Michael Fremer Leaving Stereophile?

[mhardy6647]

I always liked reading Art Dudley. Not just because I’m an avid fly fisherman living in Rochester NY. But he tended to not overly wax poetic. I think because I gave up on vinyl before being truly able to afford gear Fremers articles just weren’t relevant to me. Some of the stuff getting reviewed like the Continuim (spelling is probably wrong) turntable was just outrageous.

I very much liked reading Art's stuff as well and I was deeply saddened when I learned of his death.
I stopped short of adding him to my short list of hifi writer characters, though, as he seemed pretty straightforward & down to earth (ahem -- not that Herb R. isn't -- nor Kal R., for that matter).
It doesn't hurt that Mr. Dudley's tastes in audio reproduction seemed to run quite congruent(ly) to mine: Quad ESLs, Altecs... that sort of thing. I am sorry I never got the chance to meet/chat with him. I'd have been starstruck, though.

Art (L) with my IRL hifi chum Bruce Kennett (R) in a photo taken some years back, from their days together with Listener magazine.
Bruce is a very good and likeable guy although, also, quite down to earth.

EDIT: Oh, having mentioned Joe Roberts earlier -- He rises to hifi writer character status, upon reflection.
Joe got me hooked on the EMILAR EH500-2 horns a while back. I am not sure whether I am grateful or just an addict.

Here's where all the trouble started...

RE: Smaller, Vintage Altec Lansing Speakers - Joe Roberts - High Efficiency Speaker Asylum

RE: Smaller, Vintage Altec Lansing Speakers - Joe Roberts - High Efficiency Speaker Asylum

db.audioasylum.com

 

[Ra1zel]

High fidelity
Vinyl



Choose one

 

[Newman]

Joe Roberts: all the fun with none of the vitriol...

 

[MattHooper]

I very much liked reading Art's stuff as well and I was deeply saddened when I learned of his death.
I stopped short of adding him to my short list of hifi writer characters, though, as he seemed pretty straightforward & down to earth (ahem -- not that Herb R. isn't -- nor Kal R., for that matter).
It doesn't hurt that Mr. Dudley's tastes in audio reproduction seemed to run quite congruent(ly) to mine: Quad ESLs, Altecs... that sort of thing. I am sorry I never got the chance to meet/chat with him. I'd have been starstruck, though.

Art (L) with my IRL hifi chum Bruce Kennett (R) in a photo taken some years back, from their days together with Listener magazine.
Bruce is a very good and likeable guy although, also, quite down to earth.

View attachment 213348

Yeah, I could read Art write about practically anything. Just a talented writer. He made what is so hard about writing seem effortless.

I didn't agree with him on all things. For me he could be a bit too far "subjectivist" and would take pot-shots at objectivists...though he would also take shots at the tweaky side of subjectivism too, and also he was often mocking the audiophile obsession with imaging and soundstaging. Bit of a muckraker.

He often seemed to listen for and care about sonic characteristics that I care about. I tended to like speakers that he wrote about.

For instance I always loved this bit from Art's Spendor s3/5 review.

"It's a bit of a cliché, I know, but the Spendors had an uncanny ability to sound big when they needed to, much as a housecat can puff itself up for brief periods of time."

A memorable analogy that describes my experience listening to those little speakers.

And my all time favorite introduction line to an audio column (or probably any column)...

Consider the coelacanth....

 

[Robin L]

I always liked reading Art Dudley. Not just because I’m an avid fly fisherman living in Rochester NY. But he tended to not overly wax poetic. I think because I gave up on vinyl before being truly able to afford gear Fremers articles just weren’t relevant to me. Some of the stuff getting reviewed like the Continuim (spelling is probably wrong) turntable was just outrageous.

No LP is perfectly centered.

It's kinda like π: you can approach but you can never reach the destination.

Spending any more than $10,000 on a turntable is pointless.

 

[Doodski]

I very much liked reading Art's stuff as well and I was deeply saddened when I learned of his death.
I stopped short of adding him to my short list of hifi writer characters, though, as he seemed pretty straightforward & down to earth (ahem -- not that Herb R. isn't -- nor Kal R., for that matter).
It doesn't hurt that Mr. Dudley's tastes in audio reproduction seemed to run quite congruent(ly) to mine: Quad ESLs, Altecs... that sort of thing. I am sorry I never got the chance to meet/chat with him. I'd have been starstruck, though.

Art (L) with my IRL hifi chum Bruce Kennett (R) in a photo taken some years back, from their days together with Listener magazine.
Bruce is a very good and likeable guy although, also, quite down to earth.

View attachment 213348

EDIT: Oh, having mentioned Joe Roberts earlier -- He rises to hifi writer character status, upon reflection.
Joe got me hooked on the EMILAR EH500-2 horns a while back. I am not sure whether I am grateful or just an addict.

Here's where all the trouble started...

RE: Smaller, Vintage Altec Lansing Speakers - Joe Roberts - High Efficiency Speaker Asylum

RE: Smaller, Vintage Altec Lansing Speakers - Joe Roberts - High Efficiency Speaker Asylum

db.audioasylum.com

Ermm.. I thought you are running Altec horns but I see you have something new maybe. What are those?

 

[anmpr1]

I prefer my hifi writer characters more along the line of Herb Reichert. Or (even) the late Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg.

In the marketing department, Harvey was the PT Barnum of hi-fi. Always ready to push the limits of the unbelievable. But unlike PT, and arguably to his credit, he was absolutely sincere. But a sincere delusion is still a delusion. Like Fremer he was a true believer. But unlike Fremer, he was funny. Humor is hard to come by in the world of tweako audio, because there's so much anger in it. A lot of self righteous back stabbing, innuendo, bad blood, jealously, and downright hate. Say what you will about him, but Harvey was not hateful. He wanted to spread joy through music. At least that is my impression.

You can say that his business dealings were questionable. OK. But that's the business. Ask Jim Bongiorno about high end business shenanigans, next time you break out the Ouji.

I'll go out on a limb by saying that his reminiscences of Julius Futterman were heartfelt touching, and could bring a tear to even the most cynical and jaundiced hi-fi practitioner. Of course being the salesman he was, there was always a bit of 'how can I make a dollar or two out of his memory', behind it all. I don't deny that.

You couldn't read much of his prose, because he was all over the place, mentally. Where Ritalin could have helped, he probably favored Peyote Mescaline. But he had a way of distilling essences. For me, his funniest moment was when Mark Levinson was hawking his Chinese sourced Red Rose tube amps. At a demo, Harvey listened a while and then said something to the effect of, "Congratulations Mark. You've finally found a way to make the magic of tubes sound as bad as your solid state gear."

You could say that he died too early, but, then again, his era--the era of tweako high end--also died around the same time. It was a time in journalism when Peter Aczel took Larry Klein's advice and matched the levels of his Levinson amp with the Pioneer, and found that he couldn't tell them apart. What Mark Davis told him years before, but he didn't believe. None of us believed it. And then, after realizing the truth, he just had to report that fact. It was then that the 'magic' went away. So you could say that Harvey split the scene at pretty much the right time. It's better to leave the party early. Really, there's nothing as embarrassing as a sixty or seventy year old rock n roller acting like they are twenty. Just like hi-fi writers such as Fremer, acting like it's still 1975, flipping through bins at the record shop.

 

[mhardy6647]

Ermm.. I thought you are running Altec horns but I see you have something new maybe. What are those?

At the moment, the only Altec thingies in my FrankenAltecs are the 515B "woofers" ("lower midrange" may be a more honest description ).
I've been using the EMILAR EH500-2 horns for treble for three or four years now. In terms of affordable* horns with decently low cutoff (nominally 500 Hz), they're hard, perhaps impossible, to beat.
IMO of course... and, probably Joe's "O", too.

You don't recognize the horn in the photo because that one was lent to me by Joe He lent me two to try with my own pair of 802D drivers. I was quickly sold. The one in the photo I posted, replete with its snazzy "EMILAR" sticker, was already promised to a South Korean audiophile, so I had to send it back to him fairly quickly. Joe did, kindly, sell me the other EH500-2 he'd lent me at a very reasonable price. Shortly thereafter, I actually managed to snag another single EH500-2 on eBAY early one Tuesday** morning at a bargain price. THOSE are the ones you're used to seeing.

... but I digress.
______________
* albeit less and less affordable all the time.
** We used to be up at 4:45 AM local time three Tuesdays a month -- due to my wife's long stint of volunteer work, now winding down, with Massachusetts Audubon. But that's another story entirely.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

Enid Lumley influenced (I believe) the whole Peter Belt craze championed over here by an old pal of mine back then (we've lost touch now but I do wonder if he still does all that stuff in his very full apartment). I still have one or two CD's with foils, green pens (oh yes indeedy) and so on still there after thirty five years or so. The thing is, in the company of these people, one could hear these differences, but tried at home with a system that didn't sound bad to begin with, they made no difference at all!

I thought EL was absolutely out of her tree - did she ever go to live concerts? She used to claim that she could hear nuclear vs. coal generated mains supply, she was first to suspend all her cables at a fixed point above the ground I seem to remember (ignoring the miles of wires in a studio often laying all over the floor and crossing each other at all kinds of angles, this in addition to the wiring of a mixing desk innards). Totally bonkers...

I remember she had a piece on how placing bath towels on drying racks in the listening room would improve sound--provided they were of the correct degree of dampness, and the racks were wooden. If you didn't yet realize you had fallen down a really deep rabbit hole when you picked up a TAS before then...

 

[mhardy6647]

No LP is perfectly centered.

It's kinda like π: you can approach but you can never reach the destination.

Spending any more than $10,000 on a turntable is pointless.

Heck, DUAL used that as a feature.



I did like DUAL's attitude (or maybe it was United Audio, who was DUAL's importer/distributor in the US in those days).
It is almost inconceivable to me, as a person who is close to half Deutsch, to imagine a room full of German engineers saying (in comical German accents, of course) "Bah! Who cares if they level their turntables or not? It simply doesn't matter!"

 

[thewas]

Heck, DUAL used that as a feature.



I did like DUAL's attitude (or maybe it was United Audio, who was DUAL's importer/distributor in the US in those days).
It is almost inconceivable to me, as a person who is close to half Deutsch, to imagine a room full of German engineers saying (in comical German accents, of course) "Bah! Who cares if they level their turntables or not? It simply doesn't matter!"

That dynamic arm loading of the good old Duals doesn't really correct though the problem of the eccentricity of the records, to my limited vinyl knowledge only the Nakamichi TX-1000 attempted to reduce it:

 

[Doodski]

That dynamic arm loading of the good old Duals doesn't really correct though the problem of the eccentricity of the records, to my limited vinyl knowledge only the Nakamichi TX-1000 attempted to reduce it:

Wow. What a turntable. Why the extra long tonearm?

 

[thewas]

Wow. What a turntable. Why the extra long tonearm?

For audiophiles to play with different arms.

 

[mhardy6647]

For audiophiles to play with different arms.

Somewhat less tracking error (at least potentially) with a long arm (not to be confused with a big member, per earlier discussion in this thread) -- plus it would be needed for 16 inch transcription discs.
I know lots of audiophiles play those...

Not to serve as a DUAL apologist (I never liked their automatic changers -- way too complicated) but, in fairness, based on the text from the 1019 manual that I scanned, they are touting the low friction in the arm pivots in terms of playing off-center records, not the fact that they use a dynamically-balanced arm (which is at least relatively immune to nasty old Mr. Gravity).

The playing sideways (or even upside-down) stuff is attributable to using a spring to set tracking force.


Not a DUAL, but rather a Rek-O-Kut Empire record player in the photo above, with their dynamically balanced arm doin' tricks for the humans.

By the way -- I am sure that all y'all knew this already , but DUAL (made by Gebrüder Steidinger (Steidinger Brothers) adopted the name "Dual" in reference to the dual-mode motors they developed. To quote DUAL themselves: "The power supplies allowed gramophones to be powered from mains electricity or with a wind-up mechanism."

History – DUAL

hifi.dual.de

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Somewhat less tracking error (at least potentially) -- plus it would be needed for 16 inch transcription discs.
I know lots of audiophiles play those...

Not to serve as a DUAL apologist (I never liked their automatic changers -- way too complicated) but, in fairness, based on the text from the 1019 manual that I scanned, they are touting the low friction in the arm pivots in terms of playing off-center records, not the fact that they use a dynamically-balanced arm (which is at least relatively immune to nasty old Mr. Gravity).

The playing sideways (or even upside-down) stuff is attributable to using a spring to set tracking force.


Not a DUAL, but rather a Rek-O-Kut, but another dynamically balanced arm doin' tricks for the humans.

Not Rek-O-Kut, either. Thats an Empire 398. See the arm boxes on the shelf?
That said, I had a couple of those and I don't know how they keep the platter/bearing from falling out of the (inverted) well.

 

[jtwrace]

Unless Mikey was going to ASR full-time I could care less.

 

[mhardy6647]

Not Rek-O-Kut, either. Thats an Empire 398. See the arm boxes on the shelf?
That said, I had a couple of those and I don't know how they keep the platter/bearing from falling out of the (inverted) well.

Thank you for the correction.
Yeah, I know, sorry.
I was sittin' here lookin' at the Audio Empire curtains and wonderin' why the fug I typed Rek-O-Kut.
Fixed in postproduction. Sort of like DSP.

 

[mhardy6647]

Unless Mikey was going to ASR full-time I could care less.

That would be fun. Sort of like, oh I don't know, puttin' Elon Musk on the board at Berkshire Hathaway.

 

[Doodski]

Thank you for the correction.
Yeah, I know, sorry.
I was sittin' here lookin' at the Audio Empire curtains and wonderin' why the fug I typed Rek-O-Kut.
Fixed in postproduction. Sort of like DSP.

I was wondering if they where case lots of cartridges. I know we used to order them in by the flats and so it was not far fetched to think that.

 

[Music1969]

wait, wait -- what about @Kal Rubinson?!?

Yes Kal is obviously a great guy !

But as I wrote JA is the reason I keep paying for Stereophile... trustworthy measurements ;-)