Home Theater Geeks 453 Transcript

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00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks. I mourn the passing of the last US-based home theater print magazine. Please stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hey there, scott Wilkinson. Here, the Home Theater Geek.

00:34
In this episode I'm going to talk about a rather sad occasion. That is, the passing of the last US-based home theater print magazine. Sound and Vision will print its last issue, dated October-November 2024. That will be the last issue to print. The content will continue to be available and continue to be generated on their website, soundandvisioncom, but the magazine itself, sound and Vision, will no longer be on newsstands. What's that, you ask? Well, there aren't many newsstands left either, are there? This is happening throughout the publishing industry, but print is dying and everything's going online, and Sound and Vision hung on the longest, on the longest. So the company began. The magazine began in 1999.

01:49
When the publisher combined another title, a venerable title called stereo review, which is graphic number, with its newer video magazine it's called Video. Stereo Review had been around since 1958. And, as far as I know, sound and Vision is the last US-based home theater-focused print magazine to fold, so to speak, and I worked for most of them. There used to be a bunch and I based most of my career working at one or another of them. I started as an AV journalist at Audio Video Interiors, which we can see in Graphic 3. I started there in 1992. Before that I had worked for magazines in the pro audio and professional musician field. For Audio Video Interiors I wrote and edited features, interviews and profiles of really high-end installations. This was a coffee table magazine, sort of like Architectural Digest for audio-video. But the print magazine, the print version, is long gone. I don't think. I'm pretty sure they don't even have a website anymore. I'm pretty sure they don't even have a website anymore.

03:23
After that I was one of the founding editors one of three for Home Theater Technology Magazine, which is graphic number four. I started there in 1994. We tried to get the name Home Theater but it was owned by somebody else so we couldn't't use it. So we came up with home theater technology at that time. Now the publisher eventually acquired the name home theater. I don't know how he did it, but he did it somehow. And that's the next graphic we can see a cover of Home Theater magazine and they changed the name of the magazine accordingly and it was a popular print magazine for many years and I worked on it on and off for many of those years. Now, like most Home Theater magazines, now, like most home theater magazines, home theater was bought and sold by a few publishers over the years. In 2013, it was merged into Sound and Vision by its publisher at the time, source Interlink Soon. After it acquired Sound and Vision. So Home Theater Magazine disappeared as a print magazine, but Sound and Vision was going strong.

04:48
I was also on the ground floor of Stereophile Guide to Home Theater Magazine. I started there in 1995. It's obviously an offshoot of Stereophile, which focused exclusively on two channel audio. Its offices were in Santa Fe, new Mexico, and man I love visiting. When they brought me out for meetings and stuff, that was great. I love Santa Fe.

05:17
Now Stereophile Guide to Home Theater stopped publishing in 1999. And a couple of years later Stereophile tried again with another magazine called Ultimate AV, which I worked on for three years, starting in 2002. Now this was a very large format magazine. It printed on very large paper and I always thought it was too large to be practical. It wouldn't fit in a bookshelf with other magazines very well, but the publisher wanted it to stand out on the newsstand and it certainly did, but that title stopped printing some time ago. They had a web presence for a while, but I don't think it's there anymore.

06:08
My last print gig was as video technical editor of the Perfect Vision, which started in 2005. There we go there we can see the Perfect Vision. It was the home theater offshoot of the Absolute Sound, the other two-channel audiophile magazine other than Stereophile. Those two have been around a very long time Now. We had a crack editorial team at the Perfect Vision. I loved working there. It was really, really great, and they were based in Austin, texas, which I also enjoyed visiting quite a bit. They heard some great music there and had some great food. It was really fun.

06:58
Now that magazine ended publication in 2008. And again, they had a web presence for a while, but I don't think they're there anymore Now. The only major home theater magazines US-based that I didn't work for are Widescreen Review, which is still available as a webzine at widescreenreviewcom they were in print for a long time too, but no longer and Electronic House, which is also no longer in print Now. I never contributed directly to Sound and Vision magazine, but I certainly contributed a lot to home theater, which was then eventually folded in now with, with the? Uh, the death of sound and vision print. Uh, us-based home theater magazines are no more. It's the end of an era, and one I was proud to be a big part of for many, many years. Of course, it will continue online and its website is soundandvisioncom, and they will continue to publish reviews and how to's and all kinds of interesting stuff, currently under the editorial leadership of Mark Henninger, and I recommend you go check it out. They do good stuff.

08:32
Now, why did all these magazines stop printing? What is the death of print all about? Well, one reason is cost. It's very expensive to print tens of thousands of copies of a magazine and mail them to subscribers. Plus, ad revenues have been falling off for quite some time, and that's just an inevitability, I think. Then there's the delay inevitability, I think. Then there's the delay of getting information to readers.

09:06
You know, I remember the days of the print magazines and I would go to CES and we would spend all day at the show In the earliest days picking up paper press releases, and I would have to ship a whole box of them back to the office or back to my home and pour through them after the fact and write up a show report. You know that gave us time to enjoy press dinners. For one thing, which I remember very fondly, when my work shifted to online and everybody else's did too, there wasn't much time to enjoy press dinners. We had to file reports the day, the evening of every day that we were at the show. Sometimes, after each meeting on the show floor, I would see journalists, you know, sitting in the hallway typing away on their laptops. I did that a little bit, but mostly I just summarized everything at the end of the day in my hotel. But it was a lot more work. Now press releases went from being on paper to being on CD, to being on thumb drives, to being online. So that was a good thing than them having to wait three months to get it in a print magazine. So you know there are pluses and minuses, but as I've always said, once I went online, the web is a harsh mistress. It does not brook any delay. So that was the good and the bad of the transition to online.

11:07
Now, amazingly, the two main audiophile magazines US-based anyway Stereophile, which is the next graphic graphic number nine, there we see it and the Absolute Sound, graphic number 10, are still printing new issues. Stereophile started in 1962, and the Absolute Sound began in 1973, and they've been in print ever since. How can they keep doing it? Well, they rely on many small companies to advertise instead of a few large ones. That's one of the main differences between audiophilia and home theaterophilia, if you will. Home theater companies are Samsung, sony, lg in those days, panasonic you know just a few really big companies, whereas audiophile companies are very small, and there are many of them, dozens, hundreds, and there are many of them, dozens, hundreds. So they can continue to support print magazines with smaller ads, but lots of them. So that, I think, is one reason that they have survived. Another is that their subscribers are somewhat older on average and they don't like change. They prefer print to online. So as long as they have a strong readership and a lot of small companies to contribute to the ad revenue, they're going to stay in print, no question about it.

12:59
Anyway, I just wanted to say farewell to Sound and Vision in particular and the print industry in general print magazines. They provided me with a great career for most of of my working life and I'm sad to see him go. You know, that's the way it is. I did end my career online. My career is not over yet, let's not put it that way, but my last full-time gig was as editor of avsS Forum dot com, a fully online entity, and I did enjoy that quite a bit, but I will always miss being a print jockey. Anyway, that is the sad tale of print.

13:55
Now, if you have a question for me, I sure of print. Now, if you have a question for me, I sure hope you will consider sending it to htg at twittv. I love answering listener questions here on the show and I would love to answer yours. And, as always, we thank you for your support of the TWIT Network with your membership in Club TWIT, which gives you access to all the shows produced by Twit in their video form, and you can come into the Discord channel and watch us make the shows live. So I hope you will consider it. Until next time, geek out.