jaw@ames.UUCP (James A. Woods) (04/19/85)
# "And the pantaloon duck whack goose neck quacked: Webcor, Webcor."
-- Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Capt. Beefheart.
"Dust be diamonds, water be wine, happy, happy, happy all the time."
-- Robin Williamson
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[net.music fans, this is partially a response to something over in nut.audio.]
if you ignore the interdisciplinary nature of this, it will go away. -- jaw]
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My story is similar in spirit to Phil's, only it's about
audio NON-OBSESSION, and the peace obtained by leaving consumer
electronics design to the experts, i.e. the Japanese. It is a
story about ALWAYS having the OPTIMAL system.
grade school: owned Donald Duck mono unit which could play yellow records.
satisfied. later added transistor AM radio, good enough for
listening to baseball games, and "One-Eyed One-Horned Purple
People Eater". in seventh heaven.
junior high: traded up to Webcor one piece combo purchased at Whitefront.
listened to Beatles and Stones records enough to win radio station
contests. a nickel on the tonearm worked wonders to extend
musical life. a nice, portable setup, good for spur-of-the-moment
twist and limbo contests, whose masking threshold exceeded that
of turntable rumble; these youthful events made ridiculous any
notions of questioning tonearm compliance and other such nonsense.
hubba hubba.
high school: the Webcor broke. plastic Garrard turntable, de rigueur.
realized that swapping broken needles not cost-effective vs. wholesale
replacement of cartridges purchased at shopping mall sales. receiver:
from Allied radio catalogue. speakers: horns in plywood. effects:
99 cent Radio Shack microphone for that Jimi Hendrix-style feedback.
repaired auto 8-track decks for pocket money (remember wow & flutter?
we used a Judy Collins tape for test purposes, as well as the
nut-driver-pound-on-the-output-stage-60 Hz-human-antenna-input-
-stage-injector-three-foot-drop bench test. ignored quadraphonic.
assembled science project to Led Zeppelin's Dazed and Confused,
Credence's Clearwater's Suzy Q, Zappa's Suzy Creamcheese, and Wendy
(nee Walter) Carlos Well-Tempered Synthesizer. what a gas.
coulda been the drugs, though.
college: wow -- Pioneer superefficient 15" bass reflex, along with enough
hallucinogens to bug the animal house with Lord Buckley, Joseph Spence,
the Incredible String Band, the Velvets, Bonzos, early Richard
Thompson and Fairport, and Sun House. big item here for those
"quiet moments", Sennheiser 414's -- still going strong today.
grad school: M.S. thesis, 1975 -- Digital Data Compression of Music with
Emphasis on Adaptive Transform Coding. Unix version 5.
FFT's in C without floating point. Optimal compression
(Kolmogorov entropy) undecidable. All this study motivated by
not necessarily enjoying lovemaking while records skip. Well!
(Dolby invented his stuff after being bothered by watches ticking
in other rooms.) So, realized digital is where it's at. Knew
at tender young age that interleaved Reed-Solomon codes are cool,
that 14 vs. 16 bit doesn't matter, that transistors will always
be better than ears, and that the high-end audio industry is hype.
Home system: equipment irrelevant, switched to cassettes, knowing
full well that almost all mortals can't A-B the difference between
TDK D and Maxell UDXL2. Happy medium, again.
present time:
Walkthing. Sony D5 laser disk and good phones. Knew it'd happen.
No fussy cabling. No rubber bumpers or viscous damped cuing.
Japanese say ten dollar laser beam read disks like chopsticks
fit with ekibento (lunch) box. Am getting starchy and parochial
in musick tastes, waiting for CD incarnations of Glass, Eno, gamelan,
Residents, Fear, Billie Holiday, Los Microwaves, Diamanda Galas,
Cab Calloway and Hawaiian steel. Instead of listening to the noise
between tracks, I'm content to listen to the content, for what it's
worth. Ah, to be liberated from techno-twit blather about bloated
tricknology! Akio Morita and Sony, take me away to the land
where audio artifacts are invisible to the naked ear; just gimme
some o' that old-tyme Koto music, where blind composers interpret
what it means to be the color purple.
-- James A. Woods {allegra,hplabs}!ames!jaw (or, jaw@riacs)