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Everyone takes the limits of their own vision for the limits of the world. – Arthur Schopenhauer DEDICATION To J. Gordon Holt and Harry Pearson, who regrettably missed out on beholding their own antecedents, which both would have so enjoyed reading. Our modern times have been blessed with a copious amount of writing about music reproduction.... Read More »

We can't hear the absolute absolutely. Our ears are organic matter evolved over generations of overlapping genes. No two are exactly alike, including our own, just as no two ears located at the slightly lopsided extremities of a bumpy skull are diametrically synchronized. Add to that that both can't be equally sensitive to sound or deteriorate at... Read More »

Forget the obvious "fairies" wisecrack for a moment, and think about this: Although the internet is thick with guys out there playing the "Troll", there are no "Anti-trolls" at all―not even one "Blue Fairy." If, like me, you enjoy sharing your thoughts with other people on the internet, whether on Facebook, on Twitter, in some... Read More »

  BACK IN BLACK The vinyl is back for good. If there are people who haven't noticed this yet, they are clearly the sort that have no interest in music, know nothing about the younger generation, don't pay attention to the changes in design and don't understand the changing contemporary society. In other words, people... Read More »

I stopped writing about equipment quite some time ago. I blamed it on a number of things that were absolutely true … old man, heavy boxes; crazy distributors, the clamor of other things in my life. While this was the truth, it wasn't the whole truth. Like many men in their sixties, my hearing is... Read More »

Eight years ago or so, I purchased a pair of David Slagle's Intact Audio "Basic" $200 autoformers. They lay unloved in a drawer for five years before I put them in a little wooden box and hooked them up to my system. (HERE) Once I did, I couldn't believe how fantastic they sounded. While I... Read More »

"The digital music business has been a war of attrition that nobody seems to be winning," said David Goldberg, the former head of Yahoo music. "The CD is still disappearing, and nothing is replacing it in entirety as a revenue generator." Its no mystery that the wiring of our world has brought enormous changes in... Read More »

I've just spent a little time reading posts—both the originals and the comments on them—in some of the more than fifty audiophile groups that I know of on the internet. I'm sure there must actually be many more than just half a hundred of such groups, but from what I've seen, fifty is more than... Read More »

"Say it ain't so, I will not go, Turn the lights off, Carry me home" —"All the Small Things", Blink 182 So this all started with a big argument that my girlfriend and I had, the resolution of which was to move in together up in San Francisco, where she already lived. The problem was... Read More »

That's right, HiFi is a scam, and you, I, and every other audiophile, music lover, and HiFi Crazy have all been laboring under a misapprehension for all these many years. To make it even worse, even those people I've been maligning for so long by, in my innocent ignorance, calling them fools, trolls, "flat-earthers," troglodytes,... Read More »

Roger Skoff, for the first time ever, actually advocates blind testing! Any of you, who have followed my writings, either here or in other publications, should already have a pretty good idea of where I stand on the issues of measurement and double blind testing as related to High End audio. Even those of you... Read More »

I upgraded to JRiver Media Center 19 about four months ago (thanks Jim), and while I haven't had the opportunity to check out its performance with Mac equipment, I still firmly believe that JRiver sets the gold standard for PC-based music playback. Media Center 19's performance is miles beyond their iterations from just a couple... Read More »

Roger Skoff looks at whether saving money is always worth doing! "Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said" (from HERE) "They want HOW much? For that? No way! I could build one for myself a lot cheaper – maybe even better, too!"  Do-it-yourself has been a part of HiFi as long as there's been... Read More »

One of the things that's been in the news lately is the idea of "Death Spiral" pricing, where a company (or an industry) is, for whatever reason, forced to charge too much for its products, which causes sales to drop off, which makes the company, in order to survive, raise the prices on its remaining... Read More »