The audiophile was listening, fascinated, to a highly polished but weak-spirited phonograph. The tune was the familiar Pagan Love Song, but the words sounded strange: "Native cows are calling/Do the wings go on . . ." Since the listener knew that the lyric actually reads: "Native hills are calling/To them we belong," he was easily able to diagnose the troubles in the phonograph: limited frequency response; harmonic, intermodulation and transient distortion, peaking, and possibly flutter; nonlinearity and needle talk. The audiophile's only prescription for a cure: get a high-fidelity rig.
Some 1,000,000 Americans have done just that—and thus established a new and burgeoning industry. Each week about 3,000 more homes go hifi. A mere fad until recently, hi-fi has become a $250 million business (equipment sales have increased as much as 500% in some areas since 1952). There is a standard pattern: about two years after an area is saturated with TV, hi-fi moves in.
What Is It? The audiophile used to live surrounded by a litter of parts and soldering irons and spoke a strange jargon full of "cycles," "decibels," "curves," "roll-offs." Pre-hi-fi sets were unable to top the violin's range (about 8,000 cycles per second) and thus were "unfaithful" to all instruments but bass drum, timpani, bass tuba, piano, French horn and trombone (played softly without mutes). So the hi-fi fan went all out for high frequencies.
Result: a widespread confusion of high fidelity with screeching strings and piercing piccolos.* Today, the audiophile has relaxed. He still considers a wide-frequency response a must (good rigs now put out from 40 cps, the lowest bass viol note, to 15,000. one of the higher violin overtones), but the highs have become sweeter and less insistent.
Curves, too, remain in his vocabulary, a "flat" curve being the graphical representation of the audiophile's ideal (it means that the equipment gives the same amount of emphasis to lows, middles and highs).
In pursuit of this ideal, the hi-fi enthusiast still hovers anxiously over his treble and bass controls, giving rise to the story about the audiophile who went to hear a live concert under Leopold Stokowski and left the hall holding his ears and muttering: "Too much bass! Too much bass!" "High-fidelity sound," says one expert, "is like the term love. It means whatever you choose it to mean." Hi-fi is, in fact, an attitude—a kind of passion to reproduce music exactly as it sounded in its natural setting, e.g., a symphony orchestra in a full concert hall, a string quartet in an intimate room. Record companies tag their output with such slogans as "Full Dimensional Sound" (Capitol), "New Orthophonic" (Victor), "Ultra High Fidelity" (Vox). Says one cynical executive: "High fidelity is the chlorophyll of the record business."