THE CD PLAYER PLUS - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

Nuts&Bolts
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ally it’s been a wreck for a
long time, but we’ve all been
pretending it wasn’t, and
we’ve only now been forced to face the
truth. It’s like recognizing you have termites
only when you were on the second
floor and you suddenly find yourself in
the basement.
For the high end industry, it’s the
second stage of a double whammy. First
there’s the Internet phenomenon, which
has turned a lot of business models
upside down. Hot on its heels, there’s
the new age, in which conspicuous nonconsumption
has become cool. And so
consumers don’t buy. If they do, they get
it on-line.
Let’s take a deep breath.
We’ve seen this movie before. True,
last time the movie was 16 mm black and
white, this time it’s 3-D IMAX. The
principles haven’t changed, though. And
that gives me a pretext for repeating what
I’ve written in the past.
With updates, of course.
The first section is from The Plot to
Kill Hi-Fi, drawn most recently from
UHF No. 72. The second is adapted from
my book, The World of High Fidelity. It
was written some 15 years ago, but you’d
be surprised how little I had to change.
Feature The economy is a wreck. Actu-
Lessons from the past
The year is 1960. I’m a student, with
a need for money for books, fees and a
place to sleep. And I have a job that is
perfectly in line with both my interests
and my eventual livelihood.
I sell hi-fi equipment.
If you could travel back in time and
walk into my store, you’d find much of
it strangely familiar. Clearly it is what
would later be called a mid-fi store,
with a listening room that is little more
than an alcove, lined with cables and
loudspeakers, all connected to a large
comparator box. There is nowhere to
26 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
sit, a clear indication that the customer
is expected to get a quick listen and then
move along to the cash register. The
sources are all turntables, since stereo
FM is only a dream, and to a modern
eye those tables mostly
don’t c ut it. The
prime model is a
Garrard, which
incorporates a number of
obvious design blunders,
including an inaccurate two-pole motor,
a ribbed record mat, and a tone arm
with a plastic headshell. Even so,
it looks pretty good alongside the
original Dual, whose entire tone
arm is made of resonant plastic, and
whose cartridge cannot be adjusted for
tracking angle. The rest of the store
doesn’t feature VCR’s and microwave
ovens, items which are still spotlighted
at world’s fairs, but cameras. Despite
appearances, however, this is a hi-fi store,
the best one you’ll find within several
thousand kilometres…er, miles.
As the bloodied bruiser said as he
staggered back into the bar after a brawl
in the alley, “You should see the other
guy.”
You see, no one talks about “hi-fi”
and “mid-fi.” Rather, the distinction
is between consoles and component
stereo. Most people shop for consoles,
everywhere from department stores to
hardware stores. The typical console
contains a record changer, a radio, two
or four cheap speakers in a simple baffle
with a Masonite back, and an amplifier
rated optimistically at perhaps 100 watts
per channel. Alongside that, the plastic
tone arms I sell look pretty good.
And if you look carefully on my
shelves, you’ll see signs of what even
you would call real hi-fi. My amplifiers
include the Dynaco Mk III, a large
monoblock tube amp that will still be
valued decades later. They’re hooked
up to a pair of AR-1’s, the original
sealed “acoustic suspension” speakers.
In a drawer are plans that, for $5, will
let you build your own Klipschorns
or Karlson enclosures. And although
the Linn Sondek is still a dozen years
away, I can do a demonstration with
a Stromberg Carlson turntable which
sounds amazingly good. It is my only
belt-driven turntable, and it uses a pair
of synchronous motors to drive it. The
arm is relatively light, and it is all metal.
The mat is smooth, as it should be. The
spring suspension has a compliance that
is unique for the time. Using that gear, I
Good Sound in Bad Times
by Gerard Rejskind
can give you a pretty good
demo.
Or at least I could,
were it not that the room is
acoustically terrible. There is
no door, so the music mixes with
the sound of clicking shutters. There’s
too much gear present. And everything
goes through the comparator box,
including — believe it or not — the
fragile signal from the turntable. So I
have the potential to make the music
come to life, but the store is wrong for it.
I can let you hear more than a hundred
different component combinations,
but all of them will sound noisy and
distorted.
Though it’s not yet obvious, that
is to be a major reason for the hi-fi
revolution.
Comes the revolution
The other factor for change is
inflation. Though 1960’s inflation is low
compared to what is still to come, prices
are nonetheless rising, and that works
against hi-fi. People who once wanted a
“good little system” for $400 still want to
spend only $400, even though the same
system now costs $550 and continues to
rise. In my store in 1960, you may notice,
in passing, a strangely-styled little
amplifier with instructions in unreadable
English.
The name on the panel is not yet a
household word: Pioneer.
So the Japanese are already here.
They are proving their engineering
skills with transistor radios, before
hitting us with their marketing skills
as well. Through the magic of solid
state engineering and mass production,
consumers really can get more and more
for less and less money. As inflation revs