Hi-Fi Takes Over

The audiophile was listening, fascinated, to a highly polished but weak-spirited phonograph. The tune was the familiar Pagan Love Song, but the words sounded strange: "Native cows are calling/Do the wings go on . . ." Since the listener knew that the lyric actually reads: "Native hills are calling/To them we belong," he was easily able to diagnose the troubles in the phonograph: limited frequency response; harmonic, intermodulation and transient distortion, peaking, and possibly flutter; nonlinearity and needle talk. The audiophile's only prescription for a cure: get a high-fidelity rig.

Some 1,000,000 Americans have done just that--and thus established a new and burgeoning industry. Each week about 3,000 more homes go hifi. A mere fad until recently, hi-fi has become a $250 million business (equipment sales have increased as much as 500% in some areas since 1952). There is a standard pattern: about two years after an area is saturated with TV, hi-fi moves in.

What Is It? The audiophile used to live surrounded by a litter of parts and soldering irons and spoke a strange jargon full of "cycles," "decibels," "curves," "roll-offs." Pre-hi-fi sets were unable to top the violin's range (about 8,000 cycles per second) and thus were "unfaithful" to all instruments but bass drum, timpani, bass tuba, piano, French horn and trombone (played softly without mutes). So the hi-fi fan went all out for high frequencies.

Result: a widespread confusion of high fidelity with screeching strings and piercing piccolos.* Today, the audiophile has relaxed. He still considers a wide-frequency response a must (good rigs now put out from 40 cps, the lowest bass viol note, to 15,000. one of the higher violin overtones), but the highs have become sweeter and less insistent.

Curves, too, remain in his vocabulary, a "flat" curve being the graphical representation of the audiophile's ideal (it means that the equipment gives the same amount of emphasis to lows, middles and highs).

In pursuit of this ideal, the hi-fi enthusiast still hovers anxiously over his treble and bass controls, giving rise to the story about the audiophile who went to hear a live concert under Leopold Stokowski and left the hall holding his ears and muttering: "Too much bass! Too much bass!" "High-fidelity sound," says one expert, "is like the term love. It means whatever you choose it to mean." Hi-fi is, in fact, an attitude--a kind of passion to reproduce music exactly as it sounded in its natural setting, e.g., a symphony orchestra in a full concert hall, a string quartet in an intimate room. Record companies tag their output with such slogans as "Full Dimensional Sound" (Capitol), "New Orthophonic" (Victor), "Ultra High Fidelity" (Vox). Says one cynical executive: "High fidelity is the chlorophyll of the record business."

What It Takes. Behind the latest hi-fi labels on the records are few major new technological developments. Recording equipment is getting better all the time, but the process has been essentially the same since the general acceptance of the long-playing record, magnetic tape and the condenser microphone.* What makes records better today is not so much electronic as esthetic know-how. To recreate "concert-hall realism." the recording director jockeys heavy, sound-absorbing flats around the studio, hangs big curtains across the hall, or records the sound "dead" and pipes it into a reverberation chamber to liven it up again. But there is now a sharp division of opinion on what is a "faithful" recording. Some sound men believe in much clipping of flawed passages and splicing in better ones from other takes. Others prefer to capture the heat of an inspired performance despite some imperfections.

What does hi-fi mean in the home? Manufacturers are mass-producing record players which they label hifi, to the indignation of dedicated audio fans, who insist on buying components separately (the fanciest equipment stores feature elaborate switching panels, so that customers can compare components on the spot). It is next to impossible, the dedicated argue, to buy a real high-fidelity rig in one box--the limited speaker enclosure will probably cause a booming bass or fuzzy drum rolls, and up to half of the price goes for cabinetry instead of equipment. The best buys among the package units--perhaps not as hi as fi should be, but certainly better than most old-fashioned phonographs--sell at around $150. A good custom hi-fi rig costs at least twice that much, and the price can go as high as $2,500.

In the wrong equipment, a great deal can go wrong with sound. Its top can be lopped off, like a headless amateur photograph, making a violin sound like a flute because its characteristic overtones are gone; its bottom can be restricted, making the basses sound an octave or more higher (or not at all). Overtones can be added that were never played by the musician (harmonic distortion) or be thickened (intermodulation).

Expensive equipment is not necessarily a guarantee against such hazards. But a good hi-fi system must include at least a turntable (price $60), a diamond stylus ($20) and magnetic cartridge ($15), a good amplifier ($100), and a loudspeaker system ($150) which now usually consists of at least one woofer (a speaker designed to reproduce low tones) and tweeter (high tones). Tweeters may be cones (sweet, not too brilliant), horns (plenty of highs and often tinny), or the newly developed electrostatic type, in which a flat sheet of metal foil moves in the open air. Most speakers still need an enclosure of some six cubic feet, but it is no longer necessary to have huge coffins standing about the living room.*

Looking Forward. When the all-out audiophile swings into action, his pet weapon is the tape recorder, with which he captures music for future use from his FM radio or his own and his friends' LPs.

At the current price of tape (up to $5 per hour), the tapeworm's music will cost him about as much as the most expensive LP; often it will sound better,/- because tape at its best reduces surface noise.

If the audiophile is on the prowl for the utmost realism, he will have gone binaural, with double sound channels and speakers, in the manner of cinema's stereophonic sound. At present he can use this expensive setup only to play tape and the records of one small company (Cook).

New Era. Artists have acquired new standards of perfection through hifi. Conductors and singers carefully study playbacks of their concerts, and composers use more subtle instrumental blends. Says one composer: "I think the whole Berlioz revival owes a lot to high fidelity. His orchestration always sounded muddy on old sets." Listeners are also developing their tastes: a fluff may be forgiven in a concert hall, but hearing it again and again on a record may lead the buyer to complain. Cracks Recordmaker Peter Bartok (son of the late great Bela): "The listener is a damn nuisance." Nuisance or not, today's listener is part of a cultural revolution. The sound that comes through his speakers is not living music; its impact is no longer assisted by the sight of performers struggling with abstractions, nor by the massed reaction of a concert-hall audience. What this will do to musical taste is not clear; some think it will freeze on presold "great" classics, others that it will incline to spectacular moderns. But the important thing is that people who used to take in a live concert about as rarely as they went to the dentist are now daily exposed to good music in all its detail.

French Author-Critic Andre Malraux believes that the camera and modern reproduction techniques have revolutionized the art world by bringing art out of the museum. He calls this phenomenon the "Museum Without Walls." Something like it is happening with music: the U.S. musical revolution is taking place in the Concert Hall Without Walls.

* The bane of hi-fi wives, perhaps because female ears are more sensitive to high frequencies than the male's.

* A tubular device, famed for its sensitivity and instantaneous response to fleeting sounds.

* A strong dissenting opinion to all of hi-fi was filed by an indignant Briton who recently wrote to High Fidelity magazine: "I fail to see what pleasure there is in having to have a unit with as many as 16 knobs and selector switches . . . Me, I am so old-fashioned that my home-built [unit] has no tone control . . . Furthermore, I am sure that I have rumble--pardon!"

/- Pre-recorded tape is now being pushed by manufacturers. It is nearly twice as expensive as LPs and less convenient, but, played on medium-fi sets, sounds roughly comparable.

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