The Big Picture

Plug an Advent VideoBeam in and it throws a dramatic four-by-six-foot television image onto a special screen placed eight feet in front of it. The color picture is bright and clear, free of the obvious scanning lines one expects on so large a display. Instead, Archie and Edith loom brilliant and literally larger than life, TV close-ups become surrealistic and linebacker Chris Hanburger's flying tackles leave the viewer's body jolted.

"Once people see the VideoBeam," says Henry Kloss, Advent's founder and president, "they're not going to settle for any other kind of television."

He already has good evidence to support that statement. After spending six years and $2,000,000 developing his projection-television system, Kloss sold 100 of the $2500 devices from a tiny showroom in the back of his Cambridge, Massachusetts, warehouse without advertising and before officially introducing them to the national market last summer at Chicago's Consumer Electronics Show. There were lines of interested audio dealers who were so enthusiastic that in three days, Advent had orders for its entire projected 1974 output of 2500 units from hi-fi stores around the country. By early 1975, the company plans to accelerate production to a capacity of at least 10,000 a year and, should demand dictate, to 20,000, using a 24-hour work force.

VideoBeam is Henry Kloss's pièce de résistance, a video coup for an audio pioneer who's spent most of his adult life dreaming up ways to turn technological advances into playthings for grownups.

In the early Fifties, Kloss was a cofounder of Acoustic Research and introduced the AR speaker system, a remarkable bit of electronic wizardry that brought high-fidelity speakers down to the price and size range the average listener could afford. After he left Acoustic and became the K of KLH, he developed the KLH Model 11, a quality music system that sold for less than $200. He also put together the KLH Model 8, an FM radio with such clear and brilliant sound that it's now a collector's item among audiophiles. In 1967, Kloss moved once more. He started the Advent Corporation and soon began marketing the first cassette deck to use a Dolby noise-reduction system in conjunction with chromium-dioxide tape; this combination raised cassette sound to a quality virtually as high as that of records and reel-to-reel tapes.

Although audio products played a functional role in Advent's founding, Kloss says, "I started this company with one major goal in mind: the development of a projection TV system."

He is sitting in his comfortably crowded office chanting out ideas in thought mantras, Allen Ginsberg style, paying little attention to normal sentence construction, straining to make his concepts perfectly clear, shifting his eyes, gazing up at the ceiling as he speaks. Kloss, at ease behind his desk, is the archetypal combination of mad scientist and absent-minded professor. His gray hair hangs well over the open collar of the grape-jelly-stained shirt he insists is from Brooks Brothers ("a concession to the corporate-executive image"). He wears baggy khakis, dirty white bucks, no tie. He keeps his wrist watch running 25 minutes fast and drives an old gray Checker station wagon equipped with two large wooden speaker boxes wired into a Sony cassette deck mounted under the dash.

Walking into the company's blue-and-green lunchroom, Kloss pops a sandwich into a microwave oven and quips, "I've never understood these electronic gadgets." When someone at the table reads out loud from the newspaper that Sara Lee baked goods are mixed by computer, he comments tersely, "Sort of believable. They should be eaten the same way."

For dinner he'll put on a tie and jacket to dine with astronomer friends from Harvard at a cozy French restaurant, where he orders vintage California cabernet sauvignon.

His office is in truth more than cluttered; it is a holy mess: tables covered with the spent guts of old TVs and radios, blown speakers, tubes, calipers, capacitors, resistors, vials of chemicals, tape cassettes, charts, schematics, cans of paint. The phone on his desk is buried under piles of papers and technical reports; a stack of Wall Street Journals occupies one corner of the desk; the other end is a waterfall of paper.

Kloss is asked his age. He scratches his head and says with an air of surprise, "Gee, I guess it's 45 now." Ask him why he putters around with gadgets and he replies, "I started doing it when I was very young. There was nothing else to do growing up in Tyrone, Pennsylvania."

Just outside his office, a 15-person research-and-development team works with a sense of loose, effective teamwork. It looks like a band of freaks charting an obstacle course for a Star Trek adventure. Most of them are dressed in blue jeans and a few of the men have their hair pulled back in ponytails. One person, unbeknown to Kloss, is searching for a photo of The Leader to have silkscreened onto T-shirts for everyone to wear. Rock music blasts from a speaker at one end of the room. Down the hall, a fellow is hunched over a VideoBeam chassis branded in felt marker "Saint George the TV." ("I spend so much time kneeling over this thing, somebody decided it seemed like a sacred object," he explains.) At various spots in the room there are oscilloscopes fluttering. Someone is laboring over an eight-foot schematic of a change in the TV's circuitry. On the refrigerator is a posted declaration that all food will be removed on Friday afternoons.

Kloss's atmosphere may be low-keyed, but his business sense is not. He started AR in 1954 with an initial investment of $5000. Kloss owns two thirds of Advent, which last year grossed 11.8 "megabucks," as he puts it. It currently turns out one system—perhaps the best-selling audio unit of all time—every 20 seconds. Yet Kloss's prices have stayed low over the years and he prides himself on keeping the profit level below five percent.

"I have stands on values and we alienate a lot of dealers because I won't make a more expensive speaker," he says. "I believe this is the best speaker we can make without getting ridiculous. Who needs $400 speakers? I'd never make anything that I didn't have to. If electronic manufacturers—the people who make television and stereo consoles—were doing as good a job as they could, there'd be no need for the hi-fi industry."

Just as shortcomings of consumer audio equipment goaded him into the hi-fi business, Kloss says he began to think about developing the VideoBeam because he was so dissatisfied with the existing state of television.

"When I started thinking about it in 1966, color television had just reached its prime. All the tubes were quite similar. There's always a lowest common denominator at work in things like this that indicates minimum standards. Once the minimums are accepted, no one does much to go beyond them. The tubes were all basically the same and it seemed to me that none of them was really good. There was such potential in the television area. It just had to be put in the right format. Toward the end of my days with KLH, I noticed that you can get a large and bright picture through projection without the expenditure of much energy—much less, say, than you need for a conventional TV set of standard size.

"We didn't make any major technological advances producing the VideoBeam. In fact, the particular form of tube we use dates back to World War Two. The problem was creating the prototype and then demonstrating that the system is practical.

"There was no interest in the device before this because there was never any way to demonstrate interest. The only way one can usually express interest. The only way one can usually express interest is to buy the product. If no one knows such a product exists, there can't be any demand. I knew I wanted to build this thing, but how could you find out how many people wanted it? The cheapest and most popular existing commercial color projection system comes from G.E. and costs $44,000.

"Even after we had worked out the problems and offered the idea to major corporations, we had no takers. The project seemed too impossible. It was another Edsel story: In surveys, people tend to tell you what they think their neighbors would like, not what they'd like. So the manufacturers who saw this thought no one else would like it, even though I think they found it very appealing personally."

So Kloss found himself faced with the prospect of producing the tubes on his own, even though he'd never done any tube fabricating. Furthermore, he'd have to do it without the help of corporations devoted solely to that end. But thinking optimistically, Kloss knew that once the tube could be perfected, his problem would be basically solved. Rather than a conventional television that projects a stream of electrons at a phosphor screen, Kloss wanted—and developed—a tiny phosphor screen that would be reflected back and projected onto a reflective surface.

"Really, it's all done with mirrors," he says half in jest.

Finally, in 1969, Kloss managed to project an image onto a screen. What happened when you first saw the image? he's asked. "I remember Dean Martin and the red handkerchief he had in his pocket," he recalls. And that was pretty much the nature of his celebration. Just calm observation; no cries of eureka.

"I was working alone that night and I don't talk to myself," he says dryly. "And besides, there was never a moment of great discovery. It was totally predictable eight years ago. There was nothing technically lacking for the production of the system. This was simply a decision to develop a way to put a tube together that would hold a stable image even when the heat inside went up to 900 degrees."

In contrast with Cambridge's Edwin Land, the Polaroid inventor who dreams things up and then figures out ways to manufacture them, Kloss's genius is precisely reciprocal: Given a technological artifact—like the World War Two radar tube he transformed into the VideoBeam—he dreams of things to do with it. He also, and this is probably his most unique gift, finds ways to get his dream produced.

"Henry's brilliance lies in seeing potential where no one else can," says Edgar Villchur, Kloss's old associate at (continued on page 210)Big Picture(continued from page 106) Acoustic Research. Villchur, now 57, lives in Woodstock, New York, and runs a nonprofit institute studying hearing aids and deafness.

"In 1953," he recalls, "I was teaching a course in electronics and acoustics at New York University. Henry was one of my students. I had an idea for a way to produce speakers, substituting a cushion of air in a small tone cabinet for the mechanical spring mounting that was in use then. Henry was in the Army at the time. He'd been operating a small speaker-cabinet-manufacturing plant out of a loft in Boston, where he had been living, and he was interested in going into business with me. Henry saw what the big speaker manufacturers didn't—the value in my design for an acoustic-suspension speaker.

"His role was developing a production model of the unit. He figured out how to design and wind coils, design the cabinet and actually get the thing made. In less than two years, it became obvious that Henry needed his own company."

Thus, in 1957, the genesis of KLH: Kloss and two partners, Malcolm Low ("The first man in New England to have a Volkswagen Microbus," claims Kloss) and J. Anton Hofmann. Together, they put $60,000 into a company that quickly reached $4,000,000 in annual sales. Kloss was the research man and at KLH he plunged into a study of various materials that could be used for the manufacture of speaker cones.

"These other people at KLH didn't want to spend their lives in this business," Kloss says now. "I wanted a company like KLH could have become. I had my heart set on a whole line of audio products—small portable equipment. I thought how practical it would be. For example, you wouldn't have a record player in the kitchen; you might have a cassette player. You wouldn't want a stereo system in the bathroom; a small, high-quality tuner and speaker could be appealing."

After 1964, when KLH was sold to Singer, the sewing-machine company, Kloss stayed on for three years as president, agreeing not to engage in outside audio work for five. He started Advent after three, concentrating exclusively on video projects until KLH's agreement expired.

Shortly after he put Advent together, Kloss turned to a project that had gotten buried at KLH: the Dolby noise-reduction system. Ray Dolby, an American living in England, had perfected an ingenious electronic method to quash the hiss that plagues tape recordings, particularly cassettes. Kloss had persuaded Dolby to license KLH to manufacture reel-to-reel tape recorders incorporating his system. When Kloss left KLH, the company lost interest in the idea.

At Advent, Kloss's experimentation showed him that coupling the Dolby system with a cassette deck would solve the most annoying aspect of cassette recording: the high level of his caused by the extremely slow speed at which the tape in the cassette moves across the recorder head. He then took the process one more step. Du Pont had developed chromium-dioxide particles that were smaller than the usual iron-oxide particles used in recording tapes. The new chromium-dioxide particles could reduce the noise factor even further.

"For four years Du Pont was offering chromium-dioxide tape and nobody would buy it," says Kloss. "We took the stuff, showed you could get something worth while out of it and now they sell every bit of it they make."

Although Kloss virtually created Du Pont's market for the substance, Advent buys completely packaged the chromiumdioxide tape it sells as Advent Crolyn and enjoys no preferential treatment for its contribution. Such contractual arrangements are an aspect of the business that baffles and irritates Kloss.

"There's built-in bias that works against innovators," he says. "When we started selling cassette decks with Dolbys, we were paying about two dollars per channel in licensing fees. First I had to convince Ray Dolby that there was a consumer market for his invention—more sophisticated versions were already being used in recording studios—and then I had to pay him for the privilege of proving my point. Now that it's caught on, the price is down to about 25 cents a channel."

While the cassette machine was being developed, Kloss was still at work on the VideoBeam. Once the basic system had been put together, he turned to the next step—a screen bright enough to complement the output of the projector unit.

"About the time I realized what type of material we'd need to achieve the kind of brightness we wanted, Kodak, almost by accident, discovered a way to roll ordinary aluminum kitchen wrap to give it a special reflective quality," Kloss recalls. "So we developed a specially curved screen, under license for the use of the material from Kodak, which gave us the light level we needed."

Sony actually beat Advent to the home market place by several months with a projection-TV system. In effect, though, Sony simply uses lenses to magnify its standard picture-tube image and project it onto a 30"x40" screen. The tube's lines are obvious. Also, Kloss points out, Sony's image is one third the size and one quarter the brightness of the Video-Beam's.

"Sony had this marvelous device," says Kloss, "but it was an information machine, basically designed to be used with a video-tape unit. It had no tuner for direct viewing of programs and seemed to have been designed for sales or educational presentations. I had in mind fun—something that would go in the home like a regular TV, only on a larger scale."

The VideoBeam projector, even at first encounter, is not an unfamiliar piece of equipment. The knobs on its top are similar to those on your livingroom TV set: channel selector, UHF selector, color, brightness, tint and focus controls. One sits behind the unit. When it is turned on, three beams of color—blue, red and green—leap out to converge on the aluminum screen, filling it with a picture sharper and bigger than most eight-millimeter home movies. Sound from a speaker in the projector base is directed toward the slightly concave screen and bounces back to give the impression it originates within the image.

Now the machine becomes impressive: During a midday soap opera, the characters loom larger than life; then the show breaks for a commercial and the White Tornado swirls menacingly through kitchen windows. Watching becomes a total viewing experience, as from the front rows of a movie theater. Munching popcorn seems appropriate. Sewing or reading a book does not.

"It's a very private kind of television viewing," admits Kloss. "If you want to watch TV, you go into a room and watch TV for an hour or two. It makes demands on you, returns viewing to a somewhat more active mode. It's not designed for casual viewing, the way most TVs are used. Somebody who uses it six hours a day ... I have no sympathy with."

From a few random conversations, it's quickly apparent that viewers have different reactions to the VideoBeam. A waitress in a Boston Howard Johnson's says she hates "the big TV."

"My husband takes me out to a bar and we sit there and watch television. I want to go dancing."

But Fred Loughlan, the bartender at the spot the waitress refers to, says it's the best show in town. "It's building business up," he says. "You come back here when the Stanley Cup play-offs are going on and you won't be able to get into the place."

Lawrence Galer, a 37-year-old realestate developer, has installed a Video-Beam in his house, placing it in a specially designed game room complete with movie seats. Galer has it hooked up to an auxiliary video-tape unit. "What'd you like to see?" he asks, offering a handwritten list of movie titles including Funny Girl and Goodbye Columbus. He pops a cassette into the machine. A huge American flag and George C. Scott fill the screen with the opening scene of Patton.

"This is dynamite," he says proudly. "Basically, I'm an old movie nut and this is like bringing the movies into your home. Like any new thing, it's completely mesmerizing. It must be like seeing TV when it was first developed. After the initial spell of the large screen wears off, you find yourself watching more of the quality programs and less of the usual stuff, because you're so aware of what's bad. But the good things—The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman—I tape because the good things become fantastic.

"When football games are on, I feel like I'm in the theater-concession business, bringing guests stuff to eat and drink. There's only one problem. No clicker. I can't change the channel when I'm lying on the couch."

Galer's enthusiasm is typical of those who've seen VideoBeam, but, as Advent points out in its own brochure, the system does have significant limitations. If you rub the fragile screen with a finger, it may be permanently marred. And the 140-pound projector is not the easiest thing to move around and is incredibly finicky about where it's placed. It must sit exactly 100 inches in front of the screen. There are other drawbacks. A television signal that looks bad on a regular set may well be disastrously reproduced on the VideoBeam; and bright room lights can effectively wipe out the picture. The VideoBeam is also demanding, for seating angles could dictate that an entire recreation room be set aside for a television system.

Still, the sets are being snapped up by consumers much faster than they can be produced.

"It sells itself," says Mike Osborne, store manager at Dayton, Ohio's Carlin Audio, the first retail outlet for the Video-Beam. "People see it, their mouths drop and they really become interested in what's on the tube, particularly people who haven't liked television before."

Jacob Schorr of Opus 2 in Memphis says that the majority of the sets they've sold have been to people making less than $30,000 a year.

"They're willing to spend $2500 for a TV picture that's as good and as big as this," he says. "It's not as if it were some millionaire just buying himself a novelty."

The VideoBeam has already resulted in certain observable social phenomena. Bartenders report that customers are no longer raucous but sit quietly comatose, watching the tube. Kloss reports that he's noticed traffic sometimes stopping outside his home while drivers peer in at four-by-six-foot football games unfolding on his wall.

Peter Downey of public-television station WGBH in Boston says flatly that VideoBeam will change our whole concept of television. "It'll make people think more in terms of theatrical filming," he says. "The art of the close-up will be redefined and viewers will begin to notice every technical error made in the studio." It's the same critical awareness that occurred when early hi-fi buffs heard imperfections in pioneer LP and stereo records.

In fact, Kloss is thinking about including in the VideoBeam instruction manual a set of complaint cards for viewers to send to stations broadcasting poor program material or bad signals. For example, Emmett Buford, a salesman at Opus 2, reports that "One day we were watching a soap opera and on a close-up shot we discovered that the tears on an actress' face had been pasted on."

Naturally, VideoBeam will influence video experimenters. Says Douglas Davis, a video artist who is also Newsweek's art critic:

"The VideoBeam is the first really top-quality video system on the market at close to consumer prices. It becomes almost a human presence in the life of the artist."

Allan Hackel, president of Advertising Agency Associates of Boston, says that his VideoBeam has provided a fresh outlook to television advertising:

"It used to be that we'd take a program to different program directors and try to sell them a show," he says. "Now, once our sponsors have seen the Video-Beam, they say, 'We'll give you an extra budget to fly the producers in here to see the show on the big screen.' It's the sizzle to the steak. It presells everything and makes us look very impressive. I offered to buy the first $2,000,000 worth of units, but Advent said no."

Meanwhile, Kloss is working on new products. Last fall he introduced the Advent II speaker, which marked a new way of making speakers by injection molding. Kloss hopes ultimately to manufacture the basic cabinet for a dollar and a half's worth of labor and three and a half dollars' worth of plastic foam. In the Kloss tradition, he will pass the savings on to the consumer.

Two other audio projects fill the drawing boards: a monaural FM radio, similar to the KLH Model 8 but with a separate speaker controlled from the tuner box; and a new sub-$300 stereo system, complete with receiver, turntable and speakers.

"There's a lot of junk sold on the market for $250," Kloss says. "I want to offer people an option. I want to say to them, 'Do without the eight-track tape machine and I'll sell you a good music system for $300.' Of course, I'm getting discouraged by all this inflation."

Kloss also has several more video ideas. "I want to find out the limits of the Sony system," he says. "When you take a tube and put a lens in front of it, how much light can you have the lens collect without making the picture look terrible?

"Then there's the aspect of personal TV viewing. When you look at the fraction of light used by a single person watching the VideoBeam, it requires a fantastically small amount of power. Obviously, the idea of a TV set in an eyeglass frame sounds kookie, but that's one way one could go."

He pauses.

"Actually," he says, "I've already come up with one idea for a new way to make a direct-view tube ... but that's another story."

Now! Casablanca, The Watergate Hearings and Super Bowl-All for $9.98!

Video projectors may be only a prelude to a revolution in homeentertainment programing. The latest news from the electronics frontier is that important breakthroughs have now been made in the development of video discs. If the prototypes go into production next year, as scheduled, we'll soon be able to control our own video programing with the economy and convenience of stereo records.

Although there are several competing video-disc systems now being prepared for the market, the one that's causing the most excitement is based on a new approach using photographic film instead of vinyl as the recording medium. Pioneered by a small California firm called I/O Metrics, the system uses a laser beam carrying a coded TV signal to expose a negative of high-grade film spinning at 30 revolutions per second, the frame speed of television, as the spiral video track is recorded. Copies are then reproduced by the cheap and simple method of contact printing on diazo material, as in any photo darkroom. The home playback unit will function like a stereo turntable, except that the image will be read optically, with photodiodes and mirrors, instead of with a mechanical stylus. You simply connect the device to the antenna leads of a conventional TV set—or video projector—throw on a disc and make yourself comfortable for an hour of full-color video with quadraphonic sound.

The most remarkable thing about this new technique is that it promises to be so cheap, toppling the cost barriers that made video tape the big home-entertainment event that never happened. A video disc can be produced for only 20 cents in darkroom materials, meaning a retail price of five dollars to seven dollars—instead of the $25 to $35 an hourlong video tape cassette costs. Likewise the playback unit: Where a video-tape machine costs about $1600, a video-disc machine can be built to retail for $300. The one advantage of video tape is the capacity to do your own recording; but the video-disc developers are confident that the public will happily trade this feature for the convenience and economy of the disc medium. Why should the average consumer want to pay $30 a tape to record his favorite TV show when the same show is available in the record stores at a fraction of the cost? Or even given to him free, with spliced-in advertising picking up the tab?

If it all pans out, the implications are staggering. Picture (literally) the record albums of the future as "lookies," bringing to our home TVs the musicians themselves or any variety of visual accompaniment along with the sound. Or imagine video-disc releases of all your favorite movies and TV shows; you could have a personal movie library for the price of theater tickets. Similarly, sports events, educational productions, cultural events, new kinds of graphic animation, new kinds of video magazines and video books all should be available—and all of them would be subject to the viewer's own needs and imagination in the techniques of stop action and instant replay. The low cost of recording will open the medium to amateurs and experimentalists as well as professionals. No doubt, there will be a video-disc porno industry, too. How far it will go depends on consumer acceptance and keeping costs reasonable, but there appear to be no remaining technical barriers, and low costs for the discs and playback devices seem assured. The photo-duplicating process developed by I/O Metrics supposedly can produce discs cheaply in any volume, unlike vinyl-record presses requiring large production runs to spread the overhead. The playback units can be mass-produced without expensive precision components and still give good results, and they will be cross-franchised to competing manufacturers instead of monopolized by one. To top it all off, with optical playback there's no needle to cause scratches and wear. With this feature, video discs should someday make stereo LPs as ancient as 78s. When used for audio only, they have the astonishing capacity to record 500 hours of high-fidelity quadraphonic sound per 12-inch disc.