Art Dudley Listening

I'm beginning to understand why some people enjoy writing about crazy tweaks like electron counseling and magic listening trousers: When an idea is that new, it brings with it the chance for some gifted but heretofore unappreciated journalist to rise through the ranks and describe it to an anxious world. By contrast, when a defeated and baggy old establishment writer sets out to describe a CD player or amplifier, the product is surely the millionth such thing to come down the pike, and before long the readers complain: We used to like you, but you don't try very hard to excite us anymore.

"It's rather warm in here."
—violinist Mischa Elman, at Jascha Heifetz's Carnegie Hall debut

There was once an Englishman named H.A. Hartley, who was a contemporary of H.G. Baerwald, P.G. Voigt, P.K. Turner, and other men whose first two names are lost to us. Hartley was a capable designer and audio theorist, not to mention a gifted lecturer and writer—his literary achievements include a book on astrology (footnote 1), of all things—and he's often credited with coining the expression high fidelity. Most important of all, in 1928 H.A. Hartley teamed up with the aforementioned P.K. Turner to create an audio manufacturing company known as Hartley Products, Ltd. The Hartley company made electronics and loudspeakers, the latter of which included full-range coaxial drivers using energized field coils and, later on, quite powerful permanent magnets—just like their countrymen at Lowther Loudspeakers, Ltd.

One should be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Not only is it possible for a thinking person to now and then drastically change his point of view, if for no other reason than the sake of change—if one wishes to prevent self-seriousness and various other forms of mental decay, it's probably an outright must. So it was that I recently began to wonder if everything I know about record players might be wrong.

"A few of us felt that we were the proverbial voices in the wilderness for a long time." So writes Gary Jacobson, whose Quad ESL website, is my favorite of the many good ones out there.

"Happy is he who gets to know the reasons for things." —Virgil