Site Manager
Marc
Mickelson
Editors-at-Large
Paul Bolin
Paul
has been an audio hobbyist since he first heard his organ teacher's McIntosh tubed system
when he was in his very early teens. He began his career as an audio reviewer with The
Abso!ute Sound nearly fifteen years ago and from 2001 to 2009 was a contributing
editor of Stereophile. He has intermittently performed and recorded as a bass
guitarist and backing vocalist for longer than he cares to remember. Paul is a lifelong
resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota; he lives in the Uptown area of the city and shares his
apartment with his cat, Max.
Michael Fremer
Michael
needs no introduction to TAB readers, but we'll give him one anyway. His writing,
film, TV and radio credits are vast. For more than fifteen years, he has been a senior
contributing editor at Stereophile magazine, penning his popular monthly column
"Analog Corner" as well as hundreds of product reviews. He is also a
contributing editor at Home Theater magazine and the editor/owner of the online
music-review website www.musicangle.com.
He appeared in the oft-run History of Audio documentary on The History Channel, and
he has been on MTV, The Today Show, CNN, and hundreds of other radio and television
shows discussing, among other topics, the ongoing, unlikely resurgence of LP vinyl
records. He supervised the Academy Award-nominated soundtrack to the 1982 Disney
science-fiction feature film TRON and co-wrote the animated feature film Animalympics.
In 2006, he wrote, produced and hosted the DVD 21st Century Vinyl, and a second
DVD, It’s a Vinyl World, After All, was released in late 2008. Michael lives
in New Jersey with his wife, dogs and audio system, which is fronted by his prized
Continuum Audio Caliburn turntable.
Marc Mickelson
For
more than a decade, Marc was the editor-in-chief of SoundStage! and the
SoundStage! Network sites. He was instrumental in building the sites into preeminent
online publications, writing hundreds of equipment and music reviews, and editing the work
of dozens of writers. He lives northwest of Phoenix, Arizona, in a large listening room
with a Spanish-style house attached.
Contributors
Leonard Bloom
Leonard is a retired professor and chairman of a
university Modern Languages department. Since adolescence, he has been an avid listener to
and collector of classical music and opera, and a lover of the theater and foreign travel.
While a graduate student in Pittsburgh, he volunteered at symphony concerts and once
appeared in a production of Turandot starring the formidable Birgit Nilsson.
Leonard holds a doctorate in medieval Romance linguistics and spends much of his time with
his wife, Barbara, in Sarasota, Florida, volunteering at a local opera company as well as
for regional theater companies.
Ken Choi
Ken was subjected to accordion
lessons at an early age, but that didn't stop him from studying piano for a number of
years. His fascination with audio equipment emerged during his teens, when he taped top-40
countdowns every Sunday night and played them back on a Telefunken receiver and Radio
Society of Canada speakers. In 2004, he began writing about audio for SoundStage!
He practices dermatology and internal medicine in Toronto, where he lives with his
partner, Lisa, and their maltese poodle, Mickey.
Allen Edelstein
In the mid-1960s, Allen's parents
gave him a bona fide high-end system -- AR 2ax speakers, a Dynaco PAS2 preamp, Dynaco
Stereo 70 amp, and AR turntable -- for his college graduation. That put him on a road to
sonic enlightenment that progressed to his becoming the omnipresent AE at Stereophile,
where he began writing during J. Gordon Holt's ownership of the magazine and continued
through the beginning of the Larry Archibald/John Atkinson era. Allen is a self-described
objectivist, but one who is "not trusting of the usual objective measurements,"
an approach he will discuss and live by at TAB.
Eric Hetherington
Eric is a philosopher and the associate chair of a
Humanities department at a large research university. For years he wrote equipment, music
and movie reviews for GoodSound, Home Theater & Sound, and SoundStage!
His musical interests center around jazz (particularly Blue Note and Impulse! artists and
albums), electronic music (from Subotnik and Kraftwerk to Burial and Ellen Allien), indie
pop/rock, and what he'd call world music if the term didn't make him wince. He covets
Gilles Peterson's house of records. When not lecturing on Plato, writing, or listening to
music, he can be found climbing the hills of northern New Jersey on his bicycle.
When
Paul Bolin and I began talking about creating of an online audio site together, we settled
very quickly on the idea that we would only build something we would value and
want to read ourselves. Thus, while The Audio Beat will cover the entire spectrum
of audio products, we will have no quota for the types of products we review or their
cost. You will read about what interests us most -- great speakers, electronics and source
components, along with the music we listen to and cherish. Paul put it well in one of his
e-mail messages to me.
I
think it would be counterproductive to try and be everything to every audio enthusiast. We
have both focused on and had wide experience with the best of the best that the high-end
world has to offer. There is a place for reviews of relatively inexpensive gear, but only
where it offers extraordinary performance for the money. Our focus should be on the things
we do best.
As much as is humanly possible, the publication should endeavor to speak with one
editorial voice. I mean this not in terms of an unbendable orthodoxy or the squelching of
dissenting opinions, but in terms of what is important to us and what is most desirable in
the performance of components and systems.
Like
so many of the best audio components, The Audio Beat is a direct reflection of
the people who created it. We wouldn't have it any other way.
Marc
Mickelson
October 2009
For
further information on The Audio Beat, including advertising rates, write tab@theaudiobeat.com.
