stereo review magazine

I've been on the same path that others here have trod.  Used to read Stereo Review and then discovered Stereophile Magazine and my eyes were opened and my wallet was emptied.  

Stereo Review wasn't bad, but Stereophile has really gone downhill. I have yet to see any of my equipment reviewed in their mag.The reccomended products never seem to change much from year to year.They seem to have their favorites . 

For the beginner, Stereo Review was a good primer.  Of course, it's main purpose was to sell ads, and to get freebies for the testers.  I even blame them for the newer measurements manufactorers started using, "Power at 100cps, one channel driven", rather than full range with extreme frequency rolloff db's, etc.  I don't remember their ever writing about damping factor or interactions of amps with the motor effects of moving speaker drivers. 

I read SR from the late '70s to the end-of-the-line. But along the way, I figured out that when it came to audio, subjectivity rules, at least in the buyer/user side of the house (though not for mfr/designer). I wasn't getting anywhere when I followed numbers & stats; but when I started following my ears, all the good stuff started to happen.

(of course it also took buckets of $$$ -- even buying used)

I had a subscription to Stereo Review mostly for the album reviews. I especially liked reading the reviews by Lester Bangs. I enjoyed the articles on the music business, and remember one feature they did on bootleg albums.

As for the constant berating of Julian Hirsch in audio forums? Get a life. He approached reviewing equipment as an engineer not as a listener or music critic. Once you understood his bias you should have been smart enough to parse the information into what was useful for you, If you couldn’t and thought Hirsch was some kind of technical god - that’s on you for being that naive and not learning by reading what he wrote and then listening for yourself and making up your own mind.
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I used to laugh out loud at some of the things he said and thought he might secretly be a gag writer in disguise. Nonetheless, some of what he said made sense and you just filtered out the drivel and retained the useful pieces of information.

I think Bob Carver proving he could make a solid-state amp sound exactly like a Conrad Johnson tube amp was at least as entertaining as anything else that happened in the mid-1980s.