About Us

    What is Witchdoctor?

    Witchdoctor is a website magazine.

    It is NZ’s only portal for reliable and up-front reviews of and articles about technology products (hi-fi, AV, gadgets, cameras and more) and associated ephemera (CDs, DVDs).

    Witchdoctor is about the technology products that you use every day: those that you watch, listen to, look through and touch. Witchdoctor is geared towards interested, normal consumers rather than that tiny minority of tech-geeks.

    Of key importance is that our reviews have integrity: they are honest, and not influenced by commercial imperatives. Space will be provided for “right of reply” should product suppliers feel aggrieved by our assessments.

    The Witchdoctor protagonists are Gary Steel, Gary Pearce and Ashley Kramer.

    Profiles

    Gary Steel

    Gary Steel contemplating reality

    Gary Steel writes and edits. He has been subjecting the NZ public to his withering opinions on music and pop culture since 1978, where he began his journalism career at the now defunct Evening Post (now it’s called the Dominion Post). After that painful experience, Gary published and edited scabrous Wellington rags IT and T.O.M before a brief (18 month) stop-over at TVNZ “publicising” its entertainment shows. After that painful experience, he was journalist/editor, editor, then managing editor over a 6 year period for NZ’s “most popular, ever, ever” pop culture publication, RTR Countdown magazine. After that demoralising experience, Steel “retired” into his own project: a highly specialised record shop-cum-coffee-shop-cum venue, Beautiful Music. After that financially depleting experience, Steel reinvented himself as editor of NZ technology magazine Tone, where he hung on for dear life for 5 years. After that (censored) experience, Steel hankered to get back to writing, and has been enjoying freelancing for a variety of publications, including Real Groove, Sunday magazine, and Metro, where he is the music and technology writer.

    Gary “Stereonerd” Steel reckons he’s reviewed roughly 15,000 albums over the past 30 years, and hopes that he won’t live to see the death of the most perfectly formed mass market listening experience. Not that he wants to die, you understand.

    Gary Pearce

    Gary Pearce contemplating his limits

    As a child Gary Pearce was fascinated by technology: so much so for the first ten years of his life, he genuinely believed he was a robot, eerily pre-empting James Cameron’s Terminator franchise by ahem, quite a few years. After a myriad of bloodletting incidents (falling off the roof/bike/his big brother) he figured out that he wasn’t a cyborg at all, and today finally accepts that he is human, albeit in an odd sort of way. One aspect of his life that has remained unchanged since those halcyon days?

    Pearce is still absolutely nuts about technology. As you would expect, his home is a shrine to all things HT, audio and computers, and he has lost count of the number of amplifiers and speaker systems stacked up in piles around the house. His other interests include an almost fatal attraction to monstrous 1000cc sport bikes, along with a passion for music gigs and the great taste of real ale. So what’s a guy to do when he has technology in the blood? Write about it, of course, and it’s here at Witchdoctor where you’ll find GP’s musings and vexations about tech.

    Ashley Kramer

    Ashley Kramer contemplating an espresso shot

    Ashley Kramer has been a music fan for as long as he can remember, which is all the way back to the ‘70s when he first heard Neil Young’s ‘Heart Of Gold’ playing on an old valve radio. Growing up with a set of Lowther horns in the lounge cemented a lifelong love of audio gear, which evolved into a chronic case of technology adoration. Falling into a sales role at NZ technology magazine Tone freed him from an IT career and allowed him to finally wallow neck deep in the pungent world of audio, video and general consumer technology.

    Kramer prides himself on never turning down an opportunity to audition any gear (especially stereo components and cameras) and in addition to innumerable expeditions to “take a look”, a constant stream of boxes has flowed home with him over the years. Some of the contents of those boxes have moved in to stay, much to his credit card’s displeasure. Sales is still his poison, but writing about technology is his pleasure (being a thinly veiled excuse to spend more time testing and trialling increasingly exotic gear). He remains firmly convinced that vinyl records keep him young, that room acoustics are the devil’s playground and that both full frame DSLR cameras and hand built amplifiers were put on this earth to bankrupt him.

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