When we embarked upon the re-launch of
The Perfect
Vision
, I envisioned the experience as a great
adventure – an opportunity to explore uncharted
territory in home entertainment. Everywhere I looked and
listened, there were new experiences, as the emergence of
digital technology shattered the old notions of what is pos-
sible in home audio.
I didn’t expect that the most challenging adventure
would be developing an editorial approach that would do
justice to the topic. As I planned the audio section for each
issue before me and the ones beyond, I came face to face
with a harsh reality – there weren’t enough pages to cover
the subject using conventional techniques. Indeed, our sub-
ject matter is so rich that using the conventional approach
of reviewing consumer equipment one product at a time
would yield superficial coverage of the available products at
best, while we were forced to ignore many of the fascinating
issues that underlie those products.
We needed a new way.
For inspiration, I turned to two wildly different sources:
Star Trek
and law school. By way of analogy, most audio
reviewing today is similar to the episodic structure of a TV
series such as
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. Each
episode is a whole story, with a beginning and an ending.
And next week the crew is off on another adventure that
typically has nothing to do with last week’s. In contrast,
Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine
is serial in structure. While elements
of each show are episode specific, there is a dominant plot
structure running from week to week that makes
DS9
seri-
al. That’s what we need in TPV’s audio section: a review
structure that is open enough to feature products while
using those same products to explore the larger plot that is
our quest to accurately recreate the sound of the original
event, be it music or movie.
You may well wonder what law school has to do with any
of this. Even lawyers who love the law will tell you that
law school was a nightmarish experience. One of our
principle objectives at TPV is to provide guidance to the
intelligent reader who is interested in home entertain-
ment. This objective flies square in the face of the reality
that even if you read every publication available on con-
sumer electronics, you could not read a review of every
product you might be interested in.
Faced with this limitation, I found myself in
a situation not unlike my first year of law.
Rather than teaching us the law, our professors taught us
how to
think
about the law. There are too many “rules” for
any student to sit down and absorb them all – just as there
are too many audio products for any reviewer to cover. And,
like the law, the results obtained from an audio product are,
to a degree, fact specific. What is needed is a broader per-
spective in approaching each product.
In law school, they taught us to read cases and discover
for ourselves the issues within those cases. Only then could
we begin to comprehend the use of rules in the law. Similar-
ly, it is the issues presented by each product and each sys-
tem that must be our starting point in understanding multi-
channel audio. If we reviewers can understand and share
the larger issues with you readers, you won’t need a review
of every product to guide you. You will be better equipped to
guide yourselves. And an informed marketplace produces
better products through economic force.
And how do we fuse the structure of
DS9
and approach
of law school in the audio review section? Crudely, at first, I
suspect. There isn’t a manual that tells us how to do this. So
like Indiana Jones in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, we’re going to
make it up as we go along.
In this issue, you can read the first installments of two
serial system reviews – one by Barry Rawlinson and the
other by me. Rawlinson, with his design background, will
approach the Linn system he is reviewing from a different
and invaluable perspective. Meanwhile, I’m off on a journey
to confront humankind’s ancient enemy as I review an evolv-
ing system based on Revel loudspeakers.
I envision an audio section that will provide more con-
text and insight than is possible with a conventional review
structure. There are limitations with this approach, of
course. The most significant is that we will be covering a
smaller number of products than if we just limited our
reviews to 1,500 words and grabbed every product we
could get (worse yet would be writing 3,000 word
reviews that cared not for the larger issues –
think about it). Because of this limitation, we
must be highly selective in choosing the products
we review. We want products of high performance
that have something to teach us.
This then is our manifesto of freedom from
the old conventions of audio reviewing.
But what did you expect? TPV is not a
conventional magazine!
Death to Convention
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
T O M M I I L L E R
A U D I O
