Kalman Rubinson

The very first amplifier I bought was a Harman Kardon PC-200, aka The Prelude. It was a 10Wpc integrated, but I chose it over the competition for some of the same reasons that the HK 990 has appealed to me. Almost all amps back in the1960s had a plain cake-pan chassis with tubes, capacitors, and transformers studding the top. Integrated amps had the standard four knobs on the front for input selection, volume, bass, and treble. The HK PC-200 had an enclosed black chassis cage that formed a graceful cowl over the brushed-copper front panel and the six matte-black knobs: for Input selection (with three phono turnover settings), Volume, Bass, Treble, Loudness contour, and Treble rolloff. In addition, it had a Rumble Filter switch. The PC-200 was not only more beautiful than the rest of the push-pull competition powered by EL84 tubes, it also had more useful features. (Take that, you fans of the Grommes Little Jewel!). Over the decades, H/K products have always been stylish and innovative, but in today's fractured marketing world, most such creative energies are applied to audio/video receivers and lifestyle products.

I began my July column by talking about how quickly things are changing these days in multichannel audio. What I didn't pay enough attention to is that some things can change quickly enough to create inefficiency. Given that most multichannel digital products are based on digital signal processing (DSP), and many are network-enabled, they can be updated with relative ease. Almost every preamplifier-processor or A/V receiver I've reviewed has needed a firmware update during the reviewing process, and such updates are de rigueur for Blu-ray players, as more and more features (!) are added to new releases. And in addition to providing new performance features, firmware updates often also include corrections for operational glitches that have slipped by the designers and their alpha and beta testers, no matter how assiduously they've done their work.

Today's New York Times carries a brief obituary notice of the passing of audio innovator, Peter Pritchard, on August 23 in Austin, Texas at the age of 83. Peter founded Audio Dynamics Corporation in New Milford, CT in the early 1960's. His original ADC-1 ("Tip mass: 0.6 mg. Compliance. 20x10^–6cm/dyne, all directions. Playing weight: 1 gram or less in top quality arms") was a breakthrough product. Indeed, all ADC pickups were notable for their extremely high compliance and low tracking forces and he pursued this approach through a series of successful designs including the well-known ADC-10, ADC-25 and XLM cartridges. They were all based on his "induced magnet" principle, which derived from the older GE variable-reluctance cartridges that had been game-changers for affordable magnetic phono pick-ups in the 1950s.

Things move fast in multichannel. No, I'm not referring to the speed of sound effects as they whip around a room—let's leave that for the home-theater mags. I'm talking about audio technology. Since I began writing this column in June 2003, we've seen serious technological changes almost annually, some driven by real needs, some imposed by marketing considerations. To me, the rate of change seems strikingly rapid, compared to that of the products I review for the main portion of Stereophile, based, as they are, in the two-channel world.