About TAB

Founders

Paul Bolin & Marc Mickelson

Editor

Marc Mickelson

For more than a decade, Marc was the editor-in-chief of SoundStage! and the SoundStage! Network sites, building them into preeminent online publications. In the process, he wrote hundreds of equipment and music reviews, and edited the work of dozens of writers. He resigned from the Soundstage! Network in 2009 and shortly thereafter started work on The Audio Beat. Marc lives northwest of Phoenix, Arizona, in a large listening room with a Spanish-style house attached.

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, Butch.

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.

Contributors

Tim Aucremann

Exposure to way too much German Idealist literature led Tim to acquire a taste for Brahms choral music and really long sentences. A need for food and shelter drove him to a second career in IT architecture and project management, which he practices at a large university in the Upper Midwest. He has never looked back since trading his Bose 901s for Maggies and a Hafler DH500 amplifier kit thirty years ago. For five years, Tim reviewed audio equipment at SoundStage!

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.

John Crossett

Early attempts at learning the viola ended in dismal failure, but music and its reproduction continued to play important roles in John’s life. He has always considered his audio system a means to an end -- listening to his favorite music -- not an end in itself. For ten years, John wrote music and equipment reviews for SoundStage! He lives in northern Vermont with his stereo and ever-growing collection of jazz, rock, classical, and blues LPs, CDs and SACDs.

Dennis Davis

Dennis gave up an unpromising career as a pianist in college when he avoided the practice room and began spending far too much time in the library reading back issues of High Fidelity and lusting after AR 3a speakers. By the late 1960s, he had saved enough money for a used pair of the speakers and never looked back. In the early 1990s, he founded the San Francisco Bay Area Audiophile Society, and later that decade he began writing jazz reviews for Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity. He has been a regular writer for Hi-Fi+ since Issue 31. He has been an avid record collector for decades.

Allen Edelstein

In the mid-1960s, Allen's parents gave him a bona fide high-end system -- AR 2ax speakers, a Dynaco PAS2 preamp, a Dynaco Stereo 70 amp, and an 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.

Richard S. Foster

Richard began his career as an audio and music reviewer in the latter half of the 1990s, writing first for Ultimate Audio before moving on to Listener and finally to Hi-Fi+. He has special affection for classical music and early blues -- odd bedfellows -- and he has compiled a collection of vinyl that is extensive in its scope. He continues to broaden his music collection, especially into the digital realm. When not listening to music, which is rare, he enjoys watching films on his home-theater system.

Richard Freed

Richard Freed is a former music critic for The New York Times and Saturday Review, and contributing editor of Stereo Review, where his "Basic Repertoire" series introduced legions of readers, including some of The Audio Beat staff, to important performances in the classical-music catalog. He has served as assistant to the director of the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and as executive director of the Music Critics Association, as well as record critic for The Washington Star and The Washington Post, radio host for the concerts of the St. Louis and Baltimore symphony orchestras, and program annotator for those orchestras as well as the Houston Symphony, National Symphony and Philadelphia orchestras. He has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for his concert and record annotations, and a Grammy Award for the latter.

Roy Gregory

Roy has served his hi-fi time from every angle -- as customer, retailer, manufacturer's and distributor's representative, reviewer and editor. He was the founder and loudest (some say too loud) voice of Hi-Fi+, to which he continues to contribute. He brings his wealth of experience and unique perspective to The Audio Beat, producing far more than just straightforward equipment reviews.

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.

Jason Kennedy

Jason has been reviewing hi-fi equipment since getting a staff job with Hi-Fi Choice in 1987. Having paid his dues, he went freelance in 2001, and he now contributes to a number of audio publications, including Hi-Fi Choice, Hi-Fi+ and HIFICRITIC. He resides in the town of Lewes, East Sussex, UK, onetime home of Thomas Paine and the most lively place to be on November 5th. Jason became obsessed with music at an impressionable age, but because he was unable to re-create it on an instrument, he became a high-end-audio writer instead. One day he hopes to get a proper job, but for now listening to great music on great kit keeps him off the streets.

Chris Thomas

Chris penned his first reviews for the long-defunct UK magazine Popular Hi Fi back in the late 1970s and has been with Hi-Fi+ since Issue 1. He is a born and bred Londoner who instinctively likes music more than hi-fi, though he is still intrigued by the enormous differences he hears when listening to equipment. Chris is of the school of thought that the quality of installation is absolutely critical to the musical result and is consistently amazed at how bad most high-end systems sound. He has been fiddling with and playing guitars for more years than he cares to remember, and he buys and sells fine vintage instruments, both acoustic and electric -- a task that he laments is getting harder and harder with the increasing number of forgeries he sees these days.

What We Do and Why We Do It

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 to 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

A Note on Navigating The Audio Beat

The Audio Beat makes extensive use of a JavaScript utility called Slimbox 2. This overlays graphic images onto the current page without changing the page's native layout. We use Slimbox 2 for photos, which we can display in groups, or galleries, without having to place them all on the page. We also offer its use to advertisers.

Be sure to click on pictures with the symbol in one of the upper corners. This signals that an extra picture or gallery exists. Once the Slimbox 2 window appears, you can scroll through all pictures by hovering on the window and clicking the PREV and NEXT tabs. Any captions appear at the bottom of the window.