J. Gordon Holt

Justin Gordon Holt (19 April 1930 – 20 July 2009) was an audio engineer and the founder of Stereophile magazine, and is widely considered to be the founder of the high-end audio movement, which promoted the philosophy of judging sound quality by subjective tests, generally with "cost no object" sound components, including loudspeakers, turntables, amplifiers, vacuum tube components, cables, and other devices.

Holt worked as an editor and critic for Audiocraft and High Fidelity magazines in the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, and wrote numerous articles and reviews on amplifiers, receivers, turntables, tape recorders, and other high-fidelity sound components.

"JGH" (as he referred to himself in print) was often skeptical of wildly successful audio components such as Bose speakers, and often created controversy with passionate reviews and articles on a variety of technical subjects.

The success of Stereophile in the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired New York writer & reviewer Harry Pearson to start a rival publication, The Absolute Sound, which quickly became a very influential high-end magazine.

Pearson, who was an avid admirer of Holt's early work, has stated that he started The Absolute Sound because he wanted to "prompt Gordon to more consistent production of his own [magazine].

"[6] TAS (as it was called) embraced the so-called "subjective audio" philosophy, which placed an emphasis on the sound of components as a system, eschewing the technical measurements used by Stereo Review and other mass-market magazines.

TAS and Stereophile were arguably the Time magazine and Newsweek of the high-end audio industries throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and both thrived on highly critical reviews, editorials, and articles which tended to polarize readers and advertisers.

[7] Holt tried to start a new publication in the late 1980s, LaserNews, a newsletter intended to cover the emerging home video industry of VCRs, laserdisc players, and large-screen television technology.

Holt frequently expressed bitterness that the high-end audio business refused to embrace double blind testing, which he was convinced would legitimize the scientific process of evaluating sound quality, for example stating in 2007 that "As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal.