High Fidelity Grows Up

WHY do they have to keep it so loud?” bellowed a magazine writer to a colleague, “You can’t hear yourself think! ”

They were sharing a small room in the Hotel New Yorker with Igor Stravinsky’s ballet suite Petrouchka, zestfully performed by Ernest Ansermet and the 110-piece Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and projected with literally stunning impact by a 30-watt amplifier and a vast, darkly gleaming, three-unit corner loud-speaker.

“Maybe that’s it,” answered the colleague, as they escaped into a corridor. “Maybe they don’t want to hear themselves think. They’ve really accomplished something, you know. They’ve built a whole industry, in next to no time, out of a cultural need nobody else would believe existed. And now, just when it’s ready to pay off, up pops Joe Stalin, threatening to send the whole thing back to scratch.”

A door opened beside them and out came a noted music critic, wiping his brow. Around him emerged a tremendous gust of percussive clattering.

“ Edgard Varèse,” he explained, half apologetically. “Ionization. Considered very modern in 1931. A truncated trend, you might say. Sounds like a threshing machine loose in a china shop.”

This was the 1950 Audio Fair, second of its kind, at which seventy dealers and makers of custom homemusic equipment had gathered, early last winter, to display their wares to the public and to each other. It took up two hotel floors with several tons of loud-speakers, amplifiers, FM and AM radio tuners, multispeed record-changers, precision turntables and phono-pickups, tape recorders and acoustic cabinets.

The air was athrob with Petrouchka (London Records), Ionization (EMS),, and Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 in C Minor (Columbia), the one with the organ passage — the three current records most popular as demonstrators of equipment’s range and tone.

There were uncounted visitors. The Fair management had prepared 5000 registration cards and 7500 identification tags, and ran out of both early the third day. Some of the visitors had come a long way for their aural window shopping. Discovering that a woman he’d been talking to had flown from California that morning, one exhibitor actually got a little misty around the eyes. “It sure makes you respect music,” he said, his grammar failing under stress, “when people want it in their homes that bad.”

The mood of the visitors was exultant and anticipatory. They’d found proof of something rumored: that the reproduction of recorded and broadcast music had progressed far beyond anything hinted at in the ready-made radio-phonograph and television sets to be seen in retail stores; that the components to deliver such reproduction were available at net prices (60 per cent of “list”); that one did not have to be a technical genius to hook them up and install them in house walls or even in the Welsh cupboard Grandma left. (Of great assistance in such ventures, however, especially where obdurate carpenters or radio service men have to be directed, are certain dealers and manufacturers’ catalogues, and a rather formidable but authoritative volume called AudioAnthology, sold at either $2 or $3, depending on the cover, by Audio Engineering magazine, 342 Madison Ave., New York.)

The exhibitors displayed a certain jubilance also. The voice of the President had not yet been heard in the land, announcing that the supply of electronic equipment to the Armed Forces was to be stepped up fourfold within the year. To be sure, tubes were becoming hard to get, although Variety had checked and found that the government had drawn off only a tenth of the supply (presumably the big TV manufacturers had used their weight to acquire the rest). Aluminum and plastics were getting to be a problem too, and cobalt rationing was bound, before long, to put a crimp in loud-speaker production.

Prices had started rising, of course, as well. The $125 figure cited two years ago by a consumers’ laboratory for a high-fidelity home installation never had been truly realistic and now had gone by the board. However, $250 still would procure a rig incomparably better than any but the most expensive ready-made sets.

And business was booming. Every publication which ran an article on high-fidelity or custom home-music sets, or whatever else it cared to call them, was promptly swamped with letters. Duncan Scott, customer service manager of Lafayette Radio, one of the biggest mail-order houses, estimated that sales volume for 1950 was between 500 and 600 per cent of that for 1949 — and 1949’s had been nearly eight times greater than that for 1948. Queries put to each of a number of manufacturers, asking them to guess (1) what percentage of the national sales they supplied and (2) how big the whole national annual volume should be, on this basis, reliably evoked estimates of about 260 million dollars. Even allowing for competitive optimism, this indicated that a lot of Americans have invested considerable cash in furnishing their homes with lifelike music.

It indicated something else, too, likely to reassure worried enthusiasts. The high-fidelity industry was firmly enough established to survive a national emergency or, at least, to reappear after the emergency’s end, although casualties would be heavy. It has always been an industry of small outfits, working on narrow profit margins and without side lines. Prolonged shortages would put many out of business, sending their owners back into the war-work laboratories where many of them had earned their initial stakes in the early 1940s.

It was not surprising that some of these were not especially anxious to hear themselves think.

To some of the larger companies involved in supplying the American home with music, the national emergency looked less disastrous. For wholesale supply houses, there was the comforting fact that the government now regards radio as a vital link in the nation’s communications system. This guarantees a degree of priority for replacement parts. For the bigger manufacturers, there was the likelihood of preparedness contracts. A sales executive of one of the biggest, which furnishes most U.S. theaters with sound equipment, has reported considerable success in selling multispeaker sound systems to municipalities and large private firms by calling them, not music systems, but “disaster” systems (usable for music, however, if there should be no disaster).

This didn’t mean that enthusiasts could count on being able to get components or spare parts promptly throughout any prolonged emergency. They couldn’t. Maintenance priorities almost certainly would be slanted toward the AM table radio, the lowest common denominator in radio communication. TV and hi-fi equipment would probably be rated as luxury stuff.

However, these were problems outside the province of audio experts. So, quite properly, they stuck to the problems and the progress within it, and there were plenty of both. In fact, progress itself had brewed many problems.

Primarily, there was the problem of growing up. Norman Pickering, brilliant young manufacturer of phonopickups and speakers, spoke pointedly to colleagues about this at a technical session of the Audio Engineering Society. It was time, he made clear, for equipment suppliers to stop acting like hobbyists and start acting like businessmen — at least when customers were around.

Most customers come to shops, or to audio exhibits, with their own living rooms in mind. To have their ears split, on arrival, by all the decibels His Majesty’s Grenadier Guards Band can cram into a record groove may impress them, but not helpfully. Neither does it put them at their ease to have the sound source leap magically from speaker to speaker around the wall of a demonstration room, no matter how proud the demonstrator is of his trick switchboard. The average customer also fails signally to be entranced by frequency curves or talk of kilocycles per second. This is usually because he hasn’t the faintest idea how many kilocycles he left behind him in the 1940 mahogany console in his living room; he just knows that music from it sounds muffled and that he wants something better.

“I’ve learned what the volume knob on an amplifier is for,” said the youthful boss of a Washington installation outfit, one of the nation’s most successful, “It’s to keep turned down, until the customer asks to have it turned up.”

Associated with the problem of growing up is what might be called the problem of emphasis.

“Talk to Maximilian Weil about it,” said a Fair official. “He’s the dean of this craft. He’s a genius, too. You can tell he’s a genius by looking at him.”

Genius or not, Maximilian Weil was the only exhibitor who demanded dead silence in his demonstration room at the Audio Fair, and got it. He is a small, ageless, earnest man, with immense dignity. He fascinates children, and they him. He refused to answer any questions until he had dislodged a reluctant adult from a front-row chair to make room for a silent, starry-eyed little girl.

Weil, who is president of the Audak Company, New York, has a long and illustrious history in the design and manufacture of phonographic components. He got into this in 1916, and has 174 patents in the field. He made more than half the world’s gramophone tone-heads in old acoustic days, and invented the first electronic pickup. This was used principally for reproducing the sound of early talkies, which was recorded on disks synchronized with the film.

His latest contribution is the Audax Polyphase pickup, the first really successful high-performance tone-head which will flip over to play either standard or microgroove records. It is also phenomenally noiseless, especially on 78 r.p.m. records, and produces almost no record-wear, two qualities which probably go together. Weil thinks it was a sad day when the term “high fidelity” was coined.

It cropped up in the early 1930s, he recalls. Some years earlier, GrigsbyGrunow, a firm now extinct, had produced a speaker which would deliver real bass. Other manufacturers rallied round, and the public got an earful of tympani and bull fiddles. Then the other end of the sound spectrum was invaded. When the Radio Manufacturers Association first defined high fidelity, it meant any reproduction reaching frequencies above 7000 cycles per second, which for the first time made a fife or a triangle really audible. It would be regarded today (when many an amplifier will deliver 20,000 cycles) as kid stuff.

However, Weil points out, it sufficed to identify wide range with fidelity among audio men, and they have largely succeeded in selling the same concept to the public. Weil thinks the engineers might benefit by watching oscillographs less and going to concerts more. Having made up the musical deficiencies of commercially standard amplifiers and loud-speakers, they have plunged on into an acoustico-electronic never-never land, introducing through their gadgets sound effects which simply don’t exist in music.

Weil cites the case of a musician who tried out an ultra high-fidelity system and complained that it didn’t sound right. Nor did he take kindly to the audio man’s explanation that he’d have to “get used to it.” He went to concerts every week, he explained with some heat, and he didn’t have to get used to them.

Weil, who used to play the violin himself, sides with the musician. “There is a lot we don’t know yet,” he says, “about the ear and what it hears, especially music.” He stoutly advises customers to trust firmly to their ears, refusing to be awed by performance characteristics shown them in graphs and figures. One speaker, amplifier, and pickup may have exactly the same technical ratings as another; yet from one, music will come fort h smooth and rich, while from the other it will bear an indefinable quality of “worry” — it will be uncomfortable to listen to, especially over prolonged periods of time.

Some of Weil’s notions are regarded by his younger colleagues as outrageous, but not this one. Young Hermon Hosmer Scott, of noise-suppressor fame, figured out as early as 1944 that audio-distortion measurements then in vogue among engineers left out too many factors to work reliably on new, highperformance equipment. At Scotts laboratories, in consequence. although meter dials are not ignored, the final cheek on an amplifier’s design is by ear, using a variety of music as test matter. Apparently some oilier makers also follow this line of thinking, to judge by results. For there is no doubt the difference can be heard, though it may be hard to describe.

It is worth noting that this procedure parallels that used in recording by EMI studios in England, the high quality of whose disks is a byword. Before any pressing is released, no matter how much money has been spent making it, it must be passed by a technical committee and a musical committee. Either’s veto is final.

Probably this is why one E.S. custom-installation man remarked recently that many of his woes would be at an end if each of his dearly beloved customers had one good HMV or English Columbia record wherewith to test his machine when he suspected it of faulty performance. As it is, each time a recording firm overcuts a groove, or an FM station puts a microphone too close to a piano, the installation man is likely to get an indignant phone call: the customer’s loudspeaker is rattling nastily!

This leads directly into another problem, the peculiar problem of the man who makes home-music installations. He is often, through the nature of his business, confronted with perfectionist customers. At the same time, his line of business is one which got its big boost as mail-order commerce, at wholesale prices, and he cannot break free of this heritage. This means that, often as not, he has to buy and resell equipment at no profit at all, or at very little profit, for he is still competing with mailorder houses. A single trouble call on any one installation may eat up his entire profit on it. If any proof were needed that audio experts are amateurs at business, this would furnish it. The obvious solution is a service charge for installation, and it may as well be broken gently here that this is in the cards for the future. Television salespeople, of course, knew the angles to begin with and were able to make the socalled “service contract” sound like a bargain.

Probably what the hi-fi manufacturers and dealers need is a trade association. The Audio Engineering Society is hardly fitted to handle commercial policy, though il can set technical standards and it sponsors the Audio Fairs. The latter are run as private promotional ventures by a lawyer named Harry Reizes, who is counsel for the AES and also advertising manager of Audio Engineering. It was, as a matter of fact, the magazine’s editor, C. G. McProud, who thought of holding the Fairs in the first place. When world conditions permit, Reizes hopes to spread them to Chicago and the West Coast.

This transition from a craft industry to a commercial one is going to involve hazards, of course. For customers, at least, part of the attraction of custom home-music equipment has been that its salesmen weren’t really salesmen, but rather fellow enthusiasts.

It is a fact that, up to now, a music lover who bought equipment from these people almost could not be gypped, try as he might. There might be furious squabbles among the experts over the merits of Amplifier A compared with Amplifier B, but it was still true that $200 paid out for either was likely to procure all the value that truly dedicated technicians had been able to cram into it, and that it would yield performance the buyer never had dreamed possible.

Of course, there were also new developments, some exciting in their promise but not yet proved. There were such things as the FAS speaker system, initiated by an amateur named Edmund Flewelling and perfected by the staff of FM-TV Maga-zine. From a combination of three speakers, all standard make and reasonably priced, it evoked a tremendous throbbing bass, really organlike. The only trouble with it was that no one, including the inventors, seemed to have any idea of how it worked or why it should.

There was the Audax pickup, of which mention has been made. There were a number of new loud-speaker makes. Among these were the British Wharfedales, notable in that they had been designed originally for living-room — or moderate-volume — use, as opposed to U.S. types, whose origin lay in theater sound. The same thing applied to the American Electro-Voice line, one of which, a 12-inch job priced at a little over $20, seemed a good bet to become No. I choice in minimum-priced home-music systems.

It was also of interest to note which speakers were chosen by amplifiermakers, for instance, to show off their own wares, and vice versa. Altec Lansing, Jim Lansing, and Stephens speakers seemed to lead, with Jensen and Electro-Voice in the running. Among amplifiers, Brook, McIntosh, Leak (British), Scott, and Peerless were most in evidence, allhough equal attention went to several U.S. versions of the Williamsoncircuit amplifier, with origins in Britain. Audak, Pickering, and GE phono-cart ridges led all ot hers, as did Garrard and Webster record-changers (the old Webster model 356-27 substantially outpointing its successor, the 100-1). Among precision turntallies, Rek-O-Kut and Presto took first place, with the Pickering pickuparm an almost uniform aeoessorv. Nearly everyone was using diamond stylus-points, now reckoned from 50 to 100 times longer-lived than any other kind, and available for less than $10. Magnecord, Ampex, and Concert one were the tape recorders most apparent. Among FM tuners, Brow ning, Brooks, Collins, and Meissner stood out.

As a guide to purchasing, if must be noted, these choices were slightly exclusive: all were the most elaborate (and costly) models available, for obvious reasons.

“They sure are making a joyful noise unto the Lord,” said the magazine writer, heading downstairs for a Martini. “All I hope is that we can get deaf again next year, same time, same place, same way.”

“Amen!” said his friend.

It’s a rare reviewer or collector who can keep up with the vast output of records these days. Here are a few released in recent weeks which may not have got the attention they deserved: —

Bach: Cantata No. 51,Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen (Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, soprano, and Philharmonia Orchestra, Peter Gellhorn conducting; three 12" 78’s; English Columbia LX8756-8). There is real emotional charge in this, confined in a supremely tasteful performance. Sixth side has My Heart Ever Faithful from Cantata No. 68. Recording: excellent.

Bach: Cantata No. 82, Ich Habe Genug (Bernhard Sönnerstedt, bass, and Danish State Broadcasting Orchestra, Mogens Wöldike conducting; HMV Z-7027-9). Typical Wöldike performance and Danish recording, meaning practically perfect. This and the foregoing may be bought safely on 78’s, too, since apparently EMI studios intend to ride out “the duration” without venturing into LP production, vinylite being hard to get.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 8 in F (San Francisco Symphony, Pierre Monteux conducting; 10" LP, three 12” 78’s or three 45’s; RCA Victor LM(X) 43; DM 1450; WDM 1450). This jovial Frenchman, I should like to suggest, is playing Bccthoxen better than anyone in the U.S. today except Toscanini (and sometimes Walter) and being better recorded. Lots I of instrumental bite; no affectation,

Brahms: Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34 (Clifford Curzon, piano, with the Budapest Siring Quartet; 12" LP or five 12" 78’s; Columbia ML 4336 or MM 945). This is Brahms newly matured, un-aut.umnal, gay, grave, and dynamic by turns and bursting with ideas; a great work, a little sedately played, well recorded.

Britten: Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes (London Symphony, Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting) together with Constant Lambert-Sacheverell Sitwell: The Rio Grande (Gladys Ripley, contialto, chorus, and Philharmonta Orchestra, Constant Lambert conducting; 10" LP; Columbia ML 2145). The Britten, made from English master disks, shows how wide-range a good LP can be without hint of shrillness. The Sitwell-Lambert opus, seldom played, could be called cute if it weren’t too good for that.

Handel: Compleat Water Musick (National Gallery Orchestra, Richard Bales conducting; 12" LP; WCFM LP2). Many, many people must have been waiting years for this. Its full twenty movements include many as fine as the six Hamilton Harty arbitrarily picked for his suite; the playing and recording measure up handsomely. This is almost a must.

Hindemith: Quartet No. 1 in F (Stuyvesant String Quartet; 10" LP; Philharmonia PHLP 100). Hindemith, before he went truly modern, sounded like Richard Strauss. Recording was made in accord with Audio Engineering Society requirements, yielding good “presence” effect.

Mozart: Concerto in A Major for clarinet and orchestra (Reginald Kell, clarinet, and Zimbler Sinfonietta, Josef Zimbler conducting; 10" LP; Decca DL 7500). It sounds so easy, but nobody else can do it. Recording: good, but a little lacking in highs.

Mozart: Six Violin and Piano Sonatas — C Major, F Major, B-flat Major, G Major, and two in E-flat Major (Szymon Goldberg, violin, and Lili Kraus, piano; three 12" LP’s; Decca-Parlophone DX 103). These are fine remakes of the “old” Parlophone 78’s. The great Lili also has been microgrooved by Decca doing three Haydn trios, the Schubert Sonata No. 143, and the Mozart Concerto No. 18, for all of which, let there be thanks.

Rodgers, Richard, & Hart, Lorentz:Pal Joey (Vivienne Segal, Harold Lang, and other soloists with orchestra directed by Lehman Engel; 12" LP; Columbia ML 4364). This reconstruction of a pleasantly wicked 1943 hit, made with “original cast” zest, spectacularly demonstrates what high-fidelity can do for a Broadway show record. Cheers for some anonymous Columbia engineer!

Rossini:La Cenerentola (soloists and Orchestra Radio Italiana, Mario Rossi conducting; two 12" LP’s with libretto; Cetra-Soria LP 1208). For some reason, these “little” operas are what Cetra-Soria does best. This rollicking “Cinderella” is a honey.

Schubert: Quintet in C Major, Op. 163 (Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet, with Guenther Weiss, 2nd cello; 12" LP; Westminster WL 50-33). This Vienna group is incredibly good; on this and other Westminster releases it sounds as if it might be the best in the world. It’s also to be heard in the Schubert Quartet No. 15; the Dvořak Quintet in G Major; Haydn Quartets in D Major and Eflat Major.

Strauss (Johann):Die Fledermaus (Vienna State Opera soloists, chorus, and orchestra, Clemens Krauss conducting, with English-German libretto; two 12" LP’s; London LP 281-2). While Columbia and Victor were squabbling over their Metropolitan stars and contracts, for an English-language Bat, London foxed them properly with this sumptuous job. Right out of this nasty world.

Strauss (Richard): Duet Concertino, for clarinet, bassoon, strings, and harp; together with Honegger: Concerto da Camera (Los Angeles Chamber Symphony, Harold Byrns conducting: 12" LP; Capitol P-8115). Both of these were written in 1948 and have never been played here. They are utterly charming—melodious, clever, thoughtful, unaffected. Performances and recording are good, too.