Mike Mettler

Mike Mettler was born in 1967 a month or so after the Summer of Love, and he’s been playing catch-up ever since. He started his pro rock-writing career as an intern at High Fidelity in New York in 1988 and joined the staff fulltime in 1989 while still in college. After HF was bought and folded by Stereo Review later that summer, he joined sister publication Car Stereo Review as Managing Editor and began incorporating music coverage into the magazine, finding fairly quickly that musicians were VERY interested in talking about what they drove and what they listened to while they were on the open road. To fuel his voracious appetite for learning about (and sharing) the history of rock and roll, he also chatted up artists for Musician, Guitar Player, Guitar for the Practicing Musician, Guitar, Guitar Shop, Bass Player, Bassics, Masters of Rock, and a score of other gear mags when spare time was an option. He funneled his Jimi Hendrix obsession into "USoterica," a regular column he still writes for UniVibes, a Hendrix quarterly that’s published in Italy.

In 2000, after 4 years as Editor-In-Chief, Mike renamed Car Stereo Review as Mobile Entertainment to better serve the advancements in car-audio and video technology. ME carried on until the close of 2005, when it spent its final year dubbed Road & Track’s Road Gear. Mike assumed the position of Editor-In-Chief at Sound & Vision at the end of January 2006, an interesting case of career symmetry since S&V was known as Stereo Review until 1999, the year he became a Contributing Editor.

These days, Mike tries to balance the dichotomy of his passion for both sweet-sounding vinyl and head-spinning surround-sound music mixes. His ever-understanding wife Krista, an independent music publicist, is generous enough to allow him an entire room upstairs in the house to cultivate his rock magazine and book library and another room in the basement to harvest his ever-expanding LP, CD, DVD, and Blu-ray Disc collection.

Mike's email