DAYS OF WIRE AND WORKSHOPS

What was it like in the early days of hi-fi-which were the early days? Double take? Not for those who were there. The time, for instance, which I spent in a tiny place called the Electronic Workshop, the first of that name. That was very much in the "early days." Recently I ad-libbed for an entire Saturday afternoon on this very subject (and on some more recent days) before a group from the L.A. section of the AES, mostly young people working in the hub of the audio universe, which centers on the local smog. As you may guess, all was up-to-date-every word I said, and they said, was recorded on a DAT cassette machine of remarkable compactitude. In this fashion, our historical vista of the "early days" was neatly expanded right past our present front edge.

How can we put a date upon our beginning? As I've often noted, the term "high fidelity" was already common in the middle '30s, and many of the basic elements were already astonishingly well advanced by then--mikes, amps, speakers, FM, even stereo discs. Nevertheless, I have no doubt as to when we really began. It was just as soon as we could after WWII. Which means 1947 (when this magazine first appeared) and, give or take, a good hunk of 1948-50. Those were our real "early days." Before that time, before the war, there were components galore available to the savvy consumer, bits of excellent fi here and there. But the public audio chain was still fragmented except in the few esoteric labs and the equivalent. Thus, practically nobody heard good sound, the end product.

Missing links; better call them bottlenecks. But once we recovered from war, in that brief period from 1947-50, we closed up the vital gaps, pried open the bottlenecks (the LP did it for a major area in 1948), and at last, mixing metaphors, brought the entire audio chain together for the general consumer in a reasonable form. Nothing perfect. But we did at last produce a real hi-fi sound-rational, affordable, obtainable-for the home living room.

We had newly dedicated people, too. Like myself. And those who avidly "consumed" hi-fi in their homes. Of course there also was many a skilled hobbyist in his lab, not to mention throngs of engineer pros who suddenly saw Opportunity opening wide. In those special days, all of us sensed the beginnings of a new whole out of the fragments of the past, a whole new system, growing past the old home radio and phonograph toward much higher sound quality and diversity. It could be a dynamic thing, and soon was, perhaps paralleling (speaking of consumption) the food industry in all its interlocking action. From the farmer's seedling to the homeowner's mouth.

From live calf to veal parmigiana. This, I say, was our consuming inspiration in our first days and years! It kept us enthusiastic and inspired our new customers.

If the term "high fidelity" was old in the 1930s, "hi-fi" as a contraction came only in those postwar years, as a convenient moniker for everything we had to offer. I was amused in 1953 to find it already in France-where it was called "hee-fee." Easier for the French tongue. Our own new terminology seemed to get more inaccurate and confusing as we joined battle with our enemies in lo-fi. For a long while, we sold what we called Separate Units, as opposed to one-piece lo-fi, the standard consumer audio. "Separate units" was loaded with sarcasm. The hated old-style radios and phonos were scornfully labeled "commercial." Weren't we out to be commercial too? As soon as we could? The distinctions did hold some truth, needless to say, while we struggled to get our business started. But we were equally scornful of mass-produced audio, merely reflecting the fact that we could not yet manage mass production ourselves! True, the sonic quality of most old type equipment was indeed held down to a remarkably rigorous low standard, the public being quite willing. No bass, or merely boomy bass; no highs, deliberately muffled for a smooth-as-butter sound that hid multiple distortions as well as most musical tone quality and all the sibilants of speech. It was a useful system. Great industries had been built upon it; the big outfits saw no reason to change. There was indeed a vested interest in this mediocre, if serviceable, audio. Thanks to success, it was both commercial and mass produced. What else? So it followed that we, in our new and high-minded quality consciousness, were strictly noncommercial, which really meant "not like them." And perforce, we were also far from being mass-produced, like them. It was the terminology of envy, if you ask me.

Yes, our early products-what with big vacuum tubes in quantity, large resistors and capacitors, clumsy "pilot lights" for illumination, quantities of twisted wire and hundreds of soldered connections-were necessarily handmade. Not really mass-produced, like the deliberately simple audio of the big, old outfits. (Look at the bottom of any old radio or phono of the day.) We were stuck with quality; that was our business. And the circuit complexities, on an uncompromisingly macro scale, were formidable. Hi-fi, at that point, was definitely un-miniaturized. It was assembled by hand, many hands, in all its complexity.

Now this is where I came in. With my usual happenstance luck, I discovered a brand-new little hi-fi "factory" only a couple of blocks from my home in New York City. It was in a storefront on upper Bleecker Street, the Village, maybe 10 or 15 feet wide, going back into a dark, narrow interior. This--a factory? Indeed it was, and set up to mass-produce an excellent and fairly revolutionary power amplifier--the Electronic Workshop's A-20-6, designed by the late Howard Sterling, an electrical engineer from Columbia University with a brilliant, if high-strung, audio mind.

That little factory personified early hifi. Others may have been bigger, a few maybe less cluttered, but all shared the awful problem and challenge: How to make reliable, consistent products out of the enormously clumsy and intractable raw material of hi-fi. Most particularly, the big, hot tubes, the fat capacitors and, below, beneath the chassis "floor," a hideous jungle of twisted wire, solder, inextricably tied into masses of resistors and all those tube connections. There was even an aesthetic conflict: Neat, parallel wiring made a pretty sight, but was it always the shortest route between two points? Not in that situation! How could you produce even two units remotely the same, out of such intricacy? Nevertheless, hi-fi built itself, in the early days, upon this very basis, somehow teaching each individual assembler to put the mess together step by step, connection by connection. Not easily imaginable, I think, for today's consumer, tinkerer, or audio engineer.

So much is now prefabricated and virtually robotized. But saw it in all its fascination, and even tried a few solder joints myself. What an art! To this day, my solderings are mountainous and mostly confined to electric light or toaster problems. I have an awe, still, of those who can neatly solder up dozens, hundreds of connections and then turn the power on without an explosion.

The Electronic Workshop was a hive of activity from morn until midnight. The pay must have been a pittance, but the employees scarcely ever went home.

There were little work stations in every corner, crowded with pieces of amplifier and tomato cans full of parts. The floor was a mass of leavings, bits of wire, globules of solder, stray elements unidentifiable. And everybody talked! I was fascinated and never learned so fast, even if a lot of it was hokum.

Today, I feel that at that point I was within the very germ cell of high fidelity in the making, the concentrated early essence of our whole movement. Other essences there surely were. But none more essential.

I was then in my first years with this magazine, and very conscious of it, though naive in the technicalities of our business. I was, you recall, a record reviewer, classical. My official business was music. But audio, of sorts, had been injected into my reviews well before. My box-type review format in The Saturday Review, each week, had a separate column marked "Engineering" next to the one called "Performance," and I expect I was the first to set things up that way.

So, of course, everything I was learning, right or wrong, went straight into my record reviews and into "Audio ETC," when that came along. In turn, the kids at the Electronic Workshop respected me as a sort of odd coworker, and soon I was spending vast amounts of time there, eagerly swallowing up all the latest in audio gossip.

Plenty of other audio people streamed in and out, and the high talk never ceased, if the soldering often did.

In time, my happy status led to further connections-thank goodness not financial. I was given the loan of one of the big amplifiers and other goodies.

The A-20-6 became central to my fi. (I also owned an Austin A-40, but it was definitely not an amplifier.) The amp was a real beauty for its day, however-big, heavy, with impressive oversized tubes (6L6GA) and two monumental black steel boxes at the ends, two super-transformers for power and speaker output, both state of the art. That, I know, was basic to the Sterling design and had much to do with the quality of the output. Transformers were a serious hi-fi concern then, one of the major weak links in standard commercial radio and phono equipment (even the most expensive). I quickly learned to look down on those small metal boxes that stood on top of cheap P.A. equipment or in the far inner corners of expensive standard consoles. This amp was out to upgrade that weakness and surely did.

I think, too, that Howard Sterling's design emphasized a (relative) simplicity-that is, compared to other high-quality audio amps. Was that a virtue! But simplicity in hi-fi was not very simple. I marvel that my Workshop A-20-6 did not go up in smoke or quit, so far as I remember.

Sterling was a near-genius in design but a poor organizer and a worse shop manager. He did both, with only one partner, an equable soul named Alan Sobel, who later worked for Zenith TV and was rumored, long ago, to have a "flat screen" non-tube TV system in hand. Zenith didn't, and Al moved on to found his own company, Waveforms, also with Sterling. Al kept things reasonably calm at the Workshop; Howard Sterling was mostly on the verge of hysteria amid the flying solder. The place was a madhouse, if ever so stimulating. In time, Sterling designed me what came to be called the Canby Monster, a control system for my home activities-God knows which, at this point. It was delayed and delayed (I kept changing my mind), and all I can remember of the final debacle was that somehow the tone controls got wired into the main volume. We had an enormous fight, and that ended the Monster.

The A-20-6 did well and a good many were made, but chaos finally prevailed, at least financially. A lawyer served me with papers to reclaim the loaned equipment, the place shut down, the heady conversation ceased, and all was lost. I was desolate. A piece of my life fell away.

I owed a great deal to that Electronic Workshop, and it wasn't money.

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Jul. 1988)

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