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

I had a subscription for years to Stereo Review and loved reading the articles and equipment reviews. I especially liked the issue that came out once a year that had all (or most) of the equipment manufactured at the time, it had brief specs and prices.

For a few years before, I had wanted to begin learning about stereos (I hadn't bought anything toward my first system yet), but didn't know where to begin. I was 12 years old when I picked my first copy. I felt a little confused looking through it...until I found the glossary in the back that had the definitions of all the audio terms they were using and then I realized I had "a way in". 

I read that magazine for a couple decades, then graduated to Stereophile, then to Absolute Sound...finally I reached the point where I don't need to rely on magazines or review sites so much anymore. But, for me it all started with Stereo Review and I remember it with fondness and gratitude for that...and maybe a certain nostalgia.

I read Stereo Review for years and really learned a lot. Most of which unfortunately turned out to be wrong. At the time it seemed I was learning. Only years later did I come to understand just how great a disservice the Stereo Review philosophy had done. 

Julian Hirsch was just dead wrong to say all you need to know about wire is gauge. Wrong to say measurements like watts matter. Wrong about one thing after another. Which J Gordon Holt came along and corrected. The listener is the final arbiter of performance. Stereophile won. Stereo Review, RIP.

The one thing I did learn was the distinction between the music, the performance, and the recording. Three very different yet closely related and easily conflated things. To this day this eludes many audiophiles. Yet it was a regular feature of all their music reviews. So on balance not as bad as it could have been.

It is funny though that a magazine whose primary duty is evaluating stereo equipment did so poorly at that but then did much better at the side gig of reviewing music. But that's the thing I guess about nostalgia- we get to decide to view it clearly, or through rose colored glasses.

I'll end on a positive note: great cartoons.

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."