70's Ideology?

[DSJR]

Subjectivism in the UK was founded on a slightly different path I reckon. perhaps Serge and Frank Dernie could confirm (I believe we're all of a 'certain age' to remember those times

The audio 'hobby' is so incredibly tribal and the 70's in the UK was as bad as any other period. Turntables bought on wow & flutter figures only (and ignore the fact the deck fed back massively - which is far more audible even before howl-round), amps designed to reduce THD but who cares about high order crossover artefacts or abilities into 4 ohms. Speakers in the UK went one of two ways - low colouration for good speech reproduction but a total inability to reproduce kick drums, bass guitars or percussion properly at anything other than very low levels (Can's 'Halleluwah!' into Spendor BC1's that sounded as if they were going to shake apart is a firm memory I retain from those times ), or a LOUD shrieker that all but squawked and screamed at you but oh that bass... I was rather young and naive back then, but keen to learn and unlike my academic studies, this Aspergically inclined soul lapped up anything to do with audio gear...

And then Linn came along with an appropriated turntable design based on the Thorens TD150 but more substantially built. It SOUNDED better than the badly sited direct drives of the day (made records sound nicer) and was definitely more 'solid' sounding in the bass than the Thorens and AR 77 XB designs which by then had wobbly bearing tolerances. On th eback of said turntable was a 'domesticated 1950's PA amp' made in Salisbury, initially sounding rather valve like but in 1980 after a circuit re-lay-out, sounding, well, like a domestic PA amp with tons of 'rhythm' for us young bucks, but hard and almost harsh to everyone else. Quad for instance were left out on the cold and elderly fuddy-duddy owners tut-tutted - wasn't until the 606 amp design that they came back with a vengeance but it was almost too late for them by that time.

Please don't think I have in in for Quad here as they had the last laugh really. Owners of Quad with Spendor/Rogers and their own electrostatics took to digital like ducks to water and I had many enjoyable hours at a friend's place listening to her all-Quad system with CD - the vinyl side needed some serious work to make it subjectively successful. I recently tried an early player which I didn't like back then and found it a damned sight better than I remembered with the vinyl-compromised stereo's of the day (as said so well above).

Apologies folks, I could go on and on and on and.......

 

[sergeauckland]

One

Subjectivism in the UK was founded on a slightly different path I reckon. perhaps Serge and Frank Dernie could confirm (I believe we're all of a 'certain age' to remember those times

The audio 'hobby' is so incredibly tribal and the 70's in the UK was as bad as any other period. Turntables bought on wow & flutter figures only (and ignore the fact the deck fed back massively - which is far more audible even before howl-round), amps designed to reduce THD but who cares about high order crossover artefacts or abilities into 4 ohms. Speakers in the UK went one of two ways - low colouration for good speech reproduction but a total inability to reproduce kick drums, bass guitars or percussion properly at anything other than very low levels (Can's 'Halleluwah!' into Spendor BC1's that sounded as if they were going to shake apart is a firm memory I retain from those times ), or a LOUD shrieker that all but squawked and screamed at you but oh that bass... I was rather young and naive back then, but keen to learn and unlike my academic studies, this Aspergically inclined soul lapped up anything to do with audio gear...

And then Linn came along with an appropriated turntable design based on the Thorens TD150 but more substantially built. It SOUNDED better than the badly sited direct drives of the day (made records sound nicer) and was definitely more 'solid' sounding in the bass than the Thorens and AR 77 XB designs which by then had wobbly bearing tolerances. On th eback of said turntable was a 'domesticated 1950's PA amp' made in Salisbury, initially sounding rather valve like but in 1980 after a circuit re-lay-out, sounding, well, like a domestic PA amp with tons of 'rhythm' for us young bucks, but hard and almost harsh to everyone else. Quad for instance were left out on the cold and elderly fuddy-duddy owners tut-tutted - wasn't until the 606 amp design that they came back with a vengeance but it was almost too late for them by that time.

Please don't think I have in in for Quad here as they had the last laugh really. Owners of Quad with Spendor/Rogers and their own electrostatics took to digital like ducks to water and I had many enjoyable hours at a friend's place listening to her all-Quad system with CD - the vinyl side needed some serious work to make it subjectively successful. I recently tried an early player which I didn't like back then and found it a damned sight better than I remembered with the vinyl-compromised stereo's of the day (as said so well above).

Apologies folks, I could go on and on and on and.......

One difference between then and later was that in the 1960s and early '70s, HiFi equipment was used more for classical and acoustic Jazz than pop/rock, which was predominantly 7" singles played on Dansettes. As with all generalisations, there were clearly exceptions, but nevertheless, the predominance of low-coloration loudspeakers and low distorting amplifiers of modest power were considered adequate. Kick-drums didn't figure to someone who's most outrageous LP might have been Wagner.

Percy Wilson warned against using the 'queer noises' made by devices used by Jazz Bands for evaluating loudspeakers!

As such, loudspeakers like the BC1 were something of a pinnacle of low coloration, especially in the UK where room sizes were rather smaller than in the USA. Tannoys or IMFs for those with larger budgets and bigger rooms, although the latter also needed bigger amplifiers.

By the time rock/pop albums became more important than singles, the whole subjective nonsense was established.

S.

 

[restorer-john]

At the time there was an abuse of negative feedback in amplification - not too much but used in the wrong way - and around the same time Otala showed TIM (a particular instance of slew rate indices distortion) - so a lot of people realised that measurements were not all, or they were at least incomplete.

Matti Otala's research lead to some incredible sounding and performing amplifiers with limited feedback which still stand the test of time, to this day, incidentally from the Harman stable of brands...

 

[sergeauckland]

Subjectivism picked momentum also with the advent of Japanese single ended direct heated triode amps and high efficiency speakers. At the time there was an abuse of negative feedback in amplification - not too much but used in the wrong way - and around the same time Otala showed TIM (a particular instance of slew rate indices distortion) - so a lot of people realised that measurements were not all, or they were at least incomplete. The DHT triodes paired with high efficiency speakers offered a coloured sound that was however also very detailed, had better transients (to a point, for the time), more correct bass, or at least easier to follow during a listening session, and so on. So, instead of going for a more scientific approach a lot of people went for the ears-only one, and even started to believe that the ears were more precise than any measurement device.

Today we know better how to have good measurements and how they relate to psychoacoustic perception. Even though I would not be sure 100%, I would say that today we know how to build “perfect” amplification stages. What we still need to do, is to be able to simulate the effects of “imperfect” amplifiers to sufficient precision to reproduce any type of sound - at least without needing a liquid nitrogen cooled computer…

SET amps were obsolete by the late 1920s and by the 1950s, amplifiers had reached a very high standard, so for me, the popularity of SE amps is totally bewildering. Everything about an SE amp is wrong, so no wonder they became popular with the anti-science, my ears know better, brigade.

It's interesting to note that all amplifiers of the 1950s onwards with HiFi pretentions had push-pull outputs with the exception (as far as I know) of the Pye Mozart, which was a budget amp using a single EL34 as output. Otherwise SE amps were limited to 2-3W outputs for record players like the famous Dansette, table radios, tape recorders and TVs.

TIM was also shown to be a nonsense, there's no TIM if the input signal is correct for the amplifier's bandwidth. It only exists when the designer doesn't understand slew-rate requirements and the need for adequate open-loop bandwidth.

You're right that today we known how to build 'perfect' amplification stages, but then we have known how to design and build audibly transparent amplifiers since the 1950s, it's just that today we can do that far cheaper and infinitely more reliably. It's not even a question of power as 1000W amplifier designs existed in the 1950s, albeit they were monsters.

My view is that subjective reviewing and the consequent adoption of the buy with your ears method came out of the magazines wanting to be different, stop having to employ expensive technical reviewers, and to give customers a sense of importance and that HiFi is no longer the preserve of those nerds who passed their physics exams. It certainly avoids having to put in the hours of learning all those formulae.

S.

 

[DSJR]

The thing is, far more than just our ears are used in audio system choices as discussed here many times before. I'd still say the best of 1970's audio is still excellent, especially the better direct driven turntables if set up and sited with the kind of care 'we' give to modern vinyl spinning confections and proper gauge speaker cables instead of the string-like bell wire we used to use

 

[SIY]

SET amps were obsolete by the late 1920s and by the 1950s, amplifiers had reached a very high standard, so for me, the popularity of SE amps is totally bewildering. Everything about an SE amp is wrong, so no wonder they became popular with the anti-science, my ears know better, brigade.

It's interesting to note that all amplifiers of the 1950s onwards with HiFi pretentions had push-pull outputs with the exception (as far as I know) of the Pye Mozart, which was a budget amp using a single EL34 as output. Otherwise SE amps were limited to 2-3W outputs for record players like the famous Dansette, table radios, tape recorders and TVs.

TIM was also shown to be a nonsense, there's no TIM if the input signal is correct for the amplifier's bandwidth. It only exists when the designer doesn't understand slew-rate requirements and the need for adequate open-loop bandwidth.

You're right that today we known how to build 'perfect' amplification stages, but then we have known how to design and build audibly transparent amplifiers since the 1950s, it's just that today we can do that far cheaper and infinitely more reliably. It's not even a question of power as 1000W amplifier designs existed in the 1950s, albeit they were monsters.

My view is that subjective reviewing and the consequent adoption of the buy with your ears method came out of the magazines wanting to be different, stop having to employ expensive technical reviewers, and to give customers a sense of importance and that HiFi is no longer the preserve of those nerds who passed their physics exams. It certainly avoids having to put in the hours of learning all those formulae.

S.

The other elephant in the room for SETs is the interstage transformer. Because of the high impedance, they’re a significant error source, and make feedback a much more difficult proposition.

 

[Pluto]

This whole subjectivist audio thing took off just after the introduction of CD…

I've a theory not unlike yours, but a good deal simpler.

With the arrival of digital audio the owners of the (then) quite lucrative hi-fi press became (rightly) concerned that most of the differentiation between different brands would become null and void. When audio became little more than computing (in which there are correct answers and wrong answers), there would be little justification for publications discussing the merits of wrong answers.

So the cult of subjectivism was born to serve as a foil to the "perfection" that seemed to be available for a couple of hundred bucks.

Errr… that's it really

 

[sergeauckland]

I've a theory not unlike yours, but a good deal simpler.

With the arrival of digital audio the owners of the (then) quite lucrative hi-fi press became (rightly) concerned that most of the differentiation between different brands would become null and void. When audio became little more than computing (in which there are correct answers and wrong answers), there would be little justification for publications discussing the merits of wrong answers.

So the cult of subjectivism was born to serve as a foil to the "perfection" that seemed to be available for a couple of hundred bucks.

Errr… that's it really

Absolutely.
When I tried my hand at being a Hifi dealer in the mid '80s, I majored on CD, and was told by both other dealers and some manufacturers that CD would kill HiFi dealers, as how do you upgrade on 'Pure, Perfect sound Forever'? Magazines, dealers and manufacturers all bad-mouthed CDs, explained that digital chopped up the audio, so it was like trying to make a steak out of a hamburger, that CD sounded harsh, that LPs sounded so much better etc etc etc.

I ignored all that, carried on selling CD players and CDs, and went bust.

S.

 

[Robin L]

I've been wallowing in old issues [is there any other kind?] of High Fidelity and Stereo Review. I started reading those magazines when I got really taken by music on LPs, 1970:

HIGH FIDELITY - Consumer audio and music magazine (worldradiohistory.com)

STEREO REVIEW: Consumer audio and music magazine beginning in 1958 (worldradiohistory.com)

Back in 1975, I seriously wanted to know who had the best recording of Scheherazade, would read these two magazines front to back. If you look at the reviews of audio gear from the 1970's, you'll notice that most of the gear is "competitively priced". This is the era of Pacific Stereo and Crazy Eddie's, a time when there were chain stores devoted solely to audio goods that were engaging in price wars. Newspapers of the time would have these big spreads from Pacific Stereo [and its ilk], a bit like Best Buy today, only there were more of these stores and these stores were only selling gear for audio systems. Integration with video would have to wait.

I don't think I encountered subjectivist audio rantings until 1981, from "Fanfare" magazine. There was no budget for test gear [Fanfare is pretty much "buy an ad, we'll review your record"] and some of the audio obsessions of some of their audio reviewers went far into the jungles of subjectivism. This was the first publication where I read about audiophile cable and the profound flaws of anything digital. Someone passed on Enid Lumly's demonstration of a digital recording transfered to LP destroying the spindles of turntables. Around this time I started reading a wider variety of magazines on music and audio, eventually subscribing to Gramophone [like Fanfare, but much more genteel about the grift], Stereophile and other publications like Studio Sound.

I'm pretty sure that the emergence of digital audio technology was the end, for the most part, of "70's audio ideology". The 1970's were a time when LPs were as good as it gets [Reel to Reel never really got off the ground], cassettes were becoming competitive and big stereos playing loud rock and roll were cool. It was also a time when LP production was forced into overdrive, resulting in an avalanche of defective LPs, inadvertently creating demand for something like the CD.

 

[gene_stl]

My late great speaker builder buddy , used to love to read magazines and would buy more than I. When he had read them they would often get to my house, for a while.
When the Absolute Sound came out, we renamed it "The Absolute Baloney" ,the very first issue and he didn't buy it after that. For him not to buy an audio mag it had to be very bad. The other strike against it for me, was one or two other audiophiles I knew who DID read and seemed to like it and quote it. They were all types who were very conscious of pricing (if its more spensive it mus be better) and knew nothing about acoustics , electronics or music. Yacht club audiophiles.

 

[Pluto]

Yacht club audiophile

Great phrase!

The audio equivalent of “Monday morning quarterback”

 

[mocenigo]

Matti Otala's research lead to some incredible sounding and performing amplifiers with limited feedback which still stand the test of time, to this day, incidentally from the Harman stable of brands...

Yup, it seems that before Matti Otala's work they were using the wrong amount of feedback. Apparently it must be either the bare minimum to guarantee stability, or a lot of it (the latter esp for Class D). Just using a lot of it to only improve distortion is just bad. Not to speak its use in overtly complicated circuits and physically large loops, where propagation is slow.

 

[SIY]

Yup, it seems that before Matti Otala's work they were using the wrong amount of feedback. Apparently it must be either the bare minimum to guarantee stability, or a lot of it (the latter esp for Class D). Just using a lot of it to only improve distortion is just bad. Not to speak its use in overtly complicated circuits and physically large loops, where propagation is slow.

If you have a chance, read Bob Cordell’s book. Much debunking.

 

[mocenigo]

SET amps were obsolete by the late 1920s and by the 1950s, amplifiers had reached a very high standard, so for me, the popularity of SE amps is totally bewildering.

True, some little amps like the VTL Triode 25 really still sound quite well.

Everything about an SE amp is wrong, so no wonder they became popular with the anti-science, my ears know better, brigade.

I would not be so harsh. They do not have zero crossover distortion. They are simple. If done properly, and thus cheaply, they can be good products with little distortion and, most importantly, of the "pleasant" type.

It's interesting to note that all amplifiers of the 1950s onwards with HiFi pretentions had push-pull outputs with the exception (as far as I know) of the Pye Mozart, which was a budget amp using a single EL34 as output. Otherwise SE amps were limited to 2-3W outputs for record players like the famous Dansette, table radios, tape recorders and TVs.

Yes, after all it is not too difficult to minimise crossover distortion in PP amps.

TIM was also shown to be a nonsense, there's no TIM if the input signal is correct for the amplifier's bandwidth. It only exists when the designer doesn't understand slew-rate requirements and the need for adequate open-loop bandwidth.

I did not claim otherwise. TIM is a particular case of slew rate induced distortion (and I think I wrote it) and if the design is correct the problem does not exist. However, before that research, this was not well understood,

You're right that today we known how to build 'perfect' amplification stages, but then we have known how to design and build audibly transparent amplifiers since the 1950s, it's just that today we can do that far cheaper and infinitely more reliably. It's not even a question of power as 1000W amplifier designs existed in the 1950s, albeit they were monsters.

Correct. One of the advantages of modern Class D designs is that they allow us to have the quality and the power at a reasonable price and with a component weight that I will be able to lift even as an old man.

My view is that subjective reviewing and the consequent adoption of the buy with your ears method came out of the magazines wanting to be different, stop having to employ expensive technical reviewers, and to give customers a sense of importance and that HiFi is no longer the preserve of those nerds who passed their physics exams. It certainly avoids having to put in the hours of learning all those formulae.

The magazines had to be different, and they needed to have arguments to sell the devices. Now, to be honest, not all sources/preamps pair well with all preamps/amps and not all the amps pair well with all amps. And people often change components one at a time. So driving capability was and still is important. That also has an influence on sound. But as technology progressed, it became simpler and simpler to design output Integrated opamps used to be crappy and that's why some companies (like spectral) designed spectacular discrete stages. This does not imply that more modern opamp designs must suck, of course, but ingrained beliefs die hard. Some of the subjective beliefs are rooted in old experience – the problem is the refusal to update those beliefs. Because of some issues (like the power supply pins close to inputs in the opamp DIP8 pinout) an ideal discrete design could still perform better. But I doubt this would be subjectively detectable.

 

[restorer-john]

I ignored all that, carried on selling CD players and CDs, and went bust.

You can hardly blame CD for that. HFi dealers the world over had the second coming in profits due to CD. CD drew more people and dollars into HiFi stores than ever.

HiFi was pretty much dead IMO, prior to 1982. The dealers and HiFi businesses I knew and worked with/in made all their money either in the mid 1970s (the older guys) or between 1983/4 and the mid 1990s. The multi outlet expansions, Lexus cars for the wife and the private schools for the kids. The ones that survived and prospered had to transition quickly into home theatre and give up their two channel ideology. After all, the big brands simply killed off all their top 2 channel gear in favour of HT.

All of those ultimately failed or contracted their businesses greatly by the early 2000s. I know of only three HiFi businesses in my corner of the state which are still in business. All three of those survived from the 1980s and one from the 1970s. Two run by the original (old) owners and one second/third generation family.

 

[mocenigo]

If you have a chance, read Bob Cordell’s book. Much debunking.

I will. However, IIRC, there is not much about the feedback in Class D in his book (and I was mentioning class D when writing about using a lot of NFB).

 

[SIY]

I will. However, IIRC, there is not much about the feedback in Class D in his book (and I was mentioning class D when writing about using a lot of NFB).

I was referring to the TIM stuff.

 

[restorer-john]

In certain circles, it seems Otala bashing is almost a competition sport these days.

If it wasn't for Otala's research and low overall feedback, high performing designs (at Harman), other brands would have continued on their merry way, on well trodden paths, producing bad sounding amplifiers.

Regardless of his conclusions, it forced a re-assessment which resulted in considerably better gear through the 1980s and 1990s from all the big brands. Certainly it was helped with some wonderful devices from the Japanese.

 

[jkasch]

Peter Aczel of Audio Critic fame, along with illustrator Rick Meyerowitz, produced the well known Rectilinear ads of that era. In one of his more humorous moments Aczel explained the West Coast (JBL) v East Coast (or New England--AR, KLH, Advent etc.) 'sound'. This was around 1973-4. If you read closely you'll find Aczel's quip about the possible future of electric cars, about who is going to buy them?

View attachment 137748

Great ad, but they broke all the modern rules of good design (tweeters everywhere) and many folks still love them.

 

[restorer-john]

My view is that subjective reviewing and the consequent adoption of the buy with your ears method came out of the magazines wanting to be different, stop having to employ expensive technical reviewers, and to give customers a sense of importance and that HiFi is no longer the preserve of those nerds who passed their physics exams.

Interesting. My view is the polar opposite.

It was the 1980s when HiFi dealers started to embrace the single system/speaker demonstrations. What had previously been comparators in every demo room and entire walls of connected gear gave way to "curated" setups and "relaxed" longer term listening sessions vs quick fire, level matched comparisons.

It was deliberate and not in the customers' interests at all. It was all about selling what the dealer wanted to sell, not what the buyer may otherwise choose. The "buy with your ears" as you call it, was driven by the dealers, (Linn of course) and the brands loved it, because there was little likelihood they would be put up against a competitor in a one on one. The magazines followed suit and the entire industry shifted.

I remember one of our "new" stores, where the comparators were retired and individual systems set up (maybe three in a demo room), no wall of speakers and no ability to quickly compare anything. Of course, I hated that. In fact it was the early 90s when I bought my ex-hifi store comparators, cheap at auctions- nobody was using them anymore.