Of the many gaudy mail-order catalogs that come my way each week, with such
prosaic names as Bean's, Brent's, Breck's, Burpee's, Brookstone's and on through
the alphabet, there is one that really hits my fancy-The Sharper Image.
Now there's a name to conjure with! This outfit sells high-tech consumer stuff, at appropriate prices. For instance, I recently bought, elsewhere, the most convenient bathroom scale I've ever used; it reads the same as the one in my doctor's office and cost me $10. The Sharper Image has a scale with "four separate computer memory banks" to remember your weight last week and last month; it costs $119, but I'll hand it to them: For an added ten bucks you can have an all-mechanical model straight from West Germany. That's sharp thinking for you.
I've been bothered and fascinated for a long time by this matter of the sharper image. Mostly, we don't have it, or we have lost it. But, with all this present convergence of video, audio and the personal computer into ever more compact and more elaborate consumer entertainment centers, it has been borne in on me that we in audio have had a sharper image all along, since Major Armstrong's FM sound back in the '30s and '40s. The Sharper Audio Image. High Fidelity! Could there be a more exact description? The more you delve into technical specs, the closer is the relationship between a sharp visible image and an accurate audio image. In both cases this is a matter of faithfulness to some sort of original (even in the case of the eyes), in terms of lack of distortion, absence of "noise," i.e., meaningless and unwanted extraneous signals--and, most of all, a matter of sharply defined detail. In visible imaging we call this resolution, resolving power, but we can apply the same to an audio signal. For when you come down to it every sort of "fuzziness," of poor resolution, is actually a distortion, a blurring of the message, a reduction of its information content, whether to the ear or to the eye.
True, much "noise" is technically not a part of our signal at all, hence the feasibility of noise reduction. But, in the end, even noise is distortion, interfering with what we hear or see.
These matters are very quickly coming to a lot of heads today in the ferment of change. Suddenly, here and there, sharpness becomes crucial where before it hasn't much mattered.
And at the same time, in other areas, the steady trend towards ever greater fuzziness, the decidedly Unsharp Image, goes relentlessly onward. As we know from TV experience, there are ways to get around a lack of sharpness, using artistic ingenuity. Not everyone is bothered by faulty video resolution in the TV soaps and the "interview" shows-they are mostly close-up. Easy way out, and quite okay-who's complaining? Nor is the still-present TV sound incompatible -- it, too, is "close-up," that is, mostly simple speech, not requiring super-hifi for its message. And, we can always use, and do use, lip reading.
But in the new "third world" of the personal computer the resolving power suddenly gets important-especially where the "ordinary" TV tube is used. How well can you read the facts and figures on the screen? How small can the letters and words be, and how many can appear at a time? TV tubes are just fine for large blocks of color and great big words that sell their own message-in monosyllables. But when your computer speaks in big monosyllables it's not giving you what you want for your money, as thousands have discovered. So we have the "monitor" tube, with improved resolution. You can read words on it, whole pages of them.
You think that hasn't had any effect on the general public? It's having it, every minute of the present day, as inevitably as the thousands of babies born in the same time, so many per minute, year in and year out.
I went to a cheapie movie last week, or rather, watched it via public TV, projection style. The film was extraordinarily fuzzy but it didn't matter much.
On the other hand, at the end, I was jolted to discover that I could not read a single word of the credits that rolled by. Just a lot of blurred and meaningless lines. People do not usually fuss when they don't see sharp credits; they are mainly pro forma. But when the same thing happens on a cheap computer, as are now selling in the millions--what then? The sharpness idea is contagious! The fire will spread. All it will take, for the setting, is a few major advertising campaigns for the new "Sharper TV"-when and if. This is surely already in the works.
Once again, and as never before, the medium is the message. A sharper video image opens new "program" techniques, more detailed pictures, faster action, greater clarity in the plot line. If and when practical. It should be, in Phase Three of the marriage of audio and video with, er, a third party, the computer. (Three-way marriage? We'd better find a better, if duller, term to protect the moral sense.
Then there is that indefinable and powerful compatibility which must always exist between media in a dual format, involving sight and sound together. On traditional TV we have had lo-fi, the fuzzy image, in equal terms for both picture and sound and the combo has been a vast success. But lately people are discovering-and business is advertising-the virtues of improved TV sound. The most unsettling and miraculous development in this area is surely the new videocassette sound from Sony and its parallel in VHS. Suddenly-from the bottom straight to the top! Imagine it, hi-fi reproduction from videocassettes that rates well above everything in our hi-fi audio except the topmost digital-is that unsettling! And already this sound is being relentlessly plugged, the surest way to bring it to the notice of the many Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Publics in all their multitudinous clones. Does it now behoove the lowly TV tube, what with these mount ing pressures, to produce a Sharper Image? And what about the TV source, the present broadcast system? It's already edging into stereo-what, then, of the proposed doubling of lines, for a really "hi-fi" picture and yet with compatibility, even so, for the lingering old-style tubes? First we hike up one side of the dual message, then the other.
So, you see, the pressure for a Sharper Image mounts in many directions. The video biz is indeed finally beginning to catch up with us in the concept of high fidelity. The new video is not going to burst into bloom, as the seed catalogs say, until, in my Phase Three, the tubeless video picture really takes over. But that, too, is coming on strong, and sooner than most of us could have guessed. (I've decided to wait for a word processor until I can have it with a big, flat screen not more than an inch or two deep. IBM is talking in these terms, as are others; little screens are already on the market.) In digital, the Sharper Image is rampant and on an unheard-of scale. How many billion bits can we now process per second? John Q. and his wife are already impressed, since they owe so much to the new electronics that can process so much in so little time. One of my favorite historical memories, speaking of bits, goes back, in mind at least, to the early transatlantic cables.
Did you know that, to their dismay, the first operators found that the on-off digital-style telegraph code was rendered so fuzzy after a few thousand miles that at first only a word or so a minute could be transmitted? Like an ordinary light bulb that took about 30 seconds to fade on and then off again.
It remains to be pointed out that, with all of this potent movement towards sharpness and better resolution in both audio and video messages, there still is a much longer tradition of precisely the opposite-a steady, enduring trend away from sharpness and towards a lower resolution. Mostly, this is due to business economizing, but that aspect is, in the end, surprisingly unimportant. Public acceptance is what counts.
Have you ever looked at the celebrated landscape photographs of the middle and late 19th century, taken with big cameras which used huge glass plates, often the cumbersome "wet plate" prepared in a portable darkroom on the spot? The lenses of those days were imperfect, with much blur and distortion out at the edges, but the main body of the picture had a sharpness, especially in an original print, that is hard to believe. As late as 1929, I took B/W stereo pictures on glass plates (dry process!) that to this day, when magnified in the viewer, astonish.
In 1933, I acquired the original Ciné Kodak Eight, to my mind the best made home-movie camera ever produced. It had a little button of an f/4.5 lens and an imprint so tiny on the film you could not read it with the naked eye-but you should see the detail in a five-foot-square projection! You will find this same acute sharpness in every direction in those earlier years. I think, for instance, of my ancestors' cut glass, as compared to the similar pressed glass, same patterns, we find in today's supermarkets.
And it's the same with an original reproduction proof-cold type, that is letters and words produced via the photographic medium, has a fuzzy edge when compared with a proof made from "real" poured-metal type.
In these and other areas we have progressed to bigger and fuzzier and we still progress. Super-8 color movies are too fuzzy for me. Zoom lenses, lots of light, blurred details. Instant still pictures are the same. Not sharp. And now-all hail the disc camera! To my mind this is the worst compromise we've ever indulged in, for sharpness, and yet the system is a success. Like TV, the disc pictures are mostly close-up, nearby people and babies and dogs-not landscapes. The Unsharp Image is a part of this medium and determines its content-or is it the other way around? To my perverse mind, sharper is always going to be better. And that applies to audio as it does to photography. But the commercial question as to which sharpness, in which usage, will lead to raging success with the public is one that, as speakers say, we must address with care. You bet. As always, the canny guy who picks the right Sharper Image is going to clean up.
Ditto the outfit that chooses the most suitable fuzziness-whether in sound or sight. Some of those who do this last trick are among the canniest of all. Like Kodak, for instance, if in a negative way. But don't think that the Fuzzier Image is necessarily the way to success! It all depends. In any case, we in audio hi-fi proved long ago that our own Sharper Image was the right way to go. And still is.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Sept. 1984; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
Also see: Audio Etc. (Aug. 1984)
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