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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 21, 1982)
are inaudible with 100 dB of amplifica tion. In other words the best turntable, like any piece of high fidelity equip ment, is one you cannot hear The test for gruss faults in an older phonograph is listening for obvious sounds that, like the ticking of a timebomb, say something is amiss and may soon get out of hand. Merely turn off the rest of your stereo and listen carefully to the spinning turntable Any noise besides a faint hum from the motor — grinding, rasping or clicking — is too much Such noises indicate something is maladjusted or wearing out, like bear ings in need of lubrication. That same mechanical noise easily finds its way through your amplifier to pollute whatever music you want to enjoy Although a good cleaning and lubri cation can usually relieve such ail ments, the doctor's bill from the repair shop may total $25 to $40, probably more than your little mechanical en gineer's nightmare is worth The test is to listen through your complete system for the shortcomings of all record spinning devices, turnta bles and changers alike. These can be classified as either rumble, wow and flutter, or speed variations. Essentially rumble is a minor earth quake, vertical movement of the re cord surface, arising from assorted sources. An easy test can be conducted by switching your receiver to ''mono" while listening to a good quality re cord pressing When you flick the switch you cancel all vertical informa tion your cartridge is picking up, in cluding most rumble may hear a pervasive back ground sound vanish (Should you use a mono record, if you can find one, the disappearance of rumble won't be confused by die change in stereo perspective ) Wow and flutter are short term speed variations dial are most appar ent as changes in musical pitch or vib rato on sustained notes Any recording with an extended single note, such as the last sustained plunk of a piano piece, is an excellent flutter test Pitch should be unwaver ing. Should you hear a tinge of vibrato, try another record to be sure. Wow and long term speed varia tions, which sound similar to an off center record, can be determined by the same test Of course the spinning platter is only pan of the record playing system. Old tone arms not only impair fidelity, an inferior arm can also slowly ruin records. Typical aging tone arms may suffer from tight bearings, mechanical connections to trigger a trip cycle or just massive, batdeship-style construc tion. The grossest problems can lie lo cated by merely guiding the arm with your finger across the arc it would trace on a record. Any resistance, par ticularly not chi ness, is too much. Arm geometry and mass problems can be found by ear Since all tone arm deficiencies create tracking dif- ( faculties, they show up first as distor-' tion on low frequency passages when j using high compliance cartridges. If you don't know what to listen for, re duce tracking force below that which your cartridge's manufacturer recom mends and play an unworn record. You should hear obvious mistracking and bass distortion In quarter or half gram steps increase stylus pressure. As you do the problem should reduce. If it does not go away completely by the time you've reached the upper extent of the recommended tracking force, your cartridge/arm combination is hi from optimum. The best strategy is to replace the arm or arm/turntable combination be cause adding a lower compliance car tridge would be taking a big step backwards. Judging the adequacy of a cartridge alone is a tricky business because there is no good home standard of comparison My recommended procedure begins by first checking your stylus for wear using the microscope most local .hi-fi emporia reserve for that purpose. Next, comparison shop for a car tridge with sound that pleases you. Try coercing your dealer into using the same model cartridge that you want to replace as the basis of the comparison. If you invade the store during a non peak shopping hour (say 10 a.m.) you may be able to get a friendly salesman to mount your cartridge to use as the reference standard. Then you can be absolutely y sure of your comparison \ y listening test for tape units, be they open reel or cassette, is the ' simple A-B or source to tape comparison If you hear any difference between a source and a re cording of that source, your machine is simply not state of the art! Although sorting a live per formance from a tape may be an easy chore for anyone but Chuck Mangione and Ella Fitzgerald, most better cassette decks in top form make copies that are indistinguishable from an original broadcast or disc pressing at normal listening levels. Make sure that your recorder is set up properly for the brand and type of tape you are using by adjusting the 'bias" and "equalization" (or com bined, all-in-one tape') selector switches If you're too attached to deep-six your vintage recorder, you might boost its quality nearer acceptability by using premium "ferric” (low bias, 120 microsec.) tape. Probably, though, an older machine is devoid of that high fidelity necessity, the ubiquitous Dolby (or other noise reduction system). When conducting the A B comparison the need for Dolby becomes obvious because hiss is the primary pollution cassettes add to music. At moderate listening levels with Dolby on, you shouldn't hear any hissing tape noise — it should be as far or farther in the background as the background noises you expect from phonograph records. Next in the comparison, concentrate on the sibilant in voices or cymbal crashes In the original of what is being recorded, they will probably have a sharp --US& edge. If the copy sounds notably duller and distorted by a splashy, tearing sound, the tape is being saturated. Reduce the record level until the phenomenon goes away. Now focus on the high end again Note any change in its character be tween tape and original. There shouldn't be any. A lthough open reel tape ma chines should easily pass the same no-difference A-B test that top-notch cassete recorders do, judg ing from the vast herd of 20-year old Webcor recorders I’ve encountered recently, most are unlikely to do so. The big trouble with replacing your old receiver is disappointment. The quality of broadcasting does not match that of hi-fi gear (although there are a few superstations that justify having the best in home stereo). While technology has improved so that now the average FM station can transmit tenths of a percent of distor tion instead of the halves and full f points they did five years ago, that same technology has also pushed accuracy in the other direction. Stations can now broadcast with less dynamic range than ever before, they can distort frequency per spective with multiband processors so that every recording has essentially the same sound, and they can simply clip the hell out of the high end to squeeze the most and loudest signal ■under the 75 microsecond pre emphasis curve. Some improvements in receiver de sign can help, though, if you live in less than an optimum reception area. You can glom a larger chunk of the airwaves and find more listenable sta tions with the added sensitivity and selectivity of newer receivers. You can sort through multipath better with to day's lower capture ratios. But don't expea miracles. The improvements on the order of a dB. or so may not be audible to you. In many cases a better antenna will be more effective than a new receiver in improving reception. About the biggest advantage of a new receiver’s radio seaion is im proved tuning. Frequency synthesizer, crystal control, and phase-locked loop circuitry will eliminate distortion caused by improper dial adjusting. The effects of the improved amplifier sections in new receivers is ...-. also a feast of subtleties. Most people will find that increased power (within reason) can do nought but help their stereo. But don’t expea to blow down apartment walls with increased loud ness. Twice the volume will take ten times the power — should your speak ers even be able to handle it. fMhe biggest mistake most au diophiles make when consider X ing the replacement of their speakers is listening to advice rather than the speakers. Every design variant sounds different Your choice becomes an existential one, sorting between dif ferent realities. The acoustic suspension speaker put high fidelity in a reasonable-sized box decades ago. Now mathematical for mulae make what once was a mixture of art, black magic and luck into an en tirely predictable affair, and our expec tations have shrunk. In faa we now expea the tiniest boxes to give big bass. Most old speakers don't wear out Some may bum out, a few dry out and fall apart, but overall an old speaker is just as able a performer as it was when new. The time to change is when your taste and discernment changes and what you have begins to sound boomy, muffled, or just plain bad when com pared to something you’ve heard elsewhere. The most important question is the same one you should ask yourself when making any decision in stereo: Can you hear the difference? i 1 3 by P. Gregory Springer The Big Beep Since pre-Renaissance times, the wristwatch has been strapped onto arms to symbolize time, elegance, efficiency, gifts of adorn ment, and twenty years with the com pany. In the last half decade, modem technology has turned it into a who opee gizmo. The watch — and particularly my watch — now has a stopwatch to time yellow lights at the intersections, to notify me when I break jogging re cords, and most importantly has a mis erable shrill beep which elevates me three feet in the air from the prone position every morning about 9 a.m. Other people s watches do even more musical things, like accidentally crank ing out Brahms or “Love Story" at in opportune moments in the most artifi cial and nasal tones ever devised by man. The singing watch tips the iceberg on a musical revolution which puts to shame the minor advances perpetrated by the recent so-called New Wave. Electronic musical instruments and compact recording and playback de vices have already caused young ears to evolve in ways undreamed of in the Seventies. Our ears have accepted the beep replacing the electric buzz, the tone upsetting the tune, and synthetic sound squalling over any natural noise. The Casio VL-Tone The Casio VL-Tone VL-1 Elec tronic Musical Instrument and Calculator makes a kind of music which has been described as sounding like a frankfurter made of chicken parts. Yet, its capacity for creating songs reaches several sophis ticated levels far beyond any other basic pseudo-instrument developed for non-musicians. White, plastic, about a foot long and three inches high, the VL-Tone stuffs into a vest pocket. Its keyboard of about 2-1/2 octaves has little plastic pegs of black and white, like any piano’s, an L.E.D. read-out which flashes each note's numerical equiva lent as it is played, ten special keys for the rhythm box, the tempo setting, the recording mode, reset, plus four switches to alter octaves, instrument sound, volume, and calculator func tion. The speaker is built right in. VLSI, Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit, allows the VL-Tone to hold so much within so little a space, but the tool (I hesitate to call it an instrument) lacks a cute nickname, like the ocarina had, which may inhibit high school band directors from giving it any widespread acceptance. The range of musics which can be created is nonetheless quite various. For exam ple, by setting the rhythm box to "swing,” “rock-1,” or “rock-2" (of 7 others, “bossanova" is too compli cated, “rhumba" too defined, and “march” clearly too stultifying), the program mode then can be activated to record up to 100 notes of, say, “96 Tears" and stored in memory. Plug the VL-Tone into your stereo amp, and play the whole thing back at full vol ume without touching a button. Your neighbors will think Question Mark has returned from the beyond. If you rather haltingly recorded the tune the first time around, a feature called “One Key Play" allows you to re-record the song at any speed and syncopation you choose by pushing just one button instead of misfiring on the keyboard. One can understand why avant garde violinist Laurie Anderson is keen to write music especially for an or chestra of the little monsters. It's like having Kraftwerk condensed into a squashed cube much simpler than Rubik’s to conquer. Beyond simple diddling-about pos sibilities, the VL-Tone drives relatives i crazy at family reunions. There are five ' instrument sound settings: piano plunk, fantasy (twilight zone synthe sizer woo-woo), nose-hold violin, trill ing flute, and amateur guitar. Aunt Hil da’s proud rendition of "When the Saints ..can be played back in each sound, at any of nineteen different tempos In addition, a feature called ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Re lease) allows you to program the en velope of any sound so that one can actually create new possibilities for the electronic tone, no less than 80 million different ones. Then, "When the Saints . . ." comes out sounding like the wawa of Jimi Hendrix’s ghost, or the piercing wail of a Haitian banshee, or a tuba, or whatever, all of course con fined within the original chicken frankfurter quality sound. The VL-Tone makes a superb toy, much advanced beyond the toy pianos of yesteryear. If all else fails, there’s an orange emergency button on it which blurts out a "German Folk Tune,” utilizing five different instrument sounds and four rhythms, making it appear that you can actually make the new technology work and have talent after all. They all laughed when you sat down to play the VL-Tone. Or, you can balance your bank book with the cal culator. The Realistic Synthesizer by Moog MG-1 For a few hundred dollars more, Radio Shack will give you all the authenticity of a funeral parlor organ right through your living room stereo. Unlike the VL-Tone, you must affix the MG-1 to your stereo or through your rock group's PA before any sounds come out of it. About the size of the Compact Edition of the Ox
