Audio, Etc. (May 1972)

by Edward Tatnall Canby

TO MY INTENSE astonishment, I discover that I am the only remaining active participant of the original team that was involved in our memorable First Issue, back in May of 1947. To be sure, I didn't have much to do with it-but I was there. And to be sure, C. G. McProud, our guiding light for so many years, is still with us, checking out enticing new audio items for our Equipment Profiles. But he officially is retired; and it is the way all good engineers should retire, he continues working. So that leaves me.

Back in 1947, C.G. McProud was the possessor of a brand-new FM tuner and the managing editor of a new magazine. I was the purveyor, since 1943, of a local New York FM radio program (and still am). McProud tuned in Canby.

Aha! There's the man for our new record review department, he said. And since the McProud apartment was right around the corner from me in Greenwich Village, we quickly came to an informal agreement, amid Siamese cats and other hi fi gear. I was to write reviews with an audio-ish slant. And so I did-pages of them, done up in microscopic small print.

John Potts, for whom the Award was later named, was then editor. The office was somewhere comfortably cubby-holed in New York's midtown region, where I could drop in to chew the rag whenever my copy was ready for delivery.

I often did, and I view our present distant Philadelphia headquarters with a jaundiced eye.

My only real problem, then, was weight. Not my own (135) but that of the enormous packages of 78 rpm records that so persistently arrived, and had to be lifted. I had a top floor in an old Village brick house, with neither doorman nor super. When the postman arrived with 100 pounds of shellac records, nobody would be at home. The inevitable notice would be left at the door, discovered by me on my return five minutes later. So I would resignedly set off to walk the fifteen-odd blocks down to the P.O. (we walk to the P.O. in New York)-only to find that the package was still out on the truck, and ,come back tomorrow. Fifteen […] I would arrive home, to […] notice, for a second package, under my door. A couple of years of that and I had to move out.

Fortunately, we suffered only about a year of the exclusive 78 shellac. In 1948 the LP arrived and by 1950 there were no more of the breakable heavyweights to tax my lifting powers. In 1949, those cute little RCA 45 classical albums appeared. I still have a few of them on display, as souvenirs. On my back shelf is the gadget they sent me to play them with, the Treasure Chest.

That was RCA's high-style mahogany 45 changer. Right next to it is RCA's high-style mahogany 8-track player, another lovely souvenir. Oddly, it played 8-track pop tapes nicely but tore up two Beethoven Concertos and a Symphony, one right after the other.

I keep them as souvenirs too.

As for the 45, it soon retired into the 200-play traveling-crane jukebox, where it has lived happily ever after to the tune of billions. And the 8-track is neatly ensconced in a million automobiles and thousands of boats, snowmobiles and the like. So our classical reviews have been simplified and my life with them. They're still based on the LP disc, whether one-channel, two or four.

On points, the LP remains the best purveyor of real classical music.

I long ago retailed the story of how 1 "fell" into audio, out of music and record reviewing. In the early days I quickly discovered that in the very presence of real, honest-to-God audio equipment I simply could not write merely about music. Audio, with music as its main reproductive goal, was just too interesting not to write about. So my department fell into two parts, the second half being named, on the spur of the moment, "Audio, E.T.C.," a designation happily revived for me by our present editor. I have been learning about audio ever since, and I quail at the thought of how little I knew, not to mention how much I still don't know.

But as they say, capacity to learn is what really matters in this world. I have worked hard, over these 25 years, especially during those big moments when audio has moved on to something new, like stereo or our present quadraphonic sound. My teachers were the best brains in the business-thank the Lord, as I always say. My job has been to digest, interpret, and hopefully to add a bit to our perspective at the interface, the crucial wavefront, where audio and music work together.

I think this 25th year of our publication has in this respect been the toughest I can remember. Don't talk to me of the Battle of the Matrices! It was my Battle of the Matrix, and I haven't won it mathematically yet to my entire satisfaction. After all, I flunked out of math, as a kid, just when we got to sines and cosines and angles of geometry--and here I am swallowing quantities of phasing geometrics of a sort that would have turned me pale in college. Little did I know that music would lead me to trig like a horse to water, and make me drink too. So much for continuing education! It keeps one alive.

As a survivor of our modest 1947 beginnings, I suppose I should now promulgate words of wisdom for all you chillun' who read our magazine today.

Well, I have 'em all right. I have invented a Constant. It's something. It ranks with such enormous ponderables as e = mc^2 and--of course--Planck's Constant. As a special 25th Anniversary bonus, I hereby present it to you, no strings.

The Canby Constant helps explain why there is such an oddly diminishing distance, for you charter subscribers, between our successive Anniversary Issues, which come regularly every five years. They seem to get closer and closer, seems I barely finished writing for the last one. But my Constant takes you a lot further. It also explains why Methuselah, if that's how he spelled it, didn't live any longer than 1000 years and Moses had to give up at-was it? 800. According to my theory, these gentry were approaching a mathematical time infinity, just as a small baby is leaving one, at the other end of life.

Infinities are total barriers. You can't get past them. The Canby Constant says that for each of us, our personal sense of time begins and ends in infinity. An awesome idea, if I do say so.

Let me be specific. My better instincts tell me that I should avoid reduction of the Constant to algebra, that being my traditional bête moire, but, this being our 25th, I'll wax reckless and give it a try. So hold on tight now, while I venture onto thin ice: Er, hmmmm. Let's see ... have to have an x or something, don't I? Or on second thought, maybe not, since I'm not looking for an unknown. Forget about x. What I need is symmetry-for the eye. How about, say, Le=m=c? Not thick enough. Maybe Csq=m^2 Ic? That's heftier. Nope, don't like it. Not aesthetic. My Constant has to look right, and damn the torpedoes. I've got it! LI = FE^2. That's good-an acronym.

Suggestive. Can't have algebra that isn't suggestive, these days. LI = FE2! That's what .I'm talking about. Not to mention some species of iron oxide in that FE2 business. But does it all make sense? Maybe I'd just better revert to my special forte and give it to you in good old words.

The Canby Constant says that the apparently perceived length of your past life, stretching back from the present to your earliest recollections, remains always precisely the same-no matter how old or young you are. A fixed time span.

And, as a corollary, the element that changes is the length of the included time units-the days, months, years that have passed and continue to pass. They get shorter. And shorter. Geometrically.

Now that's some idea, isn't it. Worth thinking about. It's like the horizon as you drive across a flat plain, seemingly never closer; the miles look shorter in the background as you drive on; they're longer in the foreground. Life is the same reversed. The nearby years are the shortest, and keep getting shorter.

Or, if you wish, it's like a reversed VU meter with its fixed scale running the wrong direction. The volume units are spread out at the left end (your early years) and all bunched up geometrically at the right end (the present). The length of the meter scale is fixed.

Only the length of the equal units change on the scale, from one end to the other.

To a seven year old, life seems just as long, looking back, as it does to you looking back. To him, a year is an age. He can scarcely remember last year, one seventh of a lifetime back! Second graders do not even speak to first graders. Siblings born a year or so apart live in different childhood worlds though in old age they are as twins. It's all a matter of proportion.

Twins born ten minutes apart are half-a-lifetime separated in those first twenty minutes. The childhood term "grown-up" reflects the vast stretches of inconceivable time to come, for the childish mind unused to proportional thinking. Even the 18 year old sees a 24 year old as a grown up. The college freshman bows to the senior, four long years beyond him, almost a quarter of his life. Listen to your own ten year old, talking so wisely about his day, his gravely experienced years, already so very far into things as they are. He has lived just as long a life as you--he feels that way inside. Only his time units are different. Much bigger.

At the other end of life, those units get smaller and smaller. Days go by at an increasingly dizzy speed, summer and winter blur together-where does it end? At infinity! When you are 70, you'll be 80 in no time at all. No wonder Moses had to quit. And no wonder, the other way, that your own recollections at age 3 or 4 are so unreliable. Too close to an infinity of time-length. Time was so enormous, at that stage, that you can no longer relate your present lings to any reasonable facsimile of …. were too close to your own … back at the moment of birth, or maybe, conception. Phew! Imagine a lifetime looking back five minutes.

The Canby Time Constant is ultra-simple, like all great Constants. From now back to babyhood, every elapsed lifetime remains always of a size, year after year, as the time units go by and recede into the distance, faster and faster. As for me, 25 years with this magazine does seem quite awhile, but not really that long. My perspective goes on back still further, you see. That quarter century is merely the latter half of my life, which in geometric terms, the diminishing size of the year, means maybe at the last quarter or less.

That's how it feels. Time is proportion, as we perceive it. Time is like pitch, which is also preceived in proportions, not numerically. The only personal Time-Constant is the unchanging life-stretch... . Well, if I'm around for our 50th, I'll have to type terribly fast to get to the printers before the 75th flashes up for me. But in that year, 2022, Audio will surely still be popping along, full of the latest info on centaphonic sound, 100-channel and spread all over your walls like activated wallpaper. Each 2022 speaker unit will of course be A/V, a combined solid-state sound emanator and a light-emitting semi-conductor laser, for an integrated reproduction of sound and picture together, out of recordings (mini-cartridges?) and via broadcast. I mean it. I can hardly wait.

It's no joke, this. Real life. But, alas, by that time infinity will have caught up with me, and so I'll have to skip it.

(Audio magazine, May 1972; Edward Tatnall Canby)

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