Hip Boots: Wading through the Mire of Misinformation in the Audio Press: John Atkinson in Stereophile; Neil Levenson in Fanfare.

Editor's Note: This column was absent from Issue No. 14, and in Issue No. 13 it was still using the editorial "we." Even though signed articles and the first person singular have now been introduced as the standard convention of this publication, I feel no need to sign my name here, since no one is likely to attribute this sort of thing to another author. Rest assured, the curmudgeonly "I" is I.

Willie Sutton robbed banks "because that's where the money is," as he explained, and I keep coming back in this column to Stereophile because that's where the audio misinformation is. That's not the only place, I must admit, but then it's not the only publication I take to task here, either.

John Atkinson in Stereophile

In the "As We See It" leadoff editorial column of the May 1990 issue of Stereophile, John Atkinson defends at great length the Santa Fe magazine's practice of measuring loudspeakers at the altitude of 7000 feet above sea level, in response to the doubts I expressed about the validity of such measurements in Issue No. 14 of The Audio Critic. He writes that I feel the need to defend my reputation by attacking Stereophile's, and after several pages of circuitous arguments and frequency response curves (the thrust of which is that, yes, altitude makes a small difference, but so what) he concludes that "Mr. Aczel's hypothesis"-which he mis states so outrageously that I refuse to quote him for fear of giving the misstatement permanence-*is incorrect." Now, in my Madison Avenue days, I used to have a sign in my office that said, "I may have my faults but being wrong isn't one of them." So you can imagine how much it goes against my grain to refrain from punching holes in JA's technical arguments (and how disappointed he will be), but a larger issue than that needs to be addressed here, namely intellectual honesty in audio journalism. You see, JA is hypocritically responding only to the lesser of the two examples of altitude-skewed speaker testing I cited (viz.

Waveform) and carefully avoids any reference to the big, embarrassing one (viz. Carver). It's the same as if, for example, Nixon were making eloquent excuses for the Agnew scandal and pretending that Watergate never happened.

"I’ll come back briefly to the Waveform super-tweeter's alleged peak. First, however, I must remind JA that the un mentionable Carver "Amazing Loudspeaker," in the early Platinum Edition reviewed by Dick Olsher in the February 1990 Stereophile (as distinct from later versions), was in effect two totally different speakers at sea level and at 7000 feet-or so I am told by its designer, who was very unhappy about the difference and began to take steps to fix it as soon as he became aware of it. The review glossed over this problem and treated the consequent deficiencies of the speaker as engineering ineptitudes, amusing eccentricities, and poor quality control. According to Bob Carver, he begged DO and JA to audition and measure the speaker at a less extreme altitude, but they flatly refused. That puts a very different complexion on the subject than JA's hairsplitting little apologia. I'm now firmly convinced that before the Carver experience no one at the magazine had the slightest awareness of the altitude problem and afterwards the problem had to be declared insignificant to prevent all sorts of skeletons from tumbling out of the closet. Somehow, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is considered bad for business in Larry Archibald territory, as I have pointed out before.

To return to the Waveform speaker system, here are the plain facts: The National Research Council laboratory in Canada measured one sample of the system to be very flat. I measured another sample to be very flat. In Santa Fe, at 7000 feet, they measured the system (I don't know which sample-not mine) to have a big 16 kHz peak. Then JA had an old, spare sample (not taken from any of these systems!) of the suspected Philips ribbon-type supertweeter measured in Los Angeles at sea level and in Santa Fe at 7000 feet. In the tiny, hard-to-read graphs accompanying his May editorial, I discern approximately 2 dB more output at 16 kHz in Santa Fe than in Los Angeles, exactly as one would expect.

He calls it 0.4 dB. (Sure, John, if you say so...) Anyway, how does this cockamamie experiment put a Q.E.D. on the general unimportance of the altitude issue, and how does it prove me "incorrect"? The mind reels.

One more thing. In a nasty footnote to the July 1990 "Industry Update" in his magazine, John Atkinson has this to say about my participation in the 8th International Conference of the Audio Engineering Society, which took place in May in Washington, DC: "Characteristically, Mr. Aczel avoided discussion of his role [as audio reviewer], choosing instead to attack the other high-end magazines." He is refer ring to a special session on the reviewing of audio products, where I was alphabetized to be the first panelist to make an introductory statement.

Again, being "characteristically" ill at ease with the whole truth, JA omits that all of us panelists, including me, discussed our roles as audio reviewers all evening, only my opening remarks were not about myself but about the gener al subject of accountability in equipment reviewing-and that made JA squirm because it set the theme for the next hour or so. He ran into a bit of trouble trying to explain to a large roomful of the top academics and professionals in audio why he and his staff can't prove what they claim to hear. I suppose it did seem like an attack to him, just as my comments on speaker measurements at 7000 feet above sea level seemed like an attack on his magazine's "reputation." Anyone sitting there in that Washington conference room could see, however, that some of the best brains in audio had serious doubts about that reputation to begin with.

Neil Levenson in Fanfare

Fanfare calls itself "The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors," and in my opinion it lives up to that tag line.

Published six times a year in the form of a fat paperback book, sometimes exceeding 500 pages, it is unquestionably a quality publication, unapologetically highbrow and strictly of a "scholarly" typographic format (i.c., every page looks the same). If a labeled classical recording exists at all, you can be fairly certain that it will be reviewed in Fanfare, not only when first released but also whenever repackaged in some other form or combination. Furthermore, the review is more likely to be intelligent and musically enlightened than those in the newsstand magazines, since Editor/Publisher Joel Flegler has a large number of mostly excellent free lance specialists at his beck and call and lets them write as they please. They're a pretty sophisticated bunch. The more's the pity, then, that Mr. Flegler chose as his Audio Editor a self-indulgent pseudo expert like Neil Levenson.

Not that I expect Mr. Flegler to be an expert on audio experts. He is obviously a music man (and a good one), per haps without any close acquaintances in the inner circles of audio. But it's possible for a resourceful non-expert to push some buttons, beat some bushes, make some waves, and find a genuine expert with genuine credentials. Mr. Flegler got snookered, I think, by a fellow music devotee-because Neil Levenson does know quite a bit about music, and that makes him half qualified for the job, even in my jaundiced opinion. But his knowledge of audio electronics, electro acoustics, and psychophysics-forget it. It's an embarrassment to an otherwise outstanding journal.

Actually, Neil Levenson's bimonthly column in Fan fare, "New for Audiophiles," could just as well be appearing in The Absolute Sound, of which he is an alumnus. Like so many of the equipment reviewers from Harry Pearson's stable, he blithely inserts a new piece of equipment into his system, plays an old familiar recording (say, a CD transfer of some 78's from the 1930's), forms an instant opinion of the sound, and attributes the qualities he hears (or claims to hear) to the performance of the new equipment. Just like that, I kid you not. He makes absolutely no attempt to standardize his setup and his methods in order to achieve any kind of consistency or repeatability. It never occurs to him that maybe he is hearing something other than the effect of the device under test. Double-blind comparisons at matched levels? He probably thinks that's an event at the Special Olympics.

What irks me in particular is his smug confidence in the validity of his impressionistic evaluations and solipsistic apergus. For example, in the May/June 1990 issue, he talks about the Harman/Kardon HD7500 CD players "rhythmic deadness which made the bass line seem remote in time." And "perhaps because the HK cannot keep the bass in time with rest of the music, the mood of the performance was cauterized," he writes. "After about five minutes I was bored." Joel Flegler, how can you tolerate such untutored trash in the pages of your fine magazine? There exists no mechanism known to physicists that could make the bass go out of sync with the rest of the music in the HD7500. Neil Levenson appears to be so in love with the first little conceit that pops into his mind while he listens that he never gives it a second thought before putting it in his column.

I could go on with example after example of Levensonian howlers, but here's one that neatly demonstrates why he shouldn't be writing about electronics. In his review of the Sansui AU-X911DG integrated amplifier (July/August 1990), he writes: "I did not test or audition the built-in digi tal-to-analog converter. There are four digital inputs, one optical. I noted that the non-optical digital inputs are via the usual RCA-style jacks. This struck me as possibly not apt, because the impedance of RCA-style jacks is around a couple of hundred ohms whereas the owner's manual says to employ "75-ohm digital connection cable." It seems to me that an RCA-style plug does not properly terminate a sup posed '75-ohm' cable." I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that. Here's a man who accepts money to write a semi-technical column for audiophiles, and he doesn't know (1) that those coax digital inputs are terminated with 75-ohm resistors and 2) that it's utterly meaningless to talk about the characteristic impedance of a half-inch long conduit such as an RCA jack unless you're well into the gigahertz band. Some expert! Maybe the solution is to enroll Neil Levenson in one of those correspondence courses in electronics and ground him at Fanfare until he gets his mail-order diploma.

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[adapted from TAC, Issue No. 15]

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Also see:

Seminar 1989: Exploring the Current Best Thinking on Audio, Part III of the Continuing Transcript

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines