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The Complete Guide to High-End Audio, Fifth Edition

The Complete Guide to High-End Audio, Fifth Edition

TAS’ very own Editor in Chief, Robert Harley, has just published the fifth edition of what was, is, and remains the best book ever written about hi-fi, his Complete Guide to High-End Audio. Introduced in 1994 (can it have been twenty-one years since this book first came out?), the Complete Guide has previously been updated three times—to keep it current with the advances in technology that have occurred over the past two decades. The latest update—the Fifth Edition—adds nearly fifty pages of new material and countless revisions of older entries to accommodate what Robert calls (in his preface) a greater number of “profound changes in audio technology than in any previous decade.”

Music servers, streaming audio, wireless networking, desktop hi-fi’s, high-resolution downloads, and the rapid ascent of personal listening via high-end headphones were not yet or just barely on the map when the Fourth Edition of the Complete Guide was published a scant five years ago. Today, they are among the hottest tickets on the market.

In the Fifth Edition, Robert covers them all—and the myriad smaller, less attention-grabbing ways that advancing technology has moved the quest for more lifelike musical reproduction forward.

But comprehensiveness is scarcely the only attraction of the new Complete Guide. No one—not even the great J. Gordon Holt in his prime—could or can demystify the mind-bogglingly technical the way Mr. Harley can. It is precisely his ability to explain the thorniest complexities in plain English that has made the Complete Guide the enduring classic that it is.

Anyone taking his first steps into computer, desktop, or personal/mobile audio, anyone deeply interested in the current (and I mean right-up-to-date) state of the audio arts, anyone looking for lucid explanations of how amplifiers, preamplifiers, loudspeakers, headphones, even computer servers work (and what to look for when you buy one) would be well advised to purchase the Fifth Edition of The Complete Guide to High-End Audio. All your answers are here, written in the graceful, meticulous, easy-to-understand prose of a genuine master.

Robert Harley
Acapella Publishing, pp. 576, $44.95
hifibooks.com

Also available as Kindle or Apple eBooks
Order toll-free 800 888-4741

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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