Stereo Review Magazine
- Thread starter jek57
- Start date
I'm working off of insider information. He kept everything he reviewed very homogenized, lest there be a rift between him and the manufacturer.
I'm actually reasonably easy to please, but I spent 25 years in the industry. I've got two companies working on bringing me back in. You learn things.
And how many inputs it had.
It's bizarre how many people like to dump on Julien Hirsch, almost always without actually knowing anything about where he fits in the history of reviewing. He was, for a while, the dean of equipment reviewers, because he was the one of the first, if not the first, reviewer who actually measured everything, and didn't only review the equipment of advertisers. Sure, his reviews were couched in gentle terms - he didn't extravagently praise or condemn stuff based on his opinions of what audio should be, or assume that all listeners heard and wanted exactly what he heard and wanted. His aim was to introduce consistent and uniform measurements to what was a pretty shaggly dog business early on, and the fact that the world agreed with him, and went to using rms wattage and standard tuner measurements is to his credit (I'll admit that his speaker frequency measurements weren't all that great, but it is challenging to measure frequency response in a useful way, and I'm not sure anyone else does a particularly better job).
I don't view his saying that he didn't publish reviews of equipment that was bad as a red flag - all companies occasionally produce dogs, and a negative review can sink a small new company - this sense of responsibility clearly wasn't shared by The Absolute Sound, and its imitators. And everynow and then he did pan a component - admittedly it was usually when a company publicly contradicted his measurements - his takedown of the Sylvania receiver that claimed to be as good or better than others is certainly interesting, and his response to angry company responses to reviews was less moderate than the reviews themselves.
Of course his exalted status meant that he had to be attacked by ambitious subjective reviewers who wanted to establish themself as the top reviewer, and so much of what is thrown about as fact about Hirsch is self serving and slanted. But condemnation is exciting and gets attention, where moderate opinions get little attention.
To my mind, the fact that Hirsch was reviewing when audio was big, and the subjective press has more or less presided over the collapse of the audio market, is telling. When you tell people their equipment sucks and that if they don't spend thousands of dollars on oddball equipment that they haven't heard of, and often has dismal reliability, people will tune out. If you tell them that all digital equipment is terrible, that downloads are awful, and so on, and then, a few years too late, when everyone has abandoned the home stereo, decide that digital sound, home theater, and so on are, actually, worth reviewing, do you think anyone will listen?
I don't view his saying that he didn't publish reviews of equipment that was bad as a red flag - all companies occasionally produce dogs, and a negative review can sink a small new company - this sense of responsibility clearly wasn't shared by The Absolute Sound, and its imitators. And everynow and then he did pan a component - admittedly it was usually when a company publicly contradicted his measurements - his takedown of the Sylvania receiver that claimed to be as good or better than others is certainly interesting, and his response to angry company responses to reviews was less moderate than the reviews themselves.
Of course his exalted status meant that he had to be attacked by ambitious subjective reviewers who wanted to establish themself as the top reviewer, and so much of what is thrown about as fact about Hirsch is self serving and slanted. But condemnation is exciting and gets attention, where moderate opinions get little attention.
To my mind, the fact that Hirsch was reviewing when audio was big, and the subjective press has more or less presided over the collapse of the audio market, is telling. When you tell people their equipment sucks and that if they don't spend thousands of dollars on oddball equipment that they haven't heard of, and often has dismal reliability, people will tune out. If you tell them that all digital equipment is terrible, that downloads are awful, and so on, and then, a few years too late, when everyone has abandoned the home stereo, decide that digital sound, home theater, and so on are, actually, worth reviewing, do you think anyone will listen?
Steve Simels still has a blog. https://powerpop.blogspot.com/
Thanks for that link, you just made my day! I used to look forward to reading Steve Simels' reviews/interviews/columns back in the day, he was my favorite writer in SR.
I was becoming a hardware junkie in high school, and my late-70's/early-80's subscription to Stereo Review fed my new habit. But reading the music reviews - and Simels in particular - became just as much fun and just as important to me as poring over Julian Hirsch's test results and descriptions of audio theory and measurement techniques. And of course, I spent too much time drooling over all the ads for gear I could only hope to afford someday.
Last edited:
hemiram
Active Member
LOL, I was the opposite, if he liked it, I was highly unlikely to. Some of my favorite albums got a bad review from him. I got my subscription to SR when I was about 10, in 1966, and had it until the end. I had an old tube Fisher Tuner back in '66, and I for the life of me can't remember the amp I had back then, but it was tube, weak and the hum, though slight, annoyed me big time. I always wanted to meet Simels, but never did, I did meet Julian Hirsch in Chicago around 1975? in a restaurant. He was just sitting there eating breakfast. I asked him if he was Julian Hirsch and he said, "Sometimes!". I talked to him a while and he was very pleasant.
At one point, I was getting SR,High Fidelity, Audio, Stereophile (I found it basically full of it), along with Electronics Illustrated, Popular Electronics, S9, and a ton of others. My folks almost never said no to more reading material. My dad and my sister and I spent a lot of money on books and magazines. One day when I was about 20, I was moving and I decided to prune my magazine collection. Just for grins, I weighed my truck and took over 1100 pounds of magazines to the dump. I wish I had them today to sell on Ebay.
