It didn't take long for Stereophile to disappoint me. The November issue is only the third one in my two-year renewal, and already I'm finding fault with the opinions of the staff writers.
Take Art Dudley's "Listening" column on page 43. Please. AD wastes 2-1/2 pages setting up and demolishing straw men in an attempt to discredit blind testing. In the process he completely ignores the question of how to compensate for expectation bias in sighted subjective testing. He also fails to draw the essential distinction between art (the music he uses to evaluate equipment) and technology (the equipment itself, which should be designed to function as a perfect copy machine rather than a musical instrument). His remarks include several paragraphs of gratuitous name-calling aimed at those who are skeptical of sighted subjective evaluation of audio equipment. I was neither convinced nor impressed by this screed, though it did leave me wondering why Stereophile allocates page space for AD's opinions.
I was also disappointed by Sam Tellig's evaluation of the La Rosita Alpha New streaming DAC. ST quotes La Rosita's Web site, at which their ad writer opined that digital audio was a step back for reproduction of music because of the need for separate recording and playback time bases. Hello? Doesn't ST or La Rosita's PR hack realize that analog audio also uses separate time bases at both ends of the recording chain? The nature of the time base is different for analog, of course; instead of a word clock derived from a crystal oscillator, an analog time base is a rotating capstan on a tape transport or a rotating platter on a record lathe or playback turntable. As anyone who's ever listened to a 45 RPM record played back at 33-1/3 can tell you, skew between analog time bases can definitely upset timing cues in the music (not to mention such other important factors as pitch). The time base skew doesn't need to be this severe to degrade playback; more subtle speed errors or speed inconsistencies (wow and flutter) can still wreak havoc with analog playback. I was surprised and disappointed that a writer of ST's experience bought the explanation from La Rosita and missed this elementary point.
Take Art Dudley's "Listening" column on page 43. Please. AD wastes 2-1/2 pages setting up and demolishing straw men in an attempt to discredit blind testing. In the process he completely ignores the question of how to compensate for expectation bias in sighted subjective testing. He also fails to draw the essential distinction between art (the music he uses to evaluate equipment) and technology (the equipment itself, which should be designed to function as a perfect copy machine rather than a musical instrument). His remarks include several paragraphs of gratuitous name-calling aimed at those who are skeptical of sighted subjective evaluation of audio equipment. I was neither convinced nor impressed by this screed, though it did leave me wondering why Stereophile allocates page space for AD's opinions.
I was also disappointed by Sam Tellig's evaluation of the La Rosita Alpha New streaming DAC. ST quotes La Rosita's Web site, at which their ad writer opined that digital audio was a step back for reproduction of music because of the need for separate recording and playback time bases. Hello? Doesn't ST or La Rosita's PR hack realize that analog audio also uses separate time bases at both ends of the recording chain? The nature of the time base is different for analog, of course; instead of a word clock derived from a crystal oscillator, an analog time base is a rotating capstan on a tape transport or a rotating platter on a record lathe or playback turntable. As anyone who's ever listened to a 45 RPM record played back at 33-1/3 can tell you, skew between analog time bases can definitely upset timing cues in the music (not to mention such other important factors as pitch). The time base skew doesn't need to be this severe to degrade playback; more subtle speed errors or speed inconsistencies (wow and flutter) can still wreak havoc with analog playback. I was surprised and disappointed that a writer of ST's experience bought the explanation from La Rosita and missed this elementary point.