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The Audio Critic
Home Page

The Audio Critic's Web 'Zine

Read some articles from The Audio Critic Magazine.

Download Issues of The Audio Critic.

What they say about The Audio Critic

The Audio Critic is the only consumer publication on the subject of audio that really takes objective evaluation of audio components seriously. That means exhaustive laboratory measurements and double-blind listening tests, which are provable and accountable, in addition to the usual subjective listening impressions, which are by definition unprovable. No wonder that graduate engineers, EE professors, and other high-level professionals always speak of The Audio Critic with respect, even though it isn't terribly technical, whereas they just laugh at the tweako/weirdo audiophile magazines. Obviously, anyone can publish an audio magazine, in print or on the Web; there's no law against it, but pitifully few are qualified.

The content is broken up into a few different sections and everything that was available from The Audio Critic's website is under one of the sections below:

• The online articles or Web 'Zine is located Here
• Downloadable .pdf's of Printed magazines are Here
• What others have to say about the magazine is Here
• Philosophy of The Audio Critic is Here

Peter ACZEL May 30, 1926 ~ June 22, 2017 (age 91) Peter Aczel, 91, of Quakertown, died peacefully at home on June 22, 2017, with family by his side. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he emigrated to the USA in 1939, originally residing in Bronxville and then Mount Vernon, NY. Peter served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in WWII (1945-47) and received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1949. For over 20 years, he was an executive at numerous high profile advertising agencies on New York’s Madison Avenue. Among many achievements, he conceived the well-known “Four Hands” symbol/logo for the Oppenheimer Fund. In 1977.

Peter created The Audio Critic, an objectivist and purist magazine on hi-fi sound production and equipment. He was a lifetime member of the Audio Engineering Society. The Audio Critic, with Peter as sole Editor and Publisher, continued in print and then online with a devoted readership.

He is survived by his beloved wife, Bodil, sons Eric and Thomas, and daughter-in-law Michele. If you wish to pass your condolences or stories about Peter to his family then use my contact form, I will forward all correspondence to the family Click Here for the Contact Form.

I purchased my first issue of the Audio Critic (it was issue No. 24) and read every article I was already a bit of a skeptic on High-end Audio but this issue really opened my eyes. I shared this issue with whoever I could. When I decided to create a website I did search for anything about the Audio Critic to find out if it still existed and was other issues available? I did not find anything related to this once great magazine so I reproduced a few of my favorite articles from issue No. 24 (this was in April 2004). eventually someone contacted me about the fact "The Audio Critic" had a website (Feb 2005).

I visited the website, paid for some back issues and also paid to access the Web 'zine. At the time I was learning about Scanning material and converting it to Word and PDF formats so I decided that the Audio Critic back issues would a great to scan and convert to improve and learn about the process I did all 14 back issues and with photos and illustrations managed to create PDF's that were smaller than 2 MB in size.

I then decided to contact Peter and ask if he minded that I had some articles up from issue No. 24 on my website and how would he feel about offering 14 of his magazines as a free download. Initially he seemed none to happy that I had put articles up without permission but he realized it was not for financial gain but because I really felt this information needed to be available to everyone. Peter finally agreed to host the 14 downlable PDF's but I was not to host them myself. Peter would contact me when an error in the .PDF's was found or once because a page was missing and I would correct the issue.

I sent Peter a link to an article I wrote about the Spherex Xbox 5.1 speaker system mostly because I knew how he felt about "Monkey coffins" and because I felt these were a great set of speakers. Peter never really mentioned anything and then he revealed he had purchased a set and reviewed them (June 2007)
My favorite line was "Instead of describing each of them in detail here, I’ll ask you to go to http://www.biline.ca/spherex.htm, where the subject is covered about as thoroughly as can be, item by item, although a bit uncritically." Peter defiantly has shown his critical side more than few times so I had to laugh at that comment.

I suggested at one time about hosting a mirror of "The Audio critic' just in case as Peter didn't really have a back-up system and he agreed so I started to mirror the Audio Critic website content, this went on until Peter contacted me again in 2015 and said he was done with the website he wanted to redirect everyone to the official Mirror so I helped create the redirect webpage transferred his Audio Critic domain to a free hosting site and that is how I came to be the official Host of the Audio critic's content "although a bit uncritically"