Jim Austin

Audio Reviews and News

Audio Reviews and News

Audio Reviews and News

Audio Reviews and News

Page 11

Audio Reviews and News

Audio Reviews and News

One of my coolest radio-related experiences happened just a few months ago, when, churning through FM stations in my car, I encountered a country-inflected male voice singing “Fast Car,” the Tracy Chapman song. Rolling Stone dubbed “Fast Car” the 168th best song of all time. It has audiophile cred because its simple sonics (predominantly voice and acoustic guitar) and good engineering made it an important test track, used, eg, by Harman for listening tests and by others for assessing compression…

Audio Reviews and News

This month’s music feature, by Mike Mettler, is an interview with John Doe, best known as cofounder, in 1977, of the legendary punk band X. During X’s long recording career, Doe’s urgent voice has offset the starkly contrasting voice of co–lead vocalist (and songwriting partner) Exene Cervenka, who was Doe’s girlfriend before she joined the band; it’s one of the most recognizable sounds in punk.

There has been much discussion lately about ChatGPT, the machine-learning– based chatbot from OpenAI. Some experts say it will soon make human writers obsolete. Will that include human hi-fi reviewers? I decided to engage ChatGPT in an exploratory conversation; think of it as a sort of job interview. What follows has been intensively edited; many words have been removed, but none have been altered. I’m including my own comments in italics.

I have a confession, one I’m hesitant to make for reasons that will soon become clear, but my conscience compels me to make it. I have a new dog. A puppy. Her name is Ella Wren. Yes, “Ella” honors Fitzgerald, who started her career singing on the streets in Harlem, not many blocks from here, some 90…

I remember, at High End Munich 2019, setting eyes on one of the most attractive loudspeakers I’d ever seen, in the color that, as I now know, Estelon calls Ocean Mystery. I remember it as a passive demo, no music playing, seen through glass; whether that memory is strictly accurate I don’t know. Mem…

No hi-fi is an island entire of itself; every component is a piece of the system, a part of the mains.—John Donne, from The Compleat Audiophile, 1623 Around the time I took over as Stereophile’s editor, I bought a Peloton, the internet-enabled stationary exercise bike. It was a lifesaver during the …

There’s a school of thought that maintains that among all hi-fi components, the D/A converter is easiest to perfect or come close to perfecting. Just make sure that every sample is converted accurately, that there’s little rolloff in the audioband, that aliased images are suppressed almost completely, and that background noise is extremely low, and you have a top-quality D/A processor. Use of a high-quality DAC chip is assumed.

I’m excited about the return of live music to New York City. I’ve attended several classical concerts in the last few weeks, and in a week or so, I’ll take in a show at the City Winery: Suzanne Vega. I haven’t yet made it back to New York’s amazing jazz clubs—the Vanguard, the Blue Note, Smalls—but …

Jay Jay French has a book out, but it’s not what you might think, or not exactly. French earned fame in the 1980s as the lead guitarist for transvestite metal band Twisted Sister, which produced some of the most recognizable—and widely licensed—rock music in history: “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” “I Wa…

My As We See It column in the November 2021 issue of Stereophile was a sincere expression of regret over my inability to connect with current rock music. It ended with a request for recommendations. I got ’em. What’s more, most (but not quite all) of those who responded found themselves in the same …

Even though I’m the editor of Stereophile, I sometimes struggle to get my audio system to play. It’s a little bit embarrassing. Just last night, I put on a record and there was no sound. I figured out the problem immediately: I’d forgotten to turn on the amplifiers. But the reason isn’t always so ob…

I’ve got a music problem. Specifically, I’ve got a rock music problem.