SPECIAL 20TH ANNIVERSARY SECTION
By Larry Klein, Technical Director
IT could be said that I was close to STEREO REVIEW (originally HiFi & Music Re view)-at least physically-from the very beginning. The cubbyhole wherein I labored as technical editor of Popular Electronics was only about 100 feet or so down the hall from the office of the new hi-fi magazine's publisher, and I had been hired for PE by Perry Ferrell, the man who was to become STEREO REVIEW'S first Editor.
In 1958 the young hi-fi industry was struggling to find its way. There was no "low-end" equipment market (or even any receivers!) at the time. If you wanted to hear your music through a speaker with a diameter greater than 5 inches, you probably bought a con sole made by one or another of the major TV-set manufacturers. But if you were among the lonely few self-acknowledged audiophiles in early 1958, you were most likely losing sleep over the big question of the moment: whether to convert to stereo-and, if so, to which format. The stereo-tape controversy (in-line as opposed to staggered heads) was being resolved in favor of the in-line head gaps we have today (all stereo tapes were two-track, otherwise known as half-track), but the proper format for stereo discs was still being vigorously debated.
An all-about-stereo article in the February 1958 issue of the new magazine explained the stereo-perception process, told about the available tape machines (open-reel only, of course), and predicted the commercial appearance of stereo discs and-ultimately even stereo FM. And it was only four months later that an article in the June 1958 issue in formed eager stereophiles that at least nine independent record companies were known to be producing stereo discs, and that-won der of wonders-they were all being cut "ac cording to the same method." For non-old timers, that "same method" comment requires a little clarification. In early 1958 there were at least three stereo-disc techniques being proposed. The Minter sys tem employed a subcarrier for the stereo in formation and operated in principle not un like today's CD-4 quad system. The other two stereo-disc systems being promoted were more conventional: the London system used the separate vertical and lateral undulations of the record-groove wall to embody the two channels. And the Westrex system used very much the same approach except they tilted it a little: each groove wall carried the modulation at an angle of 45 degrees to the record surface. It soon became evident that, all other things being equal, the Westrex system was easier both to cut records with and to design playback cartridges for, and it therefore won out in the end.
Earlier that same year, Shure Brothers had announced a new tape head that "doubles the capacity and playing time of all stereo tapes." What was being referred to was of course the first four-track stereo head, a development touted as one that would "save the tape stereo market." Al ready a confirmed audiophile, I was one of those who wanted stereo saved. I had enough mono equipment lying around to interconnect it for stereo, and I already owned a copy of the very first commercial stereo disc, Audio Fidelity's "Dukes of Dixieland." There was one thing lacking, however: I was
having trouble getting a stereo cartridge. It was at about this time that Popular Electronics ran a construction article by an Electro Voice engineer that showed how a stereo cartridge could be built (!) from two of their mono ceramic models. I tried it in a stereo-modified tone arm and it worked-but not as well as the readymade E-V stereo cartridge that appeared shortly thereafter.
STEREO REVIEW'S Hi-Fi Directory for 1958 (put together in mid-1957) listed no stereo record-playing equipment or amplifiers those who had stereo-tape equipment played it through a pair of mono setups wired together. Incidentally, the first Japanese hi-fi product appeared in the U.S. at just about that time: a S25, 8-inch, full-range driver made by Panasonic. It had fine performance for the day, achieved partly by using a novel phase-correcting globe mounted at the speaker-cone apex. This raw speaker was the only Japanese import to be seen or heard for many years, although English, German, Scandinavian, and Dutch products were everywhere.
The real stereo breakthrough came in late 1958, and the 1959 Hi-Fi Directory listed about thirty models of stereo preamps, power amps, and integrated amplifiers. These In 1958, Technical Director Klein could still be persuaded to make occasional attached-kit service calls.
nevertheless still accounted for well under half of the total listings. Of the twenty or so cartridges listed, about half were stereo, and these were equally divided between ceramic and magnetic types. A number of stereo adapters were also available; they provided a master volume control and the switching facilities needed to combine two mono systems into one clumsy stereo system.
Several tuners labeled AM-FM stereo were 'also available, despite the fact that there were no stereo FM broadcasts. These tuners were stereo in the sense that they had independently tuned AM and FM sections whose outputs were available separately and simultaneously. An AM and an FM station would occasionally broadcast stereo material with one channel mostly on AM and the or her mostly on FM. (It had to be a "mostly" arrangement simply to prevent AM- or FM-only listeners from losing half the audio material). But even with the limited separation provided by AM-FM stereo, I re member how thrilling it sounded-particularly when listened to through headphones. (Incidentally, there were no commercial stereo headphones either: I had to rewire a pair of military-surplus mono phones that had reasonable fidelity.) N the 1959 Hi-Fi Directory there were about as many separate tuners listed as there were "tuner-amplifiers" (the term "receiver" had not yet been applied to the combination). The transistor began to show up in hi-fi equipment about this time-and audiophiles incautious enough to buy solid-state units perhaps deserved exactly what they got: low sensitivity and front-end overload in tuners; overload, crossover distortion, and repeated failure in amplifiers. The day of "transistor sound" was upon us.
It is also perhaps worth noting that 1958 and 1959 were years in which the separate tone arm and turntable were de rigueur for the self-respecting audiophile. According to my fast count in the 1959 Hi-Fi Directory, there were about twenty-five separate tone arms available (one of them a straight-line radial tracker] and perhaps forty (!) different separate turntables, a few with electronic drives. There were about as many models of changers (under twenty) as there were integrated non-automatic record players.
As a young bachelor with an active social life, I was somewhat upset by having to change records manually every 15 or 20 minutes or so, for it frequently interrupted in the evenings, at least-one of my other major entertainments. However, a military-surplus Microswitch installed as a shutoff on the turntable and activated by the tone arm solved the problem: the 3 to 6 grams of tracking force employed (not unusual then) made it easy for the arm to throw a Micro-switch as it traveled the run-out groove.
Somewhat later I installed the same switch on my Concertone 1401 tape recorder (would you believe it lacked an end-of-
tape shutoff?) and wrote about it for Electronics Illustrated. The same Concertone machine served as the guinea pig for a "Convert to Stereo" article I wrote for the 1958 edition of the Hi-Fi Yearbook. It showed how to mount and connect an external stereo tape-head assembly (with guides) and contained this interesting comment: "Although my monophonic system always seemed satisfactory, the sound had now taken on a different aspect. New clarity and body were immediately apparent, but even more important was a feeling of dimension.
The orchestral instruments seemed to be located along the side of the room where the speakers were." As I recall, my feelings about stereo at the time were a little mixed. On the one hand, it was clear that it was the coming thing, but on the other, program material was severely limited and expensive-and in many cases the stereo playback equipment was not up to the quality of existing mono units. And it wasn't only a matter of additional speakers and amplifiers. Suddenly some expensive tone arms and turntables couldn't make it in stereo. The tone arms were not wired for stereo cartridges (although some of them could be converted), and in some cases the low-frequency resonances of the arms were moved up into the audible area because the arms were too light for use with the stiffer stylus assemblies of the stereo cartridges.
Another thing that took a lot of us by surprise was the rumble heard during stereo-disc playback. I, like many others, first thought that the problem was in the stereo-disc cutters, but it turned out that the designers of even some of the very fine turntables had ignored rumble arising from vertically oriented vibration. This was okay in mono days, because mono phono cartridges respond only to side-to-side groove modulation. The stereo-disc signal, however, appears as, a combined lateral-vertical modulation, and the stereo cartridge responded to and, delivered vertical rumble as though it were part of the signal.
THE February 1960 issue of HiFi Review, with little or no fanfare, added the word "stereo" to the magazine's title (the word "music" had been dropped in December to make room for it.) This overt acknowledgment that stereo was indeed here to stay was in no sense premature. Stereo receivers were then becoming available, integrated stereo amplifiers were proliferating, and tape recorders were appearing with four-track stereo heads. Most of the recorders also had the ability to play the older two- (half-) track stereo tapes to ease the stereophile's conversion problem.
In the March 1960 issue, the complex stereo FM issue was discussed. It seemed very much up in the air (no pun), with the conflicting forces totally at odds as usual. The villains were those commercial forces who were using part of the FM channel of various stations to broadcast background (or "store-cast") music. It seems that the proposed multiplex adapters would permit these pro grams to be received free-obviously an impossible situation. In addition, many of the FM stations of the day were barely making ends meet, and the removal of the storecast revenues could edge them over into the red.
-- In January 1961, HiFi/Stereo Review published a how-to-buy article on FM tuners
but still no stereo. In the same issue, an article on transistor hi-fi took
a careful stance. --
Perhaps it was the influence of a new figure (Furman Hebb) in the editor's chair, but the attitude was one of watchful waiting rather than the gushing enthusiasm for the new de vices that was sweeping over much of the now rapidly expanding industry.
On April 20, 1961, the FCC finally gave the nod to a system of stereo FM broadcasting. It turned out to be the Zenith/GE sys tem, one that had, oddly enough, been scarcely mentioned in the hi-fi magazines (all of them had been supporting the Crosby technique). In the June 1961 issue, both H. H. Scott and Fisher announced multiplex stereo adapters to decode the broadcasts that might-or might not-begin by June 1.
In any case, despite the implicit promise of the MPX or STEREO jack on the mono tuners, many a disgruntled would-be convert to HiFi & Music Review First issue February 1958 HiFi Review December 1958 to January 1960 HiFi/Stereo Review February 1960 to October 1968 Stereo Review November 1968 to present stereo FM found that the adapters did not deliver quite the performance promised, even when manufactured by the same company as was responsible for the tuner. I re member one company (they shall be name less here, but they remember who they are) with a very expensive state-of-the-art kit tuner that tried for six months to design a work able multiplex adapter and finally gave up.
In the summer of 1961, Julian Hirsch (and Gladden Houck, his partner at the time) be came a contributing editor, and in the October issue he produced his first test reports for HiFi/Stereo Review. In January 1963, Editor William Anderson and I joined the staff. I had left Popular Electronics two years previously to become technical editor of Electronics Illustrated, and a close-to-mid night phone call at home--a clarion call, it seems now-summoned me away from my resistors, capacitors, tubes, and transistors to labor in the Elysian fields of music and hi-fi equipment. I soon settled into the editorial grind, slowly evolving in the process a personal "philosophy," if you will, of the goals and purposes of hi-fi (the various build-it-yourself transistor gadgets I had dealt with editorially up until that time required no such introspective exercises).
THE evolution of transistor hi-fi is a story in itself. In the May 1964 issue I wrote a story titled "Transistor High Fidelity" that embodied the opinions of the designers of the day. In retrospect, their optimistic long-term predictions for the transistor were valid, but no one of them saw clearly (or would admit to) the day-to-day problems that were ultimately to drive some of their companies into or close to bankruptcy. What were those problems? Simply that many of the semiconductors of the day were inherently not up to the demands placed on them, their safe and un safe operating areas weren't being properly taken into account, and in many cases the protective circuits were quite inadequate.
The result, of course, was that the equipment often broke down or blew up under test and in use (and remember we are talking about a time when the highest-power units were running at 50 watts per channel). But these problems were solved slowly-very slowly-and reliability is no longer a special problem (which is not to say that transistor equipment is now immune to breakdown, any more than is any other very complex mechanical/electronic device).
In retrospect, there was one big techno logical development in the Fifties and two in the Sixties. As I recall, the introduction of the Acoustic Research AR-1 speaker went virtually unnoticed in 1955. It seemed to be just another small speaker system, and everyone then knew that a speaker cabinet had to be 6 cubic feet or larger if one were to realize any bass at all from the woofer installed in it.
It was simply an immutable law of physics or so it was generally believed. Ed Villchur, the designer of the acoustic-suspension speaker, demonstrated for all to hear that low, clean bass could be gotten out of small boxes-if you sacrificed some efficiency.
In 1967 we introduced the Dolby noise-reduction system to our readers in a review of the first two discs that had been Dolby-A mastered. (The Dolby-B system was still years off.) The other breakthrough although at the time it was certainly not widely recognized as such-was the advent of the cassette machine in 1963. I don't know how many of you had a chance to play with the book-size lo-fi cassette portable introduced fifteen years ago, but we who did scarcely dreamed that the format would one day wipe out low-cost open-reel machines and at its best be able to provide performance equivalent to that heard from the finest discs.
IN January 1970 we scooped the hi-fi world with the first story on the four-channel disc, but our early enthusiasm was soon tempered by subsequent events, as the prophetically titled "The Four-Channel Follies" indicated seven months later. Act II of the "Follies" appeared a year later, and by that time I could see the handwriting on the walls-all four of them. There is no question that four-channel reproduction still has promise, but that promise remains to be realized. Its current eclipse-temporary, I believe-was the result of bad promotion, inept marketing, off-target engineering, and poor demonstrations. But I predict that four-channel will rise again! And perhaps that's a proper optimistic note to close on. In general, my association with high fidelity for the past twenty-five years or so has convinced me that it is a worthwhile pursuit, clearly a less trivial pas time than many other hobbies. For me, it not only provides the opportunity to dabble in the sciences of acoustics, psychoacoustics, mechanics, and electronics, but it offers the un measurable pleasures of music as well. With a means so fascinating and an end so worth while, who would want any other avocation-or vocation either, for that matter? Certainly not me. And certainly not the six prominent industry figures we have persuaded, in the following pages, to share their visions of what the next twenty years of sound reproduction might be like.
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Also see: Six industry spokesmen address the future of audio technology
CASSETTE DECKS -- A look at the specs and features available in each price class, IVAN BERGER
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)