Behind The Scenes (Oct. 1972)

by Bert Whyte

THIS COLUMN is being written during the "dog days" of August ... my least favorite time of the year. The omnipresent noise of the air conditioners intrudes on music listening activities (maybe Dr. Dolby ought to apply his talents to air conditioners). No one is in town, everyone fleeing from the muggy misery of New York. Nothing is happening on the four-channel front, except for some minor skirmishes in the pages of Billboard. Obviously everything is being held in abeyance until the AES and IHF shows in September, when presumably the discrete and matrix camps will each launch major offensives.

In the meanwhile, one of the interesting developments that came out of the CES was a significant renewal of activity in the field of 8-track cartridges. At the show there was an absolute plethora of new models of cartridge playback units for automotive and home use, including quite a few quadraphonic players. You may not have been aware of it, but after several years of "boom" type prosperity, 1971 was considered a very "soft" year in the cartridge industry. Many people were burned by a raft of inferior "cheap jack" cartridge players which flooded the market. There was a loss of confidence in the format on the part of many people, and as a consequence many manufacturers either folded completely or abandoned the production of players. Oddly enough, the recession was mainly confined to cartridge hardware. As far as the recorded cartridges were concerned, sales volume continued to climb, albeit at a slower pace than in previous years.

After many pundits had declared that the cassette would obsolete the cartridge, as of now the recorded cartridge market accounts for more than 60 percent of the total dollar volume of tape sales in all formats. As you might expect, the vast majority of cartridges are sold for playback in cars, although there is an increasing "double-duty" playback of the cartridges in the home. Many of the new units displayed at the CES had improved drive systems and higher quality electronics with frequent use of IC's. The overall impression was that there was a considerable upgrading of player quality throughout the industry.

There was also an increase in the number of cartridge record/playback units, but while there was more use of so-called "logic controls" on these units, "rolling your own" cartridges still entails complexities many people find quite exasperating. The recorded cartridges themselves seem to have been improved through better quality control in the duplication process. Frequency response is commonly maintained to 7 or 8 kHz, dropouts and print-through are infrequent. Crosstalk between tracks can be a problem traceable to the playback head in the machine, a "skew" problem in duplication, or a combination of both. In any case, with a cartridge player properly set up with a track alignment tape, crosstalk is not often encountered these days. Signal-to-noise ratio is, of course, the major problem with cartridges. There is no avoiding the fact that there is too much tape hiss.

While no doubt some improvements can be made in S/N ratio through the use of new tape formulations, the cartridges ultimately must be Dolbyized to make them a high quality medium, especially for playback in the home. I have made this statement in these pages before and as we move closer to production of the Dolby IC chip, and a subsequent reduction of the cost of incorporating Dolby circuitry in cartridge playback units, there would appear to be reasonable expectations for B type Dolby cartridges.

All this activity with the cartridge format is encouraging, but in terms of automotive usage there is a serious problem which can negate all the improvements to playback deck and cartridge.

I refer to the appallingly poor quality of the loudspeakers furnished with most car stereo systems. I recently bought a new car, a really deluxe model loaded with options. I got the top entertainment package ... multiplex FM stereo and 8-track cartridge player. The FM stereo is surprisingly good in terms of sensitivity and selectivity and even in suppression of ignition noise and other spurious noises common to highway travel. The cartridge player is also of excellent quality with better motion characteristics than most home-type units. I am not happy with the tone control, typical of the kind found on most machines, in which as you increase treble, the bass is attenuated and when you increase bass, the treble is attenuated. There should be either separate bass and treble controls, or fixed treble equalization (considering the more or less standard interiors of cars with similar acoustic characteristics) plus a boost/attenuate bass control. I am also annoyed by the fact that there isn't any left/right lateral balance control. All this is nothing compared to the loudspeaker installation. The front speakers are disposed left and right underneath the dashboard, facing upwards and reflecting off the windshield (actually not a bad idea for a wider stereo image, and with such a short path length and with no absorption by the glass there is little attenuation of high frequencies). The speakers are three- or four-inch units, worth about 50 cents, and best described as "skeet targets." The rear speakers, slightly larger units, are mounted facing upwards on the shelf behind the rear seats. The trunk acts as the baffle and while this furnishes better bass response, with both speakers in a common chamber, this doesn't help localization. There is a control on the playback unit to adjust the levels of the speakers for front alone, rear alone, or a combination front/rear balance. The amplifier of the player puts out a fairly clean 2-3 watts, but the speakers are so poor that even at very modest playback levels the sound quality is just marginally bearable. Considering the cost of the car the use of such poor speakers is just plain insulting.

It goes without saying that recourse to the dealer or manufacturer just gets you blank stares. If you want to improve the quality of the sound, you will have to do it yourself. Oh well, being in the hi-fi business, this shouldn't be any problem. Hah! You soon find out what a can of worms you have bought. The area of sonic improvement, in this instance, is the replacement of those execrable speakers with units of better quality. One fortunate thing is that nowadays most car cartridge amplifiers are designed to have maximum output with speakers of 8 ohms impedance. In the earlier days they had this oddball 3.2 ohms situation which is what most garden variety automobile speakers were rated. Trying to find a good quality speaker of that impedance is a major task. At 8 ohms impedance, we have many fine speakers. There are excellent 8-inch speakers made by Electro-Voice, JBL, Wharfedale and others, and this larger size, plus the higher efficiency of these units should solve my problem, right? Wrong. The eight-inch speakers can be fitted into the rear shelf without much difficulty, but even the very shallow depth of the JBL unit is too much for the usual kind of front installation. Enter at this point car stereo expert extraordinaire, Mr. Harold Wally.

Mr. Wally is the owner of Wally's Stereo Tape City in New York, a unique establishment devoted entirely to car stereo. Mr. Wally was a pioneer in the car stereo field and today his company has a reputation for "know-how" that brings customers from far beyond the metropolitan New York area. His company carries over 40,000 cartridges in stock, handles the top brands of cartridge players, as well as a special unit he helped to design, and has most comprehensive installation facilities. Mr.

Wally knows and loves music and significantly, his credo is "demonstrate!" I had met Mr. Wally some years ago, and with my desire for a really high quality cartridge installation in my new car, decided to avail myself of his expertise.

During our first conversation, I brought up the subject of using the aforementioned hi-fi speakers. To my surprise he told me that even if there were no physical problems in fitting in the speakers I had in mind, this was still not the best route to high quality car stereo sound. And thereby hangs a tale.

My car will shortly be ensconced in Mr. Wally's operating theatre, where his expert surgeons will snip out the old and put in the new ... and I will soon be giving you a full report on the operation and how the patient fared.

The cocktail party is a great American institution, and as you well know, you can meet the damndest people at these affairs. I have been to every conceivable kind of party, and I'm sure you have too. I'll bet you also have a mental catalog of the myriad types and characters that seem to infest these parties.

Well, I thought I had met them all … but I ran across a new type at a recent party. Would you believe a full-blown, card-carrying member of Women's Lib? Well, fellas, this creature I met was so typical of the Lib breed, she could have posed for a Lib recruiting poster, or maybe the cover of Ms. magazine. Let us be kind and say she was not comely of face. Typically she had a board-flat bosom, bangles, beads and kooky clothes, Gloria Steinern glasses. The only thing missing was a Bella Abzug hat. Unfortunately, I was introduced to her as being in the "recording and hi-fi business." Hoo boy! Was that a mistake! Fueled by at least four Martinis and brandishing a cocktail fork, with which she impaled some hapless cocktail weenies at frequent intervals (she eventually finished the whole plate of weenies, which may have some dark Freudian implications, but I'll leave that to the psychologists), she began a tirade about how the recording and hi-fi industries were discriminating against women! I admitted that we did not have very many women in the industry, but there were some and that they occupied some pretty responsible positions. I gave her a few examples, which didn't seem to placate her very much, but fortunately the Martinis were beginning to anesthetize her and she finally wandered off.

Obviously I'm not a booster of Women's Lib. I like my females feminine and compliant. Well, the little fire-breather got me to thinking about the role of women in our industry and speaking personally of the gals I knew and know, they have handled a wide variety of jobs in both the hi-fi and recording areas, and they have done them very well indeed.

My first contact with a girl in the hi-fi world was way back in 1950 when I was with Lafayette/Concord Radio in Chicago. My boss had the idea that a girl could be trained to sell hi-fi equipment, and that she would be a unique addition to the traditional all-male sales staff. He asked me to train a Miss Grace Friedman, a young lady with a good background in music. Grace was a bright girl and a responsive student and within a few months she was an excellent saleswoman with a good grasp of the subject and even able to hold her own in conversations with the wild-eyed audiophiles of those days. Things worked out very well for Grace ... she married the boss and now lives in Mexico City! Benefitting from this experience, years later when I had my own House of Hi-Fi, I trained my wife and my partner's wife, Esther Hollister, to sell hi-fi equipment. Both became absolute crackerjack saleswomen and they sold some very high-priced elaborate systems. Shortly after I sold my store and Mr. Harry Belock and I founded Everest Records, Esther Hollister was in a terrible automobile accident and in a hospital for three months.

Mr. Harvey Sampson, owner of the prestigious Harvey Radio Co. of New York, was kind enough to give Esther a job selling hi-fi equipment at the main store on 43rd St. So for about a year and a half, Esther sold along with the " Harvey men," in what is probably the toughest and most sophisticated audio market in the country.

Talking about bright girls with very responsible jobs in the recording industry, the names Wilma Cozart and Rachel Elkind immediately come to mind.

Wilma had formal music training and joined the classical division of Mercury Records. Within a few years she was largely responsible for most of the choice of repertoire and artists and was recording director on most of the sessions, with engineering done by the well-known Bob Fine, whom Wilma later married. By the time of her retirement from Mercury she was a vice president of the company. Rachel Elkind is the long-time producer and general factotum for Walter Carlos (of Switched On Bach fame) and his Trans-Electronic Music Productions Co. Rachel handles such diverse matters as contract negotiations, tape editing, special recording effects, and all the myriad details of producing a recording.

Teresa Sterne, also with classical training on piano, is talent coordinator and wears several other hats for Nonesuch Records. Mrs. Marianne Mantell and Mrs. Barbara Holdridge are the two attractive co-founders of Caedmon Records, who often supervise the recording sessions for their special spoken word recordings.

Joanne Nyquist works for Mark Aubort's Elite Recordings as tape editor and she is one of the best in the business. With formal music training and piano concertizing experience, she sits in front of a tape recorder with score to one side, and with amazing dexterity makes the many splices that add up to a completely edited tape. Mrs. T. Ugoda knows how to sell audio, so much so, that she is manager of the Brooklyn, N.Y. store of the Audio Exchange. Mrs. Saul Marantz used to help her husband in administrative matters, and Mrs. Rudy Bozak performs similarly for her husband.

Gertrude Murphy is a well-known figure in the hi-fi world for her sterling efforts in presenting the various IHF shows around the country. In a similar capacity, Jacqueline Harvey and Dorothy Spronk cope brilliantly with the multitudinous details of the AES conventions in New York and Los Angeles.

Dagmar Dolby handles administrative matters and can always be found manning the display booth at various conventions for husband Dr. Ray Dolby.

Wherever you see a Tannoy speaker exhibit at a hi-fi convention, you'll find Mrs. Fred Towler, helping with the setup and dispensing charm and wisdom.

Husband Fred is American rep for the British Tannoy company.

Mrs. Lincoln (Rick) Barr is a bright, attractive gal who is thoroughly conversant with all aspects of the hi-fi business and who does a solid selling job in her husband's Designatron stores on Long Island. Helen O'Connor is the attractive tall blond you'll find doing administrative work for husband Bill, TEAC rep for New York.

Last, but hardly least, of the hi-fi gals, is my dear wife Ruth. Ruth has been selling hi-fi since the House of HI-Fi days and, unencumbered by children, has been all over the world with me on recording sessions, usually handling the take sheets, in some cases helping with mikes and cables and quite often placating and "gentling down" temperamental conductors. She goes to every audio convention with me and is a fixture at manufacturer press demonstrations. She can operate any kind of equipment, including the most complex 4-channel.

Bless you, ladies! May we find more like you!

(Audio magazine, Oct. 1972; Bert Whyte)

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