Renewals if Needed

THEY SHALL HAVE MUSIC

by JOHN M. CONLY

MANY are the material blessings contrived to keep deserving Americans happy, but some come with parasitic curses attached, like spells in a fairy tale.

Engineers labor and bring forth the 1956 Whirlaway V-8 hardtop, an automotive marvel. It incorporates all the virtues of the 1955 Whirlaway, plus a new suspension system which curbs a tendency (of the earlier model) to heel dangerously on curves. But — can you have the 1956 suspension installed in your 1955 car? The whole industry bristles at the inquiry. You can not. You can buy a complete new car or you can go on heeling dangerously. And that’s that.

Whichever you choose to do, 6000 miles later in the life of your speedometer, the Whirlaway begins to cough and balk. The carburetor is full of mysterious debris. It seems to you that this easily could be cleaned out — an opinion which, when voiced, generates shocked incomprehension at Joe’s Motors, Inc. Quickly repenting your heresy, you buy a new carburetor and, to affirm your orthodoxy, a new gas filter as well. Now there are smiles all around, but never does your Whirlaway recover its initial zest. It lags in traffic and shudders on hills, and no consultation with the experts at Joe’s gains you anything except the opportunity to buy new parts.

You may suspect that what you need is a few minor adjustments, but you cannot confirm this. The parts are all armored against your screwdriver, if indeed they are identifiable at all. You live in an economy of mass production, minimal maintenance, and tolerable performance, and you had best adjust to it.

It isn’t easy, and I suspect that this is a contributing motivation in the ownership of many a high-fidelity home-music array in this land. Any high-fidelity system, painstakingly bought component by component and installed at home, is in some degree a weapon in the war against tolerated mediocrity. The aim is perfection, even if it is to be achieved in steps, and the sustaining cause is worthy, since it involves the fuller enjoyment of some of the Western world’s greatest art.

To begin with, a high-fidelity system is flexible. If you want to add to it —a tape player, for instance, or a TV tube and chassis, or a short-wave tuner — you can, without replacing the rest of the array. Or if you do want to replace something — a loudspeaker, let us say, which has been superseded by something nearer the ultimate — this also is possible. Further, you usually can sell what you want to replace, since it was made to meet professional standards, and thus will not have suffered through your use of if. Many audio dealers facilitate such sales as a matter of course, some participate themselves, and there is at least one (Audio Exchange, 159—19 Hillside Avenue, Jamaica, N.Y.) that makes a full-time enterprise of reconditioning and swapselling high-fidelity equipment.

Moreover, home high-fidelity appliances are, in general, both accessible and responsive to maintenance. They do misbehave occasionally, and the first few instances are infuriating. Thereafter, mysteriously, the owner develops a sort of diagnostic empathy toward his apparatus. It is indeed a heartening experience, in this decade, to see an insurance salesman rise from his seat, shut off a rather gritty opening of the Pines of Rome, adroitly clean and slraighten an erring diamond stylus, and get the work off again to a clear and brilliant start. This is technology behaving as it should behave, and there is nothing demeaning about helping Respighi and Toscanini achieve an effect for which both worked pretty hard.

It would be silly to attempt to list all maintenance measures possible to a new home-music enthusiast, even as envoi to a series of articles on highfidelity equipment. However, there are a few items I have found it useful to buy, and to have at hand the evening I invite friends in to hear the new Marriage of Figaro, if I want to avoid humiliat ion.

Nearly every preamplifier use’s a pair of small tubes of the 12-A series —12AU7, 12AX7, 12AT7, and so forth. These are very unreliable, and some extras will almost certainly come in handy, sooner or later. Next most useful are spare out put tubes of the type your power amplifier employs—6L6, KT66, 5881, 6V6, or whatever investigation discloses. These should be bought in matched pairs (which your dealer will understand, if you do not).

Record players need periodic lubrication. Light electric-motor oil usually is best for changers; precision turntables, more massive, commonly require something heavier, like SAE No. 10, available at auto supply shops (sometimes sold only in quarts, but luckily quarts do not cost much). When in doubt, write to the manufacturer; at next printing, perhaps he will include this information in his operating instructions.

Makers of phono-pickups usually do state in their manuals at what weight their products ought to track record grooves. Many of them also (obligingly) manufacture little scales or gauges whereby you can tell how heavily the pickup actually is bearing down. The best I know are those made by Weathers Industrie’s, Inc. (66 East Gloucester Pike, Barrington, N.J.) and the Audak Company (500 Fifth Avenue, New York), both of which are springless, counterweight devices, priced at around $5.

To remove grit and dust from a record, so that the stylus cannot grind it in, I use a damp linen handkerchief.

If you want to be formal about it, however, a delightful accessory is the Statiemaster brush, proffered by Nuclear Products Company, 10173 E. Rush Street, El Monte, California. This is impregnated with a radioactive element which counteracts the static attraction between record and dust. It works even better than a damp linen handkerchief, but it costs $18.

To keep records clean, once they have been de-statieized, and to protect them against grit in cardboard jackets, an inexpensive and useful aid is the plastic Discover, an inner sleeve made by Walco Products, 60-F Franklin Street, East Orange, N.J., and sold by most record stores. Walco also makes a small spirit-level to help perfectionists keep their turntables properly horizontal.

In the field of new audio equipment, the season thus far has brought developments ranging from the refreshing to the portentous.

General Electric has revised its triple-play phono-cartridge in a way long called for. The two siyli in its dual switehabout assembly now are individually replaceable, so there need no longer be worry lest the microgroove diamond outwear the 78rpm sapphire, or vice versa.

Pickering has come out with an entirely new dual cartridge, christened “Fluxvalve” and priced at $63 (two diamonds) and $49 (microgroove diamond; 78-rpm sapphire). The styli can be removed for individual replacement. The pilot model I had opportunity to try arrived damaged, so that it intermittently hummed and fell silent, but it tracked beautifully, without a trace of needle talk, at two grams (extraordinarily light), yielded a splendidly smooth response over the whole audible tonal spectrum, and in general behaved like a real precision instrument. By the same token, it was very small and delicate and might or might not withstand the rigors of use in a record changer.

Two new turntables have come to America since I last talked about turntables. Both are British, and each has been described by reliable colleagues as the best there is. One is the Sugden “Connoisseur,”which costs about $100 and seems to be available only in Philadelphia, I don’t know why. The other is the Garrard 301, distributed by British Industries Corporation and sold for $89, and all I can think of to say about it is that I wish I had one.

Amplifiers, which were “perfect" when I last discussed them, seem to be getting even more perfect. McIntosh and H. H. Scott have paced what may turn out to be a watt race, the former with a 60-watt, the latter with a 70-watt model.

Neither Frank McIntosh nor Hermon Scott will maintain that a private user ever will pour 60 watts into his loudspeaker (20 is more like it, even in a Berlioz crescendo). But there is a plausible explanation now current of why a 60-watt amplifier sounds better than a clean 20-watt one.

This is, that the impedances of an amplifier and a loudspeaker match exactly only at one frequency (tonal) point. Call it 1000 cycles per second, in the mid-treble range. In the very high treble or low bass, then, the efficiency of the amplifier, driving the speaker, may be substantially reduced. Thus, it may be using all the power it has, or even straining a little, with consequent distortion. I will abide by this explanation until I hear a better.

Meanwhile, and to run counter to the perfectionist trend, I will admit that my ears can find no fault with t he new Sonex 25-watt amplifier (marketed by Lectronics, City Line Center, Philadelphia, at $125) or the new Brociner Mark 30, which also embodies one of the best control and preamplifier units I have ever played with. (Very redoubtable rivals here, however, are the Altec Lansing A-440A preamplifier, notable not only for its performance but for its very good looks, at $139, and the Grommes 211, rather ugly but very clean-toned and flexible, at $97.)

It is in loudspeakers that real changes loom. Most notable is the practical development of electrostatic speakers, which utilize the first evidence of electricity ever noted — it was about 600 B.C. that some unidentified Greek found that amber attracted cat’s fur. This same attraction-repulsion phenomenon is used in the first commercial push-pull electrostatic speaker—the Janszen Model 1-30 — to appear in the United State’s. (Pickering and Company also has one ready to launch; it should be good, but I haven’t seen it yet.) A diaphragm is suspended between two grills, which are oppositely polarized by the amplifier’s signal, and it vibratos accordingly. It also vibrates uniformly, all over its surface, and thus is almost free of mechanical distortion. The Janszen will serve only as a treble speaker (down to 1000 or 500 cycles, whichever you choose) and costs $184. (There is also a utility model, which would not work for me.) I hesitate to say that it was a good buy, as of October 1. It had to be used in conjunction with a cone bass-speaker, and there was no way to govern its relative volume level down. Apart from that, it was marvelous, yielding the clearest high tones I ever have heard from a loudspeaker.

What may turn out to be its perfect complement is the Acoustic Research (23 Mount Auburn St., Cambridge, Mass.) speaker system, devised by Edgar Villehur. Heart of this is a conventional moving-coil cone speaker, but with its mechanical stiffness done away with. Instead, the eone is brought back into neutral position, after each impulse, by the elasticity of the air enclosed behind it in a hermetically sealed box, enormously firm and fortunately very small. The AR-1W woofer gives the cleanest bass response I ever have heard. It costs $132. (Also available, at $160, is the AR-1, the woofer combined with a rather good tweeter, adding up to what is by all odds the best small speaker system on the market.)

I could not quite get the AR woofer and the Janszen tweeter into phase and balance one with another, though there were tantalizing hints that, could I have done so, I might have had at my disposal the best loudspeaker system I had encountered. I do not know how hard it will be to resolve this incompatibility; Messrs. Janszen and Yillehur are working on it.

No other bass speakers I know of (save possibly the Bozak or the Wharfedale) seem likely to harmonize with the electrostatic tweeter, perhaps because their front-to-rear excursions are too deep, creating a turbulence in the tonal crossoverrange. where the one gives over to the other. But this is a development obviously worth watching.

Other new developments worth watching, unforunately, defy present comment. By the time this appears in print, there will be, for instance, a number of tape recorders which combine professional flexibility with private-consumer prices. Unlens, of course, the producing companies go out of business immediately after being launched, which is what happened the last time I made this announcement. However, keep your eye on the DeJur (DeJur Amsco Corp., Long Island City 11, New York) tape deck (chassis), which might turn out to be a real buy at $300.

For a real but conservative buy, there is always the tiny, precise Ampex 600, at $545. It is built to last, which is important. The main weaknesses of home-style tape recorders these days are mechanical, not electronic.

I had thought also to make recommendations of custom TV tuners to be incorporated in high-fidelity arrays, but color seems so imminent that I hesitate. For the utmost in black-and-white precision and convenience, the Conrac-Fleet wood (Glendora, California) remote-control unit, which comes in any tube size up to 27 inches, at about $300 without audio, will be a revelation. No conventional video set that I know of works so well.

Parting adxicc: an asset for which there is no substitute, to people assembling their own sound-systems, is a knowledgeable nearby dealer genuinely interested in their progress. Should such a man be available to your cozening, no Scotch is too expensive. You will long rejoice over the extravagance.