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Harry Pearson, Founder of Absolute Sound, Dies at 77
Last edited Fri Nov 28, 2014, 02:21 PM - Edit history (1)
I don't think DU has a forum for people with an interest in audio equipment. I didn't find this out until a few minutes ago. I'm always the last person to know anything.
I have the first few years' worth of The Absolute Sound. Those were some good years. I gave up on audio when things got ridiculously expensive. Now people accept mp3s and other compressed files heard through headphones or computer speakers as the epitome of audio excellence.
Harry Pearson, Founder of Absolute Sound, Dies at 77
Business Day
By PAUL VITELLONOV. 12, 2014
Harry Pearson, a journalist and audiophile who founded The Absolute Sound, a magazine for connoisseurs of high-fidelity audio in the 1970s and the locus of a backlash against CDs in the 1980s, died on Nov. 4 in Sea Cliff, N.Y. He was 77.
A friend, Dr. John W. Cooledge, confirmed the death, saying that he did not know the cause but that Mr. Pearson had had heart and circulatory ailments.
Mr. Pearson published his magazine every other month from 1973 through the 1990s, a period that saw sweeping change in the audio world. Though its reach was modest by mass-circulation standards — it had 30,000 subscribers at its peak, he said — Absolute Sound was influential among consumers interested in, and in some cases able to buy, stereo systems costing $50,000 and up in today’s dollars.....
The digital coding and laser-beam technology of CDs was lauded as a friction-free alternative to the scratching-and-skipping-plagued vinyl record. Mr. Pearson was one of the first to describe the loss of nuance and detail that came with friction-free sound, and he mounted a relentless critique in his magazine. ... Over the next decade he won many audio engineers and music critics to his side. In The New York Times in 1992, Edward Rothstein characterized Mr. Pearson as a kind of unofficial spokesman for an “impassioned rear guard, a group of music lovers of extreme views, an organization of Luddite fanatics” at war with the CD.
Audio Legend Harry Pearson Passes Away
By Michael Fremer • Posted: Nov 6, 2014 • Published: Nov 5, 2014
Harry Pearson The Absolute Sound's founder and the originator of the term "high end audio" and arguably the industry itself, died November 4th, 2014 at his home in Sea Cliff, NY. He was 77. The cause of death has yet to be determined but most likely he suffered either a stroke or a heart attack. Pearson was in frail health following a series of heart problems and a broken hip suffered after a fall.
... Harry Pearson {started the} magazine (arguably among the first "Zines"The Absolute Sound, which my friend plopped into my lap. Pearson was a former environmental reporter for Long Island's Newsday newspaper. The magazine was quarterly, Reader's Digest sized and print heavy. At the time it did not accept advertising. The cover art by ROBBII was dark, dense and the antithesis of what magazine covers were/are supposed to look like but they were works of art, visual puns and instant classics. I didn't read it because I was too overwhelmed by what I heard. I'd never before heard anything like it: so expansive so "real" sounding and so musically believable.
I ordered a subscription and immediately fell under the spell of Pearson's eloquent writing and the almost mythical goings on at his Victorian home in Sea Cliff, L.I., N.Y. There were the listening rooms that he would describe in misty detail. There were the writers he had assembled and the manufacturers he venerated in print, many of whom also went on to become legendary. I'd read about Pearson's famous annual "friendship parties" where the young industry's luminaries would gather to celebrate their success and pay tribute to "HP" who almost single-handedly (along with Stereophile's founder J. Gordon Holt) re-invented a moribund business that had become mass market, mundane and culturally irrelevant.
The Passing of a Legend
Some Thoughts on our Fortieth Anniversary
Harry Pearson January 5, 1937–November 4, 2014
That chutzpah (there is no better word for it) and utter, unshaken, and unshakeable self-confidence were hallmarks of Harry Pearson from the start. His courage and confidence and talent were what had led him from a tough childhood in the South to Duke University and thence to Newsday magazine, where his environmental reporting (he was among the very first to report on this now much-reported-on subject) earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination. And, as all of you old hands already know, it was that selfsame courage and self-confidence that led him (and his friend and fellow audiophile John W. Cooledge) to launch The Absolute Sound in the spring of 1973, going against the odds and the advice of his friends and colleagues at Newsday, who to a man warned him that a magazine was a money pit into which he would soon throw every penny he’d socked away. Harry, being Harry, paid them just enough heed to limit his losses—and then went right ahead. With 500 to 1500 readers tops at two dollars of revenue per head per issue on a four-issue yearly subscription, HP calculated that he could afford to “float” the magazine on that income and his own dime for a single year, and, when the inevitable occurred, eat whatever debt was left and, in his own words, “live to tell the tale.”
But a funny thing happened to Harry on his way to the poorhouse. After taking out an ad in Audio Magazine’s classified page, he found himself knee-deep in subscription requests—in numbers that went way beyond his wildest expectations. Within a short time, TAS became so improbably successful that HP was able to quit his “day job” at Newsday and devote himself full-time to his lifelong passions, audio and music.
To paraphrase Max Bialystock, “What did he do right?”
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