In The Beginning... TAS 200th Issue Retrospective

Posted by: Harry Pearson at 2:02 pm, February 24th, 2010

There were several things that made me decide to try my hand at audio journalism in the fall of 1972. I hadn’t intended to make a career out of it—in a sense, it was an experiment, brought on by the lack of any reliable source of accurate information about the sound of audio gear. Those of us who had lived outside of the major cities, as I did as a reporter in the deep South, didn’t have access to components and had to rely on the audio press, which came to mean J. Gordon Holt’s work in Stereophile, his alternative “underground” publication that told us how gear really sounded. I believed my work as a reporter, especially since I was writing about the politics of pollution and environmental preservation, was much more important. But I thought, arrogantly I see now, that I could produce a short-lived publication that would accomplish several goals, prime among them, getting J. Gordon Holt back in the saddle and producing new issues on a regular basis, instead of those coming at ever increasing intervals. And then, in ever sketchier reviews. I also thought that perhaps a back up truth-telling magazine might have a wider sphere of influence, one that could possibly affect the reporting and truth-telling of some of the major publications of the day.

Since Newsday afforded me a salary that I could stash away (reporters weren’t paid much back then), for the first time in my journalistic career I had enough to publish four issues (and in one year thought I, e’er the eternal optimist) and even if I lost a bit of money, I thought telling music lovers whether audio equipment sounded like music was worth the risk. John Cooledge (JWC), whom I called on for reviewing help, said: “They’ll laugh at us.” And I said: “No they won’t because we can out-write them,” meaning the Pharisees of the commercial press. I had been reading virtually every such publication since I had been in high school and, with friends, had heard a considerable number of components, not to mention a vast number of classic recordings especially the living Mercurys and RCAs of the day. The way it would worked at first: We would sell a year’s subscription (at $2 an issue) to anyone who subscribed during that first year. This meant if someone subscribed at, say, Issue 3, he would get Issues 1, 2 and 3, then 4 when it was published. After that, I reckoned I’d be out of business, and Gordon would be back again and in high gear. Me, I’d be the wiser, if the poorer.

Some of the folks in Newsday’s marketing department did a casual survey and told me I’d be lucky if I got 1500 subscribers during that year since, they reasoned from looking at the circulations figures of other alternative journals (and there were a few then, forgotten today), that would be about the best we could expect to do. A Sea Cliff publishing guru helped figure out the printing costs, which he estimated at $1500 for 1500 copies per issue. (How times have changed in terms of publishing costs!) I did the math and multiplied the 1500 (hoped-for) subscribers times the eight dollars, and thought I had a decent chance of getting by for a season.

So, the next question was: How do we get subscribers? And after putting the arm on all my friends, relatives, and fellow audio buddies, I had nearly a hundred putting up their cash. Then I got an idea from years of reading Audio magazine and its comprehensive classified section, and took out an ad ($80 as I recall it) and by the time the first issue was ready to go in the spring of l973, I had gotten 132 subscribers (who sent their money and sent it largely on faith), bringing the grand total to 232 subscribers for Issue One.1 (Enough, if you do the math, to pay the printing bill for the issue.)

In Issue One, I reviewed the Double Advent system, that is, stacking two of Henry Kloss’s Advent speakers together (mine on top of each other) to create a system that far surpassed the performance of either unit singly (the speakers cost a mere $130 some dollars—I say mere now, but even then they were a bargain.) Advent wanted permission to reprint the review, but I decided to do the unheard-of in those times and attach a condition—they could reprint but they had to include the magazine’s circulation information.

Ah, little did I know. On the basis of that alone, the circulation jumped to 800+ by Issue 2 (with a little help from the continued classified ads in Audio). But, to my and our surprise, the Advent reprints now were out there in increasing numbers. By Issue 3 we were at the magic 1500 number, and out of back issues if the number of subscriptions kept rising. Translation: We would have to print more copies of the first three issues, a bill we hadn’t expected, and, at the time, something of a welcome dilemma. One small benefit: In printing the first issue, whose cover was in plain black and white, with a different logo, we were able to add a color and adopt the modern TAS logo (designed by Newsday’s Gary Viskupic). And by Issue 4, we were up to 3000 subscribers, beyond the expectations of Newsday’s marketing folk and beyond our own; it seemed we had moved beyond what the paper’s people called the “hard core” and had become something of a crossover hit.