given credit.

My memory of reviewing before HP/JGH back then was that it was all about how everything measured on the bench and then at the end of the review there's be a few generic sentences about how the sound was clean and fine, just as it measured, or if their was an anomaly in the measurements, a statement about the sound to support that anomaly.

What do you think; were HP and JGH the first mainstream writers to consistently review this way, or were others reviewing like this earlier?

Seikosha,
Nicely put! I don't intend to overstate the influence of HP and JGH but they did bring subjective opinion/reviewing to a wide audience of readers. They weren't "all knowing gurus" but I'll give them their due credit.
Charles,