VIVE.. What made you decide to become involved in Hi Fi in the first place?

PEARSON: I grew up in North Carolina where there was no live music and so the phonograph was very important, and almost every household had one - it was like a piano in those days. Whenever you bumped into someone who was interested in component high fidelity that person was always terrific. Just like today's high ender, you could always trust them to be very good people. It was a hobby that many of my friendships were based on in those days considering the constraints on my salary as a reporter- I was not born with any coated spoons in my mouth).
Back in the 50s there was Mclntosh, Marantz and Dynaco. In those days they were excellent companies which were more like today's High End companies than you can imagine. The Japanese came along in the 60s after the advent of transistors and bought everything up and turned it into a big business where stereo became just another household item. At the same time, the magazines that had started with the rise of 'High Fidelity';'Hi Fi Review'andAudio were basically underground magazines which covered a unique specialized business and they basically told the truth. J. Gordon Holt was a reviewer for'High Fidelity'who I believe quit after a dispute over a speaker review because they wanted less subjective assessment and more measurements. This was the trend so these magazines became commercial and advertising became more important than let's say artistic sensibility. They became promoters, advocates and at the same time because of their financial interest in the industry, grew less and less critical. I suppose friendship had something to do with this and so by the end of the 60s the process was complete. There were no more independent voices with the exception of Gordon Holt who had in 1962 after his break with High Fidelity, started his own magazine in which he proported to tell you how things sounded instead of how they measured.
What happened was that it became big business and about the time I started the magazine dealing with 'higher' high fidelity because we really didn't have a phrase to describe what we were looking for, it wasn't until we turned to the phrase High End that we had another phrase to describe what we wanted.
Early in the 1970s there was a confluence of events with the emergence of 'The Absolute Sound', Bill Johnson's rise of Audio Research, the Mark Levinson company and those companies which were dedicated to producing components as good as they could be made instead of components made for a price point. About this time there began to be a sort of movement into more serious audio.

VIVE.. This was happening in the early 70s. Things were also happening in England as well, for example the Quad speaker people.

PEARSON: England always seems to be praising itself. We invented this, we invented the world, and on the seventh day we rested. The truth is that America always had the lead in High Fidelity. The English can claim the Quad, they can claim the invention of the turntable, maybe the Decca cartridge which is a disaster. Most of their products break down. British products have always been tinkerish and mass market. The British don't know what high end is. Their reviewers are always saying 'for the money, for the money' Money doesn't mean anything when you are pursuing art. You can say either I can afford it or I can't afford it. So if you are talking about high end for its musical merits, and I define high end as "the most music for the dollar in any given price level", I don't define it for convenience and features. They did have for many years gorgeous recordings from Decca and EMI, I'll hand them that. They certainly had an enlightened policy on recording and recording their own native artists. And they had the Quad speaker. What other speaker do they make that is worth a damn? Almost nothing.

VIVE. They had a romantic inclination in the early days as well, what with the Radcliffs, the Leaks - that was the equivalent of what Marantz was doing in America.

PEARSON: The British never produced a piece of electronics as good as the Marantz stuff. One feels inclined to tell them that they don't produce the best of anything. They have adopted the American products. Riccardo Franosovicci is living proof of how the British have adopted the American Market. The most excitement is here. The whole world looks to America.
It's a long reversal to the usual trend where America has for a long time been importing and losing its sense of national confidence, its sense of nerve. In the high fidelity industry capitalism really works. Capitalism is basically pretty dead in America and what we have is a mixed economy that bears little or no resemblance to capitalism, except that which still exists in small areas like magazine publishing or high end audio. What the high end people have done is by recognising the need for a more realistic reproduction of music, they have fulfilled a hole in the market and they are growing. The high end is booming because it is the onlv place in the market that has sex appeal. Mid Fi penetration according to a recent survey, has reached something like 94% of all homes and mid fi is increasingly looking to the high end: this is exactly what happened in the early 60s. What the mid fi people want to do is call themselves high end and take over high end so that it becomes just another big business.
So we have to keep the high end pure and not allow ourselves to be taken over by the big corporations like Polygram, CBS/Sony who have not the slightest notion of what great sound is; look at what they are doing to vinyl right now. The market for vinyl is far from dead but they decided to get out of vinyl so they are trying to make it dead. It is also a fact that vinyl factories are ageing in order to continue making vinyl records, they had to build new factories because some of the vinyl byproducts were causing very exotic forms of cancer, particularly liver cancer. So it was better to write the whole thing off and so they just ditched it. They dumped it for economic reasons and the public has no say.

VIVE.. Why did you start Absolute Sound in the first place?

PEARSON: Gordon Holt wasn't publishing. There were 14 month delays between issues. He was publishing less and less and he was reviewing basically the kinds of components that he could obtain from people who liked him. He wasn't striving for anything.
In those days I was reporting politics and investigative reporting and had won quite a few awards. I saved a river by the name of Buffalo river in the State of Arkinsaw that was to be dammed by a board of engineers in the days before they devised the word environment. We call it Conservation. By this time the Editor of Newsday heard about me and invited me up for an interview and I came to work for Newsday as the Nation's first environmental writer and that is what 1 was doing when 1 first started the magazine and 1 continued to do that for 4 years afterwards.

VIVE.. What were some of the problems posed by the development of your descriptive vocabulary?

PEARSON: Sometimes when you first start to describe a new phenomenon like 'soundstage' and you start talking about width and depth and image on the stage, you are going to make errors because you don't have a vocabulary to describe everything. The process of audio reviewing is one of continuous refinement; if you went back and read what you wrote in the past, you would surprise yourself with how much you didn't know and how much you weredt able to hear because you had no language structure to describe it.

VIVE.. As well as sitting and listening to equipment, do you meet with manufacturers and see what they are up to?

PEARSON: When I first started the magazine we were very different from any other magazine. We were not interested in equipment that wasn't serious and if it wasn't a serious attempt at a better sounding product we diddt pay much attention to it. We tended to review all the great designers and this encouraged them. Even before I had the magazine, I wrote about audio for the newspapers I was working for and was considered the staff expert. In those days I said that the tube sounded more like music. In those days it was very novel to say that the only purpose of equipment was to reproduce music and if it didn't sound like the music it was wrong. This was a very conservative message even though it sounded very radical . There is no question as to whether there is an absolute sound, the question is whether you want to reproduce it. The Mercury recordings for instance are still very much the classic recordings and they use the simplest microphone techniques in order to capture the orchestra in its real perspective and basically some of my philosophies are contained in Mercury hi fi notes on the back of the record. When I lived in the South, I wanted to turn the lights off and forget the stereo system. I didn't want the stereo system to get in the way. I didn't want to hear hum, buzz, noise and I didn't want to hear any limitations. I wanted to listen to music. There are aspects to reality especially sensory reality that we are missing because of limitation in our equipment, especially in our mechanical equipment. The only purpose of mechanical equipment is to perform. People who come in here and see all this equipment get scared away. I see it only as primarily a device for listening to music. I don't look at the name plates. I don't listen to the circuitry - I don't allow companies through all the scientific hype in reviews to affect me. Most people are not very secure in their own judgement, they want some authority to tell them. Readers of my magazine are guilty of the same view of me. I don't want to be your authority, I don't want to substitute my judgement for yours, I want you to think for yourself. 1 want you to go to the concert hall and listen. All you have to do to be 'Harry Pearson' is go to the concert hall and listen to enough concerts, obtain records you know to sound like the events you hear and play them back through as much equipment that you can beg, borrow, steal or loan and then basically what you'll be doing is what I started to do.
The success of any product is to be consistent in good quality. Sensationalism does not work. You don't allow the advertisers to call your shots and you don't sell out to them. You don't talk down to your readers but treat them like intelligent people. By following this plan you will endure because your reputation for integrity will outlast anything.

VIVE.. Why is so little known about high end audio equipment?

PEARSON: All the public knows the names of Ferrari, Porsche etc. Why is Johnson, Marantz, Dahlquist, Koetsu, Sugano not known around the world? I believe it is because they do not work together as an industry and are too busy squabbling, arguing, and gossiping. If you are on a canoe and you're on your way down the falls, the only way to get back up the stream and succeed is to pull together. Right now the high end should be pulling together. Last October we celebrated 15 years of high end and we set up a committee to set up a high end organisation that would represent the high end industry. What should be happening now is we should be marketing records, subsidising records, because there are a few small companies who are still producing analogue vinyl records.

VIVE.. Tell me a little about the mentality of the high end people.

PEARSON: I happen to like a great many of them and it is an interesting field because of personalities. But almost everyone in this field is a drop out of some kind or another.Conrad & Johnson were from the federal reserve originally with the U.S. Government, Arnie Nudell was a laser physicist, Bill Johnson was a record store clerk, Jim Winey was an engineer at 3M, I was a newspaper reporter - the essence is that almost everybody came from another industry. Almost all the designers are dreamers who don't like the 9 to 5 mega-corporate world, and they come here because they can pursue a dream and express themself in almost a unique wedding of creativity and mechanical instinct. They also tend to be dreamers at the expense of being business men. I think that only in the last 5 or 10 years have we been able to see business maturity in the high end and it has been a case of necessity indeed as the mother of invention, otherwise they would go out of business.

VIVE.. What are the sort of advances which have enabled high end to arrive at where it,is today?

PEARSON: I define the sound stage as the primary function of the speaker - to create a wall to wall or curtain of sound that reproduces the illusion of the width and depth of a concert hall that you are trying to recreate - singers on that stage in terms of their depth front to back and this is'layers of deptif. We want instruments to be the size they are and consistent with each other.
After we found speakers that started staging correctly, we began to hear what was wrong with the electronics and found that transistors were particularly bad in terms of their inability to create the width or depth of a soundstage and it is only in the last 5 years or so with the advent of the correct soundstaging speaker that transistor amplifiers or transistorized electronics in general have started making great breakthroughs.
There is a funny thing about high end. Initially there was a burst of excitement when it first came and a huge jump forward when higher quality parts were substituted in old circuits. Then there was a period of great refinement; the cables, the arm and pickup cartridge, suspension, tip toes (aluminium cones underneath equipment) on every part of the system to see how everything coloured the sound. To our surprise everything coloured the sound. What I consider as one of my great failings was not to concede that turntables had a significant effect on the sound at first. Cables sounded different. Everyone started listening to everything, capacitors, tubes, wires, resistors and were able to hear the difference. I guess the first breakthrough was to acknowledge(thanks to this magazine) that differences were really there and that other people could hear the same difference. If you don't have critics you will never have great products.

VIVE.. How would you compare for example a Cartier against a Tiffany?

PEARSON: You cannot compare them, but let us talk about food. How do you compare Filet Mignon as there is no absolute Filet Mignon. There is no absolute Bordeaux. This is where taste is everything. People's taste. There is much to be said about taste - one can appreciate craftsmanship, the aesthetic and mechanical beauty, how it functions and the extent that it functions and the impact on other people. You can do this with music, opera, and movies. In audio you have a slightly different situation. All components have shortcomings: this is the situation of say a year ago when I tested three big amplifiers which were all equally truthful but they all had major faults. In the case where nothing is more truthful than something else and there is not a decisively more truthful component then it comes down to which flaws can you live with. This is where subjectiveness comes in and where the reviewer should explain his biases up front so people know.

VIVE.. Where is high end heading?

PEARSON: I think the big question is whether high end can maintain its identity or whether it will be absorbed by the mega corporation Japanese, or European. If it can keep its independence, there is a kind of effect when you reach critical mass, when we have the right combination of ideas, freedom and independence that fuse with great creativity. There is a kind of critical mass that one reaches, and high end has it.

VIVE.. The other thing I've noticed of high end is that it is becoming too chummy, the top end ofthe market are people that have come out of your vintage - young people who wish to get into the industry cannot do it any more. It has become big business. What is the future of the youth who want to become involved. Who will replace Harry Pearson when he retires?

PEARSON: I am not sure that Harry Pearson could start a magazine in today's climate. It is not that it has become more chummy, it has just become more business like. It is hard to get started these days. We still have our doors open to young designers who have very small businesses, but you have got to have magazines that will take the time to listen to these young designers. We do this because if magazines close the door then there is no hope. Some of these designers work by word of mouth - 1 admit it is hard. As long as magazines like mine keep their doors open, these young designers whose equipment percolates to the top of the bunch will have a go. You're quite right to ask will there be anyone to replace me and my ilk, because there is a different generation coming up - not all together pleasant. Very bland, not very idealistic, very security oriented, very materialistic, not very poetic, generally illiterate in terms of writing. This is the challenge of high end; whether we can weather the storm and not become homogenised.
One thing I should say about high end is money was not the first reason for anybody I know getting into this. Money was not my principal goal - love was a great part of it, and if I made anything out of it, that would be nice. It was idealism. The love of a dream of a pragmatic ideal because we knew what we could lose and were not afraid to take chances. Youth is a time to take chances and a time to experiment. That is what you use youth for. When you get older the oppportunities for alternatives tend to narrow. But today's young people almost immediately tend to want to get into high paying jobs and into ruts and into corporations where they are defining themselves for the rest of their lives, in the search for security, money and those things that don't have any meaning whatsoever.

VIVE. Who are some of the more interesting people who fascinate you who are not necessarily in the industry?

PEARSON: I used to be a great admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright because he tried never to compromise. Yet he once said that 'at an early age I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility, I chose honest arrogance'.