Art Dudley Listening

The result is that, in certain aspects of their performance, many audio products made in the 1930s through the 1960s outperform virtually everything made since that time, often by generous margins. Those breathtaking levels of realism have yet to be matched, let alone exceeded.

I was about to add my usual, polite qualifier: It all depends on whether those performance parameters are important to you. But screw that. The fact is, contemporary audio consumers are even worse than contemporary audio designers when it comes to letting go of the things they think they know, in an effort to learn something new about music playback—something new that is, in fact, very old. Modern designers and modern consumers alike must learn how to ignore what they already know in the hope of gaining new ground.

Of the performance aspects in question, the most common by far is one that early hi-fi consumers virtually took for granted, and contemporary consumers scarcely ever experience: the ability of playback gear not only to suggest lifelike dynamics but to do so with ease and speed that, to ears coddled by generations of sluggish, overpowered amplifiers and sluggish, undersensitive loudspeakers, seem impossibly close to those of real instruments and voices.

And although neither I nor anyone else can tell you all of the precise characteristics that are responsible for those distinctions, I can tell you one thing that many (but not all) of the punchiest vintage loudspeakers had in their corner: instead of permanent magnets, they used electromagnets—referred to in audio circles as field coils, presumably to distinguish their seriousness and importance from the toys that you and I made in our fourth-grade science classes, with nails and dry-cell batteries and copper wire. Field coils—so important I had to write it twice.

In the 1930s, prior to the development of permanent magnets of sufficient flux density and reasonably low mass, field-coil loudspeakers were commonplace. Indeed, that era was uniquely kind to such drivers: during operation, a field coil requires a continuous supply of DC—something that represents to the modern audio enthusiast an extra layer of trouble and expense. But in the first half of the 20th Century, the tube amplifiers used in domestic console radios and professional movie-theater sound systems alike all required hefty inductor coils for their power supplies. In these systems, the speaker's field coil and the amp's power supply were wired for symbiosis: the former served as a choke for the latter while the latter energized the former.

Contemporary listeners who are vintage-savvy and have conducted such comparisons usually credit field-coil speakers with reproducing music with far more physicality and force than similar drivers that are energized by permanent magnets, even when the latter are made of alnico, an alloy of aluminum, nickel, cobalt, and iron (and/or copper or titanium) that many prefer. Listeners also describe field-coil sound as having more immediacy and detail yet, at the same time, less harshness and grain. My own experiences, though utterly lacking in scientific rigor, mirror those findings. I also note, also anecdotally, that of all the speakers I've heard that are based on Altec 604 coaxial drive-units, the best by far was a pair that the late Ken Shindo had fitted with field coils. (Yes, that can be done.)

My opinions about this distinction are strong, my explanations for what causes it less so. Does the flux density of a field coil "sag" less than a permanent magnet in response to signal variations? I don't know. Is the distinction explained by the Barkhausen effect, in which permanent magnets are observed to create audible noise, caused by transitions between pockets of lesser and greater magnetism? I don't know that, either.

And how was it that companies in the 1930s could offer, for reasonable prices, technologies that all but a few modern manufacturers declare are "too expensive"? Were they freed by the blankness of their slates, the relative paucity of competitors, or the potential offered by a new, huge, unsaturated market?

Beats me: strangely little aid, I know. (Robert Frost also observed: "Some mystery becomes the proud.")

I sing the magnet electric
I can't predict the sort of person who'll fall in love with a vintage hi-fi system. But I can predict, with iron accuracy, the sort of person who'll have no use for the stuff. People who use their expensive hi-fi systems primarily for background music will likely consider vintage gear to be worse than useless. For one thing, because the stuff is old and rare, those users' minds will be gnawed at, rightly or not, by the worry-rat who squeaks: Overuse will turn your old gear into dead gear. For another, as with a relatively few exceptional contemporary audio products, music reproduced by most vintage gear cannot be ignored. Making background music with a vintage system is like making wine spodiodies out of a 1961 Château Latour.

And that's because music reproduced by the best vintage gear is dynamic. It's punchy. It's tactile. It's passionate and colorful and corporeal. It wants to make love to you the minute you wake up in the morning, and it usually wants to be on top. And it usually leaves you amazed.

And, yes: vintage audio puts more demands on the enthusiast than bog-standard high-end audio. (Frost again: "It asks of us a certain height.") Music reproduced by vintage gear is loaded with information you're not used to getting, but it leaves out some things you're used to having. It tells you more than you thought was possible about the people who wrote and performed your music, as opposed to telling you more than you thought was possible about where the engineers who recorded your music placed the microphones.

Some—but far from all—vintage loudspeakers also leave out entire swaths of notes and their overtones. Take, for example, another well-loved Altec drive-unit, the 755. Introduced in 1948 by Western Electric, the 6"-diameter 755 was designed primarily to amplify voices, and so ignores frequencies below 70Hz and above 13kHz. What the 755 does it does with virtually perfect ease and impact and coherence and clarity and touch and nuance and physical presence. But listeners who are spoiled by generations of more modern loudspeakers that play notes from 20Hz to 20kHz—but with virtually none of the 755's ease, impact, and coherence—are usually deaf to the older driver's magic, until such a time as they can jettison musty expectations in favor of fresh ones. New expectations and old products go together nicely.

This
I was already pondering these things when, in mid-July, I attended this year's Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, in the foothills of New York's Catskill Mountains—an annual tradition for me since 2002. I could get away for only one day and night, and I wanted my time there to be audio-free: just music, with trace amounts of beer and food. It didn't occur to me until the next day that of all the acts I saw and heard—including the Earls of Leicester (featuring Jerry Douglas on Dobro) and the wonderful Del McCoury Band—the most essential music came from the duet of mandolinist Mike Compton and banjoist Joe Newberry. They played old-time songs like "Lazy John" and "Red Rocking Chair," the latter a doleful tune in F that reminds me of Greil Marcus's musings on "the old, weird America." These two pros brought to the music a depth of knowledge that transformed what could have been an hour of potboilers into a too-short set of emotional transcendence. The slightest nuance—one player reaching unexpectedly for a subdominant chord, the other shifting his emphasis from ahead of the beat to behind it—was fraught with meaning. As I listened from my seat in the shade, I was moved to the verge of tears by two pickers and singers performing a dozen or so songs, most so old that everyone who performs them today knows them a little bit differently.

One day later, the thought occurred to me that neither a mandolin nor a banjo (frailed, not picked Scruggs-style) has notes below 130Hz or so. And since there was noise coming in from outside this performance area—there are four or five different stages at Grey Fox, with performances taking place simultaneously on all—and since I was hearing a 50:50 mix of sound from the PA system and from the performers themselves, and since spatial cues were unnecessary (I could already see where they were sitting), I figured that the regions beyond 12kHz were also beyond my concern.

That said, I love the idea of hearing at home notes lower and higher than the above—not because I've developed my own late-20th-century addiction to same (although I suppose I have), but because they're important to other kinds of music: They are pivotal to experiences no less valid than that of Mike Compton and Joe Newberry tearing up "Sally Goodin," a one-chord song that, in the right hands, can induce a rare ecstasy.

I claim no prescience, nor have I done the heavy lifting one associates with people of greater-than-average curiosity and ambition regarding vintage gear (or any other such endeavor). But I have been lucky to spend the past six months with a currently manufactured loudspeaker that has one foot planted firmly in the world of vintage audio and the other in the realm of modern design and manufacturing. It's a remarkable product, experience of which has reinforced much of the above—and poked at and punctured some of it, too. I look forward to describing it in detail next month.