Clark Johnsen RIP

[Rt66indierock]

Chris always gets on me for who I know but Clark Johnsen is someone I wished I would have known. He passed away late yesterday afternoon after a long battle with cancer.

 

His article  From the Clark Johnsen Diaries: A Riddle, a Trip, and a Promise Broken summarizes  many of my opinions about high-end audio. May he rest in peace.

[Superdad]

Oh wow. Thanks for letting us know. Clark must have been in his early 80s, yes?

I used to bump into him at audio shows. He was a character, and a bit controversial—at least as far as the objectivists were concerned. He wrote the book The Wood Effect, concerning the audibility of absolute polarity.

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Wood_Effect.html?id=QwJRAgAACAAJ
 

R.I.P. Clark.

 

 

[ARQuint]

I bonded with Clark more than 30 years ago when we were co-winners of a Stereophile record review contest, an LP of flute sonatas played by Gary Woodward. The two of us had each won an all-expense-paid trip to Santa Fe to hang with the magazine's principals for a weekend. This was 5 or 6 years before I started writing for TAS and Fanfare and I thought I was pretty hot stuff—until I inquired of Stereophile's new editor, John Atkinson, how many competing reviews had been submitted. The answer was 7. Shouldn't have asked.

 

Clark and I shared the magazine's cottage for visitors and I definitely got to appreciate what an eccentric individual he was, but also what a brilliant and curious mind he possessed. The guy had been a physics major at Harvard and became a senior scientist working on the Mars Lander Camera and the Orbiting Space Telescope. So it was no surprise that his thoughts about  the importance of absolute polarity (phase) on recordings were very well-considered and elegantly explained in the slim volume noted above, The Wood Effect. After reading it and making my own observations, I started marking my CDs (sometimes individual tracks) with an arrow pointing either up or down that corresponded to the phase switch position on my Audio Research preamp that resulted in the better sound. The difference was most easily heard with recordings that didn't involve a lot of microphones and instruments that had a sharp initial transient, especially piano. It seemed to matter less as digital technology improved and the arrows soon went the way of the green pens, adhesive rings, and the degausser.

 

I subsequently spent an evening with Clark in Boston when I had business there and got to hear his remarkable playback of 78s, on a system  optimized for the medium, deployed in a large loft space that, I guess, was his place of business, The Listening Space. The guy knew a thing or two about classical recordings, especially those from the 50s and 60s.

 

I lost track of Clark after that, but still smile when I come across an arrow on one of my CDs.

 

RIP, indeed.

 

Andy Quint

[sandyk]

Guys

 This whole thread should have been posted in this special area of the forum

 https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/forum/22-in-memoriam/

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, sandyk said:

Guys

 This whole thread should have been posted in this special area of the forum

 https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/forum/22-in-memoriam/

it wasn’t just about his death. It was also about who I wished I had known. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 hour ago, sandyk said:

Guys

 This whole thread should have been posted in this special area of the forum

 https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/forum/22-in-memoriam/

That’s why I moved it.