Results 1 to 15 of 24

Thread: Origins of high Fidelity in first Life Magazine article on the subject from 1953

Hybrid View

Previous Post Previous Post   Next Post Next Post
  1. #1
    Senior Member glen's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Location
    Pasadena, Ca.
    Posts
    911

    Origins of high Fidelity in first Life Magazine article on the subject from 1953

    This is the initial LIFE magazine article "The Hi-Fi Bandwagon" from the June 15, 1953 issue which was probably the first exposure to “High Fidelity” for millions of Americans. Opening with a big two-page spread, it is an in-depth article exploring different facets of the Hi-Fi hobby and it’s origins. About twenty months later the “How to Buy Hi-Fi” side bar in this article was expanded into the 1955 Lifemagazine article "How to Buy Hi-Fidelity" that named the JBL Hartsfield speaker as the "money is no object" dream hi-fi speaker of it's time, which put the early JBL company on the map:
    http://audioheritage.org/vbulletin/s...ad.php?t=11917
    Attached Images Attached Images   
    glen

    "Make it sound like dinosaurs eating cars"
    - Nick Lowe, while producing Elvis Costello

  2. #2
    Senior Member glen's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Location
    Pasadena, Ca.
    Posts
    911

    "The Hi-Fi Bandwagon" scanned pages

    Here are the scanned pages of the first part of the article.
    I will follow these up with easier to read searchable/editable text of the main article and the sidebars.
    Attached Images Attached Images      
    glen

    "Make it sound like dinosaurs eating cars"
    - Nick Lowe, while producing Elvis Costello

  3. #3
    Senior Member glen's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Location
    Pasadena, Ca.
    Posts
    911

    "The Hi-Fi Bandwagon" scanned pages

    The rest of the scanned pages of the article.
    Attached Images Attached Images      
    glen

    "Make it sound like dinosaurs eating cars"
    - Nick Lowe, while producing Elvis Costello

  4. #4
    Senior Member glen's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Location
    Pasadena, Ca.
    Posts
    911

    "The Hi-Fi Bandwagon" text

    FACES OF ADDICTS LISTENING TO HI-FI ARE RAPT, THE CONCENTRATION ALMOST PAINFUL. PICTURES WERE MADE IN LAFAYETTE'S DEMONSTRATION ROOM IN NEW YORK CITY EXCEPT FOR SECOND FROM LEFT WHICH SHOWS ROBERT HUMPHREYS IN HIS COMPONENT-LITTERED WA'SHINGTON, D.C. LIVING ROOM
    Attached Images Attached Images  
    glen

    "Make it sound like dinosaurs eating cars"
    - Nick Lowe, while producing Elvis Costello

  5. #5
    Senior Member glen's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Location
    Pasadena, Ca.
    Posts
    911

    "The Hi-Fi Bandwagon" text

    THE ‘HI-FI’ BANDWAGON
    People who like music and ‘bugs’ who just like sound have started U.S. craze for high-fidelity home systems
    By HERBERT BREAN

    MORE than the citizens of any other nation, Americans almost from birth are besieged by artificial sound. The farm boy milks to broadcast music, the city boy studies his lessons to the accompaniment of recorded bop. Almost every American grows up within sound of a radio, and the record purchasing craze is a recognized and accepted stage of adolescence. The U.S. spends $300 million a year for radio sets, almost $200 million for phongraphs, $150 million for records and almost $2 billion for TV. But nearly all of this money goes for equipment which produces characterless parodies of the original sounds it is supposed to reproduce. As a consequence the average man has become accustomed to hearing one thing in the theater or concert hall and something else from his radio or phongraph. It simply does not occur to him to expect the latter to sound much like the former.


    Today, however, thousands of Americans are learning that the two kinds of sound can be identical. Systems are now available which reproduce music and speech so exactly that, with the eyes shut, it is often impossible to tell whether the violin one hears is on a record or actually in the house. The name most generally used for this new kind of sound reproduction is high fidelity or "hi-fi." Like the crystal-set radio in 1921 and miniature-camera photography in 1935 hi-fi promises to become a major American enthusiasm. Currently it is working a revolution in the phonograph industry.
    In the past few years, particularly under the impact of TV, sales of the big, familiar radio-phonograph have slumped to almost nothing. Meanwhile, in the last eight months sales of the hi-fi "rigs" have grown to the point where estimates of 1953 sales now range from a conservative $60 million to an optimistic $100 million. Whereas high fidelity units in the past have been made mostly by small manufacturers, the big mass producers are now launching into it. General Electric has been manufacturing hi-fi parts for some time, and Stromberg Carlson started turning out both parts and complete sound systems last fall. Late last year Columbia announced an assembled table model phonograph with twin speakers which is the closest low-cost approach to high fidelity now on the market. This spring RCA-Victor, the behemoth of the industry, made a significant announcement: it is marketing a full line of components for assembly into high fidelity systems, as well as "package" hi-fi systems. This month Philco, Zenith and Admiral announced new hi-fi lines and Magnavox, Hallicrafters and Motorola are known to be working on similar projects. The syrupy, "bass-heavy," unrealistic sound of the old-style living room phonograph is dying out. What is replacing it is easy to distinguish by ear but hard to describe in words. Perhaps Harold Weiler, author of High Fidelity Simplified, one of the several books on the subject to appear in recent months, does it as well as anyone:


    "Do you [when listening to your radio or phonograph] hear cymbals as a crashing sound followed by a sustained shimmering? Do you hear the triangle as a clear ringing sound? Can you actually feel the vibrations of the tom-tom? . . Can you always differentiate between the violin and violoncello? Can you tell the difference between string bass and brass bass?"


    If you can't -and if you care- you are ready for high fidelity. Once you have heard some of it you will probably never again be satisfied with whatever radio-phonograph equipment you now have. Hi-fi's ability to convert listeners into addicts was illustrated during World War II on New Guinea. Irving Greene, a sergeant in Air Force communications, was sent a hand-wound mechanical phonograph and an assortment of records with which to entertain the troops. This was in 1943 when almost no one outside the engineering profession had ever heard of high fidelity. Disdaining the phonograph sent him, Greene, a radio and sound engineer, scrounged the components of an adequate, if not necessarily regulation, sound-reproducing system. He rigged a series of six loudspeakers out of pie plates and other improbables. From them came recorded concerts of such tonal quality that when some very expensive commercial phonographs were later "liberated," the soldiers-their ears now educated refused to listen to them until Greene had improved their quality.

    The stores are jammed

    SUCH experiences, whether in Army camp or civilian living room, spread the hi-fi contagion. Since the war the number of, addicts has multiplied so fast that a basic hi-fi language is developing (box at right) and it has been estimated the components, or parts, for virtually one million hi-fi systems have been sold. Since addicts are notorious rebuilders of sets -one Philadelphia veteran admits to having completely changed his system 20 times - a part of this total is undoubtedly replacement business. Even so, the demand for hi-fi equipment is impressive.
    When a new shop devoted exclusively to high fidelity opened in Los Angeles recently, it did $12,000 worth of business in. the first three weeks. When a similar store in San Francisco announced its opening for a Wednesday, a sound-hungry public stormed its doors on Monday, trying to get at merchandise that was not yet uncrated. In March two partners erected a new hi-fi Shop on Philadelphia’s Main Line. They sold nine rigs totalling more than $5,000 before they could formally open their doors. Dealers such as Lafayette and Harvey in New York and the Radio Shack in Boston publish catalogs containing brief courses in hi-fi to save their salesmen from having to give lectures to eager but ignorant customers.


    The new sound received an unusual tribute when the Electro-Voice Company, which manufactures high-fidelity speakers and headphones, sent out a demonstration room mounted in a trailer truck. When it reached a New York town the driver-technician in charge was stopped by two tough-looking characters who said they were from the truckers' union and demanded to see his union card. The alarmed technician explained that he was not a union truck driver because his job was demonstrating hi-fi equipment and played some music for them. The two challengers listened respectfully removed their hats and invited him to proceed. .


    High Fidelity, a magazine devoted exclusively to the subject, was launched only two years ago and has almost doubled its circulation despite the forbidding price of $l a copy.
    It is still growing and the publisher is planning a second magazine, just for hi-fi retailers and repairmen. High Fidelity subscribers include residents of Taiwan, the Kenya Colony, Thailand, New Zealand and Iceland, since high-quality sound is especially popular in remote areas where entertainment is limited. Anchorage, Alaska, numbers some 30 hi-fi addicts. A local problem in Alaska is finding the favored corner location for speakers in the rounded Quonset huts in which many residents live.


    Though the "sound hound" holds the conventional radio-phonograph in contempt, it contains the same basic components that are found in the hi-fi rig. These components are a record turntable, a pickup to convert the mechanical, movements of the record needle into electrical impulses, a radio tuner to receive broadcasts, an amplifier for strengthening the weak signal that comes from the tuner or pickup and a speaker with its enclosure. But there all similarity ends. The “commercial" set is primarily a piece of furniture, a handsome cabinet often made of costly, hand-rubbed wood. Itcontains minimal and mass-produced electronic equipment incapable of reproducing all the sound frequencies on a modern record, and its speaker is usually improperly housed (drawing, p. 152). The mass manufacturer should not be blamed for this. Over the years some larger makers of commercial sets have experimentally introduced costlier, truer-toned components only to discover that what the public wanted was furniture, not good sound.


    Hi-fi components, on the other hand, have been made mostly by relatively small manufacturers to very exacting, custom standards. They are sold unit by unit, each selected to suit the individual taste of the purchaser (box, top of page 148) and then wired together. The components are not necessarily housed in a cabinet at all, which helps keep cost low, but often are merely placed in a bookcase. The speaker, which usually consists of two units - a tiny one called a tweeter, which reproduces the high frequencies, and a larger; one (woofer) for the lows - can be put anywhere. No matter how it is arranged, the hi-fi system reproduces every nuance on the record, including virtually the full dynamic range of the original sounds, from softest pianissimo to thunderous fortissimo, and it does this with virtually no distortion at all. The chief reason for this performance is the fact that high fidelity reproduces the higher-frequency sounds, or overtones, some of which were potentially available on even the older, 78-rpm records and are present in abundance on good modern recordings. Even old records usually sound better on hi-fi, despite their heavy surface noise.


    Sound, considered objectively and without reference to the animal or human mechanism that hears it, is a vibratory or wavelike disturbance in the atmosphere, the number of vibrations, or sound waves per second, determining the sound's frequency (pitch). On a piano, for example, the keyboard of which has a range of from 27.5 to 4,186 vibrations or cycles per second (c.p.s.), middle c consists of 261.6 c.p.s. When the middle c piano key is struck, it causes the corresponding piano strings to vibrate 261.6 times per second, which starts an atmospheric vibration of 261.6 c.p.s. This in turn induces exactly the same vibration in the ear's sensitive cochlea. But besides having a fundamental vibration, every note on every musical instrument has an infinite number of overtones, or harmonics. These are additional and high frequencies that are simple multiples of the fundamental. Thus the fundamental (it is also called the first harmonic) of middle c being 261.6, the second harmonic is double that or 523.2, the third harmonic is 784.8 c.p.s. and so on. It is these harmonics which are the important factor in creating an instrument's timbre or characteristic sound this is the reason the same note played on flute and French horn -is a thin piping on the one and a sonorous blare on the other. Most authorities agree that reproduction of at least the first four harmonics is necessary for adequate recording of, and differentiation between, the different instruments. The average human ear can handle around 15,000 cycles, but the average commercial phonograph does not reproduce above 6,000. Thus it is easy to understand why such a phonograph sounds muted, and why a reproductive range of 15,000 cycles is essential for realistic sound.
    glen

    "Make it sound like dinosaurs eating cars"
    - Nick Lowe, while producing Elvis Costello

  6. #6
    Senior Member glen's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Location
    Pasadena, Ca.
    Posts
    911

    "The Hi-Fi Bandwagon" text

    LOW TONES of 100 cycles, shown on an oscilloscope screen, achieve about the same height through a commercial amplifier (left) and a hi-fi one (right).
    Attached Images Attached Images  
    glen

    "Make it sound like dinosaurs eating cars"
    - Nick Lowe, while producing Elvis Costello

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Similar Threads

  1. 1955 Life magazine article that made Jim Lansing famous?
    By glen in forum Lansing Product General Information
    Replies: 27
    Last Post: 04-14-2007, 02:08 AM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •