The arrival of the compact audio disc in the early 1980s gave him his greatest subject as a critic and brought him credit in the wider world for knowing what he was talking about.

The digital coding and laser-beam technology of CDs was lauded as a friction-free alternative to the scratching-and-skipping-plagued vinyl record. Mr. Pearson was one of the first to describe the loss of nuance and detail that came with friction-free sound, and he mounted a relentless critique in his magazine.

Over the next decade he won many audio engineers and music critics to his side. In The New York Times in 1992, Edward Rothstein characterized Mr. Pearson as a kind of unofficial spokesman for an “impassioned rear guard, a group of music lovers of extreme views, an organization of Luddite fanatics” at war with the CD.

“I am one of them,” Mr. Rothstein wrote.

Mr. Rothstein credited Mr. Pearson’s criticism with spurring improvements in CD technology. And by 1998, Mr. Pearson himself was reconciled, telling The Globe and Mail of Toronto: “I still prefer records because, at this point, a good analog disc has more information — subtle dynamics, harmonic richness, natural timbre — than a CD. Yet CDs have improved so much over the past 15 years that digital has become a parallel universe to analog.”

Harry Hall Pearson Jr. was born in North Wilkesboro, N.C., on Jan. 5, 1937, to Harry Pearson and the former Joyce Welborn. Taking up newspaper journalism after graduating from Duke University, he covered the environment for The Commercial in Pine Bluff, Ark., and then, beginning in the mid-'60s, for Newsday, on Long Island, where he worked for several years while freelancing for High Fidelity.

He sold The Absolute Sound in 1998; it continues to be published in print and online.

Mr. Pearson is survived by a sister, Loretta.

In an interview last year with the online journal High Fidelity Report, Mr. Pearson said that audio technology — no matter how expensive or state-of-the-art — was merely the means to an end. Good equipment, he said, “allows you to become part of the music.” Technology critics, who test and write about such equipment, are, he said, “like guides in the Amazonian jungle.”

“What we do is say, ‘There is a tiger over there in the bushes.’ You can hear it with your ears or see it with your eyes. What we do is point out what is there.”