Analog Corner #302: 25 Years and Counting

Mikey outside London’s Royal Albert Hall.

I was planning to ignore the big three oh oh—my 300th Analog Corner column—and go about my normal business of covering an assortment of new analog gear and accessories. There’s an abundance of those today, 25 years after the publication of my first column. Back then, there was far less to write about: Vinyl was on life support and headed for the obsolete-music-format trash heap atop a pile of Elcasets and 8-track tapes.

As I commenced writing that more conventional column, second thoughts took hold. Three hundred is just a number, but it’s a big one: one column per month for a quarter-century (footnote 1). This is, I decided, an opportune time to pause, look back, reflect, and consider the way forward.

If you find this self-indulgent, I promise to do it only once every 300 columns or so.

My first thought as I write is that I can still do this while my friend, the late Art Dudley, cannot. Every Stereophile writer shares it, I’m sure. I think that same thought now every time I put on a record.

A young Mikey with an even younger Art.

I thought the same thing when our friends and fellow Stereophile writers Bob Reina, Wes Phillips, and Rick Rosen passed away, and also when Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt and The Absolute Sound‘s Harry Pearson died. Not to be morbid, but over the past quarter-century, many industry leaders have left us: A.J. Conti of Basis Audio and Alastair Robertson-Aickmann of SME; Albert Von Schweikert; Joe Grado; Norman Pickering; Irving M. Fried; Bill Johnson; Franco Serblin; Dave Wilson; and many others.

The Stereophile crew at an early 2000s Stereophile show in New York. From left to right (front): Kal Rubinson, Art Dudley, Wes Phillips, Sam Tellig, John Atkinson; (back) Robert Deutsch, Larry Greenhill. Photo by Michael Fremer.

Whenever some critic writes, in response to one of my reviews, about “insane prices” or “cable fraud,” they usually conclude with something like, “No wonder the audio industry is dying a slow death.” But, despite the passing of these luminaries, the industry is not dying, slowly or otherwise. Like so many industries, it’s changing.

Grado, Basis Audio, SME, Audio Research, Sonus Faber, and so many others continue in business, in some cases under completely new ownership and management. Others, including VPI, Wilson Audio Specialties, and Von Schweikert, passed from father to son. All of them are upholding their founders’ values.

Michael Fremer with Pro-Ject’s Heinz Lichtenegger.

In the analog world, the list of new entrants and revived companies from the past 25 years is long, and the results for the most part are encouraging. I’m thinking especially of Pro-Ject, started in the early ’90s by Vienna-based audio distributor Heinz Lichtenegger after he spotted a homely Czech-made turntable in a gas station. It’s one amazing story among so many. Another success story is Schiit, which set out to sell high-quality audio gear made in the United States at Chinese-made prices—and succeeded.

The vinyl-record production infrastructure presents another series of incredible stories worth telling, including Ton Vermeulen’s, which might be my favorite: In the early 1990s, Sony wanted to unload its “white elephant,” its vertically integrated record-pressing plant in Haarlem, The Netherlands. But the boiler, piping, and press-dismantling costs were staggering. Sony looked to the horizon and saw only red.

Vermeulen placed a bet on vinyl’s revival and offered Sony the value of the real estate and building, saying he’d bear the cost of infrastructure dismantling. Sony executives had a sucker on the line. They made the deal. Today, Record Industry is one of the world’s largest, most successful pressing plants. Vermeulen got the pressing plant free. That’s one of so many great record-production side stories.

Michael Fremer on lead vocals, John Atkinson on bass, Bob Reina on keys, Frank Doris (right) and Mondial’s Roland Marconi (left) on guitars at a Las Vegas CES. Can’t see him, but Spiral Groove’s Allen Perkins is on drums to the right of Bright Star’s Barry Kohan on congas. Note the roadie in a union shirt, far right.

For me, the past 25 years have been equally amazing—far beyond anything I might have imagined, and I have a good imagination. A quarter-century passed by awfully quickly. Whatever’s happened, whatever success I’ve had, whatever influence I have in this business, it just happened. I never had a master plan or long-term strategy. For me, that makes it all the more enjoyable and gratifying.

I first noticed something happening at American audio shows and later at ones overseas. The enthusiasm and gratitude with which readers young and old began greeting me has been beyond my expectations—though I’ve never had any expectations, just as I never made any plans. I especially never expected people seeking hugs, kisses, and selfies.

Emails from vinyl fans in their teens and 20s are the most gratifying, though the ones from boomers getting back into records are almost as satisfying. I get a lot of those as well.

Mikey in the Philippines with a fan.

I’ve given turntable setup seminars in Thailand, the Philippines, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, and Australia. I’ve spoken about vinyl reproduction in Germany, Japan, Canada, and the UK. The travel adventures this job has afforded me have just about filled up a passport with stamps—were it not for the coronavirus, it probably would have. Hopefully it will, soon, once this mess is over. I’m not sure what happens when there’s no room left for immigration stamps in a passport (footnote 2).

One of the problems with having written so many columns is that it’s easy to forget what you’ve already written about, so forgive me if I’ve written this before: Once, as I was sitting in business class on a Tokyo-bound 777, the plane still on the tarmac, the pilot came out of the cockpit to attend to some preflight tasks, looked up, and loudly exclaimed “You’re on this flight?” I looked around to see what important or famous person he was referring to, but it was me! He came over and started asking me turntable setup questions. I told him we should talk after we landed so that he wouldn’t confuse stylus and take-off rake angles!

Some who greet me at shows credit me with “saving vinyl,” which is 100% not true, although I admit I played my part. In the UK, at 2019’s Ascot show, one couple credited me with saving their marriage. (Who am I to argue?) Record Store Day founders Eric Levin, Michael Kurtz, Carrie Colliton, Amy Dorfman, Brian Poehner, and Don Van Cleave had a more profound influence on vinyl’s revival than anything I’ve done.

Mikey’s advocacy for vinyl records was picked up by an article in the New York Daily News.

The main credit for vinyl’s survival, though, rests with the inferiority of CD. At an early ’80s Audio Electronics Society meeting in Los Angeles, I ear-witnessed the North American debut of the compact disc. As it played, I said to myself “This sounds terrible!” I also thought, “This will never catch on.”

Afterward, when I realized that the excruciating sound had been met with unbounded enthusiasm by recording engineers, I knew I had to do something, even though at the time I wasn’t writing for any audio-enthusiast magazine.

Footnote 1: As JA1 notes in this month’s As We See It, this is actually Mikey’s 302nd column; his 300th was published in our August 2020 issue—but that was too soon after Art Dudley’s passing for any kind of celebration. You can find Mikey’s very first Analog Corner here.—Editor

Footnote 2: Mikey, next time you get a new passport, request the one with extra pages. (And thanks for the tip, Linda Felaco!)—Editor

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