They Shall Have Music

by JOHN M. CONLY

WHEN video’s sinister flickering crept over the horizon two years ago, the orphans of the approaching television storm seemed already picked and doomed. They were the unlucky people who happened to prefer Bach to Berle, or Wagner to wrestling.

As something to watch, Bruno Walter waving a baton obviously could not compete with the antics of Arthur Godfrey’s friends, and that was that. Pictures were in and music was out. Dealers promptly began unloading radio phonographs at sacrifice prices and closing out record stocks with grab-and-smash, 50 per cent off sales.

Radio columnists predicted that straight audio radio was as good as dead. Many generously included the record player in their obituary prophecies. Set manufacturers went along with the trend, helping it onward by focusing all their competitive efforts on picture tubes. The sound systems in their sets, skimpy to begin with, grew progressively worse under pressure of price-cutting. Many a television receiver priced today at more than $400 is equipped with audio components which would disgrace a $29 table radio. One video set owner, an East Coast professional man, remarked ruefully while tuning out ABC’s broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s 1949 opening: “Even with Risë Stevens in pants, a half hour’s opera is all I can watch.” His choice of the word watch was a good one. In the screeching, thudding reproduction of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier produced by his machine there was certainly small temptation to listen longer. Nor did he.

Fortunately, many music lovers are made of sterner stuff, as they had proved in pre-TV days. Then, when network broadcast sponsors neglected them, they had inspired and supported local classical-record stations in many cities. Now, when the established, large-scale radio manufacturers began to desert them, they sought other ways to bring good music reproduction into their homes. They succeeded and, in the process, they not only restored the sales level of record players: they bred a whole new industry — one which has flourished fabulously, if almost unadvertised, in the last three years. It is “hi-fi” — the making and selling of what are called high-fidelity custom components.

These are simply the separate working components which make up (or ought to, but don’t) a modern highquality radio phonograph. Basic items are four, or perhaps five: a tuner (FM or AM-FM) to pick up the signal of a radio station: a phonograph record player with wide-range pickup cartridge; an amplifier to increase the volume of signals a few millionfold; and last, a loud-speaker capable of reproducing the full sonic scale.

A couple of years ago, one more factor had to be added, for the nontechnical music lover: a skilled serviceman to hook the components together.

This hazard is now history. Any person capable of coping with a 1950 combination waffle iron and sandwich grill can assemble his highfidelity gadgetry himself—or herself. And many décor-conscions housewives have been instantaneously converted to the custom-component cult by the realization that the whole assembly can be housed in existing furniture (a corner cabinet, for instance) or, more ambitiously, in the very wall of a room. This renders obsolete, at one swoop, the assortment of late-Victorian-early-shoebox consoles too many radio makers have forced upon their hapless victims in late years.

However, this is secondary. What really justifies the existence of custom components is that they are startlingly, drastically better at reproducing music than their counterparts in ready-made sets.

Pridefully dedicated to keeping them better is a newly formed group called the Audio Engineering Society, who held their first convention in New York recently. It developed into a sort of symphonic tournament, with one rig (a word all AES members use, but profess to hate because it’s undignified) bellowing Brahms’s Fourth down the halls of a midtown hotel while rival gadgets tried to drown it out with Stravinsky’s Sacre or the Emperor Waltz. It was horribly lifelike proof of what a hi-fi rig really could do.

Such a rig’s components would be designed to handle, without appreciable distortion, all the tones the human ear can take in — sound frequencies from about 50 cycles per second at the bass end, to about 15,000 cycles at the treble end. For comparison, one of the most popular commercial long-playing record attachments delivers no treble above 4000 cycles. Many a popular console radio-TV set cuts off at 5000 c.p.s. A table radio may handle only the range between 300 and 4000 c.p.s., hardly one quarter of the tone range the ear gets in a concert hall.

The first critical component in the rig would be the phonograph pickup cartridge, the inconspicuous little device, screwed under the end of the tone arm, which holds the record-playing stylus (the term “needle” is o-u-t, out). In almost all instances this would be a magnetic cartridge, probably employing a principle called variable reluctance, using a jewel-tipped stylus with a widerange response and costing somewhere between $5 (with sapphire) and $36 (with diamond). Its extreme light weight increases record life immeasurably.

If a broadcast, instead of a phonograph record, were furnishing the music, the prime component would be a tuner. Probably this would be an FM tuner, since few AM stations deliver broadcasts full-ranged enough to justify using high-fidelity equipment on them. Excellent FM tuners are available from $35 up. (This and all other prices quoted are net to the consumer — usually about 40 per cent off the list price.) The costlier ones have “magic eyes” and kindred devices making it easier for lazy people to get their stations dead center. They also provide finer tuning, requiring less power in the amplifier and thus in turn cutting down the amount of noise.

The heart of the system would be the amplifier, which takes the infinitesimal electric impulse furnished by the tuner or the phono pickup, magnifies it approximately a millionfold, and uses it to vibrate the loudspeaker.

It is in the amplifier department that most of the commercial sets go astray, this enormous magnification being the obvious place for distortion to creep in. Adequate custom amplifiers can be bought for $30. An excellent one costs $130. For $220, several are available which can put Ezio Pinza spang in the middle of your living room. Sir Thomas Beecham comes a little harder, since the 110-piece orchestra strains the speaker.

The speaker, of course, is the bottleneck of the whole assembly. Most old-style cone speakers come to grief when they attempt to mix a combination of high and low tones. During one stroke of a slow, bass-tone vibration, the speaker may also have to produce several hundred hightone vibrations. One function tends to disorganize the other.

Modern speaker manufacturers, working on discoveries made by Harvey Fletcher and James B. Lansing, pioneers in the field, divide the speaker’s burden two ways. A highfrequency horn, with an ultra-thin aluminum diaphragm as its vibrating element, handles the treble tones; a separate big flexible cone delivers the bass. The improvement is astounding. Working back from this find, engineers even have hitched both vibrating elements to one magnetic driving unit, or voice coil, with gratifying results. Speakers of this kind can be bought for as little as $18, adequate two-unit ones for around $35, although a real, high-power job costs upward of $75.

In two-way loud-speakers, the treble horn is known as a “tweeter,” for obvious reasons, and the big bass cone as a “woofer.” The proper, insouciant use of these terms is essential to a layman who wants to be regarded as a true “hi-fi” initiate.

The speaker is the only portion of a rig which requires any coddling to make it work properly (although a record player behaves best when approximately level, and an amplifier’s tubes last longest when it is well ventilated).

The way the commercial set makers cut away speaker enclosures in order to furnish record storage is, acoustically speaking, nothing short of murder. Ideally, a speaker should be set in a wall, with its back open and with no door or other aperture within ten feet. If it has to be cabinetmounted, the cabinet should be sealed, lined to a two-inch depth with a suitable sound-absorbent matting, and should contain at least ten cubic feet of air space, if possible. If it is smaller, there should be cut in front a bass port, a vent approximately half the area of the speaker. The ordinary open-back cabinet allows the tones generated from the rear of the speaker to leak around the cabinet’s edges, bounce off the wall, and arrive — grossly belated — at the confused listener’s ear. This is what causes high notes, in most ready-made radio phonographs, to “shatter” and low tones to boom or vanish, canceled out completely.

Audio engineers are largely engineers whose avocation is music, or musicians whose avocation is engineering. A typical product of this talent blend is one of the widestranged, purest-toned amplifiers on the market. Developed from an English scientist’s basic circuit, it was worked out jointly by David Sarser, a violinist in Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, and Melvin Sprinkle, an electronics expert employed by a major audio equipment company. Appropriately, it is called the “Musician’s Amplifier.” It is no beginner’s item but for the adept it yields uncanny tonal fidelity.

Another example of music and engineering background is Pickering and Company, which means Norman C. Pickering, a youthful Connecticut Yankee whose name is sworn by wherever high-fidelity phonograph users foregather. A musician born into a family of engineers, Pickering followed family tradition into engineering school. Once there, however, he conducted the college orchestra with such vim that be won a scholarship to the famous Juilliard School of Music in New York. Thereafter he played the French horn for three years in the Indianapolis Symphony, running a recording studio on the side.

During the war, when he was working on secret aero-instruments for the Sperry Gyroscope Company, Pickering became disgusted with the only phonograph equipment, he could buy to play his large library of recorded classics. When the war ended, and he had established himself in an audio laboratory at Oceanside, New York, he immediately designed one of the first two modern phono pickups to use the variable reluctance principle. He planned to relax with it in symphonic self-indulgence, but his friends badgered him for duplicates, and before long he found himself in the cartridge business.

He also found himself in sudden competition with General Electric, which had barely preceded him in hilling on variable reluctance as an audio principle. This bothered Pickering a little at first, but he was too busy to worry long.

His first year’s business (1945-1946) amounted to $35,000. Last year’s passed $500,000. At thirty-two, Pickering has just put up his third factory and is branching into other highfidelity accessories. Among others he is now producing a wide-range speaker in the shape of a corner pedestal, four feet high and ten inches square, built of polished wood and with adjustable bass response.

For the person with a limited budget, $140 will provide a rig easily able to outperform any of his neighbors’ ready-made sets — unless he regularly hobnobs with people who buy $1500 receivers. For the enthusiast who can afford a good deal more, or who intends to spend it whether he can afford to or not, there is an endless variety of high-fidelity accessories and refinements.

H. H. Scott of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has invented and sells (as part of his top-grade amplifiers or separately) noise suppressors. These, by techniques best known to Mr. Scott, take virtually all the record scratch out of phonograph performance and cost but $29.50. Several other manufacturers make phono equalizers, devices which compensate for the peculiarities of different makes of records. (Most American companies, for instance, to make up for power drops in standard American amplifiers at mid-treble frequencies, exaggerate these frequencies on records, so that a high-fidelily rig makes them sound shrill, unless “equalized.”)

Another attachment compensates for the tendency of the human ear to lose touch with the bass register below certain volume levels, which is why the effect of concert-hall reality vanishes, even on a good machine, when music is played softly.

Here’s what high-fidelity custom components would cost:

Sotisfactory The “Best

Minimmn in the World”

Phonograph Turntable and Changer. . $ 20 $ 35

Pickup.. 16 36

Tuner. 30 l50

Amplifier. 35 220

Speaker. 32 150

Speaker Cabinet............... 16 100

TOTAL $143 $691

The market in high-fidelity components has expanded enormously. C. J. LeBel, retiring president of the Audio Engineering Society and a manufacturer of audio test, devices, thinks it is safe to say the industry ! has grown tenfold in the last two years.

Individual sales outlets, even while competing with each other, have experienced increases in demand which bear this out. Large wholesale and mail-order radio-parts concerns, which took up the supply burden first, report sales jumps in the last two years of from 100 to 370 per cent. A Chicago distributor, revising its 1950 catalogue to give high-fidelity items 50 per cent more space, blames part of the rush on the housing boom. Architects have found it pays to suggest built-in music systems. A 68page Handbook for Music Lovers, covering in vast detail all the whys and wherefores of home music performance, has been published by one company overwhelmed by inquiries, while High-Fidelity Music Guide, by a wellknown musician, composer, and lecturer, is the product of another. In Washington, D.C., a wholesaler lent a $160 two-way speaker to a national testing laboratory and got back, as a surprise, forty orders traceable to the laboratory’s scientists and their friends and friends’ friends.

The mail-order houses first tried to service high-fidelity fans much as they had taken care of amateur radio operators and radio servicemen, their main customers in the past, furnishing terse instructions, expecting the customer to do the rest. Now, unflatteringly, they make foolproof prearrangements. Most companies, for instance, color-code all their rigs’ connecting cables. “You needn’t even be able to read,” they assure prospective purchasers. Moreover, music lovers in most large cities can afford to be color-blind as well as illiterate, since the chances are that within easy range of their telephones is a local custom shop, staffed by three or four remarkably knowledgeable young men only too anxious to move in on them, dissect their budget, and install at once in their household precisely the high-fidelity rig they can afford but have been doing without all these months.

Probably, for the present at least, this is the only way such equipment can be marketed profitably in quantity. Sundry big manufacturers of standard sets have tried valiantly to sell high fidelity. However, when the cost of a cabinet (which had to be prepossessing as furniture) and the dealer’s markup were added to the price of high-fidelity components, the result attracted only thousands of buyers, not millions.

Despite this, some such sets have continued to do very well in the highprice console field, and some bigname firms — notably RCA, Strom-

As a service to readers, the Atlantic has arranged to make available without charge the two handbooks mentioned in this article, and other information regarding the equipment. Address your request: The Atlantic, 8 Arlington St., Boston 16, Mass. berg Carlson, and General Electric — have successfully entered the components business themselves — perhaps with an eye to making a second try later.

It may be significant that in Great Britain high fidelity in ready-made sets is widely available. Among reasons for this, suggests W. S. Barrell, recording director of the giant EMI group (English Columbia and His Master Voice Records), is the fact that, in the post-war period the average Briton had no money to waste on unsatisfactory radios. Manufacturers simply were forced to deliver the goods. Furthermore, British record makers went into high fidelity (even in dance music) long before Americans tried to, which forced the pace for phonograph makers.

Europe still has a distinct edge on this hemisphere in recording techniques, most classical disc fanciers agree. However, in the mushroom growth of FM stations, the U.S. is well in the lead. And it is in FM, when live music, is played on a local station, that the high-fidelity rig really shows its paces. Listening, by means of a good one, to a local FM chamber music broadcast lately, a Washington musician suddenly grimaced with mental effort. “I must remember,” he said, “ whenever I play on an FM concert, not to wear a stiff shirt. I can hear theirs popping.”