With Great Respect…

Cleaning the closets a bit today, I ran across the first issue of The Absolute Sound.

From Sping of 1973. Damn, I’m getting old. I remember reading it at my neighbor, longtime friend, and sometime TONEAudio contributor Todd Sageser’s house. I used to look at the mighty Phase Linear 700 amplifier on the shelf, with its gigantic, glowing, power output meters in the mall at Schaak Electronics and wonder what it would be like to have that much power.

44 years later, HP is no longer with us, and neither is Schaak Electronics. But I was fortunate enough to work for both of them, and I learned something from each. I even owned a couple of Phase Linear amplifiers over the years. And no, they never burst into flames.

Harry Pearson influenced me, with his obsessive quest for great sound, and his methodology influenced my approach at TONE, especially that of having a reference system where one and only one component was swapped at a time.

If you had the good fortune to encounter Mr. Pearson, you know he was a wild dog, in the best sense of the term. When I told him my dog’s name was Harry, he immediately thought I had named my Kerry Blue terrier after him. I confessed that my wife had named him after her screen heartthrob, Harrison Ford, Pearson retorted, “Well she hasn’t met me.”

And so it goes. It’s pretty amazing to see The Absolute Sound still thriving in 2017 and an entire industry and vocabulary sprout up from this 36 page leaflet, devoid of ads and photography. We’ve come a long way baby.