Robert Harley Of The Absolute Sound Magazine

0:00The home of podcast for the first time, as we chat about gear, the absolute sound in my ear, Robert Harley. Hey everybody, thank you so much for joining us. This is Brian Hunter in the occasional podcast once again and a very special guest today. Robert Harley from the absolute sound. How are you today, Robert? I'm doing great. Before we go into all the questions, I wanted to share a story with you and I haven't told you this beforehand, but a long, long time ago, you may not remember this. When I was very first starting out in this, I wanted to be a high-file writer and I believe it was the very first audio show I went to that you were there. I went up to you and I said, Robert, how are you? I'd really love to write

1:03for the magazine. I'll do anything. You don't have to pay me and you kind of like chuckled into you remember what you said to me? I don't remember that at all. You said, I think we can pay you. I thought at the time that was a really kind, open, encouraging, just very simple statement. They really resonated with you for a long time. It's like, you know, just simple, man, we can pay. Let's not freak out, Brian. It's got to what you're saying, I think, but I just wanted to tell you, I appreciate that. That was really early on. Not everybody has that attitude, but I appreciated that small little moment that we shared. It had to be a long time ago now. So thanks again for coming on the show. I kind of wanted to ask you a couple of questions about yourself in the magazine and what you've been up to, but I'd love to start with a very simple question is, where in the world were you born? Like what set the scene for us? I was born in London actually. Oh really? Yeah, and

2:04my parents left when I was 18 months old and I grew up in Southern California, but I'm American citizen. I think of myself as American, even though I have British parents and relatives in Britain. Today's episode is brought to you by Expona, 2026. America's largest high fidelity audio show takes place April 10th, 11th, and 12th at the Shamburg Convention Center near Chicago, Illinois. Plan a trip to the windy city this spring and discover over 220 listening rooms of high-end audio equipment. Explore the latest and headphone high-fi in Expona's ear gear experience and add to your record collection and Expona's record fair. Tickets are available now at www.axpona.com. Stop by Expona.com and get an exclusive sneak peek at the show by listening to Expona's audio insider podcast. Check out all the details and purchase passes for the three-day event. This episode of the occasional podcast is brought to you

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4:12B-W-W-W-B-O-R-D-E-R-P-A-T-R-O-L dot N-E-T. Did you do a lot of music growing up or what kind of first got you into high-fi when you were a child or listening to music and such? So when I was about 12 or 13 years old, I have an older brother named Stephen and he's four years older than I am, he's very musically oriented and he was always playing instruments, listening to music and in fact he went on to get a degree in music composition when we got older. So I'd be 12 years old and he'd say, hey Rob come and listen to this and he'd sit me down next to this primitive little stereo, put the headphones on me, queue up a place on a record, play it for me and then we talk about it and he told me why he liked it or what it meant to him and I'm having this experience at like 12 or 13 years old and he shared with me his little primitive stereo, his record collection such as it was at

5:18the time and most importantly his love for music. I think brothers and friends are so influential when it comes to what we listen to and what we think is good growing up. It's so important if you have like a really tight friend or sibling that has great taste in music and you share that together. I see so many big shifts and appreciation when it comes to like something you can share with another individual. So I totally understand that. So yeah, you kind of have a little love for music. How did you parlay that into high fidelity writing? Well, we needed loudspeakers. We had those speakers just headphones and we couldn't afford to buy them. So we said, hey let's make our own speakers. So when I was 14 we decided to make a pair of speakers and by this time we'd upgraded the stereo. We made a heat kit amplifier by the little Gerard turntable and SL 55B from Dixie Hi-Fi. You know we sent up mail order for it and so we're going to make our own speakers and didn't know anything about how to do it. So the electronics store that sold the raw drivers and the parts had

6:22a little book section and I discovered a book called Hi-Fi loudspeakers and enclosures written in I think like 1956. It was like a 400 page textbook on loudspeakers. It was a serious book and I'm 14 years old and I buy this book and I start reading it and I become fascinated with loudspeaker technology. So we made our own speakers based on that and so at 14 years old that was the beginning of my interest in the technical side of audio and I soon discovered I had no musical talent at all. My brother got all the musical talent in the family. So I decided to devote myself to learning the technical aspects of audio and audio engineering and recording and I went on to get a degree in recording engineering and I built and run recording studios and worked in CD mastering after that. So I spent my whole life in audio. That's awesome. I love guys who have at least a little bit of the language of the production side, a little bit of that

7:26production and consumption angle for both sides of the coin. So you're working on the pro side a little bit. How and when did you come to interact with high-end audio writing? Then of course it starts to work directly with absolute time. Well I was working in a CD mastering lab at a CD factory. It was kind of a startup when I first went there and I was in the mastering lab and this is in Southern California and I'd want it to move to New Mexico because I'd come out here skiing and really enjoyed the climate and the culture and the low cost of living that not crowded. And I was going to start a business out here doing location recording, CD master tape preparation and getting CDs made for clients. So I'd go on location record them and I had designed a house that had a mastering room built into it to do the mastering and I was all set. I'd written a business plan. I'd bought the computer. This was at the very beginning of

8:29hard disk editing when a 750 meg drive cost $8,000. That was the size he needed to edit CDs. And so I was all set to do this and I saw an ad in the back of stereo file magazine which was based in Santa Fe and they said they were looking for a technical editor. And the three requirements were loves music, technically oriented, willing to move to New Mexico. So it seemed a tailor made for me. So just on kind of a lark I sent my resume off and 53 people applied for the job and I got the job and the mastering room became a listing room for evaluating products. So that was May 1989. I joined stereo file as a technical editor and I've worked full time on audio magazines for the last 37 years. And what do you kind of feel looking back on your career is the main difference between working on the production side and kind of working on the audio hi-fi writing

9:34side. Do you think there's any differences in your mind when you were working on that side as to what you have now based on your experience after those 30 years? I think it informs what I do in writing about hi-fi and evaluating equipment. But the professional side is not so concerned about sound quality. You know, if audio files saw the signal path with a lot of these recordings changed, they'd be appalled. And what really opened my eyes to high-end audio was I was a student in a recording engineering program in 1978 and I read an article in Recording Engineer Producer magazine about the Sheffield Lab Direct to Disc of Tower of Power. And I read about how they made microphones that put out line level. They recorded Direct to Disc. They had no physical contacts in the signal path. They soldered everything in place before the session. The pan pot that determines if the signal goes left or right, they figured out where they wanted it to go,

10:35measured the two resistance values, took out a pan pot, which doesn't sound good, and soldered in metal film resistors to fix metal film resistors. It really opened my eyes to the idea that no measures are too great in the pursuit of fidelity. And that really opened my eyes to this whole new world that because music is important recording it and reproducing it with the highest possible fidelity is important. So that reading that article really shifted my thinking about music recording and reproduction. I like that. I like that a lot. I mean of course I'm sure you saw the article that went viral a little while ago about the guy who redid the electricity to the pole in Japan. He was like going the full extent. People go to wild extremes in the pursuit of that last measure of truth and musical communication. I'm sure you're aware of what the media and I think even the mass media called the vinyl resurgence and that happened

11:36a few years back and it's still hot and heavy and I love that. But I'm seeing more and more articles about CDs. Oh, we're having a CD resurgence now. And I know a lot of guys never let go of their CD collection and they've probably been waiting for this moment for quite some time. But there's not too many of them. You said you worked a lot on the CD and the mastering side. Do you think there's anything inherently special about a CD maybe sonically or maybe not? Maybe just in terms of aesthetics or well, I think the answer is twofold. One is CDs can sound better than streaming. The same file streamed played on a good transport. And secondly, people like physical media. They like to hold the thing, read the liner notes, own something and have that tangibility that streaming doesn't provide. Okay, so you wrote the book, the complete guide to high end audio, now in its sixth edition. The complete guide to high end audio is teaching people

12:40how the technology works, what to listen for, how to think about buying components, how to assemble a system, system matching and explaining all that, how that technology works. So I wrote that book in 1994 and self-published it. And I sold my car to pay the first print bill. I never imagined that 32 years later, it'd be on the sixth edition. It's been in five languages. It's been selling for 32 years. I've never envisioned that. But from doing the history books, I think the most interesting thing is in the area that we call the high fidelity era, like the 1950s, like Macintosh, Harmon, Carden, Haftler, acoustic research, Morance, people were into high fi as a hobby, as like part of a lifestyle. And Playboy magazine promulgated this idea too. So high fi was an adjunct to a certain lifestyle. But then in the 1970s,

13:43with the advent of what we call the high end today, I think there's a transition point. As my colleague Jonathan Valin wrote it, there are always high fi nuts, but then the nuts took over the asylum. And high fi went from being an adjunct to a lifestyle to an entire lifestyle in itself. And when you think about all the companies that started in the early 70s, like the absolute sound was found in 1973, you know, audio research and magnapan and, you know, those seminal companies, Mark Levinson was really leading the charge back in the 70s. So there's a real transition from that high fi era to the beginning. So what we call the modern high end, where it became more of a lifestyle in itself, rather than an adjunct to a certain lifestyle. And that was the beginning too of an increase in performance and cost and sophistication of the products and elegance in the

14:43build quality. Like for example, products in the 1960s always had just silk-screened legends around their lives. Starting in the 1970s with the Mark Levinson products, they actually machined out the lettering and filled it with white epoxy. Like that's an example of how high-end audio went more up market. And that trend has been continuing to this day where we get more and more elaborate products and expensive products. In like 1990, you could buy a top of the line, steel speaker for $10,000 and a Crel KSA 250 for $3,000. But today's products are so much more sophisticated than they were. So I've been working on this idea about a sense of global uniqueness in terms of sound. So do the Germans have their own unique sound? Now this is not a unified thing that everyone goes to. But is there just like an affective culture that comes in that is a response like the LS35A was in British sound. How it was fulfilled, the speaker fulfilled

15:45a need based on what was required of it, right? But if we expand that idea and we have, is there a German sound? I've done enough research to say there is a definitive British sound. My question for you is speaking about the history in that specific time period. Is there a East Coast New York sound in your mind? And I want you to think about a couple things when you respond. One, there was a couple of really strong retailers that kind of emerged. And from those experience, a lot of press writers emerged, a lot of speaker manufacturers emerged. Do those guys have a similar sound and is that the sound of New York? Well, yeah, famously, there's a West Coast sound and the East Coast sound. You know, West Coast exemplified by JBL and East Coast sound by like acoustic research or KF. More of a polite refined sound. And the West Coast sound is more big bottom end, a little bit of sizzle on top and big dynamics, valuing dynamics and ability to play loudly in base extension over the East Coast aesthetic, which is more about

16:48refinement sound staging. Going back to the book, do you have any guidelines for people when it comes to budgeting, when it comes to all the component categories? So I asked as a bunch of people so many opinions, none of them wrong. Obviously, every system needs to be categorized for your needs and wants. However, as a general rule of thumb, speaker, amp, source, and cable, what is your recommendation for budgeting between those categories? Well, it's hard to say generally, but maybe 40% on speakers, 10% on cables, and the rest on amplification and sources. You know, there's a school of thought that says you should put all the money in the front end based on the idea that if the signal's not good at the beginning of the chain, nothing downstream ever makes it better. And if you put high resolution speakers and electronics on a poor source, it only reveals the limitations of that source. And there's another school of thought that says, well, the speakers are what produces the sound you should put more of your money into speakers. In my course of reviewing,

17:53I've had crazy matches of speakers and electronics right, but $5,000 speakers at the end of a chain of like three quarters of a million dollars worth of front end and cables and vice versa. I'd use a little integrated amp to drive those in front of the sonics. It's hard to say definitively. That's a general rule like 40% on speakers. And manufacturers have also done demos where they hide the amplification. So you come into the demo room at a show and they play, you know, $100,000 speaker. And then they reveal that the amplifier is like a 3,000-dollar para sound. From your experience putting a very inexpensive speaker with a lot of expensive electronics behind it, do you find that many models become the choke point or do they actually scale just in less amounts? Like, I can still hear a difference. Or do these just like usually there's like a hard line where like, oh man, I'm getting not getting anything out of these. Right. You hear the quality of the electronics,

18:54but at some point there's a limit of the speaker's resolution and quality. Or if the speaker has some really bad flaw like a bright treble or colored mid-range, then it doesn't matter what you drive it with. It's always going to have that that coloration, that characteristic. That's a really good point. Yeah. Not necessarily going to fix a problem if it's a blaring problem, right? We think back about the heritage and the history of hi-fi from your vantage point. What do you think was the most promising audio product that never really caught on? I'm going to say a technology, not a product. And this is going to be controversial, but MQA, master quality authenticated. It's the encoding and decoding technique, digital and coding decoding technique developed by Bob Stewart and Peter Craven, that can deliver very high resolution audio over a very small file. And it uses some very, very clever technology that they didn't invent. They just adapted it from medical imaging and astronomy.

19:58And there's a parallel and medical imaging between resolving very fine spatial information and also resolving very fine transient detail at an audio signal. My experience is all been positive. I've heard original master files. Peter McGrath, one of the great recording engineers, has been at my house. And he's played his original recordings at 88 to 24-bit, the raw master recording, and with like seven megabits per second bit rate. And then he plays the MQA version, 1.5 megabits. And there are four or five of us listening. This is doing a Wilson setup. And before the first note of music, just hearing the ambience, because you can hear the conductor get everybody ready. The chair squeaks and people getting ready. The entire room broke out and instantaneous laughter spontaneously because it was so much better. It sounded so much

21:01more alive like a room and the detail before the first note of music. That's how much better it is. But the reason it didn't take off, I think, is that people had a hard time getting their head around the idea that a copy could be better than the original. How can you improve on the original master? And it's got a bit rate, a fraction of the original master. How can have a low bit rate sound better? So there's this perception that bit rate is a proxy for resolution. When in fact, it uses those 1.5 megabits per second much more intelligently. Like a PCM recording is kind of a, is it like a raw attack on the problem of how to encode a signal? MQA is a very intelligent signal. And one file can stream to a state of the art DAC. It can stream to someone's phone. It automatically scales. There's authentication so that the listener knows by a light on the front panel that they're hearing exactly what the mastering engineer created. So it's unfortunate that it didn't take off.

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23:12a stellar turntable and tone arms. You can find out more information on the news tab at TheVoiceThatIs.com and their Facebook page. Tired of audio reviews that sound like they were written by robots? Us too. For the last 15 years, part-time audio file has been an open revolt against boring, and this year we're doubling down. We have a brand new look and a brand new name, but the same old attitude. Find us at pt.audio for all your turntable throwdowns and amplifier face-offs. Great sound meets good times at pt.audio. When you think about all the hi-fi designers out there, living or past from any product category, do you have a favorite and why? Yes, I have one favorite that I'll get to, but I have some

24:16others that I want to mention in different categories. In amplification, William St. Johnson, founder of audio research, two amplifiers were dead. Transistors have completely taken over when Bill Johnson started audio research, and he created the modern revival of two amplification. It is a brilliant designer, and I visited the factory once. I was getting a tour by one of the sales guys and stopped to dissolve this. Here he's the head of this big company, and he wasn't looking at spreadsheets. He was looking at a schematic on this computer. High-end audio owes a lot to Bill Johnson. In solid state, Nelson passed. I think his absolute genius amplifier designer, David Berning, he created that outward transformalist tube circuit, and his amplifier sound fabulous. He's very inventive. Some designers are good designers, and other designers are more inventors, where they think outside the box and create something entirely new. John Curl,

25:20of course, he developed a circuit for Mark Levinson in the 1970s that became standard textbooks. It's in all the textbooks of circuit design. John Curl invented that circuit, and loud speakers, Andy Payer of Rockport Technologies. It is really a brilliant guy, Jim Weiney, who invented planar magnetic speaker, Magna Pan, David Wilson, Wilson Audio, and now his son, Daryl, is doing amazing work. In digital, Mike Moffitt in the 1990s, but was a really great designer. I reviewed a lot of his stuff in the 1990s. But today, there are a couple of really bright guys working in digital. One of them, most people have never heard of his name's Michael Flommer. It is nicknamed Flash Flommer, and he's the designer of the Berkeley converters. And he was the co-invenor of HDCD, and he wrote all the DSP code to realize HDCD.

26:22And in the 1960s, when he was like 14 years old, he was writing code in machine language. It's just a really brilliant guy, and some of the techniques in the Berkeley deck are stuff that nobody else does, which was only sophisticated. And then another digital designer is Javier Waduahara of Wadex. He's a brilliant designer, who incidentally started reading my reviews in stereo file. When he was 15 years old, because his father was an importer of high-fight into Spain. And so he had stereo file laying around, and the 15-year-old picked up stereo file and started reading, following my digital reviews and got interested in it. And now he's getting his PhD in digital signal processing, and his neat designer of all the Wadex stuff, which I think is the state-of-the-art and digital replay. In analog, H.A. Conti of basses audio, really a brilliant designer. And I said I had one designer that I grew up here above all others, and that's Keith Johnson.

27:29So Keith Johnson is like a Renaissance man of audio. He's a world-class recording engineer for classical music, maybe the best. He's an analog circuit designer, digital circuit designer, theorist. He had the whole idea for HDCD. He invented the technology that made high-speed duplication of tape possible in the 1960s. And he's just all around just a brilliant guy. And I saw him a couple months ago. He's 88 years old now, and I came up to him at the an audio event and said, you know, I've never told you this, but you're my audio hero. So he appreciated hearing that. But yeah, Keith Johnson, I've been to his lab and seen him working. He built circuits in three dimensions, optimized the magnetic interaction between components, and it's really brilliant guy. I think it's really important that we give these guys some recognition because working in high-fi audio, it's neither like the most prestigious nor the most highly

28:37regarded of the sciences. And these guys, I feel like each one that you just named, there's some angle that they were driven to this by the passion for music and design. And they could have been lawyers, they could have been engineers for greater social circles and such. But the fact that they chose high-fi, whether they ended up in the by chance or not, whatever, whatever. I just think it's so great that we give props to these guys that contributed to the hobbies and thank them for their hard work in an angle where they could have done something else. You know, they chose this thing and it's a gift back to us. And I appreciate you recognizing all those guys. A passion for music. In fact, that was the motivation behind the absolute sounds book series called the Absolute Sounds Illustrated History of High and Audio. The idea started with the idea of interviewing some of these guys. Frankly, while they were still around getting their stories on tape and publishing interviews with them, their history and how they approach what they did.

29:41And then it turned into the idea, hey, let's make this book out of it. So it's a 12 by 12-inch copy table book. And we asked them for photos, like historic photos. And we got all these kinds of wonderful photos of the early days, some of them from the family photo albums. Like we have a picture of Richard Bannerstein loading the first model too in the back of his pinto to take to a dealer, building bottle twos and a garage with a washing machine in the background. And we got all these great photos. And so we put them in two volumes and their premium paper, no expense spared in the production of the book. So we're glad we did that. Yeah, that's cool. Anything from your time interviewing these guys? Is there a common thread that you feel is woven in between all of the reason or they were attracted outside of just the love for music? You know, it's a very strange and rare combination that makes a great designer. It's technical chops. It's a love for

30:43music and it's a willingness to listen and believe your ears. And so many engineers who are brilliant, who have the technical chops, don't trust their ears. They need to see measurements to justify what they're doing. That's what they teach you in engineering school. And so the idea of of listening to something and deciding if it's better or not without any objective evidence that it is, that's hard to find in an engineer. And it's even harder to find a combination of engineering brilliance, musical sensitivity, a passion for music and making it better, and a willingness to listen and have your design be guided by what you're hearing, not just by what you can measure. I couldn't agree more, Robert. I could not agree more. There are plenty of technically proficient products out there. But when I trust the designer's ear, I can, I usually not always, but a lot of like hear their influence on the product and that's when it goes to the next

31:44level. I feel like when you have a really great designer with a really great ear who trusts their ear, that's when things start to really get fantastic. I just... And the other thing about high end designers too. In fact, this mic mop it told me this like 30 years ago, they had a resistor and it was like a 50 cent resistor in the feedback loop of the current to voltage converter. And he said, well, just for fun, I'm going to put a 10 dollar resistor in there just to see what happens. They had already settled on the bill of materials and the pricing and all that. But it's just like for fine motor. And he listened to it. And they said, there's no way we're shipping this with a 50 cent resistor. They ate the cost of the 10 dollar resistor because it was so much better. And you just don't find that in mass market products or general engineering. And in fact, the Japanese companies, they have a special division in the engineering department that takes the design and they engineer cost out of it that they look, how can we remove cost out of this design?

32:47And high end audio does the opposite. It's like they have the design, how can we make it better? Yeah, I mean, I even had a couple of conversations with Nelson Pass where he said he will fall in love with a specific little part so much so that he's like, how many how many do we have? Okay, I'm going to build an amp around this little piece. And I'm like, he's like, and that'll be the run. And that'll be the thing because we're not changing that one piece. So I that's right. And he has a stock pile. I visited this place. He has a stock pile of full transistors. Yeah, I think there's a warehouse somewhere where there was just piles and piles of potential future amps. We talked about the technical part, but do you find anything inspiring about high-fi writing? Is there anything about writing about high-fi that you feel is special or unique? And something that appeals to you, obviously, you know, having made a career out of it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. When Tom Martin bought the absolute sound in 1997 from Harry Gerson, he was a subscriber from issue number one, by the way. And he had just retired from a very successful

33:52career at Dell computer. And he loved the magazine. Wanted to see it thrive. So we had a meeting and he said, you know, what's the mission statement of the absolute sound? And we're banning about ideas. And I said, connecting people with music. And that became the mission statement. And that's what it is. You know, we help people enjoy music more by pointing them in the right direction of the best products to buy so they can enjoy music more. And the most gratifying reader letter I've ever had was from a teacher in Connecticut, a school teacher. And he wrote to me and told me about his experience. He didn't know anything about high-fi and would decide to buy a stereo system. So he happened on the absolute sound on a new stand, bought a copy and said, hey, this is interesting. There's this whole other type of music reproduction that, you know, it's not a Bose table radio. So I read the magazine for a year and following our recommendations, bought a modest system.

34:56I think at the time, this is like $4,000, which was a lot of money for him on the school teacher's salary. And he wrote to me and he told me how it changed this life, his and his life's life. They don't watch TV. Music became central to their lives. It's enriched their lives tremendously. And so he wrote to thank me for giving him that experience. So that's the most gratifying letter I've had. And that's why we do what we do. How do you kind of react to that what I would consider to be an overused quote or really the memification on social media of this quote, which I think is even poorly attributed to the author where it's regular people listen to their stereo to hear the music and audio files listen to music to hear the stereo. What is your reaction to that? Because I have my own ideas, but I'd love to hear yours. Some people have a million dollars stereo and 20 records. I mean, that's an exaggeration. But for the most part, the vast

35:59majority of people use it as a vehicle to explore music and to connect with music. That reminds me of the joke. What does an audio file listen to when he gets tired of listening to dire strait brothers and arms? What? He listens to brothers and arms through a different cable. I've never heard that and I've been on a dire search for audio file jokes. So I'm a huge fan of that one. I think a lot of people, like we just said, understand the inspiration by why people specifically make and listen to music. It's emotional. It connects with people. But what is it about the stereo headphone gear and reproduction specifically? Well, a hi-fi system. I don't know much about headphones. I don't listen to headphones, but we have a YouTube channel where we do a lot of headphone reviews. But you know, but why do people have hi-fi and listen to hi-fi? It's a time machine in essence. It takes you back. That strikes me all the time. That idea that this musical

37:00event happened maybe 50 or 70 years ago, halfway around the world. And here I am sitting in my room. And it's recreated for me in a way that feels like it's contemporaneous, like it's music making right there. I had this experience just last night actually. It occurred to me. I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald, saying a good morning heartache through the karma enigma veron 2D loudspeaker, a fabulous speaker. And it's like her voice is right there. And there's this sense of her reappearing. It's recorded in 1962. There's a story of when Andy Payer debuted his turntable at CES many, many years ago that the Sirius, which is one of the first major mega turntables. So when came in and said to him, oh, how much is this turntable? And he said $75,000, which was astronomical at the time. And the person said, well, it's a lot of money for a turntable. And he said, yeah, but it's cheap for a time machine. Yeah, I feel like I love how the illusion, at least from my

38:11experience, the illusion of audio, its ability to recreate and trick my senses into thinking something is real is much better than the current technology for vision. So like a TV never really looks real real. But with a high end stereo, I can hear something that sounds pretty darn close or at least closer than a TV is to real seeing. So I love that illusion. I love the time machine idea because I think that's a part of what the core of it is. We can convince ourselves that something is really there in a more realistic way than we came with our other senses. Right. And the better the system, the more the artifacts are removed and the less your brain has to work to get past that threshold where you recognize it's an electromechanical recreation of music rather than just the music itself. So when you reach the circumlevel of quality, those cues that tell you that it's an electromechanical reproduction disappear, leaving only the

39:13music in that sense of being in the presence of contemporaneous music making. And that's the magic of high end audio. Yeah, it's something that I think that's so innate in our brains at least where we can't always tell what's wrong, but we still know that something isn't the way it should be. Exactly. People say, well, I can't tell the difference in a good height. I don't have a golden year. And I've always maintained anybody can hear the difference between good and great sound. Now, I've had neighbors come over, you know, they're curious about what I do for a living because I work at home and I have this. I built a dedicated room and I get moving trucks coming up to my house all the time. So, no, I've had them over and I put them in the sweet spot and they're astounded. Most people have no idea that music can be reproduced with the kind of fidelity and realism and emotional expression that it can. They're just simply oblivious to it. Yeah, and I think as a society, we've taken some serious hits in that, that arena went like the

40:14advent of MP3s and Napster for my generation a long time ago now, but we took a serious hit where we thought, this is good enough, replaced the idea of better sound. This will work convenience. And I think the really sad point, I used to make this point a long time, but when, and then when people are raised on that low quality of sound, there's a nostalgia attached to it and we have an entire generation of kids who have affinity for worse sounding stuff. And I think there was a certain amount of crime, a sonic crime committed around that era where it wasn't the best, that was what really was the best for us as a society. Audio is the only technology that's decreased in quality over time. With the resurgence of the turntable, why? Some of it is aesthetics. Some of it is the tactile response, but I have to think that even for an untrained beginner audio file, some of it has

41:16to do with the way that it sounds. Absolutely. I think that the kids and the younger people that are drawn to it, they're searching for something that's been missing in just the very kind of subjective way, right? We talked a little bit about this, but I would love to, I've been dying to ask you this question. Can you explain the idea of the absolute sound to our listeners and what you believe it to mean is your application any different than that intention when the magazine was first conceived? No, it's the same. So the absolute sound is the name of the magazine and it's also a concept that was invented by Harry Pearson and he named the magazine after the concept. So before the idea of the absolute sound, judging audio equipment by listening to it was considered subjective. Like film criticism or wine or food or anything, is the reviewers' personal taste influences

42:18how highly he thinks of what he's experiencing. And the idea of the absolute sound is that that's all wrong, that there's an absolute reference against which the reproduced music can be compared and that absolute reference is the sound of unappified acoustic instruments in an acoustic space. So the absolute sound is an unappified acoustic instrument in an acoustic space and when we evaluate audio product, we use that as the benchmark how close does it come to the absolute sound and it removes the reviewers' subjective opinion. There's still subjective opinion because reviewers all value different things in music reproduction, more than, more than others, but still there's that reference standard against which the reproduction is compared. And so we made the magazine after that and it was a brilliant conception, you know, especially at the time and Harry went on

43:20to create the language that we used to describe reproduced sound. Before Harry, it was full or bright or partial, heavy, and he created this whole lexicon like of sound staging and imaging and image specificity and continuousness and all that lexicon that we used to convey to another person what a component sounds like. And that was 53 years ago. This search for descriptions outside of the sense like how do we get people to relate to the way something sounds when there's a limited amount of you know words that we can do and some of those do bleed over into other senses like bright is also used to describe a lot of wine and in a similar way and I just find that very interesting. It's like oh something can taste bright, something can sound bright. Why? Because we know what it looks like a third sense. So bringing that back home. Anything to help I feel like the readers clarify get a better sense of what's really going on and I maybe feel differently but it is

44:23a difficult task on some level to be a hi-fi writer to keep up with as you said the lexicon of words what's trending what's been used we still use a lot of stuff today but then some confusion as to what the words might mean and what someone's translation is for but I feel like a lot of readers will eventually feel like they bond to a specific writer in their taste and there is an approval process where I approve of this person's taste therefore what they hear is more likely to be what I will hear. That's true and it's a good idea for readers to follow certain writers for a while and understand what their personal tastes are what kind of music they like what they value most in music reproduction like a reviewer who's in the heavy rock is going to value bass extension and bottom end dynamics more than say sound staging which for a classical listener and orchestral music you know sound staging is very important and as is liquidity in the mid-range and treble

45:27so reviewers do bring their personal biases and tastes to the to the process that it starts from the foundation of comparing it to live an amplified music in an acoustic space. When we think of all the technologies that we have going on right now with high-end audio and it just keeps getting diverse every year I like to bring it back to this one idea and just kind of pull people as they come on the show but do you think that there is a unique beauty in analog reproduction that would be either the use of a turntable the use of tubes and amplification I do and I've had this experience quite a bit where I have very good turntail a very good digital front end the LP whether this is an additive thing or an additive artifact that's euphonic but you get this sense of ease and you get bloom and you get more space and air around images it's a less flattened dry but digital is getting really close these days it's pretty expensive at that top end of digital where

46:31it gets very very close to analog but digital is improving dramatically I mean ask us how much how much more I mean there's very few people you can ask this question to that have the experience like you have how close are we do you think to matching analog right now boy that's a tough question if you're comparing state of the art state of the art to say to the art say to the art turn to able and cartridge to say to the art digital in some ways digital is better like the speed consistency on piano for example panel sustains you can hear speech fluctuations from analog from an analog tape and not so much from me LP but more from analog tape and bottom end dynamics are better in digital but that sense of ease and liquidity is definitely better in analog yeah well I only ask because I'm starting to see that sentiment pop up more and more that's the one defining factor where I haven't really heard a lot of the trusted reviewers say this thing is good or better but in just the last

47:34four to five years it's been I start here coming up like I don't know we might be getting close finally but again right now and and if you get it let me just say if you get enjoyment out of what you listen to you know that's great but I think and when you talk with the high end of digital the the cutting edge stuff that's where it lies right now and hopefully that can come down to everybody but like that top edge I feel like is getting more and more it's getting higher and higher and some of the voice of the hobby is agreeing with that like maybe we're getting close finally but it took a very long time to get here we are getting very close and I switched between analog and digital and I enjoy both as I've said before I listen to music not formats yeah and I think that it's a different experience and obviously one is more convenient generally speaking when you just have the iPad and funny than the other but I think it's very important that we support the artist by buying the hard media the vinyl media whatever it takes in essence like sample the

48:39goods through streaming but if you love something you should buy the LP if possible or whatever hard format you prefer to help support the artist that's very important I agree there's another fact with Glenn LP's too it's a different mindset and sitting on the couch with an iPad we just skip around with songs and you put on an LP it's like a single-minded dedication you're gonna listen to this whole record and you look at the record see who played on it it's like you're participating in the playback by hands-on someone once joked that analog is the barbecue of hi-fi this is much about the process as a result yeah yeah I like that I've had a friend of mine from Texas he put like 12 hours into a piece of meat an all day affair I was it it tasted great but I was just like whoa yeah so you've had a long history with the industry and the hobby do you have a favorite story that you like to tell from working in the industry of anything curious or interesting or

49:41funny that happened to you sales guys will height products like no one ever pitches a product to me and says yeah we think it you know it's a little better than the competition or you know it's competitive with everything out there it's always your job will drop when you hear this like every pitch is the same a funny story when the mark leavenson number 30 digital channel on converter came out 1991 there was all the buzz about it was this incredibly ambitious device it was 13,500 dollars which was astronomical at the time and people are really buzzing about it and there were maybe subnaurate of them in the field and I had one of them in for review a manufacturer flew over from Japan to bring me his D-Day converter for me to review and his sales guy from the US flew into Albuquerque I picked him up at Albuquerque Airport and the sales guy was like the prototypical sales guys telling me how great this DAC is that's fails will be lifted and that type of thing he says

50:42yeah this DAC's better than the leavenson number 30 so I said oh that's that's interesting because I have a leavenson 30 in my rack right now and we can go and listen to it and compare and there were maybe eight in the world at the time yeah yeah he'd never heard it and he never expected me to have it so we get to my house the Japanese gentleman who was the head of the company sat in the the listing chair and I put some music on and he listened for 30 minutes without saying a word and then he says Mark leavenson's very good but he said that quietly the sales guys are always trying to spin the product and it's just part it goes with the territory that's their job yeah yeah and I don't I don't fault them I don't fault them either right I think they're always trying to sneak in some verbiage that they hope is going to make it into the review like I'm going to give you some really good lines right now you know if they make it into the review you know that kind of thing so what is the most exciting thing you are working on right now and then part and parcel

51:47to that is what would be your ideal job in the industry if you could do anything without restraints well those two questions are related so what I'm working on right now is I just took delivery about a week ago of the karma anigma veiron 2d loudspeaker from the Netherlands karma has been in business 30 some years that they have a track record of making fabulous speakers beautifully made just as the fit and finish and build is astonishing it's a fabulous loudspeaker 720,000 dollars with fair and I have the constellation statement amplifiers under review which leads into the next question is you know the dream job in the industry is the job I have now being that are the absolute sound and making the assignments to reviewers you know I get to assign myself the most interesting product so eight years ago I built a house with a serious dedicated listening room there's a video

52:52on YouTube about the rooms designing construction but it's pretty elaborate construction you know with a floating wall with constrained layer damping and hundreds of pounds of damping material built into the wall structure and dedicated AC and it's a very serious room with easy access to the garage so I wanted to create a platform where the industry could bring their most ambitious products and find a place where I could get the most out of those products so I've created that I'm at the point in my career where I'm reviewing like the cutting edge stuff that they're very best in the world we have an audience in a readership that either like to read about those products just because they're interested but a fair number of them are people buying those products at that levels now the people think well who buys a quarter three quarter million dollar speaker people do buy three quarter million dollar speakers they turn to us for advice so I'm in the fortunate position of you know after 37 years of having my choices stuff to review and having

53:58a venue where I can do a thorough evaluation of those products so and I work at home and I have a electrical schedule and the people I work with my colleagues are all wonderful people I've worked with Jonathan Valin side by side for 29 years on different high five magazines and the owner of the magazine Tom Martin is a serious enthusiast he loves the field he loves the hobby he loves music and so many magazines today are owned by corporate entities they're just a business unit of some corporate huge corporate entity not so with the absolute sound he's he's committed to the magazine and doing what's right for the industry and for the readers final series of questions that are meant to be decisively one thing or the other life isn't really like that very often but for the sake of this exercise just for pure listening entertainment I would like you to pick

54:59only one of the following options okay are you ready the first question a mint LS35A or a quad ESL57 ESL57 no question pristine soundstage or tone tone no question height with or depth depth perfect base or treble oh those are both deal breakers one is perfect and one is just like it's pretty good but it's not perfect so you have one that's perfection I say treble a bright hard grainy treble is you can't get past that that's it that's all I had those for what's on well done I sprung those on you yet you did not have those prepped ahead of time so you did excellent Robert thank you so much for coming on the show man I greatly appreciate you and your work and your contributes to the hobby yeah thanks so much so fun

56:08the occasional podcast is a production of the part-time audio file network which includes part-time audio file dot com the occasional magazine the pta newsletter and audio head dot com you can stay in touch with us on twitter facebook instagram and youtube the occasional podcast is produced and hosted by brine hunter executive produced by scott hall at pta productions the occasional podcast and it's original associated music is monitored mixed and mastered on the focale trio six b e studio monitors a i songs produced by odio dot com if you haven't already please subscribe to the occasional podcast on iTunes Google Spotify or wherever your favorite podcasts are down on the podcast for the first time

57:12as we chat about gear the absolute sound in my oh hallade yeah only occasional podcast hallade yeah Take it home now, on the occasional parkour Take it home now, on the occasional parkour

58:32Take it home now, on the occasional parkour