Audio Magazine
Overview
Audio Magazine was an American magazine devoted to high-fidelity sound reproduction, published from 1947 to 2000. It began in Mineola, New York, in 1947 as Audio Engineering, a title that announced its original purpose: publishing new developments in audio engineering for a professional and technically serious readership. In February 1954 it dropped the second word of its name and became simply Audio, shifting toward a consumer and hobbyist audience while retaining, as its chroniclers note, a serious scientific viewpoint. Its final appearance was a combined February/March issue in 2000, closing a run of fifty-three years that spanned the birth of the LP, the stereo era, the compact disc and the first years of home theatre.
Audio claimed descent from Radio magazine, established in 1917, and it inherited that tradition of technical publishing for people who built, measured and serviced sound equipment. Among the American hi-fi titles, Audio occupied the engineering end of the spectrum. Where rivals leaned toward music criticism or toward mass-market buying advice, Audio was known for equipment profiles backed by measurements, for technical features written by engineers, and for long-serving columnists who explained how sound reproduction actually worked.
History
The magazine's launch in May 1947 coincided with the formation of a profession. The Audio Engineering Society was established in 1948, and from 1953 the society published its own scholarly journal. Audio Engineering, and then Audio, served the wider circle around that profession: designers, dealers, recording engineers, advanced hobbyists and students. The February 1954 retitling and graphic redesign marked the pivot from a purely engineering readership to the growing consumer hi-fi market, and through the 1950s and 1960s the magazine followed its readers from mono to stereo, from tubes to transistors, and from component kits to complete high-end systems.
In 1966 the magazine's headquarters moved to Philadelphia, where it was printed by the North American Publishing Company. In 1979 CBS bought Audio from its Philadelphia publisher and moved operations to New York. CBS subsequently bought a group of magazines from Ziff-Davis that included Stereo Review, and the two sometime competitors found themselves sharing office space, though not staff. In October 1987 Peter Diamandis led a management buyout of the CBS magazine division, nineteen magazines financed with 650 million dollars from Prudential Insurance. Diamandis Communications sold seven magazines and then, in April 1988, sold Audio and the remaining titles to Hachette Filipacchi for 712 million dollars. In 1989 the same publishing group bought High Fidelity and folded its lists into Stereo Review, leaving Audio as the group's technically oriented title through the 1990s.
Content and Editorial Focus
Audio published reviews of audio products and audio technology, feature articles on recording and reproduction, and regular columns that ran for decades. Its equipment coverage was measurement-led: amplifiers, loudspeakers, turntables, cartridges, tape machines and, later, compact disc players and digital components were tested and profiled, with laboratory results presented as part of the review. Annual equipment directories and buying guidance helped readers navigate a market that grew from a handful of specialist makers to a global industry.
Alongside the laboratory material, the magazine covered music and recording practice. The long-running Audio Etc. column, written by Edward Tatnall Canby, mixed memoir, criticism and reflection on the changing technology of listening, and ran in various forms from the magazine's earlier decades into the 1980s. Columns answering readers' technical questions, such as the Audioclinic feature associated with Joseph Giovanelli, connected the magazine's expert contributors directly to readers' systems and problems. The balance was distinctive: a reader could move in a single issue from a measured amplifier profile to an essay on the future of the LP.
Editors and Contributors
Audio's mastheads recorded a stable group of technical editors and contributors. Eugene Pitts served as editor in the magazine's later decades, with Ivan Berger as technical editor. Associate editors included Edward Tatnall Canby and Bert Whyte, both of whom wrote for the magazine over very long periods: Canby as its essayist and critic of recording culture, Whyte as a recording engineer and writer on sound and music. Senior editors included Leonard Feldman, a prolific test writer across the American audio press, and Howard A. Roberson. B. V. Pisha and Bascom H. King contributed equipment profiles, and Joseph Giovanelli answered readers' questions and wrote on practical system problems.
The contributing roster in the magazine's mature years was broad, including Herman Burstein on tape recording, John M. Eargle, Anthony H. Cordesman on high-end equipment, Edward M. Long, Jon R. Sank and Michael Tearson, among many others. Richard C. Heyser, the engineer known for time-delay spectrometry, appeared among its contributing editors, a sign of the technical level the magazine could draw on. Many contributors were practising engineers or recording professionals writing for peers, which gave Audio an authority with manufacturers and dealers that purely journalistic titles could not match.
Circulation and Audience
Audio's audience was the committed hi-fi enthusiast: readers who bought components separately, compared specifications, followed test results and upgraded their systems piece by piece. It was never the largest of the American audio magazines; Stereo Review, with its broader music coverage, reached a larger circulation, and High Fidelity in its best years also exceeded it. Audio's value to advertisers lay in the seriousness of its readers, who were the customers for high-performance components, and in its influence with the dealers and engineers who specified equipment.
The magazine was based successively in Mineola, Philadelphia and New York, published monthly, with a cover identity, under the shortened Audio title from 1954, that remained consistent for forty-six years. Its directory issues and profiles were reference material kept by hobbyists and shops, giving back issues a working life well beyond their month of publication.
Ownership and Publishing
The ownership sequence traced the consolidation of American magazine publishing. After its independent beginnings and its Philadelphia period under North American Publishing, Audio passed to CBS in 1979, to Diamandis Communications in the 1987 management buyout, and to Hachette Filipacchi in April 1988. Each transfer placed the magazine inside a larger group alongside its direct competitors: first sharing offices with Stereo Review under CBS, then sharing a publisher with both Stereo Review and, briefly, High Fidelity under Diamandis and Hachette. By the late 1990s Hachette's American group was concentrating its audio coverage on the home theatre market through Sound and Vision, the successor to Stereo Review.
The end came in 2000. Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. group publisher Tony Catalano told reporters that trouble in the high-performance audio sector had led to the cancellation of the magazine, and that Sound and Vision would become the group's sole magazine containing reviews of home audio equipment. The final combined February/March 2000 issue closed the title without a merger of its own identity into a successor.
Digital Presence and Archives
Audio's later years overlapped with the early web, but its lasting presence is archival. Complete runs have been scanned by radio and audio history archives, where the magazine's equipment profiles, directories and columns can be searched and read. Those scans are a principal source for historians of the hi-fi industry and for restorers identifying components, specifications and contemporary prices. Writers and collectors continue to cite its measurements and profiles when documenting vintage equipment, because for many products an Audio profile is the most technically complete contemporary record that exists.
Legacy and Current Status
Audio Magazine ceased publication in 2000 and is defunct. Its legacy is that of the engineer's magazine within American hi-fi journalism: founded the year before the Audio Engineering Society, retitled as the hobby became a consumer industry, and sustained for five decades by contributors who measured what they reviewed. Its closure, and the earlier folding of High Fidelity into Stereo Review, marked the end of the multi-title American audio press that had documented the hi-fi era from its beginning. The surviving archive, in libraries and online, remains the technical memory of that era, consulted whenever the history of a loudspeaker, amplifier or recording format needs to be established from a contemporary source.
