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In the Forum: Audio News
In the Thread: About Harry Pearson legacy.

Post Subject: About Harry Pearson legacy.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 11/6/2014

A site reader sent me email that Harry Pearson died last night. It is sad news and my condolences to his beloved, relatives, friends and the people who knew him personally. The internet audio sites are full of tributes to Harry Pearson and this is probably a good thing but among all that universal "fashionable" worshiping of HP legacy many things get overlooked. For instance the TAS's "writer" Mike Framer published his teary piece:

http://www.analogplanet.com/content/audio-legend-harry-pearson-passes-away

…that sound like a nice combination of words if to recognize the nature of the facts. What was overlooked by Mr. Framer is that Harry Pearson walked away from TAS with very specific blame of the TAS rats, he felt that TAS got converted into a publication that he personally would never buy of read himself – a very serious charge from my point of view and something that the industry people today capitalizing on HP memories shall be very much consider. Do not get me wrong. I did not take the Harry Pearson departure from TAS very seriously; neither have I considered that Mr. Pearson was too much conscious of what he was doing. He had a direction to flow at this time, he went for it and it happed that it was not in TAS direction, who cares? Let presume that we care about quality of play more than we care about the wellbeing of the actors and let to elevate our horizons a little bit higher.

Today a lot of heard about Harry Pearson as the founder of the high-end audio industry, the owner of "Gold Standard” of audio journalism, invention of audio vocabulary and many other things that the feeble minds in audio feel that it was "given to them" by HP. The irony is that they are very right – they bought in into superficial, lightweight and mostly misleading high-end audio concept and they have no own sensitivity or brain to undusted that the industry "best intention", like cancer metastases have conquested and have converted the industry consummates into a pile of dead cells. I very much do not think that the high-end audio industry that we have it today was something that HP envisioned in 60s but for sure all his life he was VERY instrumental to shape the official audio into the format that we have today.

So, could a professional legacy of HP be evaluated by the retardness of his professional survives? Well, let look into it. The "great" industry that HP created (which is very much not true, he just was selling the concept that have existed long before he was born) never was able to identify a definition of "audio quality". As today there is no universal, meaningful, truly objective audio quality assessment test, who would believe that 50 year after HP's "invention" of the industry we still have this situation? One of the most unfortunate HP accomplishment in his professional life was that fact that he polarized a propagation of the audio idea around a group of selected representatives. It was not the people who were educated by HP machinery but rather people were converted into a silent flock who supposed to brainlessly pursue the imaginary windmills that the "representatives" (or the "high priests" of audio: magazine and sites editors, reviewers, dealer and the rest of audio dirt) appointed them to follow. And, Oh, Boy, an Harry Pearson LOVED to be the one who declared monthly marketing revolutions and kept promoting new and new pointless products and idea. For sure many today no nothing better than to imitate him and consider him as "godfather". Sure it was entertaining and sure the audio maker love to ride that thread but, sorry, it had very little to do with growing understanding of True Audio in people but instead it was about building up Artificial Audio understanding around himself and solely for the sake of serving the own club interests. The today level of official public audio thinking is a very direct harvest of what Mr. Pearson have seeded and cultivated for years and years. Sorry, I am not impressed but rather hugely disappointed.

With all my critical appraisal of Harry Pearson's audio endeavor his death it is for sure at personal level is a very tragic and very unfortunate news.

Rgs, Romy the Cat

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