![]() As the most visible and successful purveyor in the category, Monster was an obvious choice, though, as Greenhill told me recently for this article, it’s noteworthy that Monster’s early speaker cable was essentially also twisted-filament copper like the other test subjects, with nothing particularly advanced in the cable design compared with later products that came from Monster and other manufacturers. To keep things from getting unruly, they settled on testing three speaker cables at 30-foot lengths, including thin, 24-gauge of the type found at electronics outlets 16-gauge lamp cord bought at a hardware store and 11.5-gauge Monster Cable to represent the premium segment. The SR editorial team worked up the test protocol with Greenhill and some Audiophile Society colleagues and Marching Society member/ABX officer David Clark. The system had been developed by members of the Southeastern Michigan Woofer and Tweeter Marching Society, a DIY hobbyist group out of the Detroit area (of which former long-time Stereo Review contributor Tom Nousaine was an active member).īy chance, Greenhill lived a few miles away from Hirsch, and their casual acquaintance provided the entrée. This box (as explained in Greenhill’s article) used logic circuitry to randomly trigger relays that allowed listeners to compare two unknown sources instantaneously while eliminating the need for (and therefore, the bias of) a test administrator to select the sources hence the term double-blind. Testing device called the ABX Double Blind Comparator System. Greenhill’s science background and personal interest in acoustic perception and subjective listening had led him to write some articles on these subjects, and eventually to fascination with a new audio ![]() The pitch was made by accomplished research psychiatrist Laurence Greenhill, an active member of the Westchester (county) Audiophile Society based in the New York City suburbs, and a reviewer for the audio journal High Performance Review. It was no surprise, then, that in 1983, the magazine jumped at the opportunity to conduct a double-blind listening test, which editor-in-chief Bill Livingston and his colleagues hoped would reveal, scientifically, that high-end cables were indeed a hoax and provided no higher performance than the everyday lamp cord in common use at the time. It wasn’t long before Stereo Review began positioning itself as the skeptical voice of reason in what its editors deemed an audio industry gone mad. The highly objective measurement-based testing approach employed by Julian Hirsch and his colleagues already ran counter to the high-end community’s subjective reviews, which focused solely on claimed sonic differences that SR’s instruments couldn’t detect. The editors of our precursor Stereo Review were suspicious of the benefits of such speaker cables and interconnects, which were suddenly being proffered by an ever-widening mix of high-end specialists, often at prices far higher than Monster’s. In the midst of all this, the premium cable business emerged, driven in no small part by the success of the early Monster Cable products that followed the company’s founding by engineer/audiophile Noel Lee in 1979. But the High End also attracted its share of half-baked products and at least a few charlatans looking to cash in selling accessories that had little higher performance than a dime-store engagement ring. Some of these claims were founded-true advances were indeed being made by start-ups run by technicians with first-class bonafides and good ears. Fueled by an underground audio press that included magazines and newsletters such as Sound & Vision sister publication Stereophile, The Absolute Sound, International Audio Review, The Audio Critic, and others, a cottage industry emerged, one populated by small manufacturers of low-volume, high-priced exotica claiming greater faithfulness to the music than the gear reviewed and advertised in the pages of Stereo Review, High Fidelity, Audio, et al. The results of blind listening tests with eleven audio experts.Įditor's Note, 2018: In the early 1980s, esoteric high-end audio as we know it today was just taking off as an alternative to the mass-market equipment offered in neighborhood TV/appliance stores.
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