Customer Reviews

Stereophile Magazine

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Stereophile is easily the best mainstream audio equipment magazine available and I've followed the audio press carefully since the '80s. It's a great source for industry news on new products, people and events. They review a wide range of equipment, carefully detailing each product's construction and features, and they include with each review a companion piece showing the results of a comprehensive battery of tests--completely objective tests that are rarely, if ever, seen in other audio magazines. The photos of the equipments, both in the ads and the reviews, are very useful and professional. Each issue also includes a hefty number of excellent music reviews.
I can easily understand people's antipathy toward the subjective opinions about the sound of audio equipment, but it's easy to skip over those parts of the reviews. Given the low price, it's a fun read and well worth getting for all the other features.

I have read Stereophile on and off for the last 15 years, and I have always been happy with their reviews. Of course Stereophile is a very niche magazine, as the title suggests, but they generally review a lot of high-end gear that most people cannot afford. This is obviously a magazine for those who love home audio, and will continue to seek out the ideal reproduction of music within their home. The reviewers are mostly all music purists, so generally nothing is too expensive to achieve the pinnacle of music playback. So be ready for a lot of shop talk geared at audio enthusiasts. Articles are detailed and backed up with data in many cases, but the summary and bottom line are the useful bits for me many times.

That said, I am not one with a disposable income, but I have found a lot of useful recommendations that have ended up as purchases at home that I have been extremely happy with on the cheap. I have bought 3 things over the last decade as a result of Stereophile steering me in the right direction: my Marantz CD player (blew away the more expensive Denon unit at the time), my Rotel turntable, and my Grado headphones. I always recommend listening to every component at the store before buying, but I took Stereophile's word on the headphones and bought those blindly (deafly?) unlike the CD player and turntable. I was blown away at the quality I got for a 70-dollar pair of headphones. Also, I must add that there is something rich and full about a symphony that is recorded on a 180+gram vinyl record versus a CD, and can be really appreciated with the right gear. My Rotel turntable is a low-to-mid end turntable that made me a believer in vinyl 12 years ago.

I recommend Robert Harley's book on high-end audio if you're interested achieving a higher-fidelity sound in your home:
The Complete Guide to High-End Audio

I have appreciated the efforts of Stereophile doing more budget-minded systems in the past, but I still would like to see more, with articles focused on building home systems on a budget.

This magazine is interesting because of the design aspects. I enjoy seeing what the high-end is doing as far as construction, cases, etc. I am more of a DIY or mid-fi type than high-end. This magazine is as fun as Stereo Review used to be, but take the reviews with a grain of salt.

This is a review of the purchase of a renewal subscription to Stereophile Magazine from Amazon. I have long been a subscriber to this publication, and so far, renewing through Amazon.com has been easy and economical. But it has not been long enough to know if I will get the proper extension on my subscription.

There are some big problems with Stereophile that make it worse than useless unless you already know a lot about audio (so that you can separate the useful parts from the stuff they make up):

- There's a lot of misinformation, bias, opinion and pure fantasy mixed in to the articles. Unless you already know quite a bit about audio, it may be hard to separate the useful information from the rubbish.

The writers and the editors are simply not interested in really getting the facts right and testing what they know against reality - that's hard work and it's inconvenient, after all. And facing reality would get in the way of the real reason this magazine is published, which is ....

- Like most magazines, Stereophile is a vehicle for selling advertising. Though they like to believe otherwise, Stereophile is no different from GQ or Maxim or Elle magazines. (That shouldn't surprise you, even though it might.) Stereophile's main purpose is to help sell you more stuff, just like almost every other magazine.

And, like GQ or Elle, encouraging fashion trends is a key part of Stereophile trying to get you to spend more money. That, for example, is why they are so excited about the return of vinyl. It's not because vinyl actually sounds better (!?). It's because after years of stasis, it's a huge opportunity to sell more advertising to try to sell you more stuff. The fact that they moved all the turntables, etc, to the front of their recommended list of equipment helps prove the point. Fashion trends are a magazine's best friend, whether it's GQ or Stereophile.

By the way, I'm not suggesting that the writers are consciously slanting the articles. In a way, it's far more insidious than that: they actually believe what they write. There's an implicit selection process - the only way to get hired to or stay on the staff at Stereophile is to drink the Kool Aid. Over time the primary goal has become making money, so Stereophile has inevitably been shaped into a vehicle for selling advertising.

So keep in mind that Stereophile isn't published for you, it's published for the advertisers and the owners. That might help guide you through the quagmire that is Stereophile magazine. You're simply the "target" demographic. Hold on to your wallet, and decide what to buy with your ears, not your eyes.

The reviews of $10,000 speakers by reviewers who seem to think themselves immune to all bias are as ridiculous as ever. Still, they do review a lot of cheaper stuff, and it's cheaper to subscribe than to buy the Buyer's Guides retail.

I used to read this regularly, but then there was a review for a very expensive turntable. The reviewer made a recording of a vinyl LP onto a CD and then compared that CD with the comercially released CD. His comments were that the CD he recorded from the record sounded better than the commercially available CD.

Assuming that the record and CD came from the same master, then the only difference the reviewer was hearing was distortion. I could swallow an argument that maybe an LP sounds better than a CD, (I don't really think that, but just for the sake of argument), but then, how could it still sound better than a CD once it's been converted to a CD.

This article caused me to loose all faith in the integrity and logic of this magazine.

Stereophile has been around as long as any magazine covering audio equipment for those who love music and have discerning ears. It is also some bargain; the semiannual recommended components feature alone is worth the price of admission. One caveat, Stereophile's bread and butter is equipment reviews and prices range from affordable to over the top. So, if you aren't offended by an occasional review of say a $15,000 amplifier, then you will be okay. To balance things out, more affordable equipment is featured too for those of us who don't want to spend too much for great sound. This magazine will help you get the most bang for your buck with your equipment purchases, so what's not to like about that. I enjoy reading it just to keep current with this great hobby. Stereophile has very knowledgable writers of high integrity. And, the editor John Atkinson is the greatest.

This is an excellent magazine for product information and education. However, more and more they are letting political agendas creep into their writing which other than that is very well done. If this trend continues, my subscription will expire. There is no place for this in a magazine advertised as a music magazine.