Thanks myview for posting the link to that issue of The Audio Critic. It brings back memories. I never subscribed, but bought a few individual issues, just to see for myself why the high end gurus hated Peter Aczel so much.
I have mixed feelings about Aczel. On some things he was spot on - for example his admiration for Bryston amps. And some of his other equipment reviews in the magazine were informative and reasonable.
On the other hand, he carried on this rather viscous and nasty warfare with those in the high-end he disagreed with. I remember in another issue he listed "good guys" and "bad guys" in audio (I think he called them "white hats" and "black hats"). If my memory is right, Chris Russell was listed as a good guy, while Harry Pearson and William Johnson (of Audio Research) were definitely bad guys.
He blamed Pearson for starting this whole thing of the high-end as a kind of religion, complete with its own dogma that had nothing to do with objective facts or scientific truth. He blamed Johnson for bringing tubes back to the forefront in audio. There were a lot of other names on these lists, but I can't recall them (there was a cable guy on the black hats list, but I can't recall which one - it may have been Noel Lee of Monster Cable).
And until this thread, I was not aware of Aczel's conflict of interest in recommending a speaker he had a financial interest in. If that is so, it certainly would have undermined his credibility.
Anyway, all this "good versus evil" between the gods of the high-end and the devil Aczel made for some entertaining reading. I always took with a grain of salt the extreme positions of both those on the subjective side and those on the objective side, but the debate is fascinating. As with most things in life, the truth is somewhere in between.
Scientific fact and objective measurements can indeed contribute greatly to making the music come alive in your own listening room. But in the end, you can only listen through your own ears, and you have to trust them.
