"For those who are not familiar with him, Jean Hiraga cut his teeth as a writer for
L'Audiophile magazine starting in 1977. He belonged to a fringe group of audiophiles in France who discovered the virtues of old horn speakers and tube amplifiers, mainly Western Electric and Altec.
L'Audiophile became the bible of this crowd, and as Jean also speaks fluent Japanese, he acted as a bridge between the communities in France and Japan. The craze eventually spread to the English-speaking world more than a decade later, with people such as Joe Roberts writing about it in the now sadly defunct
Sound Practices magazine. Jean was doing experiments on how distortion and non-linearity in frequency, phase and dynamic response affect sound perception in the late 1970s, when English-language audio writers were still claiming that amplifiers with sufficiently low total harmonic distortion all sounded the same." (С)
"Born in Paris in 1943 from a French mother and a Japanese father, Jean Hiraga showed early on a considerable interest in complementary fields of audio and electro-acoustic fields.
In 1965, he moved from France to Japan, where he was one of the most influential specialists who promoted, from 1969, sound and musical qualities of tubes, specially directly heated version such as 45, 2A3, WE300B, 4300B, 211, 845, 6C33C.
In 1968, he started to contribute for French Revue du Son and, later, in Nouvelle Revue du Son, as special correspondent in Japan. He published in these magazines several articles that had considerable impact in hi-fi world, such as:
"Amplifiers, harmonic distortion analysis" (dec. 1975);
"Can we hear audio connecting wires" (Oct. 1976, translated in August 1977 in British HiFi News & RR review).
In 1977, Jean Hiraga, one of the pioneers of audiophile philosophy, founded and started to take charge, a chief editor, L'Audiophile, a magazine dedicated to this new high end audio world. He largely contributed in this magazine with the publication a many articles demonstrating, from 1977, importance and influence on sound quality of passive components (capacitors, resistors, volume controls, selector switches, soldering, influence of analog turntable mats on sound quality, while showing strong interest in high quality, high efficiency loudspeakers.
In 1986, he received from the British audio review HiFi News the "1986 HiFi annual Award"
Jean Hiraga invested a considerable time to tune up many audio circuits for private use. Some of them have been designed for the account of La Maison de l'Audiophile and Lectron companies and were on the international market between 1978 and 1982, such as:
- Le Prépré (head preamplifier for MC phono cartridge);
- Hiraga Class A 20 W, pure class A solid state power amplifier;
- "Minimum", a solid state, battery operated ultra-compact phono preamplifier;
- JH 30, JH 50, JH 60, JH 80, a series of hybrid power amplifiers, added later by PA50 line preamplifier. This last line of products, added by several improvements, is partly on the actual market through Jean Maurer company in Switzerland.
Jean Hiraga was the author of several books such as:
- Les Loudspeakers, (Loudspeakers, 1980, three times re-edited, 5 times reprinted);
- Initiation aux amplis à tubes (1980, Audio tubes amplifiers initiation, four times re-edited + one edition translated in swedis "Rörforstärkare", 1986).
In 1982, Jean Hiraga moved back to Paris. In 1983, he was asked him to take charge of Nouvelle Revue du Son as chief editor, this until early 2007, giving to him the opportunity to test, analyze and listen to several thousand of international audio products during more than 25 years."
