Goodness me:
http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/1107awsi/
A few tidbits:
"Audio actually used to have a goal: perfect reproduction of the sound
of real music performed in a real space. That was found difficult to
achieve, and it was abandoned when most music lovers, who almost never
heard anything except amplified music anyway, forgot what "the real
thing" had sounded like."
"Since the only measure of sound quality is that the listener likes
it, that has pretty well put an end to audio advancement, because
different people rarely agree about sound quality."
On multichannel:
"With fidelity in stagnation, spatiality was the only area of
improvement left."
And then there's this choice bit:
"As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its
credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the
kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example)
that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since
Pascal."
A lengthier diatribe is apparently in the works.
I never saw Stereophile in its samizdat days, so Holt to me was just
an occasional byline, and I assumed he was just as cracked as the rest
of them. Maybe not.
bob