Any reviewer today have the taste of Harry Pearson?

[hifitommy]

many people felt that hp sat on a high horse, and he did but he DESERVED it. he got right to the meat of a component's sound. i respected him for that and tried to follow khis music choices which weren't always that great for me. the Hearts of Space was a bid waste for me but then he had Kraftwerk's Electric Cafe on his list for a while. it is STILL the best one imo.

his descriptions of the sound was wondrous and nearly ALWAYS right. i would love to have had a set up man for my equipment. that would amount to remote control for set up. i always pined for remote control VTA and now there are TTs with that, not that i could afford them.

in hp's stead, robert harley has more than filled the bill. if i desired to know JUST how a component sounded, i would just read the review of it by RH (if he had reviewed it). he describes the product like a physics master, which he seems to be.

i know that mikey fremer and hp didn't always see eye to eye and hence, the separation. mikey would be another that i have a great deal of admiration for as a reviewewer. there are others that are certainly up to the task, but those two strike me as the creme.

 

[Avidlistener]

Even if the stories of good reviews for long term loans was true, doesn't that clearly show it was a component he wanted to keep listening to? With access to almost any gear, why would he keep something that wasn't excellent? Also regarding his state of consciousness, if true only means the enhancement of his acuity and ability to focus, not a distorted viewpoint. At least that's been my experience.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Harry struck me as a pivotal point in the turning of the tide in audio journalism. A champion of communicating the quality of experience when evaluating gear and of the need to bring balance to a time of then a strongly objectivist dominated review scene.

Harry also became the voice of quality subjective writing and sharing experiences. Whether you agreed with his point of view or not isn't perhaps as important as the example he set in being able to identify and communicate how various components and ultimately how systems led you to experience recorded music in a way more fully.

The down side of the swing has been perhaps the encouragement of a new clearly less structured type of audio journalism where the limits of the debate aren't set at the point of communicating anything much at all and where people seem to just write enthusiastically saying everything is just freakin awesome and rarely specifying any experience beyond spilling emotively charged and ridiculously complex and layered and confusing and ever sooo coool comments without exactly saying anything specific. Style over content. Harry was anything but this... an eloquent and sophisticated writer and master communicator who effortlessly gave complex thoughts to us and did so with complete clarity.

I'm not sure there'll ever be another Harry exactly because he was a fairly fabulously unique unit in a time lacking in his type. He did open the way for more to come though.

Some modern writers now do exemplify that extraordinary skill of being able to write in a strongly communicative way about how gear can sound as well as how it effects our listening to music.

Myles Astor is great example of this and Jonathan Valin (as much as I don't always agree with all of his style or preferences) certainly also is a great interpreter and communicator of how gear sounds.

There are others but these are the first two that spring to mind though each are very unique and certainly not at all the same as Harry Pearson. Given their strong individual characters I am sure neither would they want to be exactly a Harry.

All great writers are unique and I think are true to themselves. These are lastingly valuable contributors to our understanding of this extraordinary field of interest and champions of certain standards of journalism...qualities that are sadly not always met in the new world of the amateur self publisher/writer of audio reviews. I'm sure Harry could help teach many contemporary writers about the need for real structure and real content beyond someone just being an entertaining personality or just filling with paragraphs cluttered with overworked clever style but not really communicating much in truth at all. Harry was a lasting influence and a champion of balance and bringer of cultural change.

 

[Don C]

HP reviewed brand new Magnepan 3.7's after 8 hours (they take at least 100 hours to sound halfway decent) and called the Magnepan 3.6's "broken" by comparison.

Absolute BS in that review! There are many other examples of BS opinion IMO.

The same pair of 3.7's show up in his estate sale, with a claimed use of 100 hours??? He never heard them broken in - what a twat.

He kept plenty of expensive equipment that was meant to be returned to the manufacturer, but never was. That is theft!

Almost all the equipment he used over the years was on long term loan. The only things he ever bought himself were records.

And Valin follows in his footsteps with the same scams!

Tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing! That sums up both HP and Valin.

 

[Gregadd]

One vote. Not a fan.

 

[Ron Resnick]

No. But it wasn't really taste that defined HP. It was vision.

I think this is a very astute comment.

 

[Ron Resnick]

. . . [HP] kept plenty of expensive equipment that was meant to be returned to the manufacturer, but never was. . . .

Almost all the equipment he used over the years was on long term loan. . . .

And Valin follows in his footsteps . . .

. . .

+1 (but only for these excerpts)

 

[Lee]

I would single out John Atkinson as doing important work. John combines both subjective and objective analysis and tries to correlate the two. He's like a scientist who does not discount the value of subjective listening. But he continues to strive toward understanding what measurements matter.

I also like the enthusiasm of my friend John Darko at DAR.

 

[Don C]

Ron Resinick looks exactly like Bert Convy. Is that not weird?

 

[Ron Resnick]

Ron Resinick looks exactly like Bert Convy. Is that not weird?

Hey, I don't have a Jewfro!

 

[bonzo75]

No. But it wasn't really taste that defined HP. It was vision.

Very Epigrammatic

 

[sbo6]

I would single out John Atkinson as doing important work. John combines both subjective and objective analysis and tries to correlate the two. He's like a scientist who does not discount the value of subjective listening. But he continues to strive toward understanding what measurements matter.

+1 I think John is the more objective (if you can be with music and gear), technical and humble of the reviewers..

 

[vdorta]

Audio has been my hobby since the early 70s and there are two men I put above all the rest, J. Gordon Holt in the early times (he was the one who created the audio vocabulary) and Martin Colloms nowadays. My reason is that both of them tried to bridge the divide between listening and measuring in a correct way (IMO), as John Atkinson also tries to do but is too stark in his writing. I never liked HP much although I respected him as a pioneer.