Luxury you can (almost, sort of) afford

It may come as no surprise that the two Recommended Components issues we publish every year, in April and October, are Stereophile’s most popular.

- Art Dudley

Both go hand-in-hand with increases in single-copy sales and subscription requests, and it’s worth noting that equipment and record suppliers line up to get their ads into those issues.

I’m glad our Recommended Components issues make people happy because they’re a pig-faced, needle toothed, Bosch-ian hell of a miserable job to produce. As I write this, it’s one day after the April 2020 Stereophile went to the printers, and I scarcely know my own name. Jim Austin and I work even longer hours than usual during January and July—the months when we’re writing and editing product blurbs, tabulating ratings, chasing down updated information from manufacturers,1 putting all the categories and blurbs in order, and proofreading the whole damn thing—and when it’s all done, I always look back with fondness on the summers I spent driving a dump truck and working as a busboy.

But the post-RC wrap party, which isn’t a party at all but is actually eight hours of sleep followed by one day of summarily deleting all incoming emails and phone messages, is also a time for taking a second look at the reviews we’ve published over the past six months and looking for trends in our equipment coverage. And this time out, the first thing that jumped out at me was how very few preamplifiers we reviewed in the months since our last Recommended Components feature. In fact, there was precisely one: the Dan D’Agostino Momentum HD ($40,000). Heck, during the same period of time we reviewed more tonearms than that.