Tuners, Aerials, and Fm

JHEY SHALL HAVE MUSIC.

by JOHN M. CONLY

JOHN M. CONLY is a former New York and Washington newspaperman, now editor of High Fidelity Magazine. “ They Shall Hare Music” is a quarterly feature in the Atlantic.

(This is the fourth in a series of articles being written for people planning or assembling home-music systems of custom high-fidelity components. Such components — loudspeakers, amplifiers, record-playing equipment, and FM-AM radio tuners — now are put forth by a host of manufacturers and dealers, in variety to suit any living room and nearly every pocketbook. An array of such components, well chosen and installed, can deliver music of impressive lifelikeness, and no technical knowledge whatever is needed to make it behave. Previous articles in the series have dealt with loudspeakers, turntables, phono-pickups, and amplifiers. The following one will discuss the freight of the air waves and how to bring it home intact. That is to say, with radio tuners — AM and FM.)

A HUNDRED-DOLLAR bill will buy from 25 to 35 long-playing records, or it will buy a good frequencymodulation radio tuner. It is not easy to say which would be the wiser expenditure, for the person beginning to custom-furnish his home with music. Perhaps it is partly a question of geography. If the music lover lives in Alaska or Puerto Rico, in Whitefish, Montana, or Hobbs, New Mexico, the records are clearly his best buy. An FM tuner is of singularly little use where there are no worthwhile FM broadcasts. To go to the other extreme, if the music lover makes his home in New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, or Los Angeles, he would be silly not to get the tuner at once. It would put at his disposal the record collections of at least one, and perhaps several, good-music stations. Each such collection would be many times larger and more varied than his own ever is likely to be. Furthermore, the station’s record-playing equipment, in most cases, would be quite as good as his, perhaps better. In addition, the station might well contrive (as most do) to furnish him some live concert broadcasts — in the highest-fidefity sound ever to grace his living room.

As a matter of fact, the term “high fidelity” was first commonly used, back in the early 1930s, with reference to radio broadcasts rather than recordings, and for this there was reason. To be sure, then as now, network broadcasts were relayed by low-fidelity telephone wire. But commercial records — those pressed domestically, anyway — were almost equally restricted in tone range. And, even if they were not, the phono-pickups available then, even to adventurous private buyers, probed no higher into the realm of the overtones than 4000-5000 cycles per second, hardly medium-fi in today’s parlance. Studio transcription pickups, massive and monstrous though they looked, did much better than that; so did microphones.

There was some high-fidelity broadcasting in pre-FM days. Indeed, if I recall aright, part of the short-wave spectrum — the so-called “ Apex ” band — was briefly set aside for highfidelity transmission in the thirties. But this came to naught, and the general public had its first real taste of high-fidelity radio after the Second World War, when Edwin H. Armstrong’s epochal discovery, FM, came into common use. FM really was epochal, though it was subsequently oversold by its friends and maltreated in practice by both broadcasters and set manufacturers.

In amplitude-modulation (AM) radio, to oversimplify somewhat, a carrier wave is made to transmit an A-note by being turned on and off (or up and down in strength) 440 times a second. This is, essentially, a crude process. For one thing, the receiver always is open to a whole spectrum of interference noise.

In frequency modulation, by contrast, the carrier wave is not turned on and oil. Instead, it is sent flickering, so to speak, across the assigned band width, at 440 flickers per second. The frequency of the flickers determines the key, the breadth of their sweep determines the volume. If, within the band width, a spark plug or a diathermy machine is radiating a racket, it will become audible only during the microsecond when the carrier wave intersects it. This is not perfect protection against interference, but it is a vast improvement over what the AM technique offers. It is also worth noting that the assigned FM bands are in the VHF (very high frequency) spectrum, where electrical noise is sparse. The result is a startling clarity of reproduced tone, with almost equally startling silence between notes. And the tone range, treble to bass, of any FM station is well in excess of what most people can hear.

FM, when it was introduced, ran at once into a combination of exploitation and hostility. Broadcasters set up FM facilities and bragged about them, but used them chiefly to duplicate low-fidelity AM network transmission. Manufacturers incorporated bad FM circuits in cheap table-model radios, with audio so wretched as to mask the benefits of the new system. Even the separate tuners that came out, designed for the vague new army of fi-fanciers, were disappointing in the main. Perhaps because of the early overemphasis on “net” prices as a prime feature of high fidelity, most of the first tuners were too cheap to be good. For someone with the patience and digital sensitivity of a Swiss watchmaker, they would do a job. Anyone else they would drive to distraction — drifting slyly and incessantly, losing their stations whenever a cat paced lightly across the floor of an adjacent apartment. And, by virtue of their $30-$50 prices, they distracted attention from the $100plus tuners that really delivered what Major Armstrong had promised.

Things have improved vastly now. Network stations still duplicate their low-fidelity programs on FM, but hardly a middle-sized city lacks a station that devotes a substantial portion of its time to recorded music, transmitted in exemplary FM fidelity. And many custom FM tuners sold to private citizens in 1955 would have passed muster in 1950 as professional monitor units.

The average of prices has gone up, too, but that is no tragedy. A $34 tuner bought in 1948, by 1951 was something to be rid of. My 1952 Browning, though no longer the ultimate, afflicts me with no urgency to replace it, and I think tuners bought in 1955 will stand the time-test even better.

It used to be necessary to point out that there were two kinds of FMreceiver circuits, the Armstrong and the ratio-detector, and that the latter could be grossly abused through cheap construction. It isn’t necessary to mention this any longer. So far as I know, only two widely sold custom tuners still use the ratio-detector system, and both are rather expensive and very, very good.

The Armstrong circuit has now become the rule, and its performance specifications are easily read, since it necessarily employs a process called “limiting,” which is initiated by a given signal-strength and results in a certain degree of suppression of non-signal noise. A tuner which responds to a fivemicrovolt (five millionths of a volt) impulse from its antenna by delivering 30 decibels of “quieting” is a good tuner, and if you live within 50 miles of the stations you want to hear, you’ll be happy with it.

This reintroduces geography, which is probably the prime factor in the choice of an FM tuner. If you live in a city, and crave only the programs of local stations, you have no real problem (unless you happen to inhabit a “dead zone,” in which case you need the services of an expert). You can buy a tuner for less than $60 (I know of two that will suffice: the Harman-Kardon “Century,” and the “Realist,” a unit made for the Radio Shack in Boston), hook it to the apartment TV-antenna lead, and pull in all but a fraction of what something more expensive would supply. If you are not an apartment-dweller, a $1.50 indoor antenna will take care of you. Or a TV “rabbit-car,” which can be set anywhere in the room. Or a new, fancy folded-dipole antenna which comes in the shape of a modernistic flower-bowl for about $10 — the “Plantenna.” (They think of everything.) If you want to be a little safer, you could try a tuner in the class of the $87 Browning “Brownie.” This is a high-class short-range unit, very sensitive, high in fidelity and easy to use: that is, it dispenses with a tuning-eye indicator and has AFC (automatic frequency control) that cannot be cut off. As soon as the hurried lady of the household tunes anywhere near the station she wants, it jumps into full focus. But weak or distant stations cannot be tuned at all.

You wouldn’t want this if you lived, say, 100 miles from the stations you wanted to hear. Any of the top-grade, precision tuners these days have AFC, but they also incorporate a switch that “defeats” it, and a tuning-eye for finer work. Take my own case. A hair’s breadth apart, on my dial, are WABC, New York, 125 miles away and faint, and an ambitious new Connecticut station, nearer and thus stronger. The latter offers a singularly uninspiring “pop” record program while the latter is purveying the news commentary of Mr. Quincy Howe. If I leave the AFC in operation, it chooses for me. Mr. Howe is rejected as noise, and I get, willynilly, “Dance with Me, Henry.” With the AFC switched out, I am usually able to evoke Mr. Howe from the murk.

To do so, at this distance, there is something else I need — a good rooftop antenna. And since my set is three years old, I also use a signalbooster. There are at least two good signal-boosters available. The Regency ($17) needs to be tuned along with the set. The Electro-Voice ($27) doesn’t, and thus can be tucked out of sight. My antenna is a highly directional eight-element Yagi — a long tube, with transverse metal spars — which serves very well. But earlier I got almost as good results from a simple folded dipole — a single flattened loop of tubing. For information on rooftop antennas, I suggest writing to Vee-D-X, LaPointe Electronics, Rockville, Connecticut, furnishing full geoand topo-graphical details. They’ll take care of you, and the prices are reasonable.

Another convenience I need, or so I am told, is an antenna rotator, whereby I can bring the Vagi to bear on New York or Boston, as the whim seizes me. The fact is, I can do this now, and unerringly, but my wife deplores roof-climbing on rainy nights, and it always rains during Boston Symphony broadcasts. Antenna rotators cost about $30, and there is a rumor that not all of them are utterly reliable, so it may be that they should be bought from local TV servicemen, from whom a guarantee can be exacted.

Just incidentally, there is an installation detail with which your neighborhood TV serviceman should not be trusted. I mean protection against lightning. The “lightning arresters” commonly attached to antenna leadins may help dissipate static charges, thus improving reception, but are useless against lightning. Call in some nearby electrician who specializes in lightning-proofing, and get him to ground your antenna mast — and make other suggestions.

I am a fringe-area listener with a three-year-old tuner. Should you be a fringe-area resident shopping for a new tuner, keep in mind my antenna suggestions, but forget about boosters. One by one, in 1955, tuner manufacturers have been publishing — and making good — claims of three, two, or even one microvolt for at least 20 db of quieting. No present-day booster can improve on this sensitivity; indeed, a booster hooked up to a tuner that sensitive may well raise its noise level. Which is a test worth remembering when and if you go shopping for a tuner.

It would be folly to risk a timeless designation of any FM tuner as the “best.” The title changes hands too quickly. At the time of this writing, it probably would belong to the H. H. Scott 310. Most of last year it was held by the Fisher. The year before it was Browning. Never has it been uncontested, nor is it now. Bogen, Radio Craftsmen, National, Harman-Kardon, Stromberg-Carlson, and sundry others all offer tuners at prices from $115 to $150 which are hard to distinguish in performance at less than 100 miles pickup range. There is a Collins (direct-mail purchase) remote-control unit upcoming which must be reckoned with. There is the very imposing Altec at $279, which incorporates AM and an excellent preamplifier. There is the REL (Radio Engineering Laboratories, Armstrong’s own company) “Precedent” model, priced at over $300 and built to function troublefree forever.

In general I am against combined tuner-preamplifiers. They offer an economy in control panels, it is true. But they subtract from your whole system’s flexibility. If you acquire a tape recorder, and want to get a control unit with an output tap, why should you have to replace your radio tuner as well as your preamp? Or, if you want to outfit yourself for AM-FM binaural reception, via a new two-way tuner, why should you have to replace your preamplifier as well?

Which brings up the question of AM. Should you get an FM-only or an FM-AM tuner? People in areas ill-served with FM obviously should buy the latter. So should jazz enthusiasts in the New York area, since WNEW has no FM outlet. People in Iceland and Cuba should ignore FM entirely, and get AM and short-wave tuners (Browning makes one now: $87 and reasonably hi-fi, which the traditional short-wave receivers are not). Apart from that, the question is: Do you want to receive binaural broadcasts?

Stereophonic broadcasts, embodying truly three-dimensional sound, now are fairly common fare on both coasts and in the Great Lakes area. And there is no doubt that they afford the most vividly realistic music heard outside concert halls, even when a little portable AM radio provides the second hearing-channel. Good AM reception, naturally, makes it much better.

So far, only Browning and National have taken this bait, building tuners in which the AM is independently tuned and has a separate output. To use these now for binaural reception, you need a second amplifier and loudspeaker. But it is only a matter of time until someone makes a reasonably priced combination amplifierloudspeaker unit, portable, to be used only as a binaural accessory. When I say reasonably priced, I mean $50$60. Any takers?

Record Reviews

Brahms: New Love-Song Waltzes, Op. 65 (Nadia Boulanger directing Flore Wend, soprano; Nancy Waugh, mezzo; Ungues Cuenod, tenor; Doda Conrad, bass; Jean Franeaix, co-pianist; Decca DL-9650: 12”). No Germanically oriented listeners need try this. It is French Brahms, performed dry as a vermouth cassis, and I think it is just perfect. The recording is adequate.

Nielsen: Violin Concerto (Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Mogens Wöldike conducting Danish State Radio Orchestra; HMV LHMV-22:12”). Often I have been adjured to appreciate Nielsen, but this is the first time I have done so. His music is genuinely exploratory; it rambles, but always purposefully; there is a sort of Thoreau-feel about it. This is a wonderful performance, and it has been beautifully recorded.

Schubert: Symphony No. 5 with Mendelssohn: Octet for Strings (Arturo Toscanini conducting NBC Symphony Orchestra; RCA Victor LM-1869: 12”). The Schubert goes too fast for me, but is in perfect proportion. The Mendelssohn races more gracefully, and is wonderful to hear in so virtuosic performance, though here with all the NBC strings at work — it is no octet. Recorded from a broadcast, but good nevertheless.

Thomson, Virgil: String Quartet No. 2 with Selluman, William: Voyage: Cycle of Piano Pieces (Juilliard String Quartet; Beveridge Webster, piano; Columbia ML-4987: 12”). Columbia has come forth with its regular summer offering of works labeled “Modern American Music Series,” of which (his record is the one which most took my fancy, particularly because of the Thomson Quartet, written seventeen years ago. It is at once as classical and as unmistakably modern as anything could be, and has in it some of the nicest combinations of the wry and the beautiful that any age can offer. Sometimes I think many modern composers write principally for each other, and put most of their work into seeking novelty, but not Mr. Thomson, who clearly has something to say to us and wants it understood. The Schuman piano cycle was named by Martha Graham when she used it for ballet purposes. It has a kind of purposely clumsy charm, set off by aerated lyricism in style reminiscent of Ravel. Both works are devotedly performed and Columbia has recorded them very well.