Audio, Etc. (Mar. 1974)

Total Everything

1. End of an Era

Well, it really is the end of an Age, and the beginning of another. Who'd have believed it? These are days we will all remember. The old era of limitless bigger and better, the More and the Most, is a dead duck. Or rather a tired jalopy, clean out of gas.

We are going to have to convert our thinking and our acting to a new age, unaccustomed as we are, an age of economy and careful common sense. What an order, for us, the biggest free spenders on earth! We'll do it, though, and it won't do us a bit of harm. Far from it. Not even in audio. But it's going to take a lot of new ingenuity, applied in strange new ways. Not how can we make MORE and still more, but how can we make more with less. How do we get along with what we have, and not very much of that? Unthinkable, but healthy. Turn that thermostat down, buster.

Luckily for us, we still have the know-how. There is still plenty of that well-known Yankee horse sense around, the envy of much of the world, the ability to. DO. It's the truth! Living in Europe awhile last summer, I could actually feel it and see it. To observe how other people can bog down into frustrating complexity, where we at home would sail blithely right on through, is to marvel that with all our problems we really are still the original big-time industrial country. It's not just money. It's thinking, acting. Thinking out a system and carrying it all the way through, making it work no matter how complex or big. Or small. We are so direct-we move so fast! We boil things to essentials in moments, we know how to function and to get on with it, we demand results, or else, and we get them or quit. If we must, we also know how to change, to backtrack like lightning, cut our losses, come out roaring in another direction. We are still uniquely flexible. Flexible, that is, when we have a mind to. We very seldom bog down into the unworkable in our enormous expanse of industry. Go man, or get out.

Trouble is we've been misapplying our talents. Now we get back to basics and use our leverage where it counts. Back to Ben Franklin, to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford! With all the modern trimmings. The last Frontier is gone, the Petroleum Frontier. Just try, young man, to Go West on petroleum. (Was it Horace Greeley said it?) Young man, if you do try that, you will not get from New York to Hoboken. As for the Nuclear Frontier, it isn't out of the ground yet and the idea of limitless energy that way is a pipe dream (but more power to it). So off to work, fellows and gals, to see what we can do with what we have. It'll be fun. Grueling fun.

* * *

On my work desk, for instance, sit two file boxes in which for years I've dumped the detritus a writer always files under his ABC. One file is made of ordinary office metal, finished a dull gray. Undistinguished. The other, identical in size and operation, taking the same hanging file folders, is made of wood, a rather elegant veneer. I like it. That box was a product of WW II. No metal! So they converted to wood, and did better than ever. Good job.

Then, back in my closet, there is a pile of old ETs, electrical transcriptions, big shiny lacquer discs professionally cut for studio and off-the air recordings in the days before tape. Most are of me, so I could find out how I sounded. (I sounded awful.) Nothing special about these oldies, the big 16-inchers and the 12-inch 78s (so I could play them at home). The usual aluminum base blanks, cut with good-looking grooves (wish they sounded that good). But a half dozen or so are different. On the envelope is a big red label. GLASS. These, too, date from the depths of WW II. No metal. So they converted the ET to glass, and went right on recording. Some of those glass discs sound better than the metal base discs that came after the war. Hold the disc up to the light and you can see right through the lacquer, a deep purple red. That was some breakthrough, if I may coin a breakable pun. It's the kind of thing we will be doing these days.

You know, it is quite possible that we may some day convert to glass discs. More in a few moments. Materials like that are the things we will now keep our beady little eyes upon, just in case. It's a material that we have, and it isn't petroleum based. Suddenly, things like that are important. They should be. As for wood, you can never tell when that ancient, reliable and renewable raw material is going to turn out to be the best thing for a job. Hey, you kids, did you know we once used wooden phonograph styli? I tried them. The "needle" wasn't even round; it was square. You had a cutter-slicer gadget and you sliced off a new edge for every record side, if you had the patience. Built-in automatic noise filter, around 3 kHz and nothing higher. You couldn't possibly chip the shellac record, even if you tried.

So the new age is here, and I am glad. I am fascinated with the possibilities for us Americans, once we really accept the economical sanity that is about to break upon us. Just look back--we're already that far away--on the dizzy, zany age that is now gone. An era, you know, is often better reflected by its words, what it says, than what it does. For years I've been writing down the Bigger-and Better dillies that I overhear, in conversations, off the air, just so I can remember them and so that posterity, some of it, may read and marvel.

Take my favorite grammatical nonsense out of that age, all too familiar, what I call the Dangling Comparison. (That idea comes from the dangling participle of our English classes: "Taking off his shoes, they went swimming.") It is, rather, a limitless non-comparison, hanging tantalizingly, unfulfilled, absolutely meaningless (but oh-so persuasive). Part of our general madness in these last fine years! The Dangling Comparison is useful, all right. "Kris pie Krunch give you MORE." More what? They never say. More everything, anything. Sounds so good. Ginger ale is better. Oh yeah? Gasoline is faster. And liquor is quicker. You get the idea. How could you help it? Listen to this genuine one, taken off the air in the very middle of Bigger and Better, Hallowe'en eve, Oct. 31, 1965. A new FM station in the New York region. It described itself thus: "This is station XXXX-FM-where more New Yorkers listen to the most, in stereo." Well, I'm a more New Yorker, all right. As a New Yorker, after all, I must be more. But have I ever listened to the most? That's a question. I can do you better, with the quote that is the title of this piece. It was real. On June 6th of 1966, I rushed to my typewriter to get down this succinct dilly of a commercial message. It sums up the whole crazy, wonderful age we are now leaving. “Enjoy Total Everything--All Day!" End of message. End of era.

* * *

Will our present sh---ges (don't say that word!) mean, shortly, that fewer New Yorkers will be listening to the least, in mono? I doubt it. I think that we may even be able to enjoy Total Everything, if we are really careful.

All day, too. But it's going to take every bit of our traditional ingenuity, swung over to a new viewpoint, a new game plan. I expect, then, that I will be into a lot of the facets of our own audio area these next months, as seen along such stimulating and challenging new lines. I'm not bearish. I just believe in keeping the eyes open, the better to see ahead. The power of positive thinking, yes?

2. Noise

Look briefly at audio noise. It's a big thing, these days. It'll get to be an even bigger thing, I suspect, as those sh---ages (don't mention them!) ease their way into our taken-for-granted quality standards. Noise in sound reproduction is maybe the first thing to be affected by our, er, changed circumstances. It isn't yet. I'm just looking confidently ahead.

Confidently, because of the wealth of superb thinking and engineering that has gone into noise reduction in these last few years. There's Dolby, and JVC, and in another general category, DBX and Burwen, and the Editor can probably add a dozen more right here. Whatever the brand, the fact is that most of these systems have been primarily occupied with the fruitful area of tape. The tape makers, too, hand in hand with noise reduction electronics. Lovely cooperation, from two vantage points, the tape itself and the selective suppression of unwanted residual noise. But noise reduction must go where the noise is. Noise is where there exists an imperfect medium-tape, for instance. But noise, too--do not forget--is when deterioration sets in. And where will that be but on disc. That is where my mind is roaming right now.

In WW II, you may remember, our supply of shellac for discs was inconveniently cut off by the Enemy, who took over and wouldn't send us any. Plastics? They went to war, but weren't advanced to the point of usefulness in 78s. So what did ingenuity do? For lack of any other solution, we suddenly found ourselves turning in an old shellac record for every new one we bought. Round and round! Reprocessing. (Where have I heard that term before?) This Spartan approach kept the record biz more or less alive for a number of crucial years. I wouldn't say it thrived. It existed. We had new records. Of course the quality, never any too good in terms of noise, went from awful to subliminal and horrendous.. Better horrendous noise, we thought, noise and music 50/50, than no music at all. So we bought records, and we played records, on the recirculating basis.

We could do a lot better now. It might come to pass, I'd say, that one of these days we will start recirculating our present wad of vinyl. It would save untold tons of petroleum. That's enough to make us think twice, and stay one step ahead of the allocations. If this were to happen, the first big challenge would land on the reprocessors, to make old vinyl sound like new. We are good at things like that. But we start off, in this case, with near-total silence on our present discs, whereas shellac's loud old hiss covered a multitude of sins. With our best efforts, recycled vinyl noise levels would creep up only slowly, quite slowly. Heroic efforts to minimize the effect.

The reprocessors would soon have allies. A second approach is the use of noise reduction circuits. If our present noise reducers were to adapt themselves from tape towards disc, we could have new means to combat possible sonic deterioration. Between the reprocessors and the noise circuit people, I think we could do some amazing things, to Preserve Our Natural Resources and keep the disc alive. Dolby, of course, has already spread out into other areas than tape: optical film tracks, FM stereo broadcasts. I was interested to find that DBX now has a disc noise reduction system, the whole two-step bit, code and decode, with special discs cut to the DBX characteristic and a decoding box to play them through. Total silence! (But there weren't any ticks to suppress:) No distortion that I could hear, on a once-through audition. I forgot to ask whether the discs could also be cut with SQ or CD-4 modulations. This system and/or others of a like nature could take care of a lot of problems, if and when. They just might have to.

But I doubt if present noise circuitry is the whole answer. Those ticks and pops, the violently on-off transients of vinyl noise, are very different from the less jagged noise you generally find on tape, which is what the present circuitry removes. The human ear is fiendishly sensitive to very tiny transients, the jagged kind, set against a silent background. You can hear a swarm of tiny ticks on vinyl that will scarcely register in a laboratory measurement.

Think back again to another time, when the great flood of LPs burst out in the early 1950s after the changeover from 78. It was the noisiest flood you ever heard, a billion ticks and pops a minute, and we just plain got used to it. Didn't even listen. That's one way out but it's not the best. Then came vinyl improvements, pressing improvements, and to-there were only a thousand ticks a minute, then a hundred. Fantastic. The first Dolby tapes brought us, finally, the first tick-free discs, their clarity at last revealed. Well, maybe not free. But nowadays you can play a record for a minute and not hear a single tick. Maybe three or four on a side is par for the course in good records right now. Down on the micro-scale of the stylus tip, though, it doesn't take micro-much to set off a very loud noise. Our present standards are almost too high to last.

Somehow, then, the noise reduction circuits, one-step direct and/or two-step code-decode, must begin to rethink themselves in terms of this thorny disc noise pollution, even before we have it, if we ever do. A rough challenge. It might be important. I would think that the immensely sophisticated computer-speed actions in this advanced type of circuitry might be able to do a lot for those swarms of ticks and pops. (If anybody needs samples, I have thousands from the 1950s.) If not to eliminate them, then to reduce them to genteel unobtrusiveness.

Maybe they can round off the jags, convert those vicious little sonic cliffs and gorges into smooth little hills, up and down as gently as you please. Like the live-audience concert coughs that get edited into gentle swishes. Maybe they could average the little hills down to a gray noise-and then simply remove the noise? Double action. I just can't wait for the pops and ticks to begin.

Oh yes--the glass disc. Just a rumor I heard, but I suspect it's out there. Of course, we have all sorts of discs waiting in the wings. Most of them involve far-out conversion, like the "TV discs," and so are impractical for the moment, at least in a big way. A glass disc is something else. Play anywhere.

The rumor (I'll call it a rumor, just to be safe) is that Corning has a special type of glass which can be pressed directly into grooves, and is flexible enough not to break easily. It does not use petroleum. Glass generally is made of sand and gravel and such junk, of which we would seem to have plenty all over the place. Eureka! What are we waiting for? Smooth as glass? Maybe this would solve all our noise problems in one fell swoop. So to heck with vinyl.

Well, not quite. Maybe this glass deal isn't yet right around the corner. We still might have to make do with the noisy stuff, as described above. If we must, then we will. So common sense says think vinyl, all the way. Until Corning takes over.

If we use our good heads this way, we should be ready for anything-glass, vinyl, maybe even shellac. And I'm not even talking about the day when sawdust makes its debut, all unheralded, as a vinyl extender. Or maybe pumice, mica, chicken feed. Who knows. I'm not being bearish because these things will not happen. But in our present circumstances we must think that they might and be ready. So many more challenges to our ingenuity! It'll be exciting.

(Audio magazine, Mar. 1974; Edward Tatnall Canby)

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