As noted here in my last installment (December 1980) my audio life history on paper is still decelerating; it has now practically passed real time and I'm beginning to lose ground. That would end up in a curious kind of infinity, I fear.
You may remember that I left you with that incredible and massive early hi-fi system of 1936, out of Federal Telegraph, presented to schools and colleges by Carnegie along with an enormous collection of 78-rpm records. I arrived at Princeton University almost the day this thing began to come in, and we spent weeks unpacking the huge boxes of breakable discs and filing them away on reinforced shelves. The hi-fi itself then called merely a "phonograph" was set up in a sizable lecture hall, all concrete, top, bottom and sides, with a stage in front and an upslope of study type seats, the ones with the (right-handed) arm platform for taking notes and writing exams in blue books. If you can imagine a more dreadful place to listen to "grrreat music," I can't. It was poisonous. But music profs in those days (and now?) didn't think much about listening acoustics, as I have noted before. Point the speaker straight at the student, open up the volume, then start searching for the Second Theme or whatever, via the well-known squawk method. No wonder most of our students abandoned music five minutes after the final exams.
That 1936 machine really should be somewhere in an audio museum. It was astonishing. The turntable was a 16-inch professional heavyweight, a Rek-O-Kut, maybe, or forerunner of same: Massive platter, huge swinging pulleys that disengaged via a screw-down handle, with power switch. On it was mounted a long 16-inch professional straight tonearm (straight arms are the latest thing in 1982?) which allowed leeway for professional transcriptions, those huge discs, both lacquers and pressings, which preceded the days of tape. This, of course, made for superior tracking angles on the ordinary twelves and tens of the shellac 78-rpm repertory. An RCA horseshoe magnet pickup provided an adequate point pressure of seven or eight ounces or more. If you accidentally dragged that thing over the surface of a shellac disc, you not only left a gouge of Grand Canyon proportions but you produced, unless the vast speaker and its amp were first turned way down, a roar and a gigantic rasp like three old-fashioned boiler factories. The walls shook, the ears curled, faces blanched it was an absolutely new and terrifying sonic experience for all of us. I had occasion, over the next three years, to hear that horrible noise far more often than I wished.
I don't remember much about the (tube) amp, but it was plenty potent enough to power the 18-inch woofer (in 1936!) and the two heavy tweeters, the first I had ever seen or heard. The machine was marked as flat to 15,000 cycles although, not knowing of Bell Labs et al., we had no material of any sort which would test that remarkable sonic range. The magnetic cartridge broke off at around 4000, and when we later added an AM tuner (no FM then) things were even worse. Somebody didn't know enough to build us a wide band TRF tuner, which just might have brought Toscanini and the famed NBC Orchestra to us with genuine highs. No such luck.
The speaker box was no open-back. The structure, if I remember correctly, was an enclosed bass reflex affair and stood as high as a man, weighing hundreds of pounds. Carnegie was out to provide state-of-the-art, you may be sure. It took three or four of us to move that thing, on the few occasions when it was necessary. My very first act, however, was to tip the thing over on its back and shoot the enormous sound straight upwards at the concrete ceiling. Much more listenable that way, though people were shocked at the impropriety of it.
Alas, my class sections, small groups out of the hundreds that took our "music appreciation" course, were held in a small room equipped with an ordinary phonograph, i.e. a two-foot box complete with three-watt amp and mini speaker. I did my best, but music via records was not then exactly a delight to hear, especially for students who couldn't have cared less in the first place. At least, I had learned long since NEVER to squawk. I produced only nice noises, let me tell you, and if I had to search for a tune or a special place, I did it with almost inaudible volume, as a matter of course. That helped.
Not so our distinguished Professor and Head of the Music Department, who gave the main lectures in that dreadful concrete lined hall. He never failed to turn the volume up to the top BEFORE starting to look for the music he wanted--and then was sorely affronted at the hideous noises forthcoming. He HATED the phonograph. It was surely the bane of his daily life. And it never seemed to occur to him that he himself had anything to do with it. I tried, respectfully, to educate him; it was no use. He drove that machine the way people drove autos in the "git a boss!" era. Whenever he could, he turned to the grand piano that was always handy; he was a sometime pianist and that machine, at least, he could keep under control.
One year, this Professor had the bad luck to get himself mixed up with some of his Physics Department senior colleagues who were into building amps and the like almost everybody of a scientific sort did it. These gents, alas, told him that what he really needed was a better control unit (that is what we today would call it) and they would be happy to build him one with their own hands. Plus superpower amp. The Prof. didn't ask my advice. I was merely a small mouse, a nobody; these were, after all, Full Professors.
I think you can guess what happened.
They went to town and built the damndest piece of gadgetry you ever saw, with 50 incomprehensible controls and a couple of square feet of messy wiring, surrounded by vicious razor-edge hunks of chassis material. Moreover, in their joyous enthusiasm, they rushed the thing over, hot off the soldering iron, for the Professor's weekly big lecture to a packed house (required attendance). Testing? That could wait.
The lecture started and after a suitable build-up (he was good at that), the Professor turned dramatically to the new equipment, in the use of which he had had five minutes of coaching. The switch went on and out came a horrendous blat such as you have never heard, if you merely buy your own hi-fi and do not make it yourself. Startled, the poor Prof jumped at the nearest control which, of course, was the volume. A roar went out that could be heard for miles and at this point he lost his head, dropped the arm on a record, and recoiled to the sound of an agonized screech. (Open circuit, men. That's what started the trouble. No doubt a resin ground in the pickup department.) It was mayhem. Absolute disaster.
To my certain knowledge, that machine was never turned on again in our presence. We reverted to the lesser but safer terrors of Federal Telegraph's original construction. The enthusiastic physics profs retired to their labs and never came forth. Live and learn.
So you wonder why I am occasionally a bit bothered by our new turntables with automatic remote-control arms? They, too, can emit blats, if you drop the stylus on an unintended loud passage. And these days we have the power to surpass even that 1936 roar. Nevertheless, I loved that old, big machine. Because I tamed it and made it mine. It would do wonderful things, I assure you, and it did them for me.
When, after three years of teaching "appreciation," I removed to a new job in New York City as one-man music department in a tony female junior college, I ran into an amazing and helpful coincidence: Just as I arrived for my new duties, the Carnegie Collection, complete with an updated 1939 model phonograph system even better than the earlier one, arrived at the college for me to play with. And this time I was my own boss.
My only problem was the students. Alas, they got to use the big machine for study purposes. They kept its volume suitably low it was in the school library! But I quickly found that they usually played the Carnegie records with "needles" that had no points, only jagged shards of metal. So, needles aside, another four years of advanced hifi opened out to me via that endlessly rewarding monster which again treated me to its best, in response to my own concern for getting the best out of it.
As you can guess, I was not ever going to be satisfied with mere classroom hi-fi. I loved records. I was fascinated by reproduced music and, as already related, had studied the "phenomenon" of this new way of music listening for many years, during a time when most people, and virtually all music professors, were immune to the thought that the listening area, the "room situation," might be of some importance for musical results. Like the electronic music lab today, the phonograph was the latest music teaching "must." But it was still a nasty machine that you pointed at people and then turned on. Canned music.
Fortunately, most phonographs were really not very loud, including the ordinary console or "sit-down" models that were used in classrooms. Even at full distorted volume, the sound, though unpleasant, did not cause acute agony.
Only when the extremely rare 1930s hi-fi came into play, state-of-the-art equipment with real power and tonal range, did we find ourselves deep into trouble. It was shocking, distressing in the extreme, to hear one of those monsters misused, and most people instantly jumped to the inevitable wrong conclusion give me my small home phonograph! You couldn't really blame them.
It was surely the most difficult aspect of our entire early hi-fi, this problem of coping with larger, wider range sounds.
The aftereffects of disasters such as I have described went on for years and persist even now. How about the early High Fidelity Shows? Incredible cacophony. Are we much better today? Sometimes. Not always. I am grateful every time Bert Whyte chides a CES demonstrator for badly managed sound.
There are plenty of us who still do not understand.
Even today, if I may draw the moral, our biggest collective problem in actual hi-fi usage is that still, all too often, we do not know how to make the best sonic use of the equipment we own or sell.
We have every aid, from top-quality sound itself and the immensely helpful spreading out of two-channel stereo and its various extenders via extra channels, all the way through NR and companders and down to old-fashioned tone controls and new-fashioned equalizers for room adjustments. We are geometrically close to perfection in the actual chain of reproduction. But to what avail? Well, even so, never forget that the sound of reproduced music was astonishingly popular in the 1930s and we loved it. Just as we loved our cars, which never seemed more wonderful than in those heady days. Do you think I needed super-fi to enjoy my budding record collection? Though I learned how to use it when I had it. Do you think I needed a heater and snow tires to go skiing in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in mid-winter? Never heard of such things.
But I got there and back with few complaints and much pleasure. So it was with audio. We enjoyed as many good experiences then as we do now, I assure you. I should know. Along with CBS, I was there. As they say, it's all relative.
by Edward Tatnall Canby (adapted from Audio magazine, Feb. 1982)
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