Fifteenth in a series: WALTER STANTON
WALTER STANTON started his technical and business career as a teenager in Detroit, running his own radio-repair service after school hours. Later, at Wayne University, from which he received a degree in electrical engineering in 1939, he set up the college's first broadcast station. Scarcely a decade after graduation, capping a series of positions in the electronics field, he became head of Pickering & Company, and eventually he founded its sister company, Stanton Magnetics.
Though Stanton was involved in the technical side of sound reproduction from an early age, the influence of music also was strong, principally through an aunt who lived with the family and was head of the music department at a local private school. He gave up trying to master an instrument, but he has what one friend called "a great ear, a great memory, and an acute sense of pitch." After college, Stanton specialized in the application of electronics to industrial automation. At Detroit Universal Duplicator Company--where he rose to vice president and chief field engineer--he developed and patented an electronic servo system that enabled a standard machine tool to produce complex contoured parts automatically. From there he went to Control Instrument Company, Inc., now a division of the Burroughs Corporation, as assistant vice president in charge of engineering.
But the lure of high fidelity finally claimed him: In 1948 he joined Pickering, which was then three years old and primarily engaged in making products for the broadcast and recording industries. A year later the company announced a new version of its magnetic pickup--one for playing the new 33-rpm microgroove discs. As high fidelity gathered steam, Stanton's career flourished with it, and in 1950 he became president of Pickering.
Soon after, the company put on the market the Model 410 Audio Input System-said to be the first self -powered system that combined a preamp for magnetic pickups with switching for tape, TV, and radio inputs as well as phonograph, plus separate bass, treble, and volume controls. There are those who maintain that this product was responsible for crystallizing the concept of the "separate component" for high quality audio systems. Also introduced during this period was a sophisticated tone arm with a "floating" low -mass cartridge carrier, again designed especially for microgroove disc playback. Pickering experimented with corner columnar speaker systems, using drivers made by other relatively new companies-notably Bozak and James B. Lansing. In fact, Stanton recalls, "we were among their very first customers." In these early years of his steward ship, those within the organization still thought of it as a supplier to professional sound men. But it quickly became apparent to Stanton that the high fidelity field was changing. One night he took all of Pickering's standing orders and sorted them out on his office floor. He was struck by the fact that upwards of 60% were not from studio personnel, but from lay enthusiasts. Stanton began to shape things accordingly, developing a broader distribution pattern and lining up appropriate retail outlets. By the mid-1950s the company had diversified its pickup production to meet the growing consumer market. A notable product of that period was the Fluxvalve pickup featuring an easily replaceable T-Guard stylus.
In 1957 Pickering introduced the Isophase speaker, the first wide-range electrostatic to be manufactured in the U.S. A costly and somewhat esoteric item for its time, the Isophase was not successful in the marketplace, although it received wide attention in technical journals. (That year, too, Stanton was elected president of the Audio Engineering Society.) In 1958 the company followed with what it claims was the first U.S.-made magnetic pickup for stereo, beating Fairchild and General Electric to the market, though Pickering concedes that the German-made Elac pickup preceded them all. Pickering's lightweight stereo model, utilizing the V-Guard principle, first appeared in 1960 and over the next decade was refined and updated. In 1973 Pickering introduced the first magnetic pickup designed and manufactured in the U.S. for CD-4 discs.
When, by the mid-1960s, Pickering had become totally identified with consumer equipment, it was decided to form a sister company to supply the professional market. Indeed, Stanton Magnetics' first customers were broadcast and recording studios and the growing number of disco establishments. But the Pickering story repeated itself: Consumers wanted in, and it wasn't long before Stanton Magnetics also found itself manufacturing for that market and distributing to regular high fidelity dealers.
Among the consumer products offered were the Stanton Gyropoise turntable and the Unipoise tone arm; the turntable line now includes four versions of one basic model. The line between Pickering and Stanton has become fuzzy--especially to an outsider-but, as an insider puts it, Pickering products are "application-engineered for a wide variety of turn tables" and Stanton products are still "primarily aimed at the professional user." Today, at sixty-two, Walter Stanton heads both companies.
Long deeply involved with industry affairs, Stanton holds definite views on the subject of equipment standards, views that seem to have become the prevailing philosophy behind the efforts of the Institute of High Fidelity (of which he was president from 1963 to 1966) in this delicate area. A standard, according to Stanton, should not "legislate" (FTC style) performance criteria: minimum acceptable power, maximum acceptable distortion, and so on. Rather, a standard should de fine methods of measurement and perhaps a few basic concepts (such as the watt) by which a product is evaluated. Performance capabilities must remain a matter of choice by the individual manufacturer lest the spirit of innovation and improvement be lost in a "me too" acceptance of minimal performance levels-as has often happened under Germany's DIN standards. (Only products meeting those standards may be advertised as "high fidelity" in Germany.) As for the IHF itself, Stanton sees its role changing from that of an agency for promoting the concept of high fidelity sound to that of a trade organization representing the industry in dealing with its problems.
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(High Fidelity, Apr. 1977)
Also see:
Classical Records Review--Marriner's Messiah, Davis' Dvorak, etc.