Soundstage!
Greg Smith Book Reviews


Introduction and About the Book Review Series

To really know what's going on in high-end audio, there's a whole lot to learn. While you can pick up a lot of things by letting them seep into your brain as you read magazine articles and reviews over the course of a few years, it's tough to beat a good book for a comprehensive view of a subject in a short time. Rather than trying to explain everything there is myself, the Book Review series will look every month at something I've read that I think is useful to those who'd like to learn more about audio and related issues.

One of the things that has slowed up creation of this series is the difficulty of finding some of these titles. While there are the occasional exceptions, you may have trouble finding these books in your local bookstore. Accordingly, we've teamed up with on-line book retailer Amazon.com to make purchasing the books that interest you easier and (bonus!) cheaper.


I wouldn't be recommending Amazon if I weren't a happy customer myself. But, at this point that we wish to make a few things clear about this service so there is no perceived conflict of interest for you, our Readers:

Sound fair to you? I hope so (if not, please see the paragraph below from DAS). I sincerely hope you find this new series helpful.

.....GS (gsmith@westnet.com)

Doug Schneider (DAS) adds:

We intend for this book review series to be first rate in terms of interest and use to our readers. However, it also brings to forefront a new, controversial form of 90's advertising now prevalent on the web - that of linking to and referring potential customers to web-sites that have the sole purpose to sell. Some will argue that it will prejudice editorial content, and one can certainly how that perception comes to be. Others have argued that it is no different than a company purchasing advertising in conventional publications (eg. magazines, etc.) and persuading a publication to provide editorial content. I've seen good arguments on both sides.

We hope that by being up front with our readers on how this works, it will allow you to make a purchase decision by knowing all the facts. I know that there are a lot of sites out there that simply mislead you. The Amazon association is not the only such site of this type with which we have had dealings with in the past. Other music related sites have asked us to put a link on our pages for similar purposes. We have neglected to do so for the same reasons that the critics cite. However, we have elected to try this out with the book review series for the following reasons:

Thank you for your time and please feel free to write me directly with your comments.

Doug Schneider
das@sstage.com