Stereophile has been my favorite audio rag for a long time. They have the best Editor in audio (John Atkinson), the best writers (too many to name), and provide the most balanced coverage of the audio hobby in all its forms of any print magazine I’m aware of. Stereophile gets it.

As a bonus, Stereophile also has a website where they archive much of their content and make it available for free. Certainly one of my favorite Stereophile writers is Art Dudley, who has provided his readers with years of entertainment and good advice through his own late magazine Listener, which I incidentally still have every issue of except one, and now Stereophile.

The content of Art’s Listener #95 article just went live on the Stereophile website, and if you haven’t read it yet you should, and if you’ve already read it I’d say go back and read it again for good measure, like I just did. Why you ask? Because for the first time in an internationally distributed print magazine Art said what some of us have known for a long time – that it’s about the music not the sound.

You wouldn’t think emphasizing the importance of music over the importance of sonics would be a controversial position in a hobby that’s dedicated to listening to music for enjoyment, but sadly among the majority of audiophiles it is controversial. Go figure.

A snippet from Art's Listener Stereophile column:

“Critical listening has everything to do with music and nothing to do with sound. Critical listening is learning how to identify and understand intervals, harmonies, motifs, modes, and keys—and the reasons composers and musical improvisers might use them. Critical listening is learning something about the history of music and relating it to other arts and events. Critical listening is recognizing Ralph Stanley’s shape-note singing, or the connection between 12-tone composing and the structures of Charlie Parker’s sax solos, or the things that really distinguish a good conductor from a bad one.

Let me make it plain: If you think that critical listening has anything to do with listening for colorations, microdynamics, or “locating images in space,” I pity you. You’ve wasted a chunk of your life learning not how to understand music but how to imitate your favorite audio reviewer. That’s pathetic.”

Read Listener #95 in it's entirety here.