Audiophile pioneer Harry Pearson from The Absolute Sound, RIP*

R.I.P HP...thoughts and prayers to your family

 

Wow, big sad news. Wonderful writer. Loved reading his stuff in the Eighties and Nineties. A huge contribution to high end audio.

 

Met him in his Seaford home in the late 1980s putting in a phone system with my friend Howie and he saw I loved and had a good knoweledge of audio and esp.music. He signed the 20th century fox cover of the Perfect Vison issue about number 6 (I think) and was a fan of his and his hardcore attitudes and his overboard love of "Casino Royal " CD from that time and joined him in many listening sessions.
I will miss him much. Along with J. Gordon Holt the generation that got me and many others into true audio/video appreciation with an attitude ofcourse. Now so lets hope a new generation can produce such personalities as these. R.I.P. to a pioneer I met, John M.

 

Godspeed Harry, and thank you!

 

Loved the competition between Stereophile and the Absolute Sound back in the day. HP and JGH opened up a whole new world of audio to me...took the equalizer out of my system. I just thought I knew how to listen to music.

I'll play "Casino Royale" later tonight. 45 rpm version.

 

Yep, I had the same thought. I have a bunch of old Colgems pressings of it too, and figured I find one that played nicely and fire it up in tribute to the man.
Just read Fremer's remembrance. Very sad- I knew HP was somewhat irascible by reputation, but hadn't realized that his fortunes had declined, in part because of his behavior, along with his health and influence. It made Fremer's piece all the more real- the arc of life- nobody gets through this thing unscathed.

 

I just read Fremer's piece too.
http://www.analogplanet.com/content/audio-legend-harry-pearson-passes-away
Very sad on many levels.It give some insight I never had on the decline of TAS.

 

EasterEverywhere's review and recommendation to read Mike's obit deserve more than a like. Fremer was an employee and a true disciple of Harry Pearson. It is required reading for anybody who appreciated The Absolute Sound and HP. Long, expressive and personal, both kind and harsh, it's just like TAS in its glory years.

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

 

Thank you for sharing that link. Fremer captured Harry perfectly. In the years that I knew him, those friendship parties continued, albeit on a smaller scale, and attended only by his close friends. As the day would turn to evening and most people had left, the handful of us that remained would gather on that big porch and, already a sheet or two to the wind, would drink wine, pass a joint, and giggle late into the night.

I'm sure none of you really care about this, but I have nowhere else to share the story:

In the early years of the world wide web, I had constructed a crude website designed to show my then employer how websites worked. That site was a sort of fan page for the actress Barbara Steele, and I had chosen her because I had been on a hunt for her '60s horror films and had enough information on hand to work with. Harry had interviewed Steele for his magazine The Perfect Vision and contacted me to talk about Barbara. Shortly thereafter I was summoned to Sea Cliff from Brooklyn, whereI was living at the time, and the friendship began. Shortly thereafter, on one of these weekend visits, Harry decided to surprise me. He picked up the phone, dialed, and told the person who answered that there was someone he wanted him/her to meet. He passed the phone to me, I muttered an awkward "hello," and the unmistakable voice of Barbara Steele answered back. I spoke with her briefly. I'm not really the fan type and don't fawn over celebrities, so other than exchanging a pleasantry or two and saying I admired her work, I wanted OFF the phone. Angered by the intrusion, she never spoke to Harry again. Of course, knowing Harry, that is the version of the story that I know, while he and Barbara may have known quite a different one

 

One of the great writers and pioneers in promoting the "high-end" business. J. Gordon Holt and Harry Pearson told it like it is in equipment reviews, and put to bed the theory that measurements are everything in relationship to how a product sounds. R.I.P. Harry.

 

Sad, I just got me new copy of TAS in the mail yesterday and they had the Audio world pioneers what they did and when they passed and they had Gordon Holt in a picture with Harry next to him but this story was produced before his passing so I believe he would have had a page written up on him. Def will see his contribution next issue

 

It is sad to hear of his death, he was a giant in his field. In the early days of TAS Harry insisted that there must be one standard by which all audio systems are judged. He felt that his system at Sea Cliff should be that system. Of course, it is impossible to maintain one ultimate standard in audio systems because technology marches on, but the fact that Harry had to give up on this idea does not diminish his huge contribution to audio. He will be missed.

 

RIP, Harry. HP will be missed.

 

Although I've already posted in this thread I want to tell a Harry Pearson story.

More than 20 years ago I was using a Carver M-400 "Magnetic Field" power amplifier to drive my speakers. When I got another amp to drive the speakers I decided to use the Carver to drive my Stax SRX Mk.III Earspeakers. (Previously I had only used the Stax with their battery adapter and my portable CD player. I decided that I wanted to be able to use the Stax with the turntable in my main system so I needed an amplifier to drive them.) I immediately noticed an issue driving the Stax with the Carver. I heard a constant “putt-putt-putt” in both ears. It was low enough in volume that it was only noticeable when the music got very quiet or between tracks on an LP or CD.
I contacted the Carver corporation (by phone and my mail). (Summing up those numerous contacts), I was told that the amp was working perfectly and that they knew about the low level “putt-putt-putt” sound. The sound was caused by the “Magnetic Field” power supply and was not a problem when driving loudspeakers. They said that the noise was so low in level that it was never audible through loudspeakers. (That was a true statement because I had never heard the sound when using the amp to drive my Ohm F speakers.)
I asked Carver if they would fix or update my amp to solve the problem and they said no. They told me the problem was mine, not theirs.
I decided to reach out to Harry Pearson for help. A month after my last contact with Carver I sent Harry a letter. I told him the issue/story and included copies of all of my correspondence with Carver. I asked him if he would please reach out to Carver on my behalf.
Two weeks after I mailed the letter to Harry I received a package form Carver Corporation. It was a brand new Carver M 1.0t power amplifier (which worked perfectly with the Stax). I immediately sent Harry a note thanking him for helping me.
Because of this Harry was always more than just an audio writer/magazine publisher to me.

 

Very sad to hear this news. Definitely one our godfathers of high-end! RIP kind sir.

 

That is a very cool memory, David, and speaks volumes on the man.
RIP, Harry.

 

That was a very honest piece, and I have great respect for Michael that he was willing to tell the truth. I worked for Harry for two years when we merged our little magazine Videofax with his video magazine The Perfect Vision in the late 1980s. HP could be a difficult, taciturn, bizarre, and flakey person to work with (especially when you're trying to get paid for published articles or nail down a deadline), but even when I disagreed with him, I respected his writing and thought he was a very interesting personality.

My observation was that Harry was dismayed at the tumultuous changes the high-end audio business went through in the 1990s, where digital audio sources, CD, and (eventually) files didn't need the plethora of "tweaks" required by analogue and vinyl, and the advertising market for high-end audio kind of collapsed at the end of the decade. I think he enjoyed ruling over his kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s, and he told me he had hoped this would continue with video. Unfortunately, the video business did not cater to his whims as he would have liked.

I was angry with HP for quite a few years after our business dealings, but I began to feel sorry for him over time, as some of his personal relationships deteriorated and the magazine began having terrible financial problems. He deserved better than that. I think Pearson kind of saw himself as a combination of H.L. Mencken and Oscar Wilde in the world of consumer audio, with very high literary ideals, and I felt that Absolute Sound suffered quite a bit without Harry at the helm.

 

I remember when Amar Bose died. Everyone praised his achievements, apart from M. Fremer, who disregarded the context of the said occasion and wrote a sort of negative obituary. Basically, whe wrote what he thought and felt about the man and his speakers.

Well, this was camomile tea compared to what is being written about Harry Pearson these days. But it is David Robinson of Positive feedback who went farther than anyone else in this throw-a-stone-at-him-now-that-he-cannot-retaliate affair. I am not shure what the purpose of this scribbling is other than curing one's own frustration.