Editor's Eye

Audio had Loof every April, but Stereo Review had Rodrigues all year long.

In preparation for our April print edition , and in search of a subject for our retrospective flashback feature, I pressed deep into our 60-year archive for hints of the origin of Lirpa Labs and its mysterious, opinionated, and wildly creative founder, Loof Lirpa.

...We Were More Than a Decade Strong

A recent visit to The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, site of 1969’s Woodstock Music & Art Festival, inspired me to dig into the stored archive of our magazine as we set sights on our 60th anniversary year. And what a library it is. Sound & Vision was founded in February 1958 as HiFi & Music Review, when the big news in audio tech was the transition from mono to stereo.

If you ever wonder what the geeks at Sound & Vision do when we’re not listening to new speakers or tuning up video displays, well, we’re probably debating some arcane technical detail that most non-enthusiast mortals would neither understand nor care about. And so it was that a rather fired-up exchange of e-mails occurred recently between myself, video technical editor Tom Norton, and our contributing technical editor Kris Deering.

I love that time of year when, after a couple of false starts and brief teases, the persistence of winter finally breaks for good and the soft breezes of spring arrive. That’s a decidedly northern experience, of course, one that some folks eventually move south to get away from permanently (well, the winter that precedes it, anyway), and which others have never known because of their origins in warmer climes. I get it — I’ve got family all over the country and have spent plenty of time out west and in Florida, and I see how a guy could get used to it. But the New Yorker in me thinks those folks are missing out. If you haven’t struggled through a winter, even a mild one, you can’t fully appreciate the fleeting beauty of a spring and summer in the same way. You need that frame of reference. It makes being outside that much better.

In a recent post I chided manufacturers for releasing Wi-Fi-based speakers that failed to perform reliably. But then I began to wonder about the role of our Wi-Fi networks and whether the demands of these new products are outpacing the capabilities of today’s “average” network. Ravi Rajapakse, founder and CEO of Blackfire Research, sheds some light on the subject…

Wireless music is a beautiful thing but not everyone has figured out how to deliver a glitch-free experience. What's going on?

As night settled in with hours left to drive, I pulled off the highway in Barstow to tap the Wi-Fi at Starbucks and download the Audible version of Fear and Loathing to my iPhone. That’s when I saw him, working behind the counter, his wild gray hair dancing in the overhead lights...