A Tiny History of High Fidelity, Part 2
A Near-Death Experience for High Fidelity
1964-1970
In the latter part of the Sixties, the High Fidelity industry
continued to grow, but the pace of innovation slowed down after the
conversion to stereo sound. More ominously, the transistor revolution
proved the undoing of the domestic Hi-Fi industry. (This is why the Hi-
Fi line in the Markets chart breaks off around 1968 ... sadly, the
dreams of many Americans came unraveled in those bitter years, with
the triple assassination of both Kennedys and Martin Luther King.)
To return to the story of audio, the early transistor amplifiers used
the notorious quasi-complementary output scheme, since matched
complementary output transistors were not then available. In addition,
the dangers of exceeding the Safe Operating Area were very poorly
understood, so the first generation of transistor amps weren't even
remotely "solid-state reliable." Instead, they failed at the drop of a
hat, and were so aggressive and harsh with Class AB crossover
distortion and Transient Intermodulation Distortion (TIM) that an
entire generation of "East Coast Sound" speakers became duller and
duller to compensate.
The return rates eventually became so bad that Scott, Fisher,
Sherwood, and many other well-known names were driven out of business,
while the hallowed Marantz name was sold to the Tu****nsky brothers
(who owned the US distribution rights for Sony). I've talked to folks
who owned hi-fi shops during this time, and some US-made transistor
amps had a failure rate of more than 50% out of the box! Customers
aren't exactly impressed with a sales demo that include sparks and a
puff of smoke from a brand-new amplifier. (Don't think this is a
problem of the bad old days. It wasn't that long ago I was sitting
with the editor of a national audio magazine and his $15,000
transistor amplifier expired in a puff of smoke and took his $22,000
speakers along for the ride. I actually saw the tiny flash of light as
the woofer voice-coil va****ized from 30 amps of DC offset. True story,
folks.)
This was the market opening for Pioneer, Kenwood (Trio in the rest of
the world), and Sansui. The Japanese had extensive experience with
transistors in cost-sensitive consumer products (the US experience was
limited to the military and instrumentation sectors), and they made
products that were reliable-enough, looked expensive, had good reviews
in the mass-market magazines (a little cash under the table ...), and
best of all, had 40 to 50% profit margins for the retailer! The
Japanese understood the workings of the US market better than the US
manufacturers - after all, as outsiders, they had no preconceptions of
how the market should or shouldn't work - they just accepted it as it
was, not as it should be.
The well-financed and business-minded Japanese, unlike the American
manufacturers, were quite willing to pay substantial advertising costs
in expensive glossy magazines like Playboy, wining and dining magazine
editors and staff, and paying generous Special Promotional Incentive
Fund (SPIF) payments to thousands of salesmen at the end of the day.
Back when I worked in retail, SPIF payments that came right out of the
cash register of $50 to $100 at the end of the day wasn't at all
unusual - and this was back in the early Seventies. For American
magazines, product reps, and the local hi-fi store, it was, as they
say in the Syndicate, an offer you cannot refuse.
As the traditional American manufacturers sank under the tidal wave of
Japanese im****ts, slow progress was made in the development of output
transistors, allowing the use of a matched PNP/NPN complementary (or
push-pull) output stage with direct-coupling. This removed the worst
of the bias reliability problems of the quasi-complementary output
stage, but problems with high-frequency instability and thermal
runaway still plagued transistor amplifiers, keeping the long-stated
goal of "solid-state reliability" as empty as the digital promise of
"perfect sound forever."
Things weren't much better in the movie theaters. By now, widespread
color television owner****p had cut deeply into the movie-going
audience, and most theater owners were not interested in maintaining
costly 70mm projection systems with large curved screens. The theaters
had been divested from the movie studios by Supreme Court order, and
the new independent owners wanted to maximize profits as quickly as
possible. That meant bigger popcorn concessions, faster audience
turnaround (no more double features where you stay all day if you
wanted), smaller screens, a much smaller (and non-union) theatre
staff, and a serious technological regression to 35mm film and 1930's-
vintage mono optical sound.
We now know the Eastmancolor filmstock of the late Sixties and
Seventies was inferior, color-****fting and wa****ng out in less than 20
years. The films that were not transferred to separate frame-
registered black-and-white negatives for archiving are now essentially
beyond recovery - but frankly, technically, they were crap to begin
with, with a reduced 35mm aperture to provide the illusion of
widescreen, and low-fi mono optical sound. When you see a really
terrible-looking movie or TV show from the Seventies, that's why.
It took more than a decade for high-fidelity stereo sound to return to
the new, smaller, multiplex theatres, thanks to the runaway success of
the Star Wars movies. (Without Star Wars, it's quite likely the
theatre owners would have ignored Dolby Labs and stuck to antique
optical-sound mono.) When word finally got out about the poor
stability of Eastmancolor, the industry put pressure on Kodak to
improve the filmstock, and archivists and historical societies put
pressure on the industry to improve storage conditions. Although very
few theaters can now exhibit 70mm, a few big-budget pictures are shot
in that format, mostly so special effects can be more effective and
realistic.
The tape-recorder market was in a state of flux. The introduction of
small-signal transistors was a more positive development than in power
amplifiers, since high power is not an issue in tape-decks, and the
circuit complexity is high ... a situation tailor-made for
transistors. Japanese tape recorders, some of high quality (TEAC and
Sony), and some not, steadily drove the US-made machines like Ampex,
Magnecord, and Viking off the consumer market.
In an unlikely alliance, ****amichi, Dolby Labs, and Advent co-operated
in transforming the Philips Compact Cassette, originally designed as a
no-fi ****table dictation format, into a near-hifi tape format (similar
to MP3s today). In less than 4 years, the new cassette format drove
the unreliable 4 and 8-track endless loop systems off the market. The
non-technical public had an easy-to-use, hard-to-break stereo tape
recorder for the first time. For better or worse, the Compact Cassette
is by far the dominant medium for world sales of pre-recorded music,
being dirt-cheap, plenty good enough for the mass market, and
trivially easy to mass-copy and pirate. The latter is a major
advantage for Third World nations that have no intention of paying
royalties to obscenely rich Western entertainment cor****ations -
cassettes are still the dominant medium in the Third World, although
mass-duplicated CDs and almost-free CD, VCD, and DVD recorders and
players are quickly closing the gap.
The Rise from the Ashes
1970-1980
As the Sixties fizzled out into the spreading gray twilight of Asian
mass-fi, a tiny ray of light emerged from an unlikely corner of the
industry: J. Gordon Holt's typewritten zine, the Stereophile. This was
a very different magazine than the glossy 4-color product you see on
every newsstand today. Every pint-sized issue had a grainy black-and-
white picture on the cover, and J. Gordon's zany sense of humor was
evident in the writing, the goofy cartoons, and the downright funky
photos.
This tiny little magazine, with never a single advertisement, was just
about the only place where you'd see serious discussion of the sonic
merits of the JansZen 130 electrostatic tweeter, the Paoli Mark III,
the KLH Nines, the Fulton FMI-80, and a brand-new vacuum-tube preamp
from a small company in Minneapolis called Audio Research. This was
something else ... a different set of values was in place here. If you
looked hard, you might even find a funky little hole-in-the-wall
dealer that actually carried this hard-to-find stuff. In the formative
years of high-end, image, style, and fa****on counted for nothing,
zilch, nada.
The designer-jean, style-over-substance, marketing-uber-alles
zeitgeist had to await the ascendency of Ronald Reagan, still some ten
years in the future. Remember, these were the dark and war-torn Nixon/
Ford years, a different kettle of fish altogether. The counterculture
was ferociously alive and well in the early Seventies - this was the
time of the Kent State mass murders, antiwar rallies that drew
millions to every major city, the release of the Pentagon Papers
uncovering a decade of high-level government deception about the
Vietnam War, revelations of FBI spying and black ops, and the
Watergate dam bursting with the President exposed as the Criminal-In-
Chief.
During this unsettled time, J. Gordon Holt played a pivotal role in
unearthing the interesting things when the American Hi-Fi business had
to all appearances entered a state of terminal collapse. Sure enough,
here and there, in little workshops all around the land, folks were
building strange new products ... vacuum-tube electronics,
electrostatic speakers, making direct-to-disc recordings, all kinds of
zany items. They made their way to the door of the early Stereophile,
and the market kept on growing. Slightly less funky dealers started
picking them up. More companies appeared. In a few years, a new
industry, risen from the ashes of the old, had a name: the High End.
(No, Harry Pearson did not invent the name High-End. Long before his
magazine appeared at the end of the decade, everybody in the industry
was already calling it that, so let's put that self-serving little
fable to rest.)
When I joined Audionics in 1973, I had a ringside seat watching and
participating in the profound changes in speaker design techniques of
the early Seventies. The most significant was the re-discovery of
Neville Theile's landmark paper first published in Australia in 1963
(and promptly forgotten). Theile, a lead engineer for Australia's
Color TV project, had gone on to fully analyze both closed and vented
box loudspeakers as 2nd and 4th-order high-pass filters.
No more cut-n-try approximations, no hypercomplex theoretical math
filled with mistaken assumptions, just straightforward Butterworth and
Chebychev filter functions ... and none of this outdated "M-derived
filter" stuff, either. Theile's paper also gives precise methods of
measuring fundamental properties of the driver such as Fs (resonance
frequency), Qt (damping), and Vas (compliance). With a scope, an
oscillator, a voltmeter, a frequency counter, a test box, and a basic
hand calculator, you could accurately design a closed or vented box
system and get results within a fraction of a dB of the prediction ...
a genuine breakthrough in low-frequency design that removed all of the
hopeless cut-n-try guesswork of the last 40 years.
What's a little sad is that Theile's paper was ignored for nearly a
decade simply because it was published in a little-known Australian
journal. It took Robert Ashley of the Audio Engineering Society to
pick up Theile's work and also that of Richard Small, who published a
very comprehensive summation and extension of Theile's work in his
doctoral thesis (as well as the modern near-field method of measuring
loudspeakers). All of this material appeared in the AES Journal in
1973-74, and it took the speaker-designing world by storm. Within a
matter of months, Theile-Small became the accepted method of
designing, prototyping, and measuring closed-box, vented-box, and
passive-radiator speakers all over the world.
Small simplified the system so powerfully that all it took was one of
the new scientific calculators (the slide rule was beginning to fade
away) and a set of nomograms to design accurate bass response. After
personal computers were introduced in the early 1980's, the T/S
equations became an integral part of every commercially available
software package for designing loudspeakers.
Over at KEF in England, Laurie Fincham was extending the analytic
techniques pioneered by Theile and Small on the more difficult problem
of crossover design. Using the best available HP minicomputer of the
day, he was able to acoustically measure the driver using FFT
techniques, measure its impedance characteristics using the new T/S
techniques, set up a prototype "target function" for the desired
crossover filter, and let the computer optimize all of the possible
values of crossover elements. In effect, the computer goes through
thousands of potential crossover variations and picks the closest
approximation to the desired response curve.
Although nearly everyone adopted Theile-Small techniques for bass
design (except the transmission-line holdouts), it took ten years
longer for computer-based crossover optimization to be widely adopted,
due to the high cost of computers and programming. KEF paid more than
$100,000 (in 1975 dollars!) for the two-rack-wide PDP-8 DEC system
they had; this on top of the custom-built anechoic chamber required by
early FFT techniques. The FFT programming was entirely custom-written
in FORTRAN for KEF by full-time computer engineers on loan from a
local technical college. As you might imagine, this was far beyond
what a little company like Audionics could do, and the high-profile
American companies of the Seventies, then as now, invested their
profits in marketing, not engineering. Serious advances in loudspeaker
design was the province of the British in the Seventies. (The
Canadians would have their day in the late Eighties and onward, thanks
to the government-funded NRDC of Canada.)
KEF, Celestion, and Bowers & Wilkins were pretty much alone in using
the target-filter-function technique until the advent of low-cost,
powerful PC's with off-the-shelf speaker-design software. Today, the
speaker designer mouse-clicks the "optimize crossover" function after
measuring the electrical and acoustical response of the driver,
choosing the desired crossover topology, and selecting a set of
starting values. After the PC models the crossover and graphs the
response, you can build the physical crossover, measure the speaker
system, and sure enough, it'll be within a small fraction of a dB of
the software model. You still have to know what you're doing and how
to measure the speaker; the computer won't think for you. But what it
has done is level the playing field between the biggest and littlest
speaker companies. We all use the same software, and the PC's used by
JBL are no different than the one you're using right now - in fact,
the computer you're reading this Web page with is far more powerful
than KEF's PDP-8 I saw in the mid-Seventies.
The systems-modeling approach perfected in the early Seventies
extended to driver design, an even more intractable realm. The BBC was
seeking a cone material that would provide exact pair-matching as well
as permitting the design of a highly consistent and repeatable monitor
speaker. Bextrene, an acetate plastic derived from wood products,
first saw use in the KEF B110 driver, which had a starring role in the
legendary BBC-designed LS3/5a compact monitor.
(While I was at Audionics, we applied for permission to officially
license the LS3/5a design. After 10 long months of British silence,
the BBC sent us a very gracious letter that boiled down to "Forget
It!" If Audionics had been as business-savvy as one of our
competitors, we would have made a second-rate copy, and advertised it
as our own brilliant and original design. If we'd done enough
advertising and schmoozing magazine writers, we might have convinced
everyone we were first!)
In the late Seventies, the BBC perfected polypropylene cones, which
had the significant advantage of not requiring a treatment with doping
material, as well as higher efficiency and much flatter response. By a
process I still don't understand, the BBC patents were cir***vented in
less than 3 years, and everybody and their brother started making
polypropylene-cone drivers. Even mass-fi rack stereos use
polypropylene drivers these days, which tells me that they must be
even cheaper than paper to make. However, the BBC was very much on the
mark in not using poly drivers any larger than 8 inches; the latest
BBC monitor (the successor to the LS3/5a) uses a Dynaudio 5.5" driver
with a poly cone, which I feel is the just about the right size for
getting the best sound from polypropylene.
Moving on to electronics, the power amps of the late Sixties and early
Seventies blew up a lot and sounded pretty nasty. We're not talking
classics here, we're talking about junk that should never have been
put on the market. The engineers of the early Seventies were still
wrestling with problems like maintaining adequate phase margin with
real loudspeaker loads, Nyquist feedback stability criteria, staying
within the Safe Operating Area for the driver and output stage, and
little things like that. Audionics' first amp, the PZ-3, fit right
into the picture: loads of feedback, and very low THD distortion
measurements. (0.03%, get it?) It measured just fine, but it wasn't
too reliable in the real world, with an alarming fondness for shorting
out driver transistors, smoking bias resistors, and shooting flames
out of the cooling vents (in anticipation of the much larger solid-
state melt-down at Three Mile Island).
I remember many days when more of these dogs came back for repair than
we ****pped out. Some of the amps had circuit boards scorched beyond
recognition, and top plates discolored by lines of light-gray soot.
We'd replace the circuit board, repaint the top cover, and ****p 'em
right back out again as "new" product. (Refurbished? What's that? You
mean this new amp right here?) Needless to say, the PZ-3 was not a big
money-maker for Audionics. The only consolation was knowing that all
the rest of the high-powered transistor amps were just as bad. (We
tested our competition on the bench and they blew up too.)
In the mid-Seventies, along came Matti Otala and the discovery of TIM
(slewing) distortion. Our Number One engineer (the conservative old-
timer who designed the PZ-3) was utterly horrified by Otala's first
Audio Engineering Society paper and said it was unscientific bunk
(well, his language was stronger than that). Our young Number Two
engineer took Matti seriously, let "traditional values" go by the
board, and tried a different approach.
Bob Sickler let the distortion rise up to the 0.1% level, by making
very large decreases in feedback (feedback dropped from 40-50 dB to 20
dB) and using the most linear complementary-symmetry topology
possible. The slew rate and power bandwidth improved by a factor of 10
to 50 times. Best of all, we couldn't break it, even with my speaker
simulator load hooked up.
In 1976, Audionics introduced the CC-2, which was the first low-TIM
amplifier sold in the US. Sure enough, it sounded much better than the
PZ-3, and the failure rate in the field was well under 1%. The reason
for both was probably the 200 kHz power bandwidth and an excess phase
margin of 60 degrees, both quite unusual at the time. Although I
rarely listen to my CC-2 these days, it's still not a bad transistor
amp; by now, though, nearly all transistor amps use the same design
principles as the CC-2. Matti's paper had such a profound impact on
the solid-state design community that nearly all high-end engineers
got on board ... besides, it's hard to argue with better reliability,
which a high slew rate and adequate phase margin certainly provide.
Everyone loves reliability (well, I have to make an exception for
software companies, but I digress).
As the high end market expanded in the mid-Seventies, Harry Pearson's
"The Abso!ute Sound" magazine made its first appearance. HP's approach
was more subjective than Holt's, and he was attracted to more unusual
products than Holt. I wasn't a big reader or follower of HP, since he
was attracted to things that left me cold, like the Dahlquist DQ-10,
the big big Infinity panels, and the ever-updated galaxy of
Magneplanar and Audio Research products. Still, despite my personal
feelings, I must credit HP with playing an absolutely crucial role in
blowing the whistle on the truly appalling sound of the first CD's,
and in kindling the flames of the tube revival. Also, HP provided a
continuity that could easily have been lost when J. Gordon Holt sold
Stereophile to its new owners. (The "Establishment" Stereophile you
see today bears no resemblance in style or content to the sassy,
funny, and contrarian earlier magazine.)
I still remember the massive PR blitz (similar to the Windows95
onslaught) pu****ng the first CD's and their players. I didn't take the
claim of "Perfect Sound Forever" too seriously, but I really did
expect that digital sound would be a significant advance for the
entire industry. (In extenuation, I was an AES member at the time.)
After all, LP's have serious problems with end-of-side distortion,
noise buildup, guessing the correct VTA adjustment, etc., and tape has
its own set of troubles with scrape flutter, IM distortion, setting
bias and EQ for the exact tape formulation, Dolby mistracking, etc.
etc. Digital sidesteps all these problems, and has noise and
distortion approaching that of an op-amp ... hundreds of times better
than any LP or tape medium. In principle at least, it should sound as
transparent as a good amplifier. Little did I know.
As it turned out, the designer of the CC-2, Bob Sickler, went out and
bought one of the very first players, the Sony CDP-101. His roommate
was a professional musician for the ****tland Symphony, so when they
both sang the praises of the new medium, I was expecting my first
experience with digital-in-the-home to be something like hearing a
well-done mastertape, or even a live mike-feed straight from the
console. After all, both them had good taste in music, and I knew that
the digital process was almost distortionless compared to any other
medium. It had to be good, right?
My friends put on a all-digital DGG classical disc and all I heard
from the big TAD studio monitors was screech, screech, screech. The
massed violins were far worse than any Columbia LP I'd ever heard ...
they actually sounded like carbide saws cutting into two by fours, and
I heard tearing and ripping sounds in the loud passages. Gross over-
the-top clipping distortion on a so-called "audiophile" recording.
Unbelievable. The quiet passages were dead silent ... actually, like a
switch turned off ... but any sensation of space, of stereophonic
dimension, and of acoustic presence was totally absent. The start-stop
reverberation sounded as flat as a paper moon and just as fake. I was
speechless ... this was the most repellent sound I had heard in many
years, and I knew it wasn't the fault of their hi-fi system, which was
pretty good.
My Audionics friends were grinning the whole time and saying, "Isn't
it so clear! There's no noise and clicks at all!" I was silently
thinking "Is this the future of audio!?" So I simultaneously
experienced both bitter disappointment and astonishment that my
friends were having such a radically different sonic experience. And
my CD-loving friends weren't headbanging yahoos; heck, one played
violin in the ****tland Symphony and the other had designed a first-
rate amplifier, the best of its day. But they loved those first DGG
discs and I was nothing less than appalled.
That whole experience really opened my eyes - and ears. I realized
that people really do hear things in quite different ways ... my
friends thought the Sony CDP-101 and the ****ny little coasters were
just terrific, and I thought they sounded awful! After that, I started
taking the reviews in any magazine a whole lot less seriously. After
all, how was I to know the reviewer was hearing same things that I
did?
This experience gave me an unpleasant premonition about the future of
the high-end industry. The exhibitors could only play LP's for so long
at the CES before they gave into the tide of weirdly artificial CD's.
What would that mean for product design in speakers and amplifiers?
For one thing, forget about super-performance tweeters that went
beyond 20kHz; that was dead forever with the ferocious brickwall
filter that had to descend 96dB (the entire dynamic range of the CD)
in the tiny frequency range of 20 to 22 kHz. And the sonics
themselves? How would even the most clever engineers get around that?
Of course, little did I suspect that "tweaking" would become the
relentless obsession of many audiophiles and reviewers, and develop
into an entire sub-industry of its own ... the first funny-looking
Fulton speaker cable has only been on the market for a few months. I
was still in the Seventies mind-set that you built audio equipment to
sound good, and then you listened to it until it was time to build
something new, and hopefully better.
I left Audionics in 1979, went down the street, and joined Tektronix.
No more big frog in a little pond, but the time spent with the
Spectrum Analyzer business unit was an education not available in any
sector of the audio business. MIL-SPEC and consumer-grade are two very
different ways to build products. During my 9 years at Tektronix, I
peeked in on the audio world from time to time. I remember a brief
flurry of interest created by the Quad 405 quasi-feedforward amp, with
different exotic mixed feedback schemes appearing in every other issue
of the Audio Engineering Society Journal. For a while there, it looked
like the old-time high-feedback engineers and the new boys on the
block could have it all: zero distortion, very wide power bandwidth,
ultra-high slew rates, a simple output stage that didn't require any
bias tweaks, and the complete elimination of crossover distortion!
Unfortunately, once you hooked these miracle amps up to real
loudspeakers, the balance equations eva****ated. (Isn't that just like
speakers ... they're always screwing up the latest "wonder amp") As a
result, none of this intense theoretical activity resulted in any
lasting sonic breakthroughs, except to once again point the finger at
loudspeakers.
The Fa****on-Magazine Gatekeepers Take Over
1980-1990
From the perspective of an outsider, the Eighties were not the best
decade for audio. As CD's wiped out LP's, many high-end consumers
gradually forgot what good sound was like, and looked for guidance
from the Big Two audio magazines. As these publications grew in
circulation and advertising revenue, they tightened their grip on the
industry, becoming gatekeepers that told faithful readers and chains
of audio-boutiques which brands were "in" and which was "out",
following the model of the fa****on industry.
After Gordon Holt sold Stereophile magazine at the end of the
Seventies, the policy did a swift 180-degree turn from "No
Advertising" to only reviewing products that were advertised in the
magazine - and had a minimum of six dealers, making for a slick little
Catch-22 for new manufacturers trying to break into the market. You
either had deep (cor****ate) pockets and entered the market with a big
splash, or could forget about any reviews in the magazine that now saw
itself as the industry's gateekeeper. Gotta keep the riffraff out,
doncha know.
In a few years, things reached the point where high-end audio was no
longer about sound, but perceived status, with high-profile reviewers
passing out awards to the "inner circle" of manufacturers. Dealers had
little choice but go along and get along; customers came in to the
store clutching a dog-eared copy of the magazine, and by golly, they
wanted that "Component of the Year" right now. At a discount.
Especially if the review said it was much better than last month's
favorite.
At a time when the Japanese magazine "MJ" was seriously writing about
the sonics of Western Electric 300B's, Osram PX25's, RCA 845's, and
GEC KT66's, the Big Two American magazines were rhapsodizing about
this month's favorite $7000 DAC and $3000 speaker cables ... all
sup****ted by 4-color ads costing the manufacturer several thousand
dollars per issue. The cheapskates were amused and entertained by the
"tweaks" section and the letters column while the High Rollers got the
color picture on the cover, the lead article, and most of the reviews.
It was the Age of Reagan, after all. The stock market was rising by
the day, hostile takeovers were reshuffling the map of cor****ate
America, and Greed Was Good.
One reason audio magazines of the Eighties never compared Western
Electric and Golden Age tube equipment to modern high-end was a simple
result of the business ethic of the times:
Nobody ever paid Advertising Money for something that was 40 years
old ... so it was off the radar screen entirely. Didn't exist. Hey,
it's old, how could it be any good? Since Americans were taught by the
magazines that old-timey stuff was junk anyway, guess where it ended
up? The HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara"
Akihabara
district in Tokyo, to be sold to wealthy Japanese who sold Japanese
mass-market electronics - to gullible Americans who believed every
word in the trendy US audio-fa****on magazines.
Big-name equipment reviewers came up with their own wacko vocabulary
for aspects of sound ... words having nothing to do with sound or
music, "bleached," "chocolate," "white," and others became part of
audiophile jargon. This trained the audiophile to zero in on abstract
sound elements, instead of the simple pleasure of listening to music.
The magazines eventually came out with their own CD's complete with
listening instructions for each track ... truly "Hi-Fi for Dummies,"
marking the degeneration of High Fidelity into a fa****on-lifestyle
statement.
The reader might think this is a pretty harsh *****sment of an entire
decade, but seriously, what has endured? Are there any classics from
this time? Would you want a 1986 "state of the art" cable? A
"statement" 1988 CD player? A 200-lb transistor amplifier chock-full
of silicon goodness?
I didn't think so. Nothing goes stale faster than yesterday's hype.
Nothing exemplifies that better than the magazines themselves; it's a
thrill to read Fifties enthusiast magazines, J. Gordon Holt's
Stereophile of the early Seventies, or practically any issue of Audio
Amateur. But seriously, who wants to read a 1985 issue of Stereophile
or Absolute Sound? C'mon, anyone?
Two good things came out of the Eighties: slow but steady improvement
in speaker-driver technology and Walt Jung's im****tant article about
capacitor sonics in Audio Amateur. This article put "passive"
components under the microscope for the first time, and surprise, they
turned out to be a major source of subjective coloration.
Capacitors have easily measured differences in Dielectric Absorption
(DA) and Dissipation Factor (DF). Teflon, polypropylene, and
polycarbonate are best, and electrolytic, ceramics, and solid
tantalums are the worst. And dielectrics (insulators) are everywhere,
in circuit board substrates, wire insulation, anywhere two conductors
must be electrically isolated. As with Matti Otala's TIM article 5
years before, there was a lot of resistance from the old-timers, but
Walt Jung's DA and DF measurements were easily made and correlated
well with what you could hear. In addition, people were finding out
with digital sound that measurements right at the limit of detection
were just as im****tant as traditional THD and noise measurements.
This opened the door to examining discovering subtle weaknesses not
seen before: caps are microphonic, and can self-excite and "sing" at
resonant frequencies. Metallized-foil caps sound different than solid
foil caps. Even solid-state electronics can be affected by vibration
thanks to circuit board flexing and low-level microphonics in the
polarized and charged electrolytic power-supply caps. Resistors can
have voltage coefficients, and low-level point-contact rectification
where the dissimilar metals meet. Insulation on wires in transformers
and inductors can have poor DA and DF characteristics, and the process
of winding the wire induces stress cracks where oxygen enters the
wire. Low-level, hard to measure, but plainly audible on a good
system.
For speaker and electronics designers, this adds another layer of fine-
tuning ... but also another degree of freedom. I was surprised when I
designed the Ariel that changing the tweeter caps to a different brand
was subjectively equal to about 0.5 to 1.0 dB of equalization. Back in
the Seventies, I used junkbox Mylar-films, along with everyone else,
and equalized the speaker around them. These days, it's a choice
between solid-foil Polypropylene, exotic Silver/Oil, or new-production
Teflon caps if you want the best sound. Yes, they may cost as much as
the tweeter itself, and it'll be worth it - and a lot more cost-
effective than messing with cables.
The biggest difference between pre- and post-Eighties design is the
awareness that "passive" parts may actually have more coloration than
active circuitry. A pre-Eighties circuit will toss "nonpolar"
electrolytics all through the design ... take a good look at a Revox
A77 or Dynaco PAT-4 schematic if you want to see a lot of coupling
caps in the signal path. It wasn't until the mid Eighties the idea
arose that every single part in the signal path had to be examined for
sonic degradation, not just transistors and tubes. The "Progressive
Optimization Of Generic Electronics" (POOGE) concept goes back to
Audio Amateur's series of articles about improving mid-fi amplifiers
and CD players by replacing bad parts with good ones; it can be
applied with even more success to a new design, and became standard
practice in the industry.
The Thermionic Revival Meeting
or, Back to the Future
Thousands of engineers, designers, and hi-fi fans were ready for a
return to good sound after a decade of more and more "accurate"
speakers, power amps, and CD players. The crusade for magazine-defined
"accuracy" had reached the point where reproduced sound was
spectacular but also becoming bizarre and unreal.
In 1989, Ed Dell, publisher of HYPERLINK "http://
www.audioxpress.com/" Audio Amateur, took a chance on a new magazine
devoted strictly to vacuum tube amplifiers. "Glass Audio" had three
strikes against it: vacuum tube manufacturers were disappearing, most
hi-fi retailers refused to carry tube equipment, and the magazine
catered to the hobbyist market, which was also fading away. Yet a year
later the magazine grew to twice its original size, and the reader****p
kept growing with each new issue. What was going on here?
A little anecdote might illustrate what was happening on a larger
scale. At the time I glanced at the first promotional issue of Glass
Audio, I was also working on an advanced 200 watt MOSFET amplifier
with two friends from Tektronix. This amp represented the pinnacle of
the high-end art: fully differential, all-cascode, all-Class-A, zero-
TIM, 200V/microsecond, fully regulated, and 120 watts/channel. The
same month, I went to the second HYPERLINK "http://www.curtcass.com/
OTS/" Oregon Triode Society meeting, and one of the members brought a
rusty old Dynaco Stereo 70 that first saw the light of day when Dwight
D. Eisenhower was President. The sum total of his "tweaks" was to
convert the EL34's to triode (cut and tape two wires), and replace two
coupling caps. About 2 hours with a soldering iron. We're not talking
aerospace engineering here.
The OTS guy turned it on, and we compared the Stereo 70 to everything
in the dealer's showroom. It was plainly superior not only to any
transistor amp in there, it wiped out the latest $3000 Audio Research
all-tube confection that had received a glowing review in the latest
Stereophile. Say hello to humble, and good-bye to price, power, and
prestige. (That dealer did not invite the OTS back - gee, wonder why?
Buncha troublemakers if you ask me.)
If you stay in audio long enough, that kind of experience can make you
do some deep thinking about cherished assumptions. I set aside the
transistor project, stopped laughing at the "tube nuts" and subscribed
to Glass Audio (Vol. 1, Issue 0). Two years later, I reviewed the Herb
Reichert Silver 300B and the Audio Note Ongaku for HYPERLINK "http://
www.positive-feedback.com/" Positive Feedback (on the newly-designed
Ariels).
As the speaker designer, I felt I knew my speakers inside and out. Or
so I thought. The Ariels were transformed from a pleasant speaker to
near-electrostatic realism and "you-are-there" quality. All from
changing an amplifier! David Robinson later called this my "Road to
Damascus" experience. That ended any idea that amps were pretty much
all the same, or if they weren't, mainstream high-end gear was pretty
close to perfect. I was surprised to discover that speakers were
better than I thought, and that amps had a long long way to go.
As articles from Japanese and French magazines appeared in Sound
Practices, Glass Audio, and HYPERLINK "http://www.vacuumtube.com/"
Vacuum Tube Valley, the notion of craft, or "artisan" audio began to
emerge. People started to design and build exotic amplifiers that cost
thousands of dollars in parts alone, and then told others about their
experiences in new magazines, the Internet, and regional vacuum-tube
audio fairs. The subversive notion grew that quality was something you
built, not something you bought.
As people built more, it became apparent that mainstream prices were
grossly inflated relative to parts cost ... the transistors in a
$15,000 high-end amp cost less than a hundred dollars, while fancy
metalwork, 4-color ads, and a dealer network add zero to the sound. On
the other hand, hand-made power triodes, point-to-point chassis
wiring, and custom-wound transformers are obviously expensive and
labor-intensive ... and the difference from mainstream high-end to
triode are obvious to the most casual listener. Oddly enough, many
audiophiles are relatively deaf to the experience, but non-audiophiles
can hear it right away.
I've had audiophile friends play "Planet Drum", "Jazz at the Pawnshop"
or the latest Stereophile test CD on a superlative amplifier like the
Ongaku and just not "get it." I would play ravi****ngly beautiful music
that would take me close to tears and my guests would just look bored,
or start talking over the music. That's when I realized there really
is a difference between listening for certain audiophile sound effects
and getting swept up in the music. Obviously, musical tastes differ,
but there's listening to music and listening for sound effects.
The home-theater boom of the Nineties underlines this. These gadgets
don't play music at all; they measure well and all that, but music?
It's like there's a hidden MP3 processor in there, stripping away 90%
of the content, leaving behind a music-like shell with nothing in it.
I have no clue how the home-theater people do it, but music has a real
struggle getting through these things. Dialog, sound effects, car
crashes, phaser blasts, you bet. Music? Nope. Can we interest you in a
personal MP3 player?
Like ancient Gaul, the audio market has split into three parts: home-
theater (the life-sup****t system for just about every dealer), high-
end (for few remaining true believers in the review magazines), and
last but certainly least in terms of market share, equipment optimized
for music playback.
But thank goodness it's there, otherwise we wouldn't have any High
Fidelity at all. And somebody must be paying attention, since we
finally have the gift of digital done the way it should have been in
the first place, the competing Sony DSD and DVD-A systems. How the
same companies that designed the mid-fi 44.1/16 PCM Red Book standard
came up with not one, but two genuinely high quality digital systems
is a mystery I don't understand (although the expiration of the
original Sony/Philips patents might have a lot to do with it).
What's interesting about DSD and DVD-A is that it exposes the
"accuracy" claim of 44.1/16 digital as the fraud it was all along. The
new mediums sound very close to top-quality analog mastertape or
direct-disc sources, while the exact same material on a top-flight CD
player sounds flat, artificial, canned, the exact words that were used
to describe it 20 years ago.
Play some music from SACD, DVD-A, LP, or open-reel tape on a vacuum-
tube system to an audiophile used to solid-state, and they are usually
startled by just how "Stereo" and three-dimensional everything sounds.
Well, why do you think "Stereophonic Sound" made such a big impact in
the Fifties? It was all-analog, all-tube sound, and the difference
between "Stereophonic" and mono was astoni****ng. We are very lucky to
have to have both triodes and SACD/DVD-A make their joint appearance
at the turn of the century. Rather than a bunch of old-timers grousing
about how great things sounded in the Golden Age, all you have to do
is build a simple triode system, get some efficient speakers, and show
friends what Stereophonic High Fidelity is all about. If you don't
want to build, well-restored Golden Age equipment is satisfying and a
heck of a good deal.
Don't know where to look? For building, try the Tube DIY site at
Audio Asylum. Want to own an American classic? Try Vacuum Tube
Valley for starters (avoid eBay!).
The New Millenium
Looking back, it's interesting how the 1930's, the 50's, the 70's, and
the 90's were periods of rapid innovation and change, while the "out"
decades have been times of backsliding, mass-fi, and technical
regression. Where next? The fizz and argumentation of the first wave
of triode mania has come and gone, taking many of the early magazines
with it.
Home theater continues to make inroads on the remnants of the
mainstream High End business. Transferring the prestige game from 2
channels to 5 ... or 6 ... or 7 channels is pretty simple, especially
if you can persuade the client to build a "media room" to show off all
the fancy, soon-to-be-obsoleted gear. What's funny are the short time
horizons of the home theater crowd; it was only a few years ago they
started buying expensive system controllers that were all digital. All
digital at 44.1 or 48 kHz, of course.
What about higher-fidelity mediums like DVD-A 192/24 or DSD? Ooopsie!
Thanks to the paranoia of Hollywood executives, a standard for
transmitting DVD-A or DSD from player to receiver or DAC has been a
long time in coming - many CD and DVD players still downsample to the
legacy Red Book 44.1 or Dolby Digital 48 standard before they transmit
a digital signal to the outside world. (Pioneer is a welcome exception
here.)
The business model for vacuum tube audio is still being developed. The
Japanese market is a pale shadow of the glory days in the early
Nineties, so sales must go into the ever-cautious American market and
the Chinese ****tions of the Asian market. The Internet is making a
difference; although individual newsgroups, bulletin boards and forums
are regularly disrupted and eventually destroyed by anonymous
trolls, quieter and more civilized groups promptly appear to replace
them. The Internet is a big place, after all. The biggest op****tunity
are people who love music, then discover that home theater or
mainstream high-end are not for them.
This is where well publicized regional hifi shows can make a real
difference. Another idea would be adult-education cl***** through
local community colleges, similar to existing cl***** in Wine
Appreciation or Gourmet Cooking. There's no reason that music-
appreciation cl***** in Quality Audio couldn't be offered in the same
way, with advanced cl***** offering hands-on instruction in kit-
building. All you have to do is connect music lovers with genuine high
fidelity, show them it doesn't have to cost absurd prices or turn the
home into an engineering lab, and they'll figure out the rest."<<
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