BARNSTORMING

Late last summer, when it was still warm enough so that an uninsulated old barn was a comfortable place to be in, I gave another audio show, my umpteenth one-man event in some 60 years. No--not an equipment display. Rather, an ad-lib lecture with abundant taped sonics. I hate to call these things lectures-they rate in my mind as instructive entertainments, a minor branch of show biz. Hence a show, an audio show.

Well, this time I had to get help to move a pair of extremely heavy loud speakers back and forth from my living room. (A right decision, it turned out, choosing these over a much smaller and more convenient pair.) I hefted my old professional TEAC, a Tascam equivalent, and also mountains of cables, stacks of prepared tapes (reel to reel and full of white leader cues), and my most pessimistic standby equipment, a box of extra cables, sticky tape, connectors, pliers, screwdriver, and of course soldering iron. I am too well acquainted with Mr. Murphy to skip these essentials. Also, forewarned by long experience, I demanded at least two hours by myself in that barn (converted to a guest house in 1921) for detailed setup. I used all but five minutes, and was I lucky! Only one inoperative a.c. wall outlet and one sputtering speaker.

Now this was a very tiny show by big-time pop music standards, but al ready, I think, our audio big shots will see that we live in the same world. As the Boy Scouts have it: Be prepared.

Be prepared for all sorts of improbables you would never have thought of, if you did not know how probable they were. Be prepared even in the material you present, the show itself. Leave nothing to happenstance.

Paradoxically, the very basis of my thorough preparation has always been the opposite of what you may think.

Never a fixed procedure, safely recorded and timed out to the last second. Instead, every successful "lecture" I have ever given has been with out script, done entirely ad-lib. My sort of ad-lib involves hours, days, of prior study and experiment, long rehearsals of possible procedures, the rejection of vast amounts of material, and the amassing of at least twice as much usable stuff as I will have time to handle. This, both in the ideas and in the actual audio on tape. Alternatives! Quick ones, ready-cued, that can be slipped in dexterously anywhere, just as though they were part of the plan.

Indeed, any plan I have is always a batch of alternatives-of clumps of material, spoken comment and played illustrations, even a flexible sequence of events, depending on audience re action as well as the effectiveness of the sound in a soundspace totally different from that at my home. All this is very specific, with leader tape at each possible example--so I can get there quickly-and a well-tried group of spoken phrases that I go over in my mind, and sometimes out loud, just to see how they will work. Oddly, this is what makes for a feeling of spontaneity, as though I really were making it all up on the spot.

After you get through the equipment hazards and sonic surprises in the set ting up of a show and everything is working, you still have that unpredictable unknown: All those bodies and minds that are your audience. This time I had maybe 75 or so in attendance, ranging in age from kids of seven or eight to doddering ancients with impaired hearing. How was I to know which of my alternatives would please? And how long would they listen to each? You understand that the recorded spoken word, which is all I've had in this show (over a span of 40 years) is notoriously difficult to listen to as projected to a lot of people at once.

No TV picture, no live presence, just the sound. At best the attention span for this kind of audio is short before restlessness sets in.

Oddly, music reproduction is less critical. Problems, yes, but recorded music is more easily adaptable to a variety of situations, your audience's attention span is longer, and your re corded examples can be longer too.

Yet even music commentary with recorded sound is a tough proposition to put to a live audience. You must exert every ingenuity you can devise to make it work.

So on my small scale, and on many intermediate scales, you must be pre pared to be flexible. The more rigid your plan, whether in the spoken comment or the recorded sonics, the more likely is disaster. No, you don't just improvise. You juggle your material and with ease, since you have it well prepared. You shape your show as you go along, with an eagle eye on that audience. You nip boredom in the bud just as soon as you sense it, shifting neatly to something else as though you had meant to all along. You can really fool 'em this way. Keep one step ahead, and you have them right in your hand. That's my kind of audio show.

The average high-end consumer, I am aware, is much more familiar with differences in the sound of equipment than with differences in playback location. You come to know your listening room so well, or the sound in your car, that when you acquire new audio you can judge the differences accurately and quickly, quite aside from room acoustics. Most audio people I know have developed remarkably sensitive ears for those tiny but fascinating variations in quality--to the point where even in a noisy audio show (of the equipment type) or in a dealer's demo room, they can judge, or profess to judge, all sorts of subtle performance factors, quite easily ignoring the hideous sonic interference all around. I am in awe of such people--I have never been able to hear sonic quality in such an environment! It all depends on what you train yourself to listen for. My ears go for music as reproduced wherever it may be. I hear the total effect. A different perspective, neither better nor worse.

As a "lecturer," then, a sonic show producer, the listening space variables are vital to me, and are they huge! The variety of effects displayed by the same equipment in different places notably the large assortment of public rooms, halls, churches, and libraries where sound may be reproduced-is absolutely macro, endlessly astonishing. Until you have heard, you will scarcely believe. I would put the com parison between equipment differences and listening hall differences as perhaps 100 to 1. The most glorious high-end speakers you can buy can sound like mud in the most unexpected places. It's bewildering. But once you gauge the enormous size and scope of these differences in playback effect, you can do things to help.

Sometimes, for instance, you find yourself in what seems to be a quite bright hall, and yet when you set up your equipment, you discover that, in explicably, your speakers are dismally muffled. No highs. Worse, the bass is grotesquely too loud and boomy. This, you understand, with entirely "normal" settings, as of your home living room.

Disconcerting, to say the least. Your first reaction is that something dreadful is wrong; your equipment is ruined.

How could it possibly sound so awful? Unless there's a pair of burnt-out tweeter units and some hideous electrical malfunction to produce all that muffled and boomy bass. What to do? Your audience is going to think you have very poor equipment, for all that cash you spent. Or that the recordings you play are inexcusably deficient. In plain fact, the equipment is in perfect order and working normally. It is the strange room space that spoils your sound.

Fortunately, experience has taught me a lot of things to do in this sort of situation. I am only momentarily surprised when that dismal bass-heavy sound emits from perfectly good loud speakers. It happened this time once again, in the old barn. For maybe 10 seconds I had the usual shocked reaction-something must be horribly wrong. Then I realized what it was.

The barn is all wood in its main room, where the cows once lived, with a peaked and shingled roof, ancient irregular sidings (some of the boards 2 feet across), and a wide-spaced and sturdy barn frame of huge oak and chestnut supports that were hand hewn a century or so ago. Though all wood, the room is actually quite bright in sound, with only thin curtains and very little furniture padding. So I had set up my speakers, one on each side of a huge central fireplace and chimney, and hooked up the rest of the gear quickly-only stopping for the one dead speaker, a loose connection in a professional connector, and the wall receptacle that was inoperative. I admit I do not really understand what produces that boomy, bass-heavy sound with the total lack of highs. But it was there, and I had heard it before.

Even so, might I have real trouble this .time? It's always a possibility. I could never give my show with this sound! And I had not brought spare speakers. A bit of brief panic! So first, pessimist that I am, I walked up to the speakers from out in the room and listened, close up, to the tweets that should have been producing sweet highs, half expecting them to be dead. From 8 inches away, they were alive and well and working normally, both midrange and supertweeter units.

Rut at 4 feet, they were already inaudible. And the bass was still booming, even close up Very strange! But it had to be the room, not the equipment.

Now what would you do next? With one of those fashionable equalizers that have sliders, I suppose most home audio owners would try a modest move as a first adjustment: Pushing up the high-end sliders for more highs. Nothing radical--let's not go to extremes.

This is fine audio equipment. Every thing in moderation. Then, for the inexplicable bass boom, you would edge the corresponding bass sliders gently downward so that the whole equalizer indicated a sloping line, up in the treble, down in the bass.

At that point, I would have produced a loud horse laugh. You're much too delicate. You don't understand. You have to do something really drastic here. This room is overwhelming those speakers with its sheer acoustic weight.

I didn't happen to have slider adjustments, but my sturdy old standby system--the Crown 150 control unit and amp--did have a reliable and well-designed standard boost-and-attenuate double knob, for both channels or either one. Moreover, on the big loud speakers (brand name and model withheld-no longer produced), there was a screwdriver adjustment for both midrange and tweeter units. So I knew what I needed to do, and I did it.

First, I turned the control-unit bass on both channels alt the way down and the treble controls all the way up to maximum highs. Then I took screwdriver in hand and jacked up the already somewhat harsh loudspeaker highs (as of my living room) far beyond the "normal" point and to "flat," the maxi mum volume. At home, I knew, this would emit an unendurable screech.

But here, it was strong medicine. I needed nothing less than violent compensation.

I had it! The sound became almost human, with a normal-seeming balance. The room was defeated. One thing still wrong: Too much beaming.

Straight out in front, especially near the speakers, those highs hurt. So with two enormous heaves, I tipped the big speakers back against the wall and removed their fronts (more highs) so that the beam went largely overhead for a good dispersal, not into any body's face. That killed the head-on confrontations.

You know, after that show I received all sorts of compliments on how splendidly natural the sound was, how real the personalities of the recorded voices-just as if the talkers were there. Some of those voices, I should add, were those of the dead. With living relatives in the audience. They still loved it. In spite of all that crazy audio tweaking? Just goes to show. I guess I rate as a good Boy Scout.

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

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