by EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
Symbiotic Softgear
A successful softgear-hardware relationship such as the LP's (see last month) is like a well-matured marriage. It takes many years to perfect this sort of dynamic intimacy, and the result is there fore precious and irreplaceable, because it works. True, time passes and circumstances change, but the relationship adapts-it is too strong to break. Until at last death does it part. So with the LP.
Why else do you think this much-outdated disc still persists after 35 years, along with its enormous mass of softgear? We believe in our hearts that it cannot be replaced, that special symbiosis between the artistic softgear and the engineering hardware for which it remains the crucial link. What comes next will be a different animal, and a different relationship.
Death comes to all and it will come to the LP, if the rest of us last a little longer. Most of its special virtues re main but the flesh is weak. On the hardware side, as we all know, it is as far outpaced by the little CD, the Compact Disc, as the buggy was by the auto or, more accurately, the horse by the gas engine and the electric motor.
And there is video, harassing from the side--the LP's successors, in one or another format, are easily picture-capable. Also surround-sound-capable in any old number of discrete channels in case we're interested-we may be. The LP can never enter these leagues. Nor, except by ingenious artifice, approach the dynamic range, the soundlessness of background, the absence of distortion--why go on? We know the story. But there it is, even so, still an immense and stable force in our entire business, a governing super-flywheel to hold us together and in some sort of control of our destinies.
That's what an enduring softgear-hard ware marriage is all about.
Indeed it is an agony to try to see the future shapes that will prove symbiotically successful! Some people, as I suggested last month, have the gift.
They are mostly the artists as such, not the engineers, but there is not really that much difference remaining be tween these categories. I would only say that the engineers do tend to be quirky in a big way (having the goods to do so), seeing some things with true clairvoyance, intuition, genius, but missing others in the most obtuse fashion. And in this the captains of industry have all too big a hand. I can never get far from Thomas Edison in such thinking-he had the most peculiar mental oscillations, comb-filter style, seeing some things with absolute brilliance yet incurably blind to others. Not a very good softgear guide, this Tom. It was his younger assistants, his rivals, who saw the real means to put Edison's many syntheses (that's what they generally were) into softgear situations that would work.
When I look at some of today's hi-fi and TV I think of old Tom. With a difference. His was the approach of simplicity-not today! But simple or complex, any invention, any equipment, is only as good as the softgear that goes with it-say that again. If we are floundering today in a welter of marvelous technology and practically nothing new in the way of softgear except the video arcade, it is because in spite of the ads we can all sense the confusion, zany products all mixed up with useful ones, instant opportunism, overwhelming far sightedness, and nobody really sure which is which.
Can I be more specific about the enduring aspects of the LP symbiosis? Yes, but only by looking back beyond, at the whole span of the disc, which will soon be 100 years old. The LP is only its final form, short of the digital Compact Disc.
I'm not sure I really consider the CD a disc. It is far more closely related-in operation-to the audio cassette or, for that matter, the videocassette. In soft-gear terms it is barely a disc at all. The new CD is automated and can never be otherwise. Its "discness" is no more important to us than the "tapeness" of either type cassette, out of sight, out of mind, most of the time. Yes, the LP is now belatedly automated, perforce, but this is not really its nature and it responds clumsily in spite of the ingenious new mechanisms. The LP began on a par with the earlier disc and it is still, I think, a naturally hand-operated music source. It is as though we had belatedly automated the fork and the knife. The LP didn't really need that.
Look, then, how quirky has been the disc's success as it has evolved its symbiosis, the softgear and the hardware, over a century of sales, how quickly it has responded to varied changes, and how unpredictably. What size? What speed? These, in the beginning, were of course determined by the 19th century engineers, not the public. Speed: Very approximately 78 rpm or thereabouts.
Size: Erratic, but there were 8-inch discs to start with, if I am right. Then, as the symbiosis began to take hold and the public to buy, in a remarkably short time the 10-inch disc became standard.
It was the sellable, usable, popular form.
Why? Did it fit the music and skits available for recording-or were these written to fit the three-minute format? Impossible to say; they happened together, give & take, tit for tat. All we know is that the 10-inch size and length worked so well that the entire modern corpus of recorded pop, from rag time to jazz to rock and show tunes, has adapted itself ever since to that basic length-and even far beyond any engineering necessity, right up to the present.
Could you have foreseen it? There's your symbiosis.
Alongside the acoustic 10-incher came the elegant 12-inch disc as recording began to go high brow (classical)-mostly in opera excerpts. A different situation there, but it too worked. The longer span, maxi mum five minutes but much better four, combined with the length of most arias and the special qualities of the opera voice (high acoustic power and maxi mum intelligence at the narrow frequency band available) drew forth, one might say, a sub-symbiosis, the bigger disc alongside the smaller and compatible with its machinery. The pairing was immensely successful.
The two aspects continue in essence to this very day, classical and pop, though the original engineering is all but vanished. Again, symbiosis.
When we come to a time of real change, we tend as I said last month to carry on with compatibility and all the old pre-existing softgear, just as far as we can. Necessary-at first-for business continuity. But also very good for any coming symbiosis, if the old traditions can persist into the new. When electricity hit the sound field and audio was born, we got the electrical recording and then, a bit later, the electric reproducer. (No, they did not appear together as a system! Compatibility al lowed old and new discs to be played on either type of equipment.) And lo once again there were the old 10- and 12-inch discs, as though nothing had happened. What else? We try for continuity, and this time it was easy.
Yet almost immediately big changes cropped up. First a matter of hardware, new equipment, the radio phonograph, the electric portable and, above all, the jukebox in prototype. But the new engineering sound parameters immediately began to change things too. Pop music in the home became mainly louder--a forecast of things to come but the jukebox was really new (well, almost). It channeled the world of pop into new areas of recorded listening and, hence, record sales. The jukebox has never died. It evolved into our present disco, not to mention music for banks, airports and supermarkets.
In the classics, electricity brought more extensive softgear changes.
Suddenly-albums! With the micro phone and big orchestras in large halls, we could record anything, and we did, in multiple-disc sets. Straight through the bottomless Depression, that early electrical recording spree was the most fertile and productive we in audio have ever experienced. The entire concert repertory of classical music and much beyond was put down on wax and onto 78s. Even the giant works, hours long with hundreds of performers, found their unlikely place, all chopped into four-minute segments, a dozen, 20 discs in enormous albums so heavy they could scarcely be lifted, horribly breakable, clumsy, impracticable! Yet viable.
Here was one of the miracles of audio history and an example of what can happen, even in a Depression, when the symbiosis turns out right.
Even into electricity, then, the disc carried on and developed-there was no revolution. Albums, then art covers (mainly after WW II), in particular, pro gram booklets, a vital new addition for those who listened. In the main the old standard worked again, the 10-inch for pop and the 12-inch for classical elegance. Good continuity. People went for the idea.
Twenty years-and again, revolution? Could have been. We had the LP and, a year later, the 45. But note how ingeniously, instead, the LP adopted the best of the earlier practice from the 78, already a half-century old. Immediately, LP took over the album aspect of 78 classical and applied it to the new single discs. We still call them albums (even in pop!). Good-looking covers (though the first Columbia’s had no more than undifferentiated paper covers--somebody soon caught that blooper). Extensive program notes, now even more convenient, both on the album itself and in big, readable, unfolded inserts. Thus the compatibility phase for the LP was superbly handled on the softgear side to preserve all that was good. Most important of all, the new disc was not even launched until it was possible to build up an impressive catalog of softgear via dubbing, both the 78 and LP versions copied from a common 16-inch lacquer master disc, this being shortly before tape. The original public demo of the LP (I was there) displayed a consider able stack of LP discs in the new form, alongside a mountain of 78s containing the identical music, enough to satisfy any doubter that the LP format would lose us nothing in the way of music to play, our traditional wide choice, a true "library" of availabilities right from LP's beginning. Can we say as much about today's offerings of softgear in the new formats? The 45 disc, a year later, must surely have been aimed at the jukebox, where it was a fantastic success. But at the beginning it came out, flatly liter ally, as successor to the 78 in all forms.
There were fancy classical albums (the first things introduced) and players for the home. Too literal-for there were the same old four-minute sides we'd always had, merely smaller. It was classical prestige, I suppose; in any case, that particular classical symbiosis was a dead duck in no time at all. I have a few left, as museum pieces. But ah-the jukebox! The 45 took to pop like a duck to water. Thus do software and hardware interact.
Note, finally, a more subtle disappearance, that of the 10-inch LP. As I say, the symbiotic balance is always delicate. This disc followed very logically after the 10-inch 78, and the machinery to make it was available. In the classics it lasted quite awhile. It did have points. But the factors added up, or shall I say, subtracted, and in the end it was better to kill it-even in pop--and concentrate on the larger size disc. What will be the equivalent subtleties that show up on future CD offerings, the little laser disc? Obviously, nobody has the slightest idea, at least in public, at this point.
Note, to end, that the LP disc and its forerunner the 78 have always thrived on a very large backing of softgear. A lot more (by maybe 10,000 to 1) than some of our present promoters think is really necessary. They are wrong. This is an inherent aspect of the entire disc history. Even 78 catalogs were very large. Schwann's LP listings built into the many thousands in the earliest years. And the 30,000 or so titles of decades back have merely varied a bit, mostly upwards, right through to the present. The audio cassette is no-where near catching up. You think this can be ignored? It's basic.
Next time you see the big ad announcing Fifty (50) titles now available for so-and-so digital player, just relax.
When we get to 10,000, we'll be out of the woods.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Jul. 1983; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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