Issue 220   February 2012
William Zane Johnson
Editorial By Robert Harley

 

  Athough I met Audio Research Corporation's founding father William Zane Johnson — who passed away on Saturday, December 10, 2011, at the age of 85 — at several trade shows and knew him well enough to say "hello," I didn't really have a personal relationship with him, the way our Editor Emeritus Harry Pearson (who will write his own reminiscences in our next issue) did. As with a favorite author, I came to know WZJ through his creations — the ARC amps, preamps, and phonostages which were to have a profound effect on my life as a listener, and on the lives of so many other audiophiles of my generation.

I've told the story of how I first heard Audio Research electronics (and Magnepan speakers, which were then distributed by ARC) many times before. It was in the winter of 1973-74, and I was a student at the University of Chicago — a budding classical music lover who fell in with a bad crowd of audiophile grad students. I fancied myself an audiophile of sorts, too — had since I first heard Marantz 9s and a 7C driving a home-built horn system at a high-school friend's house — but like the majority of hi-fi "hobbyists" in the late sixties and early seventies I was virtually rudderless when it came to buying decisions. Oh, I was well aware that some things — Quad 57s, IMF Monitors, a hybrid electrostat from the brand-new loudspeaker company Infinity — sounded "better" than other things, but preferring stuff that sounded "good" (which is to say beautiful, sensuous, and appealing) and measured well in Stereo Review, Audio, and High Fidelity was as close as I came to a listening philosophy.

Then came the fateful day when a couple of those grad students dragged me and my wife to a specialty hi-fi "store" (actually a flat in a brownstone apartment building) on the Near North Side run by a colorful character named Basil Gouletas. Basil was rather like the Hugh Hefner of hi-fi salesmen: I don't remember ever seeing him in anything but pajamas and a bathrobe. At the far end of his flat, Basil had a grand piano almost entirely shielded off by a pair of tall decorative screens; at the listening end he sat ensconced in a La-Z-Boy recliner with a turntable well within arm's reach.

As soon as Kathy and I sat down on a couch nearby him, someone began to play the grand piano behind the decorative screens. "Who's playing your piano?" I asked. Basil smiled and said, "Rubinstein."

Of course, those screens weren't screens — they were Magneplanar I-U loudspeakers. (No one had seen or heard Maggies before.) And the electronics that made the I-Us sound so realistic that both Kathy and I were fooled into thinking that someone was actually performing a Chopin Nocturne were the Audio Research SP-3 preamp and D75 power amp.

In all my sixty years, it was the most unforgettable hi-fi demo I've ever experienced. And it was a turning point — a genuine epiphany. I didn't know who William Zane Johnson was, didn't know that he'd started a little hi-fi repair shop in Minnesota to modify Dyna gear and to home-brew his own electronics, or that (after a false step with a holding company called Peploe) he'd started his own electronics-manufacturing firm, the Audio Research Corporation, and shocked the hi-fi world at an early 70s CES by introducing tube gear (then completely eclipsed by the latest marvel, transistors) that sounded unlike any tube gear before it. I'm not even sure, at the time, that I realized that the Audio Research electronics that so wowed me were tubed.

What I did realize immediately — and what has stuck with me to this day — was that metal boxes full of electronic parts could not just make recorded music sound "good"; they could (with the right speakers) make it sound fool-you realistic. Suddenly, I had a philosophy that went beyond cosmetics, measurements, and euphony. I had a grail quest: the sound of the real thing, or, as HP would soon put it, the absolute sound. More than any other figure, William Zane Johnson put me — and thousands of other music lovers — on the road to audiophile enlightenment. As with so many of my generation, he is the high end to me — and always will be.

I know that Audio Research is in very good hands with its current staff, but WZJ's passing really does mark the end of an era — a thrilling, youthful era of discovery in my life and in the lives of so many other now graying and balding music lovers and audiophiles, who found out what I found out thanks primarily to Mr. Johnson: that there is not just a better sound but a more rewarding, truer-to-life one. I certainly hope that WZJ knew how much he meant to all of us — and how long his memory and the memory of all of the wonderful "high-definition" products he authored will last in heart and mind. My deepest condolences to his family and to the Audio Research Corporation, which was his second family. May he rest in peace.

 

--- Jonathan Valin

 

 

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