Keeping your Fi Hi

this year's battle cry in the high-fidelity evolution is "more power to the people"

The French have a saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In today's hi-fi field, you see it in two ways: the soft-pedaling or total absence of four-channel products from many new audio lines and the very nature of the new lines, which--as in the early days of hi-fi componentry--emphasize such audiophile appeals as manual turntables, separate and high-powered amplifiers (power seems to be the name of the game these days) and experimental and large speakers. All of these new items are high-priced. There are, of course, some units at the cheap-and-cheerful end of the spectrum, but the message of most new equipment is loud and clear: This is high quality, and high quality costs. At any rate, and a few exceptions notwithstanding, the great middle area of audio products is less accounted for than ever in most manufacturers' new offerings.

In a sense this high-end development is the hi-fi industry's answer to both the failure of four-channel to take over the market and the doldrums of our economy. To understand why, for instance, a company like Lux Audio has the temerity to enter the U. S. market this year with a brand-new line topped by a $3000 amplifier, or why an old hand like Fisher is making every effort to forge a new image with supercomponents that include a manual turntable, it helps to (continued on page 159)Keeping your Fi Hi(continued from age 140) understand that four-channel's anticipated big splash has turned out to be little more than a modest ripple. Six years after its introduction, the most optimistic sales estimates remain below 15 percent of total sales, hardly enough to support a revolution in sound. Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, the four-channel, mass-market push will be on again, with many of today's problems resolved.

But for now, the high-fidelity-components industry is still special-interest group catering to near-elitist tastes. Alter some years of trying to tell the recording giants that they ought to make records to conform to their latest electronic inventions, the audio-components people are once again doing their own thing, which is, simply, designing electronics to bring out the best in existing recordings. In a sense, we have witnessed a protracted battle between the software and the hardware men, and the software crowd has won, as, indeed, it has throughout the history of recorded sound.

From the standpoint of the hi-fi buyer, this means a resurgence and an application of those basic tenets off good sound that created the hi-fi field in the first place. In record players, for instance, the auto matic changer is giving way to the single-play modal--perhaps with some automation but essentially an updated version of the manual type that was once the sine qua non of the true audiophile. The magic phrase here is direct drive which eliminates some messy parts and makes for smoother operation. One company--Technics by Panasonic--is trying to straddle both worlds with a unit that offers direct drive and also changes records; but so far no one has followed this example. What the new turntables do offer--in place of stack and play--are such desiderata as truer speed, lower motor noise and refined tonearms that really work with the new superpickups at very low tracking forces.

In many of the latest amplifiers, distortion is virtually at the vanishing point; more than one lab technician has admitted that his test instruments have more residual distortion than the units being tested and that he has had to beef up his dummy loads to handle all the output power some of the new wattage monsters are capable of furnishing. The interest in high power is itself significant: The aficionado courts high wattage not because it sounds louder but because it sounds clearer. This is a complex subject, but two points may help clarify it. One, modern circuit design leans heavily on the use of large amounts of controlled feedback to reduce distortion, and in creating an amplifier this way, the audio designer finds himself--as one put it--"involved in really high power whether we like it or not. It's the only way we can be sure that what comes out is damn close, to what goes in."

Two, wattage numbers are misleading as indicators of the relative loudness of sounds. A 60-watt amplifier cannot be thought of as producing twice as much sound as a 30-watt amplifier. All the former really has is three decibels more of headroom for loud, complex signals. From the standpoint of how we actually hear, it takes an increase of ten decibels to convince us that a given sound is twice as loud as a previous sound. But ten decibels, terms of wattage means ten times the power. In other words, it would take a 30-watt amplifier to make a sound twice as loud as a 30-watt amplifier if both were being fed the same input signals and were driving the same speaker.

Twice as loud may not be your main concern, but ample power to drive your speaker surely is. The high power available in today's amplifiers provides the kind of stimulus needed by the latest speakers, in which ultimate efficiency (the ratio of output to input) is deliberately sacrificed in order to achieve smooth, extended response. The techniques vary; speaker designing is an area of unbridled experimentation in which near geniuses constantly try to circumvent the laws of physics. Thus the new shapes, sizes and materials seen in the new speaker lines that are in sum a challenge to the long hegemony of the familiar air-suspension, bookshelf models. Despite their differences, they share two elements: a need for high amplifier power and some means of adjusting the response to the listening room--varying relative output levels of woofer and tweeter, multidirectional spread of middles and highs or sometimes both. The most far-out technique for matching a speaker system to a room is the separate speaker equalizer an elaborate tone adjuster that can compensate for whole range of sound, octave by octave, and that may cost as much as, or more than, the speaker itself.

In FM equipment, at least one feature of four-channel technology has found its way into the better tuners and that's the so-called phase-lock loop, a special circuit used in CD-4 (discrete disc) demodulators and recently found to make a marked improvement in reception. Also showing up in FM circuits is some form of the Dolby noise-reduction system. This invention, initially grabbed by recording studios because it made for quieter tapes with better-sounding highs, moved rapidly into consumer cassette recorders to make them acceptable for hi-fi use. Dolby now is the latest improvement in FM; a set equipped with it seems to be performing as if it were connected to a superantenna.

The three tape formats--cartridge, cassette and open reel--are still with us, but a pattern seems to be emerging. With the possible exception of Wollensak, the hi-fi-component companies are not putting much effort into the cartridge-tape format. This format has not made it to the top ranks of audio esteem because of too many problems, mechanical and electrical. Cartridge tape, of course, is available as a four-channel medium, but that in itself remains a questionable asset. On all other counts--acoustic response, mechanical reliability, general versatility--it is easily outclassed by the two other tape formats.

The preferred choice for the well-heeled, serious recordist remains the big open-reel deck, which offers the ultimate in sound, not to mention such activist fillips as ease of editing, multitrack recording, echo effects, mixing and the facility for modifying the circuits for special input and output connections, trimming the bias and equalization to fine-tune the deck for best results with a variety of tapes--being in general the kind of product that, a few years ago, would have been labeled strictly professional.

But before you rush out to buy a Revox or a Ferrograph or a top-line Sony or Teac, check your bank balance and your own inclination to become involved with the intricacies of such a machine. You can do almost as well from a purely listening standpoint and somewhat less from a recording standpoint, with one of the late-model cassette decks. Other than the fabled Nakamichi 1000, these are priced mostly at or below $500, and when equipped with Dolby (or the similar ANRS circuit), plus the facility for using a variety of tapes, such units qualify admirably as adjuncts to a high-quality home music system. All of the newest models boast improved transport mechanisms and superior tape heads; many offer input mixing; a few are showing up with separate playback heads and automatic reverse. Cassettes themselves--both the blanks for recording and the commercial prerecorded releases--are better, too. Just to show how much better the can be, Advent recently issued its own musical releases--the Process CR/70 series--which are the first to combine Dolby and chromium-dioxide tape. Played on a good cassette deck patched into a good stereo system, they sound as great s disc recordings and have even fooled some experienced listeners who thought they were hearing open-reel 7-1/2-ips tape.

In getting back to basics, in putting performance above novelty, in renewing its bid for a sophisticated market, the hi-fi-components industry has higher credibility today than at any time in the past few years. This puts the informed consumer in a healthy bargaining position, bolstered by such developments as the recent Federal ruling on accuracy in amplifier-power ratings and the continued decline of fair-trade pricing. And the buyer can expect to be wooed from unexpected sources--such as the Mesa factory in Mexico, formerly an assembly plant for Garrard changers and now producing its own line; or the new Strathearn Audio operation in Northern Ireland Funded by the government, Strathearn plans to export 75 percent of the equipment it produces, At the same time, its managers hope that the employment it offers will unite the embattled Irish factions and substitute a commonweal for old antagonisms. As a company spokesman put it, "Our chaps may toss a few stones at one another outside the gates, but once inside the works, they cooperate beautifully.