STEREOPHILE’S 29TH ANNUAL
This is Stereophile’s 29th Product of the Year issue; the first appeared in 1992.1 That was the year I finished grad school. It seems like a long time ago.
That year, the Loudspeaker of the Year was the $14,000/pair Sonus Faber Extrema. The winning digital source was the legendary Mark Levinson No.30 DAC—also approximately $14,000. JA later bought one, upgraded to 30.5, then to 30.6 status. He still has it.2
The finalists in the Overall category included that Sonus Faber speaker and the Jeff Rowland Design Group Consummate preamplifier, which cost just shy of $9000. (The Levinson DAC was the overall winner.)
Those were the most expensive products to win a category in 1992. The least expensive was the $499 Audio Power Industries Power Wedge, which won in the budget category. (This year’s Budget winner cost $100 less.) The average price of 1992’s winners—excluding the budget category—was $6259.
Since 1992, prices in the economy as a whole have risen by 85%, which means that, in today’s dollars, those Sonus Faber loudspeakers and that Levinson DAC each cost almost $26,000. In today’s dollars, the average price of a 1992 category winner was almost $12k.
Except in the Budget category, which this year was limited to products costing about $2000—there was no specific limit in 1992—reviewers are under no obligation to consider value when nominating or voting for Products of the Year. Reviewers are free to apply their own criteria.
Yet, some years—including this one—value seems very much on reviewers’ minds. With one exception, this year’s category winners all cost less than the average price of a winner in 1992—and that is in actual dollars, not adjusted for inflation.
One of this year’s winners—to figure out which one, read on—is quite expensive—although it’s far from the most expensive product eligible for this competition: That would be the $179,000/pair darTZeel NHB-468 monoblock amplifier, which failed to make the finals despite its excellence. Nor did the $149,000/pair VAC Statement 452 iQ Musicbloc amplifier—also judged to be of the highest quality but, in this competition, apparently penalized for its high price. Several other excellent, expensive products failed to make the final round of voting.
This year, with that one exception, expensive products didn’t win.3 Apparently, for whatever reason, this year’s judges were concerned about value.
HOW IT WAS DONE
In a sense, the process began when we started preparing our reviews for the November 2019 issue—or maybe it was back in 1962, when J. Gordon Holt founded the magazine. Either way, it really got going in early September, when I compiled and shared a list of all the products reviewed
