John Atkinson Retires

[Balle Clorin]

If Stereophile do not continue the Atkinson measurement style, I will not renew my subscription..
Stereophile measurements has been one thing that the real story about performance, without them the subjective smokescreens makes it impossible to know what quality we get. Without measurements the charlatans may take over..in many areas they have..

 

[welwynnick]

Besides being a champion of measurements in a magazine of subjective reviews of high end audio, one of the things I will remember about John Atkinson is his delightfully understated conclusions. If something was bad, he wouldn't be overtly critical, but once you got to know his writing, you could tell exactly what he thought. Equally, if something was fantastic, he would be the last to slather it with gushing praise like so many others.

This is the most extreme positive endorsement I can remember, for the second generation Kef 207:

While spaces remain in my heart for the Sonus Faber Amati homage, the mbl 111B, the Dynaudio Confidence C4, the original Revel Ultima Studio, and the Wilson Audio Sophia, I must say that the Series 2 revision of KEF's Reference 207, the 207/2, is overall the best-sounding full-range speaker I have used in my current listening room.

And the most critical comment I could find, about the Metronome CD8 S CD player:

Nevertheless, its measured performance suggests that the Metronome player is sub-optimally engineered.

Can anyone think of some other good ones?

 

[Snarfie]

From minuten 6:10 says it al regarding evaluating a system pricecless. Never knew he was on ASR as a member.

 

[ahofer]

If Stereophile do not continue the Atkinson measurement style, I will not renew my subscription..
Stereophile measurements has been one thing that the real story about performance, without them the subjective smokescreens makes it impossible to know what quality we get. Without measurements the charlatans may take over..in many areas they have..

I don’t suppose we could take up a collection and buy them a Klippel.

 

[Mr. E. Guy]

Stereophile have announced that John Atkinson is retiring today.

John was the editor and technical editor across 40 years.

Before that he was a writer and then editor at HiFi News & Record Review.

In particular. he was one of the people who tried to reconcile subjective and objective assessments of hifi.

He's one of my audio industry heroes, I will miss him very much, and wish him a long and happy retirement.

Nick

The End of an Era: John Atkinson Retires | Stereophile.com

The July issue is a milestone in Stereophile's history: It's the last issue in which John Atkinson will be performing the measurements for our equipment reviews (footnotes 1 & 2). As a start toward digesting this momentous event, I asked JA1 some questions. Jim Austin: Over your 50 years as an...

www.stereophile.com

Now lets be clear here...it was my superior intellect and pointed probing that got John to confess his retirement after I highlighted that Stereophile can't have two technical editors (as shown below).

So credit where credit is due!!!

And yes, I will accept your apology...that's the sort of man I am.

Peter

View attachment 539788

Y'all did read it here first! And it was in the magazine a month ago. But the way the internet works it wasn't "news" until the magazine article got posted online.

 

[SigbergAudio]

If Stereophile do not continue the Atkinson measurement style, I will not renew my subscription..
Stereophile measurements has been one thing that the real story about performance, without them the subjective smokescreens makes it impossible to know what quality we get. Without measurements the charlatans may take over..in many areas they have..

They will be measuring in the future as well.

 

[Cbdb2]

They will be measuring in the future as well.

But they will still think like this: JA quote "traditional measurements, where one parameter is plotted against another, fail to provide a complete picture of a component's sound quality. What we hear is a multidimensional array of information in which the whole is greater than the sum of the routinely measured parts."

Theres always an excuse for there measurements to back there subjective crap. Other than speakers/room the signal is one dimension, voltage, plotted against one dimension, time.

 

[amirm]

I think the best case scenario is them doing similar work to JA in providing some measurements and commentary saying they may or may not relate to subjective assessment. More likely is a few measurements thrown into a side bar like HiFi news and calling it done. The current management certainly would like this more than what existed before.

 

[Cbdb2]

I think the best case scenario is them doing similar work to JA in providing some measurements and commentary saying they may or may not relate to subjective assessment. More likely is a few measurements thrown into a side bar like HiFi news and calling it done. The current management certainly would like this more than what existed before.

And so would the advertisers and manufacturers.

 

[mglobe]

With Stereophile and all the other publications that publish at least some measurements, I have since I’ve been a teenager looked at the pictures, skimmed the subjective stuff, looked at the measurements, and read the comments of the person doing the measurements. With JA, I can always reconcile his comments with the measurements, and come to a rational conclusion. Then I would go back and look for recordings in the review that I had not heard before. I enjoy that process.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, you sometimes have to read between the lines with the measurement comments, but that’s part of the navigation that commercial publications in need of advertising have to do. Reading between the lines is not all that hard to do, and when you do you get information of value. It’s just part of the business the magazines are in

 

[CapMan]

Wishing you a long and happy retirement @John Atkinson

 

[gzost]

This older essay on Stereophile is a great example of John Atkinson's role as scientific fig leaf for the subjectivist crowd:

Subjective Fact or Objective Fantasy? | Stereophile.com

Blame the Puritans! say I. The high end has always had an ostinato accompaniment of grumbles from those who appear to feel that it is immoral to want to listen to music with as high a quality as possible.

www.stereophile.com

To the uninformed it may read like a cogent argument regarding the utility of measurements vs listening, but it is really just sophistry, built around the basic and wrong tenet that we can trust our ears in the process that their reviewers employ.

Having said that, here's the first post-Atkinson speaker measurement in Stereophile

Silent Pound Bloom loudspeaker Measurements | Stereophile.com

Sidebar 3: Measurements The Silent Pound Bloom loudspeaker was measured in a large conference room 11'11" H × 25'3" L × 15'8" W on top of a PT&D MDT turntable and with an accelerometer attached to the glass crossover cover. The speaker was measured on the tweeter axis at a 36" microphone...

www.stereophile.com

and damn, I miss his summary at the end.