They Shall Have Music: Custom or Ready-Made?

by JOHN M. CONLY

JOHN M. CONLY is a former New York and Washington news paper man, now on the staff of High Fidelity Magazine.

THE annalists of our national culture can start phrasing a long footnote right now: Fall-Winter, 1953, was the Season of the Great TweeterWoofer Boom.

It was not unportended. Summer, 1953, had been the Season of the Ubiquitous Music Festival. The national countryside had sprouted harpsichordists and Little Opera groups like mushrooms, and unprecedented thousands of motorized pilgrims had got lost in country lanes, vainly asking bland-faced natives the way to Woods!angle (Massachusetts), Brevoort (North Carolina), or Aspic (Colorado). Some went even further afield, to Austria (Sal’s Burg) or Germany (Bay Ruth).

Not all returned quite clear as to whether they had heard Munch conduct Brahms, or vice versa, but that didn’t matter: they had shown the right spirit. And a sizable sector of the American radio-TV manufacturing industry, profoundly moved, had decided that the spirit should not die, nor even feel winter’s pang. People wanted music; they’d get music (at least until the time came for them to get color TV, which was not yet). The call went out to advertising copy rooms, and the copy writers, true to their minuteman tradition, flashed back at once with the magic words, for which they hadn’t had far to look. The words were two: High Fidelity.

Speedily, the words went winging out to every literate American living room and promptly obtained a currency comparable with that of such expressions as “3-D” and “UHF.” The semantic trimmings were Prime A No. 1 grade, too. The impression was conveyed that Heifetz by hi-fi was somehow richer, crisper, more deeply satisfying than Heifetz in the flesh.

Nearly a dozen major manufacturers, in this concerted rush, plunged into high fidelity. Some plunged headlong. Others plunged about kneedeep. The score, all things considered, was good. At the time of this writing, four big companies had turned out legitimate high-fidelity readymade sets — RCA Victor, StrombergCarlson, Admiral, and Crosley. Others had produced modest-priced record players which, if their fi wasn’t quite ski-hi, were still good enough to make the ears of the uninitiate perk up. Among such items were the Columbia Records table-model “360”; portables by Webcor and Triomatic; and a console by Magnavox.

Thus the awareness of high-fidelity home music, in Autumn, 1953, was brought to the millions. And no one truly devoted to both music and people could fail to hope that the millions would respond and benefit. There was great and glowing promise in the event. Yet it caused misgiving and glumness among some of the men who had done most to bring it about — the men who really began and developed high fidelity.

The publicity which accompanied the new hi-fi and quasi-hi-fi sets into the popular market gave — and perhaps had to give — the impression that wide-range audio was a 1953 development. This is, of course, pure nonsense, even as regards ready-made sets. Take as a single contrary instance Avery Fisher of the Fisher Radio Corporation, New York. In 1937, when the open-back squeak-andboom speaker enclosure was the rule, Fisher was selling radio-phonographs with padded infinite-baffle and bassreflex enclosures behind his coaxial speakers. In 1946, when the 6000cycle crystal phono-pickup cartridge was standard in $500 combinations, Fisher had incorporated the General Electric wide-range magnetic cartridge in his sets. Fisher, who today makes some of the world’s most honored audio equipment, is amused by the newcomers’ claims, but it’s a somewhat chilly amusement.

However, it is Fisher’s other colleagues, the makers of individual custom sound components, whose name is legion and who are not amused. For the last six years they have labored lovingly, designing, making, testing, improving, matching, installing, and selling a myriad of rather wonderful electro-musical devices. They have educated tens of thousands of musicloving, venturous-minded Americans in their use and in the pleasure of realistic music in the home. They have achieved some surprising indirect results, too — like exposing the minds of rigid Mozartians to Bartók and Copland and forcing upward the quality of microgroove records. They know the feel of opening important territory in a national culture, and (pardonably) they like it.

They know who follows the trail blazers, too, though, and they are not surprised at the invasion of the hi-fi field by the big set-makers. They’ve been expecting that, and without great trepidation. Competitively, they are fortified by a substantial price-advantage over masssales organizations; their products reach consumers by a short route, so to speak, and rarely cost them more than 33⅓ above the factory price — an unbeatable discount. Technically also, the component makers have flattering proof of how little they need fear; of the four big companies producing the best ready-made hi-fi, three buy most of their amplifiers, record players, pickup cartridges, and speakers from the custom component makers!

What the precision component makers do fear is simply this: that their two precious words will be ravished and made meaningless. Without the words “high fidelity,” they’d be deprived of the short, vivid qualitysymbol which has up to now distinguished their precision wares from lesser gadgetry. Not all of them, in the past, have been completely happy about the phrase “high fidelity,”considering it something short of the ultimate in either semantic exactness or euphony. Many would have liked to de-emphasize the “high” in favor of the “fidelity.” But now that it is threatened, most of them want to save it.

They tried one way to save it in September, asking a technical group of the Radio-Electronics-Television Manufacturers’ Association to work out a set of standards by which equipment could be judged fit or unfit to be called high-fidelity. However, the mills of the RETMA grind slowly, sometimes to a full stop, and no one really expected a swift, dramatic solution from there.

A prompt, brief set of enlightening definitions for the public would be very helpful, of course — likewise impossible. Perhaps some could have been contrived in 1950, when the Atlantic printed its first general article for laymen about high-fidelity home music. But it is doubtful that they’d stand up today.

At that time, for instance, it might have been safe to say that a phonopickup cartridge, to qualify as highfidelity, would have to be a magnetic one, probably embodying the variable-reluctance principle. This would still apply to the best sellers — G.E., Audak, and Pickering — and to Clarkstan, and the word “magnetic” could stretch to include the superb new Fairchild, a moving-coil cartridge. But it would leave out the splendid Weathers, a powered frequency-modulation cartridge, and the tropicdwellers’ favorite, the climate-proof chemico-electric Pfanstiehl. And now, to complicate matters, Electro-Voice has produced a piezo-electric crystal (that once taboo word) cartridge for which it claims performance easily up to magnetic standards.

Thus does progress make stumblebums of prophets, for which let there be thanks. But the result of all this flowering of excellence is that acceptability can no longer be judged by type. The hard-working audio amateur writing a magazine column can no longer give the public broad, brief instructions as to which advertisements should arouse automatic disbelief. Things have come to a sorry pass.

A qualified testing engineer isn’t in a much more helpful position, either. He can establish standards but he can’t make them at once foolproof and simple enough to frustrate a clever advertising man really bent on a little huggermugger. Each of two “10-watt” amplifiers, for example, can be described as able to reproduce the “entire spectrum of audible sound,” or from 20 to 20,000 cycles per second, with less than 1 per cent harmonic distortion. One of them may be really able to do this while putting forth its full rated power. The other, however, may have been tested (to help out the advertising department) at a carefully controlled ¼ watt of power. Later, when it is bought by a trusting music lover and set to the task of driving a Berlioz fortissimo out of his big coaxial speaker into his 40-foot living room, it may flunk that kind of test in hideous cacophony.

Up to now, the amplifier (or other component) like No. 2, which goofed off in the pinch, has had fairly short shrift. Sold as a single item, it has faced two hazards, the dealer and the customer. The dealer in custom homemusic components has usually been sincerely interested in good sound reproduction (although often prone to certain loyalties) and jealous of his reputation as a judge of same. And the customer has had to be an extraordinary person. Usually he, or she, has obtained a degree in English, history, or medicine, and doesn’t know an ohm from an oboe. Just the same, he has had the gumption to outface an assortment of vacuum tubes, transformers, and pin-tip plugs. (“Pretty simple,” he usually says, with an insufferable smug smile, “once you’re into it.”) And woe to the amplifier which, after he has put his ego in its trust, betrays him before his mocking friends. For he knows there are other amplifiers. And he knows where he can trade his in or know the reason why. This kind of triple interaction has kept standards reassuringly high.

It has also confined the bulk of hi-fi shopping to large cities, where the customer is assured of ready access to the supplier for consultation and complaint. Doubt and distrust increase with distance, when unfamiliar equipment is concerned. In a sense, then, the outlying hi-fi customer, vintage of 1953, has opportunities (if risks, as well) denied his predecessors. He can, if he wishes, and has the money, buy a ready-made of reliable make. He will be getting a compromise. His music system will not be tailored to his living room. But the assembly of components will have been done by competent men.

Or, if he is a little more ambitious, he can buy a matched but unpackaged assortment of components. Several major companies — among them RCA Victor, General Electric, The Radio Craftsmen, Stromberg-Carlson — either produce or recommend sets of components tested together for compatibility, and furnish all necessary data on assembling them. (One RCA assembly, incidentally, features the newly modified LC1A “Olsen” speaker.) This yields somewhat better bargains, and sometimes higher quality. (As illustration, not one ready-assembled set, at this writing, included a precision single-play turntable and phono-arm; all incorporated recordchangers instead. Yet many people strongly prefer the turntable.) Of course, many a good custom-installation house offers this service and more, including advice based on the nature of the room in which the music system is to work — but usually it charges for the service.

What over-all effect the massmarketing of hi-fi, and purported hi-fi, and the widespread exploitation of the term “high fidelity” will have on the home-music equipment market is impossible to predict with any solid conviction. It depends on something unknown - the size and vigor of the demand for music latent in Homo sapiens americanus.

There are, without doubt, some people who simply have been missing the old phonograph since the TV set displaced it from the parlor. They will take, and gladly, a preassembled quarter-portion of hi-fi.

There are, next, audio bugs, an infinitesimal but obtrusive minority, who will continue to seek out exotic devices productive of startling noises, which they absorb much as dope fiends take heroin.

Then, there is the potentially most exciting contingent, whose numbers keep swelling — the people who never really heard any music until high fidelity introduced them to it. Hermon Hosmer Scott, a professional sound equipment maker and sparetime philosopher, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests that, in the old days of the AM-radio music broadcast and the narrow-range phonograph, only the listener with extraordinary musical imagination derived any effect from home music listening. His imagination filled in what wasn’t there to be heard. The person less sensitized (if only slightly) never got enough stimulus to arouse a response. Moreover, the failure of the reproduced music to get through to him may have kept him from ever trying live music. Exposed later through high fidelity, this man often becomes a music enthusiast in short order. We have all seen this happen, says Scott (which is indisputable), and he adds, Who knows how many million such potential music lovers there may be in this country?

No one knows, but this is a rare idea, of a kind which immediately draws convincing evidence into its wake. Its credibility is enhanced by the way the high-fidelity enthusiasm has grown — the actual experience of hearing, at friends’ homes or in shops, being obviously the determinant conversion factor.

If the Scott theory is correct, no danger awaits the custom music equipment business. The man who meets and learns to love music through highfidelity equipment will remain devoted to the latter as well as to the former. He will probably come to think of it as a musical instrument. It might, indeed, be well if the man who sells it to him and installs it should think of it likewise. At least, so says David Sarser, himself a violinist in the NBC Symphony and an audio expert of considerable note. Sarser thinks home-music installation has been too long a part-time activity of radio-parts houses. An installation, he says, should be made by someone who knows how it ought to sound. Once in, it should stay in (unless an obvious improvement is possible), and components should be chosen to last. In this he is vigorously seconded by Emory Cook, recording engineer (“Sounds of Our Times”), who points out, cryptically: “A 10 per cent difference in price can make hardware out of software.”

This brings up the problem of maintenance (insidious, when gradual dayto-day deterioration tries to fool the ear). Cook has made a major contribution here — a test record which will detect phonographic malfunction through a signal which changes from dot-dash to dash-dot when the distortion in amplifier-plus-pickup rises above 2 per cent. It can also disclose, in its own uncanny fashion, which of the two components is to blame.

On this score, and by way of approaching the question of merit in new equipment, it is pleasant to be able to report some results of testing with a Cook distortion-disk. Wellused (if well-treated) samples of the most commonly employed magnetic pickup cartridges, Pickering (dual), Audak, and G.E. (single microgroove), were checked. All stayed securely within the bounds of the 2 per cent distortion from almost 18,000 cycles per second to 4000, which may allay the buying worries of those who recall when pickups were the weak link in the audio chain.

They are a fairly strong link now, but amplifiers are probably a stronger one. The better amplifiers seem, in fact, to have outpaced the standards by which their performance used to be measured — range; harmonic and intermodulation distortion. Hermon Scott is looking for a new kind of intermodulation distortion, whereby to award demerits to top-grade amplifiers, including his own. He also makes mention of the record-equalization factor, which is increasingly more important as the power-producing portions of amplifiers become cleaner and cleaner in their response. Naturally, the more exact the reproduction is, the more clearly it brings out traces of the distortion which various record manufacturers build into their disks to minimize surface noise and save groove space — unless the distortion is neutralized.

Neutralizing these pre-emphases and de-emphases has become no simpler in the last few years. As a matter of fact, there are three more sets of recording-characteristics in common use than there were in 1950. On the other hand, the designers of amplifiers’ “front ends” have paid more and more attention to compensating for them. The most satisfactory compensating systems now use marked “equalization" controls for both treble and bass (quite apart from the graduated treble and bass “tone" controls). Notably successful are those of Brociner Laboratories, Fisher, Brook Electronics, and Scott himself. Scott, responding half-humorously to demands by perfectionists, recently produced a super front end, covered with handtooled leather and sporting eight control knobs guaranteed to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of any disks — past, present, and future. Then (to “equalize” his public relations?) he produced a 10-watt amplifier, price $99.95, with record-compensation flexibility heretofore common only in substantially more expensive amplifiers. Fisher, not to be outdone, at once put forth a remarkably good and inexpensive self-powered preamplifier equalizer for people whose amplifiers or tuners already have tone controls. It’s $19.95. Worth noting, while on the topic of record compensation, is an excellent inexpensive 12-watt amplifier by Bell Sound Systems, with very effective record compensation achieved at low price through the use of printed (silver ink, instead of wire) circuits. It costs under $70.

FM listening is becoming more rewarding. Despite economic hazards, good-music stations, so-called, are surviving and multiplying everywhere, in some areas using relay networks from city to city. FM tuners have improved enormously in sensitivity and stability. The Fisher (AM-FM) and the Browning (AM-FM or FM only) are especially good. For people who live in “fringe areas,” a truly useful gadget has been designed by Regency (Indianapolis) — an FM signal booster, which substantially improves reception on even very sensitive sets, particularly when they are fed by fairly elementary antennas.

Tape recorders are finding their way into more and more home-music systems, particularly in areas where there are FM programs worth recording. For high fidelity and high reliability, people who can afford them still get 15-inch-per-second recorders, the most popular probably being the Concertone and Magna-Cordette. But several 7½-inch-per-second machines now can deliver up to 12,000 cycles per second — no mean range — and one (Tapemaster) claims 15,000. Also, the Magnetronics Corporation, of Minneapolis, has begun marketing hifi recording heads for installation on erstwhile low-fi machines.

Loud-speakers remain the most fractious of all high-fidelity components, and the source of the most ferocious arguments and most abject despair. More than one owner of a giant $500 or $600 corner speaker system has been heard suddenly to exclaim: “I’m going back to earphones!”

Just the same, loud-speakers have been improving steadily, if less dramatically than other components. And a great deal has been learned about housing them.

Trends in loud-speaker treatment, in the past three years, have been three. One has been toward developing very small cabinets for small speakers (and, of course, for small residences). Another has been toward multiple-speaker assemblies, at the other end of the size scale. Still another has been toward the room corner, which is now commonly used almost as part of the speaker enclosure, to help build up bass.

The rear-loaded corner “horn,”the Helmholtz resonator principle, the air-coupler design, and variations of the bass-reflex pattern have been used to reinforce bass produced by small speakers, with varying success. Considerable. acclaim has gone to the two-cone, carefully balanced Kelton (Boston), an orange-crate-sized enclosure ($49.50; also available as part of a compact phono-console at just under $200). Even more impressive is the Jenson “Duetto,”which incorporates a horn tweeter (treble) and an 8-inch cone woofer (bass) and will almost fit in a bookshelf. It costs $69.50.

The royal giants of the speaker clan — the Brociner “Transcendent" and Model 4 Corner Horn; the Altec Lansing 820-A; the suave Klipschorn; the 4-unit Electro-Voice “Patrician" and newer, more compact “Georgian" (a mere $495!), and the Jensen “Triplex" — have been trailed into the corner by a variety of housing designed around the established makes of single and coaxial 12and 15-inch speakers. The Bozak Binaural-Monaural system, almost alone, has stayed with one wall.

The binaural prospect, incidentally, includes the likelihood that a fairly cheap binaural phono-pickup adapter soon may be on the market. Already, there are two inexpensive binaural amplifiers — Bell’s and Newcomb’s.

In a different kind of futuristic vein, as a hopeful parting note, is a report from the Heath Company, world’s leading maker of electronic equipment kits. A little more than a year ago, tentatively, Heath began marketing a Williamson amplifier kit, without great expectations. It went like wildfire. Now, as far as Heath knows, it’s the biggest amplifier seller in the country. And there’s no doubt about where a very large percentage of the Williamson kits are going. They are going to the American high school boy.