Dear Editors

I would like to respond to Tom Davis’ insightful article, "The Future of Two Channel Audio".

During the course of my life I have pondered this enigma: How do thought patterns get entrenched in a culture, and then resist change: Slavery, Communism, Apartheid are obvious heinous ones, but I have worked for enough Fortune 500 companies to observe the same intellectual petrifaction in business. Each of us can observe the same resistance in our own lives to letting go and evolving. It was very satisfying that in my last article "SETMI" I noted that large segments of our population do not believe evolution occurred, to discover that states were passing laws preventing biological evolution from being taught in their school systems.

The reason I mention this is because it is important to separate the exciting developments in the audio arts from the widespread intellectual petrifaction among audio journalist, manufacturers and retailers.

Here’s a stick to whittle on:

(1) Almost Dead White Audio Professors Who Can’t Dance Must Die: Being rejected by almost every other significant area of human activity, because of their mealy minded mediocrity, about twenty five years ago, a group basically kind-hearted men, who were probably abused as children and never had fun in their life, didn’t have a clue about the spontaneous ecstasy of life, never danced, had the narrowest view of musical reality, and suffered with chronic hemorrhoids, discovered that audio journalism was sympathetic to their personality. Many pretended that audio engineering had some relationship to the experience of music. Terrified of controversy, unable to make authentic emotional contact with their peers, and totally disconnected from the dynamism of America art and culture, this group of existential paupers became increasingly irrelevant, Some even started magazines and failed. That is the history of both mainstream and high end American audio journalism, and explains why my friends call me "Red Hot Chili Pepper Up Your Butt/No Mercy Given/No Mercy Asked".

And the passing of this culturally irrelevant group is a good thing, and has no relationship to the expanding possibility of musical ecstasy in our home.

(2) Live Concert Suck, unless you are in music clubs where you can dance, so you don’t have to listen to how shity the music sounds: Are there any humans out there? Aren’t we having a whole range of musical experiences in our living rooms that are illegal, impossible or unimaginable at a live event? What terrible things happened to Wes Phillips, as a child, that he just "sat and listened to music"? It is detestable that we have, as a community, have not been able to communicate this simple benefit of our technology....We take you beyond the enormous limitation of live concerts ....... Why is this true? Personally, and I have no intention of being kind here: it is because most journalist are still trapped in an adolescent intellectual meta-context and are afraid of revealing wider dimensions of their personal musical life, or they have none.

(3) PF Kicks Butt in the Next Century: The most valuable contribution PF can make to the audio arts in the next century is to become even more critical of every facet of our industry and that includes, itself, other magazines, manufacturers, and trade organization. ONLY PF HAS THE GUTS TO DO IT, and we should do it better. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Music quality matters, food quality matters, air quality matters, love quality matters, and it is time to kick sand in the face of our increasingly whimpy tribe.

Dr. Gizmo: No More Mr. Nice Guy

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