Photos by Eleni Mylonas
No editor could ask for a better contributor (or a better friend) than Julian Hirsch. He was an unquestionably honest man, a scientist who welcomed innovation, an enthusiast who clearly enjoyed what he was doing, an astute critic, and a fine writer who could address complicated technical subjects in plain, straightforward English. Julian never talked down to his readers, nor did he ever dismiss out of hand any piece of equipment that came to his lab. He listened, and measured, and listened some more. His enthusiasm for the equipment and his respect for his audience shone through everything he wrote. No wonder millions of people relied on his advice through the years. What he said mattered.
— Louise Boundas, editor in chief of Stereo Review from 1987 to 1998
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I met Julian Hirsch in 1981 on a press trip to Osaka, Japan — a few months after joining Stereo Review’s principal rival, High Fidelity. Julian was a half-decade older then than I am now and had been writing about audio since about the time I was born. He accepted me immediately. Over the many years and trips that followed, he became one of my favorite traveling companions. Amiable, modest despite his depth of knowledge, experience, and relative fame, and utterly unpretentious, Julian was always good company. (And it was fun when he was noticed in an airport or on the street, that distinctive bald pate so recognizable from the pages and cover of the magazine.) When I eventually wound up on staff at Stereo Review, I found him a pleasure to work with as well, for the same reasons. Plus, he delivered clean copy, on schedule, traits endearing to editors the world over.
Among the things that set Julian apart from most audio journalists was that he was a real engineer. He worked on radar in World War II and designed electronic test instruments after. (His first visit to Japan, incidentally, was immediately following the war as part of the Allied Occupation Force. Over the following half century, he witnessed at close hand what surely must count as one of the most staggering national transformations in history; it’s too bad he never wrote about that.)
His understanding of how equipment worked converged with his love of music and a flair for down-to-earth explanation in a way that profoundly affected the development of high-fidelity sound reproduction. I truly believe that without Julian Hirsch the audio industry would have evolved much differently — and achieved far less.
At the time Julian started reviewing equipment with his engineering buddies for The Audio League Report in the early 1950s, a lot of the gear was pretty bad. His solid technical approach unearthed the flaws, often in gory detail, and pointed the way to improvement. When he made the leap from what was essentially a tech-hobbyist hi-fi fanzine to writing for High Fidelity (briefly) and then Popular Electronics and Stereo Review, his audience and influence multiplied tremendously. The emerging Japanese manufacturers, especially, adopted his critical method as the foundation of their design schema. Their competition to excel when measured against his performance criteria drove home audio technology ahead at a furious clip.
Blind pursuit of that race could lead to absurdity, and the eventual, inevitable cases in point emerged as a regular theme of Julian’s “Technical Talk” column. A meter can register the difference between 0.01% distortion and 0.0001%, but not the human ear. While retaining an enthusiasm for superior and, especially, innovative audio engineering, Julian did what he could to discourage unproductive “specsmanship.” He was also keenly aware of how difficult it could be to correlate even significant measurable performance deficiencies with their audible consequences (another recurrent theme).
I remember asking him once for a set of frequency-response curves from a loudspeaker he had tested, which duly arrived in my office with a two-word note attached: “Good luck!” He understood both the value and the limitations of his lab results and worked to share that perspective with his readers. And he always emphasized that what ultimately mattered was the user’s experience, including not only a component’s sound quality (first and foremost), but also its usability in the hands of ordinary human beings.
How strange, then, that such a practical, skeptical, clear-headed gentleman came to draw scorn in the audiophile fringe as a dogmatic “tin-eared meter reader.” Hard to be farther off the mark. But the folks touting this ill-considered caricature were usually peddling real dogma of their own. If you’re desperate to believe — or to convince others — that every amplifier has its own distinctive sound, to take a prominent example, it probably is frustrating to endure an individual of Julian’s integrity and stature insisting that the good ones now are uniformly neutral, transparent reproducers. (Worse, apparently, that it’s no longer easy to find even cheap receivers that don’t qualify!)
Most curious to me, however, was the way the argument so often circled back and gravitated to an exotic specification (TIM, jitter, etc.) that allegedly did tell the tale. Some meter-readers are more equal than others, I guess. Although Julian would respond seriously to reasoned criticism, he seemed impervious to the more emotional attacks, seldom bothering even to acknowledge them. He kept his feet out of the mud.
I’ve wanted an opportunity to say some of these things in a public forum for quite a few years. If only it could have presented itself another way. Above all else, Julian Hirsch was a good man, honest and true of heart — someone you might hold up as an example to your children and say, “Be like him.” No higher praise could anyone offer. Goodbye, old friend. And thank you.
— Michael Riggs, editor for High Fidelity from 1981 to 1989, senior editor of Stereo Review from 1989 to 1995, editor in chief of Audio from 1995 to 2000
I first met Julian back in 1976 when I was demonstrating the first concert-hall simulator for the living room. I was a bit nervous in that I was meeting an authority and legend in our industry, and I was a neophyte when it came to experience and breadth of knowledge.
To my surprise and delight, he was warm and friendly, and he expressed great interest in the device — how it worked and what it would eventually mean for consumers. That single meeting and the subsequent review of the product launched my career as a manufacturer.
My experience was just one of many — others like me met with Julian and had a chance to explain what we were doing and what our products were all about. It didn’t matter that we were not one of the Japanese giants or powerhouse speaker companies. He was there to listen, learn, and suggest improvements. And he was ready to use his valuable editorial space to discuss products or ideas he felt had merit, no matter where they came from. For this opportunity, I and many of my colleagues will be eternally grateful to a man who gave us the chance to grow in our careers. He will be missed by all of us.
— Peter Tribeman, chairman, Atlantic Technology
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Julian’s “ethic” and common sense inspired me early on, and still guides me to this day. I enjoyed his company, coaching, and confidences on many an occassion, most especially those overseas “junkets” where he was revered by the hosts and carefully attended by the “youngsters” within earshot of his wisdom.
— Steve Booth, senior editor, Consumer Electronics Daily (successor publication to Television Digest)
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I guess few of the younger generation know much about Julian. Back in our youth, he was the unchallenged dean of hi-fi reviewers. He never had an ax to grind, accepted each product with an open mind, and, in an age of strongly individualized hi-fi components, was always respectful of the designers’ intentions and efforts.
I only met him in person twice that I recall. Once was at an AES convention in New York City. He was the center of attention wherever he went, but he seemed oblivious of his celebrity status and would patiently chat with and respond to anyone who tried to speak with him.
Eventually, I started working in the industry and had the honor of having something I had designed, the dbx Soundfield-One loudspeaker, reviewed by Julian. Jerome Ruzicka, a VP at dbx, and I drove the speakers to Julian’s home in New Rochelle. It was like a dream come true to spend a day with him at his home laboratory, and, of course, he was a most gracious host.
These days, so many consumer-electronics products are produced by large conglomerates, and the Internet has let anyone be a reviewer of individual products. All this has, to my mind, reduced the importance of magazine-based reviewers. So I doubt we’ll see his like again. Too bad — he was definitely the right man in the right place at the right time. He will be missed.
— Mark Davis, Dolby Laboratories
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Although living in the U.K., we used to look forward to reading Julian Hirsch’s lab reports and “Technical Talk” column. As magazines in this country changed from the mid 1970s to the present to 100% subjective reviews full of unfounded claims (like there being huge audible differences between turntables, amplifiers, or cables), it was always good to have him to guide us through the nonsense.— Mark and Lily J, readers
Julian was a superb engineer and one of the most level-headed reviewers in the history of our industry. But most important, he was a true gentleman and a kind, warm individual.The first time I visited him at his home in New Rochelle, NY, I remember thinking it was like a slice of Americana — a nice, suburban split-level, two unassuming midsize cars in the driveway, some slightly worn carpeting in the living room, and a few framed covers of Stereo Review with Julian’s picture hanging in the foyer. Just like your uncle’s house, as unpretentious as could be. New Rochelle was the home of Rob and Laura Petry on the 1960s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, which somehow seemed perfectly apt. The famed “Hirsch-Houck Labs” were in the basement of his home. Julian and Mr. Houck had departed company many years previous, but he always kept the H-H name because, as he told me, he “liked the way it sounded.”
On one wall of his lab were all his electronics and test equipment. He had a 1970s-vintage Pioneer 50-watt-per-channel four-channel power amp that he used continuously for decades for various tests and listening because it “worked perfectly well and had inaudible noise and distortion.” That’s not to say that he used this amp for critical listening evaluations of expensive speakers under test, but the fact that he continued to use a piece of perfectly good gear after it was no longer “fashionable” attests to his pragmatic unemotionalism with regard to equipment evaluation.
The various so-called “golden ears” at the other audiophile magazines didn’t always like his polite, inoffensive reviewing style, but Julian was absolutely unfazed by fads, the cable of the month, or green Magic Markers. He was an engineer, and he placed his faith in meticulously conducted instrumented tests and controlled listening sessions. When I asked him one day about his seeming reluctance to write a negative report, he smiled and said, “If a unit from a well-known manufacturer tests poorly, we’ll call them and give them the chance to submit another sample, since what we test are often preproduction units that may not be completely ‘right.’ If a unit is truly bad, Stereo Review’s basic policy was that they’d rather not waste the readers’ time, or our editorial pages, with something negative. The editors would rather report on something good, so the readers might learn something or expand their buying choices. I know some people may disagree with this policy, but I think it serves our readership well. You can tell the difference between a decent product and a really outstanding product pretty easily when you read our reviews. And we never say something is good if it’s not.”
I never had any quarrel with this policy. If people wanted to read a harsh review, there were other magazines only too willing to oblige. The completeness and accuracy of Julian’s measured results were way ahead of the competition for years, and he knew — very correctly and early on — that frequency response, distortion, and signal-to-noise ratio were by far the prime determinants of listening quality, no matter how much we may want to believe that some other, more esoteric factor is The One.
He had a mint condition AR-1 speaker from 1954 that he proudly showed me the first time I was in his home. “I knew that things had changed forever when I first saw this,” he said to me. Mounted on his wall, opposite his test equipment, was a pair of AR-7s. The last time I was there (in mid-1997, about six months before he retired from Stereo Review), I asked him why he still had them up. “I still listen to them on occasion. I tested them in 1973, and found them to be flat within ±2 dB from 60 to 15,000 Hz. They were such remarkable speakers.”
And he was a remarkable guy. Knowledgeable, practical, experienced, well-respected, well-liked, and kindhearted. I feel privileged to have known him. We’ll miss you, Julian.
— Steve Feinstein, product development manager, Atlantic Technology
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I can’t quite believe that Julian is gone. I feel that I met him in 1969, when I was in junior high school. My friend Thorpe subscribed to Stereo Review, and he introduced me to the worlds of stereo and cars. And Julian was my first mentor, gently guiding me with logic, humor, intelligence, and helpful advice. He taught me about everything from cartridges to acoustics, especially during the years that I worked at Stereo Review and was lucky enough to be able to call him directly.I enjoyed traveling with Julian in Japan, and I enjoyed reading everything that he wrote. Because of Julian, I have had a wonderful career with Leisure Time Electronics, Stereo Review, Car Audio and Electronics, Car Stereo Review, and Mobile Entertainment. He will be very much missed.
— Bill Burton, technical director of ME — Mobile Entertainment, and technical editor of Stereo Review from 1986 to 1988
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I have read Stereo Review/Sound & Vision for over 35 years and have greatly missed Julian Hirsch’s down-to-earth commentaries since his retirement. In this day of $15,000 “reasonably priced” preamplifiers and speaker cables costing many hundreds of dollars per foot, I think his breath-of-fresh-air views are still needed.
I know Julian was accused by some “golden ears” of having a tin ear for not always hearing the supposed improvements from adding hockey pucks or the latest fad of the day to one’s equipment, but sometimes the emperor does wear no clothes. Julian was never afraid to point this out.
— Steve Braswell, a reader
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We are sorry to hear about the loss of Mr. Hirsch. He was a highly regarded engineer and contributor to consumer audio. His truthful stance on audio cables and insistence on measuring audio equipment was both refreshing and inspiring and now seems somewhat lacking in many online and printed audio publications.
— Gene DellaSala, president of Audioholics.com
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I was very saddened to hear about the loss of Mr. Hirsch. Having been a subscriber since I was 15 (I’m now 39!), I grew up with his reviews and no-nonsense approach to audio. I kept hoping he would occasionally come back and bless us with a few more words of wisdom in the magazine before heading off to that sweet home theater in the sky.
— Karl Huddleston, a reader
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I was saddened to hear of Mr. Hirsch’s passing. It’s funny how someone you have never met can have such an impact. [I remember] reading my brother’s Hi-Fi, then Stereo Review magazines, then subscribing myself, at first struggling to understand what was being said, then slowly acquiring an education so as to comprehend the test reports. But I’m sure this simple experience pales in comparison with the impact he made on those who truly knew him. His honor and dedication were evident in his writing.
— Tim Gray, a reader
More:A Tribute to Juilan Hirsch, 1922-2003