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If the audiophile is on the prowl for the utmost realism, he will have gone binaural, with double sound channels and speakers, in the manner of cinema's stereophonic sound. At present he can use this expensive setup only to play tape and the records of one small company (Cook).
New Era. Artists have acquired new standards of perfection through hifi. Conductors and singers carefully study playbacks of their concerts, and composers use more subtle instrumental blends. Says one composer: "I think the whole Berlioz revival owes a lot to high fidelity. His orchestration always sounded muddy on old sets." Listeners are also developing their tastes: a fluff may be forgiven in a concert hall, but hearing it again and again on a record may lead the buyer to complain. Cracks Recordmaker Peter Bartok (son of the late great Béla): "The listener is a damn nuisance." Nuisance or not, today's listener is part of a cultural revolution. The sound that comes through his speakers is not living music; its impact is no longer assisted by the sight of performers struggling with abstractions, nor by the massed reaction of a concert-hall audience. What this will do to musical taste is not clear; some think it will freeze on presold "great" classics, others that it will incline to spectacular moderns. But the important thing is that people who used to take in a live concert about as rarely as they went to the dentist are now daily exposed to good music in all its detail.
French Author-Critic André Malraux believes that the camera and modern reproduction techniques have revolutionized the art world by bringing art out of the museum. He calls this phenomenon the "Museum Without Walls." Something like it is happening with music: the U.S. musical revolution is taking place in the Concert Hall Without Walls.
* The bane of hi-fi wives, perhaps because female ears are more sensitive to high frequencies than the male's.
* A tubular device, famed for its sensitivity and instantaneous response to fleeting sounds.
* A strong dissenting opinion to all of hi-fi was filed by an indignant Briton who recently wrote to High Fidelity magazine: "I fail to see what pleasure there is in having to have a unit with as many as 16 knobs and selector switches . . . Me, I am so old-fashioned that my home-built [unit] has no tone control . . . Furthermore, I am sure that I have rumble—pardon!"
† Pre-recorded tape is now being pushed by manufacturers. It is nearly twice as expensive as LPs and less convenient, but, played on medium-fi sets, sounds roughly comparable.