This essay does not represent a complete history of my life experience. I have done a great many things in addition to evaluating audio equipment in the last half-century. I will simply present some important details of my experience in our specific area of interest in an attempt to demonstrate that I am uniquely qualified to write about the subject matter that will be discussed on this site and in the Audio Perfectionist Journal.

Identity

My name is Richard Hardesty. For nearly forty years I have sold, installed, repaired, designed, consulted on the design of, and reviewed high-end home audio equipment. I have listened to virtually every audio product that has achieved meaningful commercial success during that time, and I’ve heard lots of failures too.

Motivation

Beginning in my pre-teens, I studied music and the piano for thirteen years during which time I developed an interest in the construction of hi-fi systems designed to provide more natural reproduction of recorded music at home. Music is very important to me and I continue to be involved with it in various ways.

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I’ve been a lifelong audiophile, constantly seeking the best possible sound from my home audio equipment. I started building electronic kits as a child at about age nine and, as an adult, I designed and constructed my own audio equipment while earning my living as a computer engineer. I entered the hi-fi business in the early '70s by opening one of the first high-end audio stores on the West Coast of the United States. My technical background is well grounded in science from both the theoretical and practical points of view.

I worked for two pioneering companies in the computer industry, and I didn’t like it much. Computers at the end of the 1960s were huge, primitive devices that used discrete transistors and core memory but Ohm's law was the same then and the laws of physics haven't changed, so far as I know. Pentavalent atoms still have five electrons orbiting in their outer shells, don’t they? If you’re making a transistor you need to know stuff like this. If you are evaluating products that utilize transistors in their circuits this atomic information is somewhat less significant.

My knowledge of modern computers is sufficient to allow me to use them in my work, but my consuming passion involves audio technology. Do I know as much about amplifier circuit design as John Curl or as much about loudspeaker design as Jim Thiel? No, and I don’t claim to, but my technical knowledge about electronics and physics is sufficient to allow me to fully appreciate the work of these men and I can troubleshoot their circuits and repair the products that they manufacture. I have heard the sonic results of their work as well as the sound delivered by products from competing designers in a vast number of differing acoustic environments, and I have measured and tested more equipment than I care to remember. I am eminently qualified to comment on the performance of today’s audio components.

I can measure audio components in all the conventional ways and I have developed a few unique methods of my own for evaluating product performance, but I always listen first. I use measurements to confirm my listening impressions and in an ongoing attempt to discover why things sound as they do. I listen to evaluate sound quality and I measure to determine why I hear what I hear, and to make sure that I'm not being momentarily fooled.

Sound Exposure

The retail store that I started with my partner, Curtis Havens, was one of the first stores to cater to music listeners who were not hard-core experimenters. We were there at the genesis of the high-end audio industry. We sold all the edge-of-the-art products and those components that simply sounded better than the comparably priced mass market competition. We sold equipment by actually demonstrating the sound of one component compared to the sound of another—a novel approach in those early days and one that is becoming rare again today.

One of the "value added services" that our customers got was me. I offered to come to the customer’s home and listen to and tweak every system or major component that we sold. Many people took me up on this offer. We sold between one and six systems a day, seven days a week, for over twenty years (with the help of as many as twelve employees). I visited eight to twelve homes each week. If you do the math, a conservative guess as to the number of audio systems that I have auditioned and adjusted in domestic settings is about 10,000.

We had an open-door policy for vendors who were marketing equipment that was appropriate for our venue. I personally listened to every component and speaker system that was brought into our store and compared it to what we were selling at the time. We also encouraged customers to bring in their own gear for comparison to products that they were evaluating for purchase. These practices allowed me to hear everything that was a commercial success and hundreds of things that weren’t. I am an experienced listener, to say the least, and I still enjoy it.

In the early days I performed component modifications and repairs myself. This allowed me to gain valuable, hands-on experience with a broad range of products and to become thoroughly familiar with the electrical and mechanical aspects of their designs.

I retired from retail after nearly twenty-five years and today I am an industry consultant and audio equipment reviewer. I attend all the trade shows, as I have for decades, so that I can stay current on industry trends and new technology, and I review audio components on a daily basis and write about my findings. My technical articles and product reviews have been published in Widescreen Review and The Perfect Vision magazines and I was listed as a senior writer for The Absolute Sound although they never actually published any of the material that I turned in. I write technical “white papers,” manuals and brochures for audio equipment manufacturers and consult on new designs.

Summary

I was trained as an engineer. I have owned and operated a high-end audio retail store, worked for various manufacturers in the audio industry, written engineering papers about audio components, and was a contributor to several consumer audio/video publications. As you can see, I am experienced in virtually every facet of the high-end portion of the home audio industry and I’m thoroughly familiar with home theater systems as well.

I know how the industry works from an insider’s point of view but beneath it all I’m a music lover who wants good sound in my home and good value for my money. I know how to get both and I can help you do the same.

My opinions are based on real-world experience and lots of it. I look forward to sharing with you what I’ve learned.