SOUND OBSERVATIONS

Have you been to an audio show recently? Chances are good that you have if you are interested enough to read this magazine regularly. Audio shows are every where. But it is curious that the two largest variants of the basic idea are both outsiders, so to speak, that have found themselves in the audio-show game almost in spite of themselves.

They are the twice-a-year, summer and winter, CES (Consumer Electronics Show), basically for dealers, and the annual conventions, east and west in the U.S., of the AES (Audio Engineering Society), aimed at the other sort of audio professionals. Neither of these enormous organizations was remotely in the hi-fi show biz when that peculiar form of sonic display first appeared almost 40 years back.

We must reluctantly recognize, of course, that the most important audio shows, and maybe the biggest, too, are today found elsewhere, from Lon don, Berlin/Dusseldorf, and Paris to Tokyo and Singapore. Are we Americans, even here, becoming just a "ser vice economy"? Yep. And I hate the thought, as should every red-blooded soul hereabouts-not to mention blue blooded. But what can we do? Well, at least I can turn back to nostalgia. But first, more on how I see things now.

Let us define an audio show as an ostensibly public event, representing more than one manufacturer (and/or his cousins and his aunts), that displays reputable audio equipment from, shall I say, the top down. (How far down is not to be specified too exactly.

The top is what matters.) And one more obvious proviso-there shall be audio sound, somehow or other. Can you imagine a more contradictory proposition than a silent audio show? Well, I can. Because that is the way the AES began its once-modest displays of professional audio equipment years ago and, in fact, this is still its worthy aim, if on a hugely greater scale. But time, and life, tend to erode such worthy determinations. (Remember that it is me, and not AES, who is saying that their show includes an audio component today!) The AES people do all the other things professional societies should do, faultlessly year after year. But dear me, there is audio sound. Ways and means are found for this, de rigeur. Circumspectly, but oh so definitely once you are inside one of those dozens of private rooms. (When the doors are left open, the audio is a bit less than circumspect, if you ask me.) You also will find audio at some of the professional sessions, which are sonically well-illustrated according to need. AES is hardly a silent organization. Nor, today, can it be.

As for CES, I do not know exactly when that trade show first began, but for years, many of us in high fidelity re-baptized audio--looked down with scorn on this growing monster of electronic showmanship because it featured the hated "mass-production" cheapie stuff everybody else buys. We felt we were different and definitely on a higher plane. Yet as the impetus and direction of our hi-fi shows faltered and splintered, we had to move n a CES direction. Eventually we joined up, even though at CES there's plenty that is not audio at all. So now my show definition holds: "From the top down." CES qualifies because the top is now there. If you can find it in the melee.

Audience? Trade, public, or professional? "Does it really matter," I ask, "just so there are enough thousands?" The AES is ever-so-specifically learned and professional, yet at the big conventions, I am always astonished at the hordes of college and high school students who mob the exhibits, often sit ting expertly in what we might call the driver's seat, manning the big boards, the synthesizers, the multiplicity of ever-new equipment as veterans to the manner born. This is good-these are the people of the audio future, thrilled to learn hands-on. But you'll have to admit that it tends to blur the distinction between professionals and the so called general public, at least during convention hours. Far as I can see, the general public, all ages, is freely on hand in many shapes and sizes, except perhaps at the more technical of the primary papers, seminars, and so on. As far as I know, anyone with the will and the necessary cash can par take of AES offerings one way or another, including becoming a member, and this is surely as it should be. And so a big part of these professional conventions is, by my definition, an enormous audio show. What else? Indeed, the world's audio shows are remarkably alike, whatever their official intent. Just look at the kids in Japan who overwhelm every show. It's a universal phenomenon, a piece of our civilization-for better or worse.

Over at CES, we also have presumed restrictions as to intent, per haps a bit more so than at AES. The genuine "public" is not supposed to be there. This is a mammoth trade show, an everything-electronic show, with audio built in. Though nominally its dealers are being given an advanced look see, long before the public gets one, I suspect there are plenty of leaks, what with all the daily media around. (Is that 16-year-old over there a dealer? And that benign-looking grandma with the 'phones on her head? Do I hear a gaggle of schoolgirl giggles?) You can't keep these big shows private. It's against present-day nature.

The only place in the "advanced" world that is really different is France, where I've just been visiting, which somehow contrives to set up a Western-type civilization without much reference to anybody else's. In France, this principle applies everywhere, right down to flashlight batteries. This year, for the first time in a half century, I saw a regulation standard D cell for sale in a French supermarket. Since the original Voltaic pile, this country has had its own special battery sizes that fit no body else's. (I'd hate to be one of the AES technical coordinator& when the international AES meetings are held in France!) The French can match us or surpass us at anything when they have a mind to; I'll also have to observe that remarkably few Japanese products were to be seen anywhere. That takes a national unity and pride we do not share over here. Anyhow, I'll bet a hi-fi show in Paris isn't that different from those of the rest of the world, whatever the equipment. Nor do I presume either to praise or to criticize the French way-even if I am for world inter changeability, wherever useful.

The French aren't always rigorously logical, though they always are deter mined to keep whatever is worthwhile to them-in the very face of logic. That includes the most snail-like red tape you ever could face, and not of the audio variety. Woe to anyone who tries to hasten it! These people have a marvelous ability to do things in a complicated fashion. But the French way also includes the most heavenly vegetables you ever tasted-fruits, as well. (This quite aside from French cooking.) Wow-tomatoes with taste, actual flavor and juicy red! You can't hate a nation which provides that kind of product, can you? Further (I'm full of France at the moment) French cars drive on the right, but all rail traffic, from the Metro to the incredible, super-high-speed TGV trains, keeps strictly to the left. Air France has a standard computer net it has to. Check in anywhere, and there's your name on the screen. But though French rail stations are jammed with automations and computer-type equipment, you can't check a phone reservation except at the station where you made it. The computers are totally isolated. So you stand in line at the station and pay up, just as you did around 1900.

The last "regular" public hi-fi show I attended was one in Osaka some years back. (As the shows get bigger, I get less tolerant of the shove and push, not to mention the un-mentionable sonic mix.) What astonished me about that show was that it was entirely underground, in a series of man-made caverns extending like some disused subway system as far as the eye could see. (And further than Beyond the hi-fi were other exhibits and shows, on and on lengthwise, until I lost my sightseeing nerve for fear I would never recognize my audio home base when I got back to it. A war left over? Or built especially for conventions? I did not know.

You understand that the audio show biz began life way back, as this "regular" sort, for the general-interest pub is and anybody else who had business to do. This in contrast to the more specific stated purposes of the biggest shows today, which actually seem to be muscling out the older sort of event simply by their sheer size. Again, officially, these are not audio shows. But, as I see it, they have almost taken over the show business.

It is therefore worth recording, I think, that there is really not much difference between one kind of show and another in actual practice. And this applies even to the once-sharp distinction between professional audio and the consumer type. True, AES still displays entirely what is supposed to be professional equipment. But are we now able to make the distinction? In all the shows since the beginning, every sort, the various locations have been assigned not to types of equipment but to named manufacturers. Many of these now make alternative lines of professional and consumer equipment, often rather closely related. I re call Ampex and the TEAC/Tascam combination as early proponents of this arrangement, straddling the professional gap in their own production.

Many other firms have since gone the same way, not only the Japanese (who really cover the field from professional top to consumer bottom!) but also numerous American and European manufacturers. Crown bridged the gap early on and, thereafter, it was never easy to tell which of its worthy products were professional and which high-end consumer. (Crown has since gone to straight pro, which could be a trend.) The crossing of the gap continues strongly, perhaps because of the inherently longer-lasting qualities of IC and chip technology. The basic distinctions, still obvious at the outer fringes of audio equipment, get less and less defined, and the overlap more extensive, that if such a large and variable overlap between consumer and professional equipment exists, and therefore between the people and firms involved, the hi-fi audio show is bound to be affected since it only reflects what is there. What can the AES or any other show promoters say when the "gray area" so clearly exists in almost every manufacturer's display potential? Today, if I were to see a full-sized mixing board in somebody's palatial living room, I would not bat either eye.

True, it might be one of those new home-based pro studios that db magazine is calling the cottage industry of the audio world. (Some cottages!) But, then again, it could just be hobby stuff on an astronomical scale, which is common enough today. After all, if you can sail a 100-foot yacht just for fun, why not pilot a 50-foot audio studio? This has been a rambling account of today's activities in audio show biz, but behind it are real questions to be thought about. The shows will go on, one way or another, but are we sure which shows are for pros and which are not? With these thoughts off my mind, and on yours, I'll get back to nostalgia and the first audio show, when the very idea was new. It's quite a story!

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

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