WHERE AMERICA SCHLOCKS
by EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
Footprints in the sands of time.
Here today and gone tomorrow.
Am I in a cynical mood this month! Some of the great new ideas in componentry strike me as all too much like those footprints, and may they vanish in a hurry. They probably won't.
I have a picture in front of me which , has been bugging me for weeks, out of an Annual Stockholders' Report from a giant conglomerate. Marriage of TV and hi-fi componentry, huh? You should see this.
Grotesque. What I call a typical NOW product, dizzily incorporating every evanescent fad that its designers think might bring in some more cash. We'll soon have zillions, one in every living room.
I'm going to have to describe this still unlaunched NOW monstrosity (as of present writing) or I'll bust with irritation. But I will end up with some sober comment that might be useful and constructive. However, to save my soul, I'm going to have to use my ETC credit (i.e., the etc. in my title) to go further into footprints-for there's philosophy there that I find fascinating. There is a connection--isn't the very idea of NOW an ever-changing footprint in the flow of time? Okay, here's how I got into this surprising mood. I get these Annual Reports every so often, even one from a gold mine (one share, a party favor at a hi-fi press conference).
[Editor's Note: Ardent consumer advocates and the underground press should note that this penny stock has never declared a dividend and, indeed, has cost me more in Post Office forwarding fees and stamps for the proxy statements than the share is worth. -E.P.]
Big glossy books (the bigger the corp., the glossier), full of color pix of giant machines, blue, red and yellow, towering oil rigs, ranks of smiling workers, triumphant annual meetings with banners aloft, the chairman of the board, beaming and ruddy; the president, same.
Plus a lot of figures that, oddly, always add up the same. (Accounting is one of the mysteries of my life.) Also-and particularly in the booklet I'm talking about a confidential photo glance at the company's superb future products, so cannily designed (lab technician in white gown) for the benefit of every stockholder.... That's where I jumped. Here was a picture of a Thing, un-nameable, under the heading of Recent Developments, with "futuristic looks and features," which for a second I could not believe. All sorts of zany images flashed through my mind. A dentist's work console, one of those things they wheel up to you just before the drill starts? An X-ray machine for--major surgery? Ir--An artificial kidney? I But then it struck me that what it really reminded me of was a gas range. A big old-fashioned stove, squared-off 1920s Art Deco, with great over-hanging upper works above the cooking surface, maybe a smoke hood or even an overhead oven. Incongruously, down at the bottom were four big, black dolly wheels. I could just see pop towing this latest gadget stove behind him around the kitchen as the quiche cooked. Even now, at the 900th glance, the thing still looks like a gas stove. A gas range with wings, yet! Two tiny, square, angel wings up at the top that couldn't lift a fly, let alone a kitchen stove.
But, of course, it isn't a kitchen stove. It's Component TV with Component Hi-Fi.
I've named this thing the Gas Range System and I hope it will fade away as soon as the next low tide. It is the purest example of NOW, shortsighted, ugly, ill-assembled, unthinking, and no doubt designed to sell fast. But this is a big company and what it does for the millions, the others will do as well. I fear that it is a picture of our immediate audio future, if we persist in getting mixed up with video in a NOWish way.
Give me a breath, then-I have to talk about footprints before I give you the flashy details.
The footprint in sand is an age-old metaphor for the fleeting quality of all things human, and for the NOW that is forever a tiny moving instant in the great fourth dimension, the endlessness of time itself. It's odd, then, that real footprints are actually the oldest and most abundant record of ancient developed animal life, if by sheer accident-the preservation of a typically brief and immediate NOW, just like our own but displaced casually by thousands or millions of years. This is uncanny when you think about it. I can't forget that marvelous triple set of small barefoot human prints discovered a few years ago, three little hominids walking across a long stretch of squishy volcanic ash hundreds of thousands of years ago (I've mentioned them before), the whole episode maybe three or four minutes long. Was their sense of NOW at that moment really any different from ours today? The present! That's what always counts. Was it maybe the 19th of November at 2:38 p.m. in the year 469,742 B.C.? Or maybe 1,008,356? I forget the dating. They never knew, or cared. Why bother? Then there was that great herd of dinosaurs, carnivorous monsters, that one day a good many million years ago charged simultaneously in a long line across a mud flat in the upper Connecticut valley, leaving great prints behind. So these beasts hunted in packs? That seems to be the scientific message. But again the whole thing took maybe three or four minutes, a very vivid NOW, a spectacular sight if you had been there (and safely out of the way). But no dinosaur had the sense in his pea brain to look either backwards or forwards in time for his own good. For him the footprint of NOW must have been almost instantaneous. Big animal in a small present.
Do we do any better? Sometimes.
We have the brains. But mostly, NOW is just as shortsighted as ever.
Look at this ever-moving NOW, the present's imprint on time. Maybe a good figure of speech for today would be, not footprints in the sand, but footprints on asphalt and concrete. "Footprint" is the proper term for the impact of an auto tire on a flat surface. A very small oval, shorter than a man's print but a bit wider.
When the car moves (which is its purpose and destiny), that small oval-moving in time as well as space-becomes astonishingly like the NOW of the ever-changing present. It is there and measurable, yet never the same, continuously changing, just as our lives move in time. Nice concept! What we can use, in both cases, is a bigger, broader, longer NOW for more traction. A better grip, on the road, and on our human destiny. Some of us have that grip, even some of our big corporations, though not the one which will perpetrate the Gas Range System.
Our best audio equipment shows it, the bigger NOW. We can all name classics of audio design that have shown this sense of a larger present, a better awareness, a bigger footprint on the eight-lane superhighway of modern life.
The contact point, the NOW, of an idealized wheel on a flat surface is thus infinitely small, a point with no dimensions at all. That is the ultimate, instantaneous NOW! A present that is deprived of all sense and reality. Sometimes I think a few of us are that limited.
We think like a point.
One more small step and I'll have my breath back. If we look again at the ideal wheel contact as an expression of the NOW, the present in the great expanse of time itself, then we must admit that not only is that theoretical NOW a point, but the wheel of time is infinitely large; on such a wheel you never get to see a repeat, always new wheel edge coming 'round the bend.
Does time repeat? Not so you'd notice.
You know, the actual components of my Gas Range System, taken individually and each for its own proper place and function in the larger scene, really aren't bad, nor in any way unusual. It's the ghastly ensemble of this particular System that hurts, the mindlessly misdirected clutter of incompatibilities, of a sort that we will soon see in a thousand other TV Component offerings, I am all too sure. Matching components? That's just what they are not.
Take them out and set them all in a line and you have the story. First, here, you have the cart, the dolly, a big, heavyweight substitute for a rack that might carry 500 pounds.
On the lower shelf, clearly removable, is what looks to be a VCR of current conventional, if bulky, format. It should be fairly standard, I expect, whatever the details. Also reliable and of good quality. VCRs do not come cheap (yet), and few of them are of the junky sort. Nature of the beast itself. By every indication, this is a quality example of a component that the video people have long since brought to maturity. It's probably as good as they come, but expensive.
On the upper shelf rests a large TV "monitor" of the latest sort, elegantly thin-framed, black surround, no doubt weighing plenty. (I could barely move the one I recently rented.) A fine unit on its own and, again, surely of state-of-the-art commercial quality. They don't really come cheapie, these big ones.
I'd be glad to have this TV-set-without-the-works on any suitable support in my own living room, if I felt I needed a unit that probably should be viewed no nearer than three or four yards away.
So there we have one-half of the Gas Range ensemble, two high-class and very classy video units, surely not far below the general top of the available range. But now we come to the other half of the "marriage," the audio.
Hanging just below the upper shelf that carries the monitor is a much slimmer component that is apparently the audio center. Details are not very visible in my photo, but there is a black strip to the right with what are clearly two peak-level indicators. We assume a power amp somewhere inside which could logically rate anywhere from 3 watts per channel up-but not very far.
For one thing, there is no visible ventilation; the unit fits spang against the bottom of the upper shelf. Highly unlikely that it puts out 100 or 150 watts per channel! And if it did, what of the speakers? Get to them in a moment.
On the left of this same audio unit there likely is an audio-cassette play/record, or a radio, or maybe both. Can't be sure. This is the usual. And all in the one unit. I could be wrong-it might be a $1,000 Technics--type thin component with all sorts of marvelous goodies within. But again-the speakers.
Well, here comes absurdity. They are those two little "angel wings" that grace my gas range and couldn't lift a fly, let alone a stove. Two oblong excrescences attached on each side of the handsome video monitor, little boxes maybe seven or so inches tall and an inch or two deep. That is the speaker department of the Gas Range Sys tem! Heaven forbid, is all I can say.
Does this tell plenty about the rest of the audio componentry? Yes, the mini speakers are no doubt removable for stereo, but how desirable would that be? You'd better stick to your simulcasts and a genuine audio hi-fi component system if you want real stereo.
So there you have the Gas Range and some of its siblings to come. Mish-mash messes, hooking top-line expensive TV gear to bottom-line minimum audio (though better than what preceded it, perhaps). They should remove that monitor tube and put in a microwave oven. It would be more suitable.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Apr. 1983; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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