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I listened to musical notes straight out of musical instruments - not out of loudspeakers, and I did it day and night. I ate and drank live music, slept with it, wallowed in it for a whole month. And now I'm musically vitamin-starved (in etwa = Vitaminvergiftung). Wouldn't have believed it.

There wasn't a quiet moment where I was, practically ever, from the early-bird tootlings of the first morning clarinet, up betimes and against camp regulations to do a bit of extra practicing, straight through to the last cough of a wet French horn blowing itself out for the brief night's rest.

(They are very wet instruments, especially in a humid climate. Your pour them on the floor, every few minutes.) There wasn't a minute, all day long, when I could settle down in my usual fashion, to contemplate in respectful silence the greatness of the audio art, or lose myself in the hifi sounds of Palestrina from the West Coast and Gershwin from Vienna.

Normally, I live the world over, via records. Here in Tennessee, the world shrank down to the size of one college dormitory (Schlafsaal) filled with practicing musicians - and did they practice!

Bits and pieces of familiar music were constantly drifting about my ears, or buzzing like annoying, persistent mosquitoes. Upstairs, a clarinet would start on a phrase out of Brahms; down the corridor and in another key a sour fiddle would scrape painfully out-of-tune scales, carefully, one note at a time. Next door, my bassoon friend would blow a sudden explosion of grunts and wheezes, the bassoon's way of warming up, and start off on the bass part of something by Beethoven. . . .

I know too much music by now, alas. I could always recognize these bits and fragments, or if I didn't, I'd go crazy trying to figure out where I'd heard them before.

Meanwhile somebody else would plough into next week's modern offering, perhaps a piece like the "Kleine Kammermusik" of Hindemith - teetittletee, tittle tee, tittle tee tee - and play that one tiny little phrase of music a hundred times, by count, without a single perceptible pause.

Tantalizing tunes kept repeating themselves ad nauseum, divided and subdivided into smaller bits for concentration on trills, jumps, and other tricky passages, until I thought I'd go nuts waiting for something new. It was like the record that repeats grooves in the apartment upstairs, or the red traffic light that won't turn green. Go on, play the next part, I'd yell silently to myself, tearing out hairs in my anguish; but they never did; you don't when you practice.

There were a few expert musicians among these all-day tootlers, mainly professionals on the faculty, who tossed off their bits with life-like realism and polish even if they never did get beyond a few notes at a time.

I'd no sooner begin, thankfully, to enthuse over a really beautiful phrase from, say, the Mozart Clarinet Quintet, (down the hall) when the same phrase would float in again on the breeze; half an hour later it would still be playing, over and over. Then there was the Clarinet's breath control practice, which consisted of a single note begun extremely softly, growing to full volume and fading slowdy away to nothing. Eerie! It sounded exactly like an electronic oscillator (Tongenerator) being turned up and down.

Worst of all, there were the predictable exercises, those dreadful, brassy, stupid progressive tunes that all teachers write for their special instruments, which start on a pattern and keep it going for minutes and minutes, moving laboriously upwards or downwards. When one of these begins, you feel you can't afford to take a breath until the horrid thing reaches its lengthy unwinding and stops. Truly hypnotic, like the sight of a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike.

It was the beginners who really got me down, though - the hard-working, admirable students. I loved them, but not their instruments. When a student, off somewhere in the very audible distance, started work on one of those familiar bits of melody, painfully dribbled out half-speed and out of tune, I'd get ready to run for the nearest woods.

No - not that way! And as if responding telepathetically to my agony, the distant instrument would stop, think things over solemnly while I waited with baited breath, then proceed to play the same passage and the same wrong notes all over again. Oof! I almost went out of my mind, trying not to listen. I'm not much good at not listening.
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There is, indeed, a hifi moral to all of this. We who listen to good records are doubly spoiled with good music. True, the live concert is the immediate end-product of all the tortured practicing I heard - as the resplendent new amplifier is the product of the engineer's yearly sweating. The live musical audience hears only the best that the musicians can do and, like us, is spared the hideous sounds of preparation.

But the record listener is even more a victim of spoiling, for records are technically more perfect than concerts. A fluff, a wrong note, a minor slip - these are the spice of the live concert and the human evidence that music is human and humanity is frail, if endlessly determined. The very fact that nothing whatever can be done about it is a challenge of a special sort. You play it right the first time - or else. And if you make a blooper, you go back to practicing again, with more determination than ever that the next time will be better, nearer to perfection.

Not so with records. Mistakes can be corrected and so they are made. Music can be re-performed, re-taped, patched together. And right here, needless to say, is the musician's greatest beef about the art of recording - it deprives him of the challenge of the perfect live performance, the musical hole-in-one, that is no longer necessary and therefore in effect quite impossible!

No doubt about it, musicians do make more mistakes in recording sessions than they do in live performances. They can't help it. But we, the spoiled listeners, never even get to hear them. We are doubly removed from the reality of the musician's experience. That's the way many musicians feel, anyhow, and I think maybe they're right.

Anyhow, I'm glad that I was able to suffer for awhile in the birth-pangs of some real, nascent music. It was worth it. I left Sewanee like the proverbial shipwrecked sailor, music, music everywhere and not a note to drink; I was starved for good playing, for perfect playing. I had listened to all the practicing I could possibly stand. I craved, shall we say, the surcease of hifi.

Just what the doctor ordered for my species of chronic musical jaundice, with more records coming in every month than I can absorb in a year. Maybe I ought to do this again.

Oh me. Oh my. Back about ten years ago (also etwa 1949) when the LP record first blossomed out in plastic and the static problem raised its ugly high-voltage snout for the first time in earnest, I got excited about ways and means to eliminate static.

What really worked me into a tizzy was a blinding, brilliant idea that struck me one day as I was reading, I think, "Popular Science Monthly". It was so good that I wrote a registered letter to myself, hired a Washington patent engineer - and got exactly nowhere. Now I can't even find the letter, but no matter; RCA has come out with "Miracle Surface".

You see, I dabbled (nebenbei beschäftigen) first with Static-Clean and the like, the liquids which allow static charges to leak away; I tried all the wet-wash and detergent systems then being promoted; I rushed out with a gleam in my eye to get an early model of the famous Static Brush, with radioactive polonium mounted in it - and I hit the national news-fronts in those heady atomic days when I suggested that the thing might be dangerous, perhaps. (It wasn't a bit; but then, who amongst us knew much about radioactive elements then.) Come to think of it, the gentleman of the press who picked me up on the static brush was none other than one John Conly, then a mainstay of "Pathfinder magazine" and since a hi fi and music stalwart.

Anyhow, all of these proceedings seemed to me then - and seem to me now - quite cart-before-the-horsish. It was obvious, to me at least, that the right way to solve the static problem was to get hold of a record material that wouldn't develop static. So simple in theory, but not so simple in the patenting.

The "Popular Science" article wasn't about records, of course. It merely described a newly developed and astonishing family of electrically conducting plastics. Don't remember the name, but I do recall that one of them was spoken of as having a con ductivity equal to that of mercury, which still seems slightly unthinkable. But the blinding light hit me instantly - why not use this type of plastic for record making?

Better - why bother to make a pure, all-out new material with the "conductivity of mercury". I thought to myself at once that even a very slight electrical conductivity would suffice for our special purposes; maybe this mercury material, in some form or other, could be added to vinylite, in sufficient quantity to reduce the static but not enough to throw those delicately balanced physical qualities of vinyl plastic awry and gum up the presses.

(Ugh, said the careful amateur in me, they already add carbon black and that is a conductor; maybe my idea isn't so good.)
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It wasn't amateurishness that stopped me cold, though, but simply the plain fact that I could not get hold of the material itself, nor offer any description of it to the govt. I tried. My obliging lawyer looked up all the patent literature and found nothing that seemed to smack of my idea at all.

But, he said, I'd have to be specific about that conducting plastic. It, in itself, was probably well protected; mine was merely an idea for its use that hadn't been propounded before.

Well, we tried hard, but those plastic boys were clever. All I ever got was polite letters suggesting that samples were not available and that further information would be sent on at an appropriate moment; they'd put me on a list.

I never heard a thing again, as you may easily guess. Every attempt I made to get more information led to the same block. So that was that.

Now roughly ten years later, RCA Victor has announced "Miracle Surface." It is a "new revolutionary anti-static ingredient 317X" ... one of the greatest technical advances in recording of the decade (sic)."

"Miracle Surface records will not attract dust, will help to prevent surface noises and ensure faithful sound reproduction on all RCA-Victor Living-Stereo records."

Doesn't mention mono but we'll suppose this to be a mere oversight.

"Miracle Surface records were developed after years of the most intensive and detailed research by RCA Victor engineers. It has long been a dream of the record industry to make record surfaces anti-static. A large part of consumer complaints about records have always concerned the problem of extra-musical noises and the accumulation of lint as the needle passes over the record grooves. Miracle Surface records eliminate these problems."

Well, I say congrats to RCA and my only wonder - just having received the advance press release - is whether the "compound" (the term RCA uses) is all the way through the record or a matter of surface treatment, suggested by the trade name. - No illumination whatever, at this point, but this is much too big a thing to keep exclusive and, if it works as it should, we'll soon have all the other companies' ideas on the subject - either with comparable materials, licensed use of the same stuff, or with raucous objections.

If the new material does what it is supposed to and keeps on doing it for the life of the record, if playing quality and record life are unchanged in the physical sense, then RCA has something tremendous here.

Hey, RCA, how about tossing me a Christmas dividend? Like, say, a life membership in the RCA Victor Society of Great Music. I could use a few more records.

The record changer makers have really been on the spot these last couple of years, what with stereo, new and smaller points on our styli, lighter stylus force - down to almost nothing, relatively speaking - and in general the necessity for a home-type, general-purpose component that has all the finesse of a highly professional machine yet remains childproof, wife-proof, dog-proof and, (let's not forget) - changes records, every time.

Skeptics have always been able to claim that a changer is at best a hideous compromise, between lazy-man automation and the true requirements of the "modern" record.

Even the very first changers, with their enormous bulk, their three-pound playing heads and their lovely habit of smashing a shellac disc every so often, were quite clearly a form of low-caste compromise. The highbrow record collectors of the thirties didn't mind saying so, even then.

The high-type record collector disdained the early changer, whether it was a Capehart or a Garrard or what-have-you, and changed his 78's by hand, with his nose in the air and a very satisfied look upon his big face.

No change - or not much - as of today, in this basic attitude among the new hi-fi faithful. Changers are still for the birds -  i.e. the non-intellectuals, the non-dedicated, the background music listeners, the lazy people, the button-pushers.

The real gone hi-fi man changes his own, as always (handling the record ever-so-carefully by its edges, with a delicate swipe of a polishing cloth on the immaculate surface before he puts each one on the table) and most such people are particularly proud of the fact that their manual record playing equipment costs more than a comparable changer.

It must be good!

Well, of course, speaking generally, it is. As I say, the changer people have been on a mean spot, trying to keep up their mechanical prestige, so to speak. But as almost always happens in such cases, adversity - not severe enough to put them out of business, there being plenty of low-brow lazy people still around - has sharpened their efforts towards improvement! Changers now try ever so manfully to be manual players too. Believe it or not, it is now a virtue for a changer to be a manual player!


A true virtue, too. With the LP, manual playing is honestly only a shade more troublesome than the automatic sort. Automatic playing still has annoyances that offset its values only too frequently, and no point in going into them - we all have experienced them.

The main value of a changer, today, is in two mechanical operations neither of which involves changing. The biggest usefulness is the simplest, the automatic shut-off at the end of a record. There, in one device, you have the most striking, the most genuinely practical aspect of the present-day changer. When the record is done, the machine stops - there's none of that gentle, persistent, gradually increasing rurrr, rurrr, rurrr, rurrr, which indicates a record turning idly in its final groove - it always happens when you are on the phone or in the kitchen or outdoors or elsewhere; time and again you are likely to let the thing just run, quietly, for minutes, hours, even overnight. An automatic stop is the answer and no two ways about it.

The other vital function, as I see it, is the automatic start. Now this, of course, is not nearly as much of a straight convenience. It is usually much quicker and simpler just to put your stylus in the groove by hand and let-'er rip.

But few of us can do that little thing nowadays without at least one or two loud squawks of protest from the speaker. Pickups are too light, our hands too clumsy.

The automatic start, involving the relatively slow process of putting the record onto the changing post and pushing the start button, is seldom an out-and-out pleasure. Just a nuisance, and the wait for the cycle to complete itself and the music to start can seem exasperatingly long - especially when the arm returns placidly to its rest position, instead of settling onto the record, or whips into the ten-inch or seven-inch location. It shouldn't do these things but somehow, it often does.

Nevertheless, the automatic start, when it works, insures a clean beginning and an undamaged groove and pickup. What we need, I think, is a simpler one, much faster working, minus the fancy cycling motions of the full-scale changer. Push the button and the music should begin, say, within three or four seconds. That would do it. With such an automatic starter and with the standard, time-proved automatic stop, a manual record player really has 99 per cent of the advantages of a changer. No wonder the changer manufacturers now like to boast of their changers as manual players too.

The Dual 1006, which I've been using on and off for the last month or so, is a good example, as they say, of recent trends. This changer is German and shares some of the conventions usual in that country with the long-familiar Miracord line - the same pushbutton controls, including stop, start and that cryptically spelled repet  -  which might be either bad English or good German, for all I know. (Actually the abbreviation for REPFTTIVE operation. Ed.)

There's the same pair of removeable spindles, a long one for changing and a short one for "manual" operation; the Dual and Miracord also share the absence of overhead arms or platforms - the records are supported for changing entirely by the center spindle's small protuberances. Clearly, both of these machines come from a common tradition of changer thinking.

Refinements in changers are now to be classed as small and large. Small refinements are involved in such crucial matters as arm mass and freedom of movement, rumble and the like in motors, smoothness of the whole drive mechanism, gentleness in the treatment of the stylus and the record. I say "small" because refinements in these areas are physically on a delicate plane, often quite invisible to the eye.

These smaller refinements are by far the most important, given stereo and our new standards for stylus force and all the rest; but they don't show up very dramatically on casual trial - they are negative in effect. If the machine works; if it changes, plays, is reasonably rumble-free (and especially, if the rumble ratio between mono, or lateral-only, playing and stereo, or lateral-vertical, playing is acceptable), if it skips no grooves, leaves records and stylus undamaged, drops, lifts, turns on and turns off correctly and in the right place at the right time, in spite of featherwight arm and feather-free bearings, then the machine benefits from optimum "small" improvement.

Lack of these minute but crucial adjustments in design makes many an older changer useless for today's stereo, even with four-wire stereo harness, new cartridge and every modernization you can think of.

By "large" refinements I mean those dramatic new methods of operation that really make a changer look and act new, right off. They are good for sales, and usually useful as well, though the small things are really far more important.

The GS77 changer, for example, stops its table dead during the entire change cycle, picking up speed after the stylus is lowered to the record; the cycle itself is fixed in speedr independent of the four playing speeds. Two good ideas, both on a relatively large scale - call them macro-improvements. The Dual changer has comparable features, though somewhat different in detail.

Dual's change cycle is also independent of playing speed, but the table keeps turning - not, however, at the speed setting indicated by the records you are playing. As the change cycle begins the table suddenly lets go and turns at 45 rpm. On LP and 16 it speeds up; at 78 it slows down.

This is an odd thing to watch - and, indeed, the Dual's actions are startling to the eye in a number of interesting ways. Looks as if the table had suddenly gone out of control, as it speeds up and begins churning around wildly, while the record drops! But the system works beautifully; the proper speed is resumed in plenty of time for the music to begin (if it didn't there'd be some dreadful sounds!) and all is just dandy.

Reminds me of my first LP-speed changers, which changed so slowly (having been geared for the old 78's - that in exasperation I used to throw the speed switch up to 78 to hurry things up. Dual does it for you, automatically.

But the most startling thing about the Dual changer is the unique "feeler" mechanism, which tells the stylus where to drop for any size record, standard and all sizes in between. It presents the most amazing psychological hazards, purely visual, that I have yet encountered - but it works, and has been working entirely satisfactorily for me to date without the slighest damage to records and stylus.

The psychological hazard is in the extra-ordinary arm motions that takes place when this machine goes into its change cycle. The first time I saw them, I couldn't believe my eyes. Here's what you seem to see:

Push the start button and the arm lifts off its rest, swings quickly out over the inner record grooves and proceeds to drop all the way down onto the disc with a thump - then it drags itself straight across the entire surface sidewise, out to the edge, where it proceeds to fall off. Your eyes are quite right - it does ride on the record grooves.

If you are able to watch this far without flinching, you'll then see the arm rise up nonchalantly once again, move serenely over to the first groove and lower itself piously and gently at the correct spot, meek as a lamb. Crazy.

The first time I saw this, unforewarned, I grabbed the arm off the record and swore! One disc ruined, I thought. But what actually happens, what really goes on, is an ingenious new device that is more practical than it sounds. The arm doesn't scrape the stylus over the record at all; instead, there is a tiny wheel, canted a bit, which rides lightly over the tops of the grooves and steers the arm back to the edge, where it falls off - onto another, which sends in a figurative message to the changer's mechanical brain, saying, here is the spot where the arm must come down. It is the spot too - without fail. Can't go wrong, no matter what the size, unless maybe you have an elliptical record to play.

Once all this is taken care of, things retract and when the arm comes down the next time, rightly positioned, the stylus is finally exposed, to play the grooves.

I admit it sounds zany, but I can't really find anything too seriously wrong with the system, once you get used to the psychological hazards involved in watching it. Remember that this system operates with an extremely light arm, designed to track at from 2 to 4 grams or so.

The small wheel does not "scrape" the record surface; it rolls on it; and I have so far been unable to find any trace of a mark where it passed. The "fall-off" principle is infallible, since it measures every record impartially for size without preconceived notions, and this is clearly a good idea, other things being satisfactory.

I do have two suggestions, though. First, in my Dual, the arm definitely drops too suddenly onto the record surface and onto the small wheel - it bounces, and oscillates as it rides back towards the edge. No harm done, but a more gentle descent - easily managed, I think - would add a safety margin and make for better visual appearance. I hear rumors that this has already been taken care of in later production.

The other suggestion is simply that there is an inherent difficulty here worth a thought, well understood by the makers and amply provided for, but still a difficulty. The small wheels on the arm require the stylus to be placed with extreme accuracy, within a very small vertical tolerance.

If it extends a fraction of a millimeter too far down, there will in truth be a catastrophic squawk when it gets dragged over the record!

Once correctly mounted, there is absolutely no way in which further trouble can occur, and the Dual's designers have provided all that is needed to get things right the first time.

Nevertheless, caution is advised, and you will find that one or two cartridge models cannot be used at all in the Dual, as now manufactured. My Pickering fits to a T and works to perfection.

What else? The Dual is absolutely silent in use; the motor is so quiet you must put your ear to the table to hear it. Rumble and pitch steadiness are absent and excellent, respectively - very good for a changer.

The machine is small, compact, without fancy arms and legs and extensions ; with the smaller spindle in place it looks altogether like a manual player -  nothing protrudes higher than a couple of inches. Good. There is automatic retracting of the drive and, for double safety, a neutral position on the speed shift. (Indeed, once in awhile my Dual goes into neutral at the beginning of a record when it ought to be playing. That's efficiency for you.)

The best features of the Dual, for my listening, are its excellent "manual-play" facilities, which are more serviceably "manual," more flexibly "automatic" than any changer I've tried before. It will do more things that please me, plays fewer nasty tricks on me, than any "changer" so far.

(Excuse the quotes - it's getting so that one can't be sure when a changer is a "changer," and that is all to the good.)

The Dual, in its alternative "manual" operation (with short spindle inserted) gives you a sensible and useful choice at all times between semi-automatic and strictly manual operation. You can do it either way, without adjustments. To start it you may press the regular start button and the machine goes through its usual cycle (as above) and plays the record.

Or you may lift the arm manually by its "wing" lift (not far enough from the record surface for fat fingers to get hold of, but OK for my medium-gauge ones), flip a little white slider marked manual and the record turns.

Replace the arm on its rest by hand at any point and the table stops, via one of those microswitches mounted in the arm rest. Entirely manual, you see.

The best thing is that you can put the arm down in any grove right up to the final one and the music will play - the automatic trip does not snatch the arm rudely out of your hands, as in so many changers in the past. This has long been one of my pet changer beefs.

Now, "enfin" (also ganz zum Schluß), I am satisfied. Yep, the trip does work, when the stylus reaches the lead-out grooves, eccentric or non-eccentric. The arm then - and only then - returns to its rest position. Now that's what I call real manual automation.

You can use the automatic stop button alternatively, if you want, to shut the thing off in the middle of a record. The cycling goes through in its usual form (with a few more of those visually odd spasmodic heavings that are typically Dual, as though the arm couldn't make up its mind; it does of course - the effect again is purely visual). Or you may just lift the arm off the record and set it on its rest. Either way works, and the machine doesn't mind a bit which way you do it. Even the REPET button can be used; push it down and at the end of the record the cycle will begin the same side again, automatically. (The REPET cancels if you push one of the other buttons.)

There you have it. Uh, Oh yes ..... I forgot a couple of dozen details, like, for instance, that this is a stereo changer, complete with a four-wire system (how could I forget that ...) the cartridge holder lets the cartridge out with a quarter-turn of a little top lever - very neat - and there is a mono-stereo switch (paralleling the two sides of the cartridge for mono playing) that is not placed underneath the turning record, but out in a good spot at the arm pivot, marked with a single circle for mono and two linked circles for stereo. (You have to use your imagination on that.)

Ah yes ... there's a built-in stylus force gauge, too, a little red hook next to the arm rest that operates a rjointer on a dial below. Does it read correctly? I wouldn't know; I didn't bother to try. (But you'd better.) I'm getting so my finger, lifting the stylus by its point, is a fairly good indicator of proper stylus force, or weight, anyhow. (Not pressure; the styli don't usually stick out far enough to hurt your finger in proportion to actual point pressure and, anyhow, my skin is too tough.) Still ... a stylus force gauge right at the spot where it counts is a very good idea - if it reads right.

Wenn der Autor den DUAL 1009 (in USA erst Anfang 1964 verfügbar) schon gehabt hätte, er wäre tagelang im Dreieick gesprungen.
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