By Edward Tatnall Canby
GET AWAY from it all! That's good advice sometimes. So I did. It was my own advice to me. For some two years I hadn't been off for more than a couple of weeks where I could honestly say that the name AUDIO would be totally unknown-or almost. Not to mention the name Canby. That new 45-day round trip to Europe by air came along and with it my opportunity-I got home on the 44th day with hours to spare. Six whole weeks, and now I'm back at the old post to orate on things that haven't happened, audio and musical.
I didn't listen to a single LP in six weeks, though I did hear half of one, once, in France. And my gleanings on audio in Yerp, in spite of a brave batch of addresses I took with me, were marvelously nil. What a pleasure, if I may be so bold as to say so! I am a new man.
Well, not quite nil. I still have a pair of ears and a lot of curiosity, en passant, as the French say. For instance, I had never been on a 747 before, nor had I sampled the much advertised stereo fare, plus movies, which I hear of 20 times per day in New York via the ads on my radio in the kitchen. So why not try? I plunked down that outrageous $2.50, required (as they keep telling you) by international agreements or something, and in due time--very due--a pretty gal came along with what looked like a basket of gray spaghetti and tossed me a hunk of same. Headphones? Now keep in mind that I still ply my binaural hobby and I like headphones. Moreover, I am steadily impressed by the improvements in headphone fi which have been coming our way during these last few years.
I still have a whole piece to write on binaural listening too. So the headphone, to mix the metaphor once again, is my dish, especially in two-channel format. I am quite prepared to go along in principle with those heady ads which claim that today's phones give us truer sound, hi-er in fi than most loudspeakers and just about as wide in tonal range if not wider. (Wider than some speakers anyhow.) So I took the gray spaghetti and tried to figure out which end was which.
Where, for goodness' sake, were the transducers? All I could find were tubes. (Yes, I know, you flying commuters from one coast to the other know all about such things, but remember, I'm a neophyte and so are a few of our more stationary readers.) Tubes that went from the ears, via a most uncomfortable (sorry--my personal impression) sort of a squishy plastic thing that squashes into the orifice, down to a pair of holes in the seat control panel. Push 'em in, at both ends, switch around the channel selector until something happens, and you're in business, sonically speaking.
Well, I do declare, it was a shock.
In fact, in moments I was quite fascinated by the extraordinary degree of non-communication provided by those dual spaghetti tubes. I am an inveterate telephone user and have been ever since I began with the old two-piece apparatus with the tall column on a base for the mouthpiece and the removable heavyweight ear unit on the end of a cord that we used to dangle expertly between a finger and thumb an inch or so away from the receiving ear. Limited frequency range was then the norm, but you could understand.
My science teacher explained that, though there was no bass response, you could recognize a male voice; your ear had the ability (provided by the Creator aeons before Bell) to reconstruct low-frequency intelligence via the overtone content in the middle high range which the telephone communicated successfully. You could even understand music over the phone minus any real bass. To any musical ear, as we all know, the harmonic sense of a passage of music in entirely intelligible via phone--or for that matter via miniature transistor radio. You can indeed "hear" the bass line at the bottom of the music though, technically, it isn't there.
But, do you know, I could not even recognize the music I was hearing in full stereo over the spaghetti tubes! Unbelievable. I knew it had to be Dvorak because the classical music program said so and I caught a note or two, in the loudest parts, that identified the sound as in fact Dvorak or a sampling of a tiny corner of Dvorak, a sort of biopsy in sound. But as for hearing or reconstructing any sort of bass, I simply could not do so. For minutes at a time I would lose the thread of the music, though it was not unfamiliar to me. The basic harmony of Dvorak, and of a Tchaikovsky symphony too, was totally missing. How could it be? Only last month some ex-members of the Canby Singers worked up a madrigal among themselves, out in Buffalo, and then phoned me long distance in New York to sing it. Perfect.
I got every note and could even recognize the voice of the bass singer, whose name was Jeff. A telephone reconstruction and better than any computer could do, I'll bet. But Tchaikovsky on a 747? Meaningless jargon.
Well, I don't want to knock the spaghetti makers unnecessarily. They have a job to do and it isn't an easy one. You don't go around passing out massive hi-fi headphones to hundreds and hundreds of passengers in any case. And there's the matter of sanitation, which accounts for the sticky plastic earpieces and the lack of any other contact with the human head and skin, presumably covered with unmentionably varied germs. So the spaghetti stuff is undoubtedly a workable and practical solution for a mighty difficult problem of communication. And I think I know why there wasn't any bass, not even reconstructed bass. A matter of massive masking.
Yes, the inside of a 747 in flight is relatively quiet. A lot quieter than some planes I've been in, both pure jet and prop jet. But if you start to apply good old living room hi-fi standards, you run into some figures that need not be quoted-they can be sensed. Without a suitcase full of equipment, I could only use my ears. But my guess is that the flying ambience in a 747 or noisier equivalent comprises a white noise spectrum-maybe I should say a dark gray spectrum-that runs from the subsonic up into the midrange at levels which must reach rather enormous heights down in the very bottom and [...]
(Audio magazine, nov. 1972; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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