stereo review magazine

Happy Loof Lirpa Day, everybody!

This is a quite old thread and beating up on some of the pioneers has been a favorite pastime for the uniformed for much longer.  At the risk of opening Pandora's box, I would like to offer a bit of home truth to the discussion.  The first thing that needs to be addressed is the old saw that Julien Hirsh never wrote a negative review.  What is not understood is that he along with a number of other audio engineers fought behind the scenes for many years to combat the out and out fraud that was being perpetrated by many unscrupulous manufacturers in the form of false specifications.  The honest firms did not make false claims, but for every one of the honest ones there was a counterpart making exaggerated claims.  He and others like him refused to give credence to the hucksters.  That is why he only dealt with positive reviews.  Meantime he and his colleagues eventually convinced the Federal Government to intervene by setting standards for pre-conditioning to establish meaningful amplifier power ratings, how to measure and report distortion values and so forth.  If he did not have all the answers, he worked within the frame work of his age and within the limits of what was known and understood.  And yes he was conservative and did not grasp new ideas readily.  That does not justify the abuse heaped upon him by people who came later and don't have the perspective or knowledge necessary to offer a balanced perspective.  As far as Stereo Review otherwise, the record reviews are invaluable to the record collector right up to today.  The same can be said for High Fidelity.  Audio, which was my favorite during it's years in publication, I find less useful today in as much as there was perhaps less emphasis on record reviews, but it is still interesting.  So enough with the invective already.  

I remember going to my local news paper candy store in Sunnyside, Queens. Having an egg cream and reading it...hear i was in High School.But I would always buy it afterwards.

@billstevenson 

"Julien Hirsh never wrote a negative review"

You guys just espouse the same old crap! I used to spend countless hours at the Boston Public Library fawning over original hardcopy from the late 1950’s through late 1960’s of Stereo Review, High Fidelity, Audio and Consumer Reports and they wrote more than a few negative reviews which always included detailed electrical test bench data, well explained so that the consumer could judge objectively as well as subjectively. For years they complained about the lack of standardization regarding manufacturer’s specifications and were constantly lobbying for the RMS or root, mean, squared approach whereas the IHF or Institute of High Fidelity was the most common and were exaggerated, inconsistent and didn’t give the consumer a rational means of comparing one product to another.

Interestingly, I learned from Consumer Reports that my generations teeth, bones and thyroids are full of decaying radioactive isotopes from atmospheric nuclear testing that we consumed from the milk-based formulas we were nursed on, the two cent cartons of milk we were fed in elementary school and all the other vegetable and animal products we ate including my Sugar Smacks. They include cesium, strontium, iodine and others along with the fact that the early detonations rarely burned more than 20% of the fissile material like U235 and plutonium in the chain reaction and wound up in the upper atmosphere. Plutonium is the most poisonous substance known to man, since as an element doesn’t exist in nature, we invented it. Rarely does fission either. Fusion of course does and we learned how to do that by using fission to compress lithium deuteride which produces tritium, an isotope of hydrogen which can undergo fusion and then boom! Sorry folks just in the mood tonight.