So you want to know more about the Stereophoner? (See this space last month.) Maybe so, maybe not; it's only a bit of audio history. Either way, there will be a slight delay. In all fairness, I feel, some basic research should be done as to exactly what the 1957 contents of that small box might do to a mono signal fed through it, emerging as two signals.
And so the whole mess of pottage (after the Meltdown) is on its way to the West Coast, where knowledgeable engineer friends will play with it.
We are not exactly a historical-minded profession yet, we in audio and HiFi. Nor are our consumer-type allies who absorb our current output as often as they can afford it. Only a few of us, who have been around since audio's beginnings-not so coincidentally at about the time this magazine was founded-are finding ourselves more and more interested in what happened back then, in how we got where we are now.
There was audio before, of course.
But institutionally and in engineering terms it was attached to contiguous areas, electrical engineering, radio, motion pictures. It took the First World War, radio, and then the astonishing developments of electrical sound, to bring the name audio towards some identity. Still another war had to pass before we actually set ourselves up as a professional field, complete with the Audio Engineering Society. All this when things finally got going again on a civilian basis, several years after WWII was over. It took awhile.
You will note that the first "new" automobiles after that war were dated as 1947 and 1948 models (a very few in 1946). These were basically prewar models, after the factories had reconverted from military use. The earliest audio, as such, took the same course; all the innumerable military and leftover civilian areas of electronics, suddenly shut down almost overnight in August of 1945, coasted along month after month with no power until the same basic conversion back to civil life could take place. It is not surprising, then, that our first issue as Audio Engineering Magazine came out in May of 1947. Precisely in tune with history! That was when things were getting started. Everywhere.
The LP record took a little longer--not much. It was formally launched a year after us, in June of 1948. Somehow, I have always felt that the coming of LP, an out-and-out modern updating of technology, marked a symbolical coming of age in the audio field and its semi-sibling, hi-fi. Do you realize, do you remember perhaps, to what level of degradation our civilian audio descended during the war years? Can you believe, you younger readers, that for every new record we bought, a 78 rpm, 10to 12-inch disc, we had to turn in an old one as scrap? Records were made of shellac and shellac came from the Far East, which at the time was not habited by Westerners other than the military. There was no substitute, for the simplest of reasons-war. The record biz, like the rest of "nonessential" audio, was allowed to get along with whatever it had around on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. Period. Essentially, that was what happened to all nonessential business, including cars. Yes, we could drive our old buggies if we wanted to, any old place (with the proper shielded headlight slits on the coasts) just so long as it wasn't military and we didn't use up our "A" coupons for gas, five gallons a week, rationed.
History! Too few of us know our own, out of these last years. Few audio people relish going back in time further than their last big batch of hi-fi equipment, which could be maybe six months or a year or, in extreme cases, five years. After almost 40 of those years, audio as a whole still rates as an upstart field with scarcely even the beginnings of a history. Too new! We are not yet legendary.
After all, our very earliest major efforts are just beginning to turn classic in a properly historical way, like classic cars. And most of those efforts, still, came before the Big War, long before either audio or hi-fi had any formal place in the larger world. Incredible--45/45 stereo discs, wide range, back in 1931! Now there's an historical artifact for you, out of Bell Labs. But the historical urge that brought these discs out of oblivion in Bell Labs' files did not grow strong for 50 years, until the day before yesterday.
We are indeed now discovering our historical roots, our prehistory, so to speak. It seems, even today, to take a half century for the historical sense to emerge. We haven't given a thought, collectively, in the large, to our real youthful period, after 1947. Too soon? Not for some of us! But for most of us, old audio stuff is just old audio. Out of date, unimportant, stupid, considering all the incredible things that are going on now.
Maybe 99% of us, all types, are wrapped up totally in that now, month by month, sometimes, it seems, day by day. It is indeed enough to keep us bewilderingly busy, alas.
I say alas, not because of any lack of appreciation-far from it-but simply because until we have history we have no dimension. As in Einstein, history, even our own, is the dimension of time without which the others are basically meaningless. Short-term. Myopic.
Wrong-headed. Yes, you can get in and make your megabucks in audio (or you could, awhile back) and get out again, maybe safely. But as an industry, as a field, as a multifaceted, many-peopled endeavor, audio, hi-fi, cannot know where it is going unless it knows where it has come from. In the round. Stereo.
It is the past, excursions into the past, studies of the past, which give us shape and confidence for a present and a future. There is always a now.
Every moment of history was, at some point, precisely as important as the instant-present now today (for those who were around). It was now in May 1947, as I remember. It was the same, if I remember correctly, in late 1931, when Bell Labs was recording in Philadelphia, somewhat clandestinely in the basement, and I was gallivanting around Boston, all unknowing. Nevertheless, I Was There, to misquote Edward R. Murrow. But for the accident of a few miles (and a few other li'I factors), I could have been down in that basement watching the 45/45 stereo grooves appear under the cutting stylus.
Why all this? No, not to be merely philosophical! Or is it philosophic? I've never much believed in abstract thought not designed to get down to the nitty gritty, and I see no reason at all for us to fuss about our history merely because it is elevating or cultural or something similar. History is useful simply because it is-or was.
That dimension again. How can one work in the rigidly demanding medium of time, which waits for no one, without some perspective in that very direction? It's as though your right foot went forward without your left foot lagging--impossible. We must cultivate and understand our own budding history if we are not to fall apart and collapse in a heap. Which in these times is quite possible.
I can show you what I mean. To change analogies a bit, history in any area always seems to me to work in loops, ellipses if you will, or wave forms, highly symmetrical. A fad, any old fad, in this sense is easily defined: It is an uncontrolled oscillation. It goes way up, senselessly, then as quickly collapses in a heap. If not a zany piece of ellipse, then at least we may call it a peak. A more lasting development, any old development you wish, has a better and more consistent wave form. Get the idea?
BUT of far bigger importance are the long waves, the slow ellipses, that take years, decades, centuries, even millenia, to achieve their shape. Far too often, we miss them cold. We see only a straight line, shortsighted as we are.
We miss them in terms of billions of years: We are baffled by the time curve of the Big Bang and cannot yet see where it goes. (But Halley's comet will be back in 1986.) We have missed the curve of man's short existence, as witness those casually preserved footprints (a hi-fi recording in volcanic ash) of three little homo habilis (?) people millions of years ago, wandering along in a hitherto unimagined now which was as real to them as ours is to us.
And we can easily miss our own "long" shapes of continuity and change! A mere 40 years of audio history is plenty long, with its full prehistory, to tell us a few things about shapes, now and tomorrow.
You see, we are in a terrible state of panic now because in a strictly competitive business way we are unable to see where, in God's name, we are going. Audio is sinking, overwhelmed by pictures! Audio and TV have to combine, which everybody believes will be to audio's cost! It really seems to look, to business people and designers who have so much at stake, as if the wave of audio, the ellipse of a half century, is in fibrillation or something. Television, instant picture messages, discs, tapes, digital everything, will simply bury us in vast mountains of sound/ sight. We will be but the little tail of a great big TV kite, a tail so minuscule that we may not even be visible to those on the ground, no matter how hard they squint to look.
Well, am I not correct? Isn't that our prevailing mood? Isn't everybody in the biz trying frantically to get into some small corner of video, preferably a bigger corner or even a hefty segment-because, after all, hi-fi, audio for audio's sake, sound and sound alone, is dead. Or will be dead in a short while.
Bunk. I've said it before and now I'll have to begin yelling. Bunk! This is strictly the fad psychology in reverse.
Suddenly, the smooth, useful curves of audio progress in so many areas go into meaningless oscillation? Could be, if pig-headed panic takes over in place of rational thought.
Not, though, if we take a better look at those shapes, for our antecedents, including the art of music, go further back and back into history and will go onward, we trust, in their accustomed symmetry of change--if we can only see. Music too, and our demand for music is most assuredly not going to stop overnight.
It is clear that the major shaping of reproduced sound with pictures, not really our field in the past except as a sideline, is indeed at a turn of its own, the shape extending all the way back to Edison. Note that his first experimental movie was a talkie, via semi sync phonograph, and there were sound movies around 1913, recently exhumed; these are all part of the long sound/sight ellipse, as are the still shaky and undetermined videodiscs of the present moment. A majestic curve! And it will not move by wild oscillations. It will pay for all of us to see that shape.
The curve of audio is related but only parallel and overlapping. We are different. Surely, the era of pure sound entertainment is also at a turning point-it would have to be so. But sudden extinction? Hardly. Just an intelligent shaping (by those with good sight) at the turn. We will go on, go back if need be, to make new relationships with the listening art of music, with the seeing art of the moving picture. We will develop our fi where it is needed, as it assuredly will be. So, remember the Stereophoner (more later), which is but a piece of another curve within audio itself, soundspace, the sound field, the audio image.
Curves within curves-that's history.
by Edward Tatnall Canby (adapted from Audio magazine, Jun. 1982)
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