by Edward Tatnall Canby
Herewith another segment in my running audio-bio (see Audio, Jan., 1980),
otherwise known as "How I Fell Into Audio," recast and power-amped
out of two short pieces I wrote for this mag back in the 1950s.
I left you in the middle of my two pick-up playback of a 78-rpm record, one pick-up acoustic, the other electric, using the two primitive phono portables I then had on hand as a college student. It was a kid's stunt, no more, but as al ways it seemed to presage much that has happened since in more professional audio terms. Vast (and unexpected) synthetic reverb, thanks to delay be tween the two needles in the same groove. Distributed frequency bands (not unlike the later Bell Labs two-band experiment)--scratchy, tinny highs from one machine, muddy, tubby bass from the other, for the combined "wide" range. Wider, anyhow. Accidental surround sound, too--out of one loudspeaker and one set of acoustic doors, both aimed randomly in different directions.
I was always the outrageous experimenter via whatever came my way, and always unofficially. Once when my mother was away I got into her kitchen--aged nine, maybe--and concocted a monumental dish that included absolutely everything from Old Dutch Cleanser to raw eggs, heaping tablespoons of flour, soap flakes, oat meal, vinegar, Jello, and on down the line--I couldn't stop. Like a fine engineer, I was driven by some compulsion towards perfection. I am still the same, though my scope is now more limited. Make do (and more than do) with what you have at hand. That's always been my motto.
After a somewhat dismal year at the Great University, I moved on to another Great University which was pleased to have me if I didn't mind being a freshman all over again. No love wasted between universities in those days. So it was once again as a freshman that I roomed with an ultra-sophisticated young school friend who thought we really ought to have a big phonograph for respectable playing of our now-combined record collection. The thought of still another suitcase portable made me wince, and so we went right out and splurged our dollars on a second-hand but genuine console electric radio-phonograph (doubtless junked by some earlier freshmen). It was an extraordinary machine, that one, a stand-up job but still crafted out of the old Art Nouveau Victrola style, all curves and curlicues. It had a curious bulbous protuberance down below where the loudspeaker was hid den and, at the top, a hefty handle in a long, sidewise slot. To tune the radio you shoved this big handle back and forth in the fat slot. It always reminded me of a tongue stuck out between hideous grinning lips, and the bulbous thing down below was certainly a pot belly to match. It did have a certain dignity, I'll admit. Some readers may remember the breed.
Getting a Handle on Handel
This machine looked so good in our college room that we went out and bought some new records for it. Nothing small for us! The entire set of 12 Handel Concerti Grossi Op. 6, under Ansermet, an early 78 classic. And phew--Beethoven's huge Missa Solemnis in an album that must have weighed 20 pounds. I told you we were high-brow. Too high-brow. About halfway through the Missa Solemnis, four-minute sides ad infinitum, we looked at each other and agreed to a cease fire. Next day the album went back to the store.
But we liked the Handel, the best of easy Baroque (as we now call it), in spite of some really dreadful sounds from the records. They seemed to be defective. Some very heavy bass, and that bass was almost unlistenable, all broken up and buzzy and blasty and generally distorted--nothing to do but grit the teeth and play on. Better at least some Handel than none. As so often in the early classical days, I got to know Handel, the composer, through this set of records, just as I was introduced to the fascinations of erotica via a borrowed "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in a dog-eared imported (unexpurgated) edition. I went on, far and wide, from these points. Both of them.
Now this Handel turned out to be significant. I understand today why the bass was so prominent. The re cords were undoubtedly cut with a low-turnover bass roll-off (this was long before RIAA and standardized re cording curves), and consequently they played back with too much bass on an American machine. U.S. discs generally used a higher turnover point to begin the bass de-emphasis that is still necessary today in all commercial discs. Of course, I knew nothing of such things at that time.
But that didn't account for the bad recording--it merely made it sound worse. We were resigned. We played Handel and we winced at the blats and the squawks. But along in the spring we decided we deserved an even fancier phonograph, now that we had bought still more new records. So we traded in the machine with the potbelly and the grinning lips for a newer one, the first of the modern-type console designs and no longer Art Nouveau-Victrola. It had flat, simple cabinetry, uncarved and uncurved, and the conventional green-lighted radio dial with sliding pointer that soon became standard. Millions like it were to follow and we see their descendents today.
To our astonishment, the Handel re cords suddenly repaired themselves! Miraculously, they were undistorted and like new. We played and played, hardly believing our ears. They were OK! Smooth, even bass, not broken up. The problem had not been in the records but in the machine that played them. How could we have missed? A very elementary lesson in hi-fi, you will admit. But even today we still make the same mistake a thousand times. Don't blame the wrong element in your system. It's all too easy, as professionals know even more than amateurs. Don't I remember, for instance, the widespread and very vocal skepticism over the new LP around 1949--we were swamped with complaints that the new discs were impossible to track, the grooves were too small, the system much too fragile. Back to the 78! But as most (not all) of us now know, the problem was not in miniaturization, not in the LP record groove, but in the tracking equipment--the working combination of stylus, cartridge, arm and table.
At my second university I was subject to a lot more music teaching via recordings, which were to that period what the electronic music studio is to day, very much the "in" thing for a good Music Department. Previously, most professors had just banged out all the music--chorus, symphony, what have you--on the piano. Or, very rarely, had it actually played by live performers. (That was decidedly a good thing.) As you see, I was being subjected to audio sound, relentlessly. I practically bathed in it. But what those professors could do to recorded sound, over and beyond the equipment, was a hi-fi education in itself. They had not the smallest idea as to how to use records, how to play recorded music to show it to its own best advantage.
Paine-ful Sound
Most of our music classrooms (in a building unfortunately called Paine Hall) had a low stage up front, with blackboards, piano, etc., from which the professor did his talking and where the piano or the occasional live music was played. When the new electric phonographs came along, and the first actual recordings of the music being taught, the machines were as a matter of course plonked down right at the front of this stage, aiming straight out into our ears. Where else? Why not? That's where any live music would come from. The phonograph, after all, just another musical instrument--of sorts. Canned music.
So hour after hour, month after month, we were blasted straight in the face from that single point source, the one small, highly beamed loudspeaker inside the machine. I will say nothing about the exquisite technique the profs used to locate, say, the second theme of the Beethoven Eroica sym phony, halfway through a record side.
Such squawks and screeches you never heard, with the volume all the way up. (Of course they hated the machines and blamed them, instead of themselves.) We lived with that, as well as a modicum of actual, uninterrupted music. Some people just never learn.
But what bothered me much more was the disastrous effect of aiming a speaker straight into a listener's face at close range. This was the mono era--there was no distributed source, no stereo spread; all the sound came from that one point source (and not even a tweeter), and it was far from undistorted sound to begin with. I didn't know anything, but I suffered. I just felt that, somehow, something must be wrong.
There had to be a better way. But what? I would not have been able to tell you. I did not know. The profs didn't care--for in their minds this was the way recorded music always sounded. So you grit your teeth and play--and call it canned music.
Nevertheless, I had not forgotten the magical sound of that Orthophonic Victrola playing Bach-Stokowski in the wide, stone spaces of our school chapel, as described in my first installment. The germ of a new thought concerning playback acoustics was in my mind. I began to realize dimly (as the professors did not) that a phonograph was not a literal substitute for a live performance but, maybe, had its own laws, its own different requirements, its own values for musical sound. It dawned on me that these people, my professors, were really murdering good music, good recording, and all with the very best of intentions.
That summer I attended a musical Summer School, not for professionals but a sort of inspirational musical live in (as it would have been called in the Sixties) to experience what we were al ready calling "great music." And even to sing and to play it, more or less. Never mind the mistakes; the spirit was what counted. I ate it up--just marvelous. How could I know about the mistakes when all the music was new to me? We didn't have 30,000 LP records to learn from, and the local symphony wasn't that accessible, nor that adventurous.
Gym-Class Mass
We tried to sing the Bach B Minor Mass, with piano accompaniment, but it was no Mass, rather, a mess. We plowed straight through and Bach would have turned over 50 times. Chaos! But fun, even so. Then, one very warm day, we heard we were to be treated to a lecture on the Bach Mass by, of all people, one of my own college music professors. He was going to be really up-to-date. He would illustrate his words by a recording of a real, professional performance. (There was, indeed, a single complete recording of the Mass at this time and for years afterwards). Now, at last, we would get to hear what it really sounded like. Terrific.
So the granddaddy of all console Victrolas was wheeled into the big school gym where we met and, you guessed it, placed straight up front, dead center, at the very edge of the raised stage at one end of the gym. Might have known! Exactly as in the professor's own small classroom. But now, however, there was a big, big space and an audience of some hundreds. So the professor did the obvious. Wouldn't you? He turned the volume up to the very top, stepped back, and let fire.
I shall never suffer a more hideous "concert" than that one. It was agony. I was sitting right in the beam, near the front (eager-beaver me), and I got it right in the face. There was no escaping that lethal blast. Half the audience was figuratively mowed down in the first moments. KY-RIE ELEISON! A vast howl like a thousand buzz saws. Excruciating. So this was electrical reproduction?? So this was Bach?? It was just awful, and it was a turning point in my life, too.
I decided right there that playing re corded music was NOT like playing music live, and that was that. It had to be different. You cannot use loudspeakers like machine guns. Or heaven knows--like musical instruments. This was all something very new that came in with the process of electrical recording. We were experiencing new phenomena at both ends of the audio chain, now that the microphone could take on large, big sounds in big places. Recording got ahead first because it was within the pro area, but playback lagged behind. Too many amateurs, too many professors. Keep in mind that in the long acoustic era of recording, these problems--and opportunities--did not exist. Acoustic records were made at close range and totally dead. They played back scratchily and not loudly. Room acoustics simply did not matter, just as there were no recording-hall acoustics--none to speak of, anyhow. (A few faint background sounds once in a while. Very rarely, an infinitesimal bit of room sense, a space in which the music was occurring.)
So we had the one mono source of reproduced music and we had new, big-sounding records that did indeed occur in a space-a space that was in the recording. (Not as much as now, but it was there.) Some of us, even myself as a college kid, began to realize that we had to give that space a better chance. We had to disguise, for the ear if not the eye, the fact that it all came from one, single point. We began to find that some of our listening places did this for us, not badly at all you might say automatically. Most people then would have credited the machine, or the record, or both. Wrong again! But, one way or another, music did sound good in some of our rooms, and mine-largely by accident-was one. I used to have whole evenings playing records for college friends. I found myself, as usual, experimenting, trying this and that-if only, sometimes, to fit in a few extra chairs and make room; you had to move the phonograph to a new location. I was learning, without thinking too much about it. But after that catastrophonic Bach lecture I began to be a lot more definite.
I went home to Connecticut that same summer and immediately began to have evenings of record-playing at our local swimming club boat house for a lot more people. In effect, these were informal record "concerts." There was a big, rough-hewn upstairs room where the ladies served tea on Saturday afternoons, all unpainted wood with an irregular pitched roof and lots of internal rafters-and one whole side opening widely out onto a deck or balcony over the water. Perfect! Lots of reflection, highly randomized, very few plane surfaces in parallel, and that open side to kill any standing waves. All this, of course, I am saying after the fact. I guess I had an instinct for the right place; I knew nothing about standing waves and random reflections.
I gave a whole series of phonograph evenings there, and you may be sure that I never seated any member of my audience directly in front of the phonograph--never that again! Not before the stereo age. I aimed my sonic beam off into a corner, diagonally, or set up the machine to one side so it played along the edge of the audience and into various reflecting surfaces that would disguise the source. In the dark, you could not tell where the machine was at all. That was the idea! Distributed source. And what a difference. Even a lousy old 78 phonograph could sound marvelous in this fashion.
Ah--moonlight! No room to de scribe that famous evening; enough to say that I acquired a second audience, out in motionless canoes over a half mile of absolutely still lake, listening to my phonograph from far, far away. Now that was the kind of magic I was after. And still am.
(adapted from Audio magazine, May 1980; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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