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From Hi-Fi to Ultra-High End

From Hi-Fi to Ultra-High End

The High-Fidelity Era: 1945–1970
If the pioneering epoch of loudspeaker design was driven by the motion picture and broadcast industries, the subsequent “high-fidelity era” was more centered on home entertainment and, in particular, on Columbia Records’ marvelous invention—the long-playing (twelve-inch) 33rpm vinyl record. Announced at an NYC press conference on June 21, 1948, the first LP, Nathan Milstein performing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto accompanied by Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic, appeared in record shops a week later—and was an instant success. 

Not only did the LP mean that an entire symphony could be listened to on a single record (as opposed to the multiple sides of the five-record 78rpm sets that preceded it), it was cheaper than a box of 78s and purportedly more durable. Almost immediately record companies worldwide switched over to the LP—even Columbia’s chief rival, RCA, which held out for its seven-inch 45rpm alternative format for almost two years, threw in the towel in January, 1950.

From Hi-Fi to Ultra-High End

The introduction of the LP wouldn’t be important if its advent hadn’t been accompanied by another change. From Edison and Berliner on, recording companies had been claiming that the sound of their cylinders/discs was so close to the real thing that even a trained musician couldn’t tell the difference. And the truth is that amateur and experienced listeners alike were, at first, wowed with each new advance in recording technology. But with the LP recorded sound made a genuine leap forward, due in equal parts to the new condenser microphones coming from Germany (particularly the Neumann U47, M49, and M50—the numbers being the year in the twentieth century when each microphone was introduced), the 30ips dual-track tube-powered reel-to-reel tape recorder (another German invention, brought back to the U.S. after the war and championed by none other than Bing Crosby), and advances in record cutting and pressing equipment (notably the Westrex cutting head and Scully lathe). Thanks to variable groove-spacing, LPs could not only offer twenty-two or more minutes of music per side, they could also offer that music in genuine “high fidelity”—with a bandwidth that, theoretically at least, comprised the gamut, from the lowest notes that listeners could hear (or feel) to the highest. 

Around 1954, this windfall for music lovers was almost literally doubled when the stereophonic reproduction of sound (introduced in motion picture theaters well before it found its way into homes—1940’s Fantasia, for instance, could be heard in a handful of select theaters in multichannel sound) became a reality. By 1955 home audio enthusiasts could buy pre-recorded stereo tapes for 7.5ips decks with “in-line” or “stacked” playback heads, and in 1957–58 the first stereo LP (Audio Fidelity’s A Study in Hi Fidelity Sound) was marketed, followed by a flood of stereophonic recordings from all the major recording companies.

The advances in higher-fidelity sources (recorded and playback) coincided with several other changes in the market and in society as a whole. The birth of rock ’n’ roll, for instance, in the early-to-mid-50s was to have an incalculable effect on the record-buying public. At the same time, the mid-50s marked one of the high points in classical recorded music, with most of the great artists from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s still at or very near the peak of their abilities. Add to this the expansion of the middle class following the war, the low-fidelity (and sparse musical offerings) of 50s television and AM radio, the growth of higher-fidelity FM radio, and the general feeling (as old as the bourgeoisie) that listening to music in your home made you officially “classier” than your neighbor, and you ended up with a lot more records (and tuners) being sold and played in people’s living rooms—as well a whole new subculture of (mainly) guys who spent their leisure hours and more plentiful extra dollars on the latest higher-fidelity gear and recordings. While the birth of high fidelity couldn’t exactly be called the birth of the audiophile—there have been “hi-fi nuts” in every generation—the 50s did mark a wholesale expansion of the audiophile sub-class.

To keep pace with all these musical, technological, and socio-economic changes, the loudspeaker industry changed too. While the pioneering efforts in high-fidelity playback and recording were made by research scientists at large labs in response to the advent of the “talking” motion picture, those of the post-World War II “high-fidelity era” were tailored to a public that was consuming music in its homes. And homes, by definition, are shared spaces. In other words, hi-fi manufacturers had to find a size and style that would meet with an entire family’s approval. Though giant horn speakers were ideal for huge auditoriums and motion-picture theaters, they were never “at home” in a living room. And one of the first trends you see in 50s loudspeakers is the domestic downsizing of transducers. The “bookshelf speakers” from Acoustic Research and KLH weren’t called “bookshelf” without good reason. They were designed to better blend with home décor—to call less attention to themselves than the giants that preceded them—and to do all this while at the same time delivering the much higher fidelity that 50s LPs, tapes, and FM broadcasts were capable of.

Though the AR-3 and the KLH Model 6 weren’t born in a research lab, both speakers had immaculate pedigrees. The father of the AR-3, Edgar Villchur, taught a night course (the first university course, actually) in the reproduction of sound at NYU; the father of the KLH Model 6, Henry Kloss, was Villchur’s prize pupil. Neither Villchur nor Kloss was a research scientist per se, as almost all of the innovators of the pioneer era had been. Though academically trained, Villchur did not have a degree in electrical or mechanical engineering. He was, like so many others of this period, a self-taught mix of hard science, hard work, careful calculation, and sheer inspiration, what you might call an extremely gifted amateur—so gifted that he came up with two of the most important ideas of the high-fidelity era: the acoustic-suspension woofer and the dome tweeter. Though not unproblematic, both of these brilliant innovations made full-range high-fidelity playback possible in a much smaller package within a much smaller listening space. The same thing could be said about Peter Walker’s original Quad, which was not only a technical stroke-of-genius (the first “full-range”—or, at least, “fuller-range” electrostat) but which was also specifically designed for home playback. 

Although the market for the horn loudspeaker—the king of transducers throughout the 20s, 30s, and 40s—shrank as a result of these innovations, the horn speaker didn’t disappear. It too became more domesticated—shedding inches and pounds, slimming down to more “living-room-friendly” proportions (especially in certain JBL iterations), and in one famous instance being cleverly designed to be placed in a corner (i.e., “out of the way”). However, there was a technical limit to how small a horn could get without compromising its sound. (A horn has to be a certain size to work as intended.) By the beginning of the 70s horn-loaded loudspeakers (with their “horn colorations”) looked like they were on their way out, but then heavy-metal rock ’n’ roll happened, innovators began experimenting, and the ultra-dynamic horn speaker found new life.

Toward the end of the “high-fidelity” era, when the computer was just beginning to cross over from the scientific/military world into the business community (and a decade or so later into the home), it found its way into loudspeaker design. British companies like KEF were among the first to apply computer-modeling and computer-testing to loudspeaker and driver design. This more rigorously scientific approach was complemented by a superb sense of industrial design that led to speakers, from Bowers & Wilkins notably, that not only measured extraordinarily well and sounded great, but also looked fantastic. The trend toward computer-assisted engineering and industrial design would also bear fruit in the “high-end era” and, notably, in today’s generation of beautifully sculpted, computer-optimized dynamic loudspeakers.

 

The Modern High-End Era Begins: 1970–1980  
If the High-Fidelity Era was marked by a shift from pure science practiced by professional researchers in the service of industry to applied science practiced by gifted amateurs in the service of home entertainment, the Modern High-End Era is most certainly more of the latter than the former, but with a key difference. Most of the products of the hi-fi era were made with the discerning, moderately well-heeled, upwardly mobile music lover and audio enthusiast in mind. For the most part they were designed to blend into a lifestyle that included other people and other passions—not to become a lifestyle in and of themselves. All that was about to change.

There have been “hi-fi nuts” in every era of this hobby. Even before there was hi-fi in the modern sense of the word there were connoisseurs who wouldn’t settle for anything but the best of the best. But throughout the Seventies (and beyond), the nuts rather took over the asylum—not everywhere, of course, but to an extent unprecedented in the past.

Part of the reason for this was the Sixties—and the music, energy, and excess it produced and inspired. Listening to records in your home had, by turns, always been a joy, a solace, a shared form of discovery and education, a display of status, and (Lord knows) a tool of seduction; in the late Sixties all these threads were woven into something like an ecstatic communal rite. The Sixties are almost unimaginable without the rock music they are famous for; the protest movements, the sexual revolution, Flower Power, pot, even the Vietnam War—the other things the Sixties are famous for—still live for us in song, as if the entire wild, rebellious, besotted era had been scored for a rock ’n’ roll movie. If you lived through the Sixties, you didn’t just want to have a nice stereo in your pad; you had to have one. It was your connection to the world at large and the worlds within that world. 

From Hi-Fi to Ultra-High End

When you combine this compulsion for constant sonic stimulation with Sixties idealism, experimentation, and self-indulgence, you get something like what happened to hi-fi in the Seventies. You get an explosion of new ideas—some of them half-baked, some of them fully cooked, most of them shockingly expensive to implement, and all of them contributing to the excitement and momentum, to the feeling that “something” new and different was up that we wanted to be a part of. 

In the Seventies (and Eighties) anything that could be tried was tried. An electrostat that used an acoustic lens to launch a hemispherical soundwave? A plasma speaker that combined a spark and a bottle of commercial-grade helium to make a massless driver? A tweeter that squeezed air in its folds rather than pushing and pulling it like a membrane or a cone? A bending-wave driver that looked like a short spherical horn standing on end with paper at the throat of its elongated cone, aluminum in its middle, and titanium at its neck? Been there, done that.

Perhaps the best exemplar of this new epoch in hi-fi was Jim Winey’s planar-magnetic Magnepan Tympani 1U/D—one of several speakers using drivers never seen before (the Walsh driver, the Heil tweeter, the Hill plasma driver, and the MBL Radialstrahler were four more from this unusually fecund era). I call the Maggie an exemplar not just because of its extraordinarily realistic sound, but because of the way it looked. Where hi-fi-era designers mostly built speakers that would fit unobtrusively into living rooms, many of the iconic loudspeakers of the “high end” (which is what this spirited new epoch came to be called) fitted in nowhere. The Tympanis, for example, were six feet tall and nearly six feet across—per side!—insatiably power-hungry, and about as attractive as office-cubicle dividers (which is exactly what their planar-magnetic panels were housed in). Their sole raison d’être was great sound for the audiophile who put great sound ahead of everything else—wife, kids, home décor, old age pension, peace of mind.

The high end wasn’t just a bunch of new products; it was a fever in the blood (on both the design and consumption sides), a single-minded lust to get closer and closer to the sound of the real thing, no matter the sacrifice in domesticity or the penalty to the pocketbook. And that penalty got steeper and steeper as the decade wore on. 

As boutique became the new mainstream and little companies no one had ever heard of before suddenly became the hottest tickets on the market, specialty audio manufacturers discovered that they didn’t necessarily need economies of scale to turn a profit; they quickly learned that any number of people would pay again and again for their “new and improved” offerings, even after spending small fortunes on their previous ones. The high-end merry-go-round began to whirl, as standard-setting product followed standard-setting product. In the decade of disco and rampant drug use, high fidelity was another addiction—a ride some folks just couldn’t get off of, even when their jobs and marriages went up in smoke.

And at the still center of this whirligig was The Absolute Sound. For a whole lot of us the guide and connection to the new landscape of “high end” audio was none other than Harry Pearson and the magazine he founded in 1973. Of course, Harry’s magazine wasn’t intended for penniless, bedraggled scum like me—it was meant for the respectable hi-fi nut, not the hippie hi-fi nut. It was, quite self-consciously (and sometimes off-puttingly), a members-only club made up of old-timers from the hi-fi era (like Harry himself), married to the best reproduction of acoustic music, and FNGs from the Sixties and Seventies, who, just out of college, were on their way up and wanted that rock soundtrack to accompany their climb. 

There was, at least at first, a good deal of tut-tutting about the extravagant prices of some of the earliest high-end gear from companies like ARC, MLAS, and Infinity Systems. But that was mere lip service. High prices (and they proved to be pittances compared to what was to come in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s) simply made the gear that much more desirable—either because it was tantalizingly out of reach of most of us or in reach of the chosen few. For guys like me, it was the fox and the grapes retold with every new issue of TAS. 

But there was something else going on in addition to “me generation” conspicuous consumption—something just as closely tied to Sixties idealism and experimentation as the explosion of “high end” products from brand-new or little-known companies, many of them started quite literally in garages.  

Prior to The Absolute Sound (and Stereophile, which preceded it), most of us depended on the numbers published in mainstream audio magazines to form our opinions of which hi-fi gear looked worthiest of purchase. The better the numbers, the more appealing the product. Even though readers hungered for plain-English opinions about the way things actually sounded in real rooms with real sources, such opinions were seldom voiced in Audio or High Fidelity or Stereo Review, lest a negative review upset advertisers. J. Gordon Holt famously jeopardized his job at High Fidelity for speaking this kind of truth in its pages—and went on to found the first “subjective” audio magazine.  But it was Harry Pearson’s TAS which made the “absolute-sound” standard—the sound of actual acoustic instruments playing in a real space—the benchmark. Using real music as a basis of comparison wasn’t HP’s invention. Acoustic Research, for one, produced “live-versus-recorded” exhibits on an occasional basis throughout the Fifties. But with Harry, the occasional became the absolute. The only reliable metric was how close reproduced music came to the real thing; the only reliable measuring device was the human ear.

What made the products of the Seventies so special—and so memorable—was that, unlike many of the measurements-bound Old School audio designers, the new generation believed as fervently in the absolute sound as HP and his readers did. The sound of the real thing was what they were after, too. The resulting colloquy in the pages of TAS was unprecedented in audio history—an open-ended discussion in which new-gen (and some old-gen, as well) audio designers, Pearson and his staff, and a growing and vocal readership, all speaking more or less the same language, shared opinions about audio gear and audio goals. 

In time, something like an extended family formed around the magazine—a family that those of us alienated from the establishment by the Sixties embraced wholeheartedly. The absolute sound was something you could believe in without a penalty in dashed hopes; it was a community you could belong to even if you couldn’t afford the initiation fee. Issues of the magazine were passed around like pages of the gospels; opinions were voiced about products heard, unheard, and never to be heard; cliques formed around certain products and certain reviewers who championed those products; a new high-end normal began to coalesce, replacing the old hi-fi one; and it was all incredibly exciting and incredibly fun. 

 

The Industry Matures: 1980–1995
As is always the case in any market, yesterday’s mavericks become today’s BBB. By 1980, many of the innovative little companies that virtually no one had heard of at the start of the 70s—Magnepan, MartinLogan, Thiel, Vandersteen, and Infinity—were the new high-end establishment, with a fresh wave of upstarts in the wings, clamoring to be heard. While the 70s saw a flurry of omnidirectional-speaker designs sparked by the success of the Bose 901, the start of the 80s saw the introduction of the most wholly original and enduring iteration of the omni, the MBL Radialstrahler from Germany. Again, while the 70s saw the triumphant introduction of Magnepan’s superb and very popular planar-magnetic multi-panel Tympani and single-panel MG-II loudspeakers, the 80s saw both Magnepan and a new company called Apogee Acoustics, launched by Jason Bloom and Leo Spiegel, develop true ribbon loudspeakers—a fabulous tweeter in Maggie’s case and a great line of full-range-ribbon speakers in Apogee’s. Though both the Radialstrahler and the Apogee were exceptionally difficult to drive—another characteristic of 80s speaker designs—with very low sensitivity and impedance drops that approached short circuits, the simultaneous introduction of high-current solid-state amplifiers from Mark Levinson Audio Systems, Krell, Threshold, Phase Linear, and others made powering these speakers possible (albeit pricey). 

Without question, another very-difficult-to-drive loudspeaker proved to be the most successful and influential of the lot. Started by a recording engineer and sometime TAS contributor named David Wilson, the then-California-based company Wilson Audio Specialties introduced its WATT (Wilson Audio Tiny Tot) at CES 1985, and the high-end-audio marketplace really hasn’t been the same since. 

Meant to provide the transparency of Wilson’s giant full-range WAMM speaker (originally introduced at the start of the 80s, continuously perfected throughout the decade, and redesigned and reborn in the 2010s) in a portable package, the WATT—followed in 1989 by Wilson’s highly influential two-piece WATT/Puppy, a WATT seated atop a dedicated woofer in a three-way configuration that is still widely copied—was not only a watershed loudspeaker; at $4500 (equivalent to $10,000 today), it was also a two-way monitor that set new highs in compact-monitor pricing. The first WATT/Puppy ($22,000 in 2013 dollars) upped that ante considerably. 


From Hi-Fi to Ultra-High End

Though have-nots like me had been stewing about the prices of hi-fi gear since the start of the high-end era (though the higher prices certainly didn’t keep the haves from buying), it was in the Eighties and early Nineties that the formula “high end = high price” became a reality. Infinity’s IRS system cost about $65,000 in the mid-80s ($118k today), while later versions of the Wilson flagship eclipsed it in price.

We may not have sensed this at the time, but Wilson and Infinity, under Arnie Nudell, and soon enough many others were really opening up an entirely new segment of the high-end market—the “ultra-high end,” where price was no object, and sound and cachet were everything. Wilson loudspeakers proved so successful (the WATT/Puppy, for instance, remains the best-selling speaker over $10,000 in hi-fi history) that by the mid-90s Wilson Audio laid claim to almost 50% of sales in the high-priced high-end market. Owning a Wilson speaker put you in the company of movie stars, rock music icons, and New Age entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs. It wasn’t just a great loudspeaker; it was a status symbol. 

Not unsurprisingly, throughout the 80s and 90s other players from all over the world followed Wilson and Infinity into the ultra-high end. Italy’s Franco Serblin developed his swank, beautiful-sounding Sonus faber line of loudspeakers, with their leather trim and lute-shaped enclosures. The Netherlands’ Charles van Oosterum introduced his Kharma loudspeakers, equipped with Bernard Thiel’s newly-developed ceramic (and later diamond) drivers and Oosterum’s own superbly engineered, rock-solid enclosures. In the United States, an extraordinarily gifted speaker and turntable-maker with a scientific bent and a musician’s ear, Andy Payor, started Rockport Technologies and by the mid-to-late 90s was designing loudspeakers with aerodynamic monocoque enclosures, the very-latest low-distortion drivers, and super-high-quality crossovers—true harbingers of today’s foremost ultra-high-end designs. The stage was being set for the new millennium, where even the worst recession since the Great Depression hasn’t kept expensive loudspeakers from sky-rocketing in price (and sophistication)—or kept those with the dough and a taste for the better things from buying them.

As was also the case throughout the Seventies, there was a countervailing movement in the high end toward reasonably priced products—some of which, such as the MartinLogan CLX, were high end by any sonic standard. Companies like Sandy Gross’ Definitive Technology and Paul S. Barton’s PSB Speakers offered superb sound for the dollar.

Interestingly PSB was one of the earliest to avail itself of the new tools of loudspeaker design—the computer and the Fast Fourier Transform, whose use was pioneered by British companies like KEF and B&W. Although the use of computers to simulate the way loudspeakers, drivers, and crossovers might sound really came into its own in the 2000s, the general movement toward this new, more exclusively science-based approach to loudspeaker and driver design—the fount of the great discoveries of the Teens and Twenties—gathered momentum in the 80s and 90s, as computer tools became more sophisticated, portable, and affordable, psychoacoustic research more sophisticated, and the engineering of loudspeakers and other audio equipment a subject that could be studied at universities worldwide. Though audio designers have always been satyr-like creatures—men who, early in life, were bitten by the twin bugs of hi-fi and music, and who brought scientific training (although not always training in electrical engineering) as well as God-given inspiration to bear on their twin passions—for better and worse the scientific side of the equation began to reassert itself at the dawn of the computer age.

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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