My Treasure – "Wrinkles like grooves bring audio wisdom" –'A Salon in a Vision' By Otomeijin (August 12, 2005) I would like to introduce a bible at the time when the LP audio equipment started to appear: "Encyclopedia of LP Technology" (approx. 530 pages) written by Shigemi Takajo and published in June, 1954, which now I own but which was owned by my brother-in-law then. I think this was the first book which introduced abundant information on the audio and which summarized the information systematically 50 years ago. The book begins with a question "How is an LP playback machine?" The contents are quite different from the audio beginners' magazine nowadays, because the author's major was mathematics. It contains photos and data, and rational and easy-to-understand explanations, which gave me an easy image of the real audio equipment and which let me understand the audio scientifically. In addition to the technological explanation, European and American audio equipment in those days is introduced not exaggerated for commercial aims but to explain technologically. Probably those overseas audio equipment which had already been marketed in Japan was only a part of those introduced in this book. The Altec, Jensen and Electro Voice, which have often been placed in Hi-Fi Do Online Newsletters, were the sought-after models at that time. |
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I would like to tell you an episode relevant to this book. I loved an example of a listening room that is placed in the book as "an ideal salon for listening to LPs" (shown in the photo below) with the room design and colors incorporating panels of a composer and score, and so I simply wished to get such a listening room in my future. (Note: The two speaker units bridging the tweeters are the real Jensen G-610 models. The brown box in the left below is a special Jensen cabinet. The Jensen models are incidentally placed in a reference photo of "Full Range Now" books in 5. Auction of Hi-Fi Do Online Newsletter No.136. I have not even touched the G-610 that is super-expensive, but I think the design including the form is superb beyond the time. I cannot think that the design was made 50 years ago with its front having tweeters, and with its back and curve well balanced with the caliber. The mechanical appearance of the model in the photo too fascinates me. The design of functions is great. It is a compact 4KHz 3-way model with cross of 600. However, I would not have purchased it even if it had been available for me. I felt something bad would happen by modulation because the mid-range horn's sound way is the low range cone.) |
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Around 1961 when the time was for stereo LPs, a friend of mine through life with common interest in the audio, whom I had first met in my university days, said to me, "I hear there is an extraordinary stereo set made by Mr. Takajo in the parents' house of the wife of my just-married professor. Shall we ask the professor for permission and go to the parents' house?" I accepted the invitation. In those days, we were enjoying making a cartridge arm by ourselves in our audio circle, so we went the house with those handmade cartridge arms. (I feel sorry for not being able to show you the state-of-the-art (?) design of my handmade work, because I did not keep it. See the image figure below. Sometimes I show you photos of my old handmade works, but they are "my monuments" which have incidentally survived at hand. Who calls them "junk"? I have never been a collector.) At the parents' house, the details were gradually known to me. The wife's father was the president of a publishing company that had published the "Encyclopedia" by Mr. Takajo and loved music and knew much about the audio. In that relationship Mr. Takajo made and set up the stereo set using then famous units. The president welcomed us noisy students and let us use the stereo player freely. We placed our pickup arm in our accustomed manner (arms are made just to be placed, not to be attached with a throughhole), and connected it and listened to music on the stereo player. We were boastful about our MM type with stylus pressure 1.5 to 2.0g and our light-weight arm of needle-pivot type. The president listened to music on the stereo player using our pickup arms, and was surprised at our handmade arms with a praise. Although my pickup arm worked well at home, it did not work sufficiently at the president's house picking up hums and the sound was not clear probably because of the iron core of the coil for transformers. When we finally listened to a Mozart "Horn Concerto" on the stereo player with the original Ortofon arm, the stereo player offered clear sound as if unveiled, and as a result, we realized how bad the materials and the signal-to-noise ratio of our pickup arms were. The president praised our handmade arms, though he knew their defect. But ours were superior in regard to the stylus pressure. I will talk some day about the light stylus pressure in those days. |
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The president served us with dinner and I told him that I read the "Encyclopedia" by Takajo and loved the listening room shown in the photo of the book. Then, he answered, "That was the photo of my room, but we had a death in our family and pulled down that room because I was told the room was located in an unfortunate direction." It was a big surprise for me that the room had been pulled down because of such a reason (a kind of fortunetelling?). What a waste! Anyway, I was so surprised that I did not remember other topics talked at dinner. I said to myself, "Is it true that what I dreamt of was pulled down and exists no more?" If there had remained the listening room, I would have entered the room and immediately understood everything. However, the stereo player and amp box with a glass lid (shown in the left photo), in which we placed our handmade pickup arms, was the one that had been used in that room when the room existed. |
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I remember the following occasions in which I was moved by the audio in my past: (1) The first time when I connected the radio to the Pioneer PE-8 Bass-Reflex speaker box; (2) The stereophonic cubic effect when I listened to the stereo in the NHK Radio No. 1 and 2; (3) The low range sound with the wall between the living room and the closet as a baffle when I remodeled my house; (4) The good signal-to-noise ratio in FM in a live program or tape-broadcasting; (5) The pure and soft sound I listened to at the aforementioned president's house, and the like; In my analysis, these occasions were all related to changing or upgrading the audio. So, if you become unmoved getting accustomed to your audio equipment, listen to bad sound for several days patiently, and then come back again to your best sound. In this way, you may be moved again refreshingly or fall in love again with your sound. (To tune by audio goods is a kind of this way?) |