Ian Masters: Answer Man

[Wayde]

Like almost all audio nuts, I had picked up most of whatever early information I had from various sources, some of the most fruitful being the question sections of various magazines. Joseph Giovanelli and Herman Burstein offered scads of useful stuff in Audio magazine, as did Norman Eisenberg in High Fidelity. A relative latecomer to this group was the "Q&A" column in Stereo Review, written by Larry Klein. Of these, Klein's effort was probably the most influential, if only because Stereo Review was by far the largest magazine (as is its successor, Sound & Vision).
In 1984, I had begun to write for Stereo Review on a casual basis, contributing mostly the usual how-to-buy-a-speaker stuff, as well as a couple of pieces that still infuriate the more ardent subjective audiophiles. One of these reported on a series of experiments that sought to discover the exact nature of sound differences between CD players (we didn't find any, as long as the machines were not actually broken).
The other suggested that audio amplifiers didn't really exhibit distinctive sound characteristics if they were working properly. You can still find the outfall from that article on the Internet almost twenty years later.
Then, one summer afternoon, SR's editor-in-chief William Livingstone called me to tell me that the magazine and Larry Klein had parted company, and to ask if I would be interested in taking over "Q&A".
Would I be interested in rewriting the Bible or the Koran?
Sure thing! I started in the fall of 1986 and am still doing it. One thing I couldn't have predicted however, was that they would want to illustrate the column with a drawing of my face, derived from several photos I sent. I was assured that the artist did caricatures for the New York Times, so I had nothing to worry about.
The resulting drawing (above), I hasten to assure anyone who cares, looks nothing like me (even 20 years ago), but it did have its good side: nobody ever recognized and stopped me at an audio show for as long as the illustration ran.


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