Gramophone Dreams #93: The Kalman R Experience, Audio-Technica ART20 Phono Cartridge

The day I visited Stereophile Senior Contributing Editor Kalman Rubinson, I arrived back home with a headful of new understandings, but before I could ponder those things, I made a cup of tea and sat down to read a few New York Times obituaries.

While Kal and I sat chatting on his couch, he told me that reading obituaries was not only fascinating but had actually helped him find out what happened to a few people he had lost touch with. I told him I hadn't read Times obits in years but when I did, I did it to enjoy the quality of writing. We agreed that the Times's obituaries (as well as their Sports, Food, and Arts & Leisure pages) are good places to find inspired bits of pure journalism.

After some raving about our favorite journalists, we began telling when-we-were-kid stories about how we used to stare through the grille cloths on table radios, where inside by the speaker we would see the announcer's face, and sometimes whole orchestras—in miniature—on a dark stage where the speaker cone morphed into a concert shell.

In dramatic contrast, I've never forgotten my first time seeing how radically bigger and more detailed the orchestra appeared while projecting out in front of a single Klipsch corner horn. The K-horn presented sound as in a movie theater, projecting out from the screen. It reminded me also how higher fidelity during the 1950s meant using a bigger speaker.

I remembered my aunts and uncles sitting on dining room chairs placed in an arc staring at a big Zenith console radio in the living room. Its 12" driver was pushing sound energy out into the room, but the orchestras, singers, and announcers remained inside the box.

Kal recalled childhood experiences hearing orchestras on the radio and how that kind of listening put him on his way to becoming Classical Music Director at Kings Crown Radio (WKCR) during 1961 and '62. Part of Kal's job required him to walk to the tiny office-warehouse of Columbia's classical record distributor and dialog for as long as an hour about which records he should hand carry back to the station for play. As Kal was talking, I imagined looking into this man's office from above, seeing a dirty linoleum floor, surrounded by cheap wood paneling, a noir desk fan, and a heavy Bakelite phone—probably made by Western Electric.

Next we swapped stories about our first experiences with our parents' music consoles. His parents' console was in their living room, where, he told me, he listened to AM radio and played 78s. My brain spun trying to picture Kal as a child in knee pants, playing 78s.

Then I bragged how my parents had this midcentury modern Columbia console strategically positioned in a niche, just beyond the vestibule coat closet. That console's 10" speaker fed two hallways and our living room—filling the entryway and most of the house with soft warm sound. My mother and her architect pal put the console there on purpose, so its smooth modern sound would combine with their leading-edge rheostat-controlled lighting to set a welcoming tone for guests.

Kal told me his lifetime commitment to audiophile audio began in the mid-1950s, when his older brother returned from the Air Force and fired him up by describing the benefits of higher quality audio components! Along with a pal, Kal began combing Manhattan's Radio Row (on Cortlandt Street) every Saturday, where, he said, "The salesmen were helpful and tolerant of a couple of kids." Eventually, Kal bought his first sound system, with products by Webcor, Eico, and some no-name speakers.

Kal agreed that for most people, creating audiophile-quality sound systems is not a shopping hobby, or a winter DIY project; it's a lifetime commitment.

The 1960s introduced boomers to another popular listening paradigm: 9V transistor radios, which fit in a shirt pocket and came with a single (crystal) earphone, which I immediately adopted. Late night, dark room, ear bud in, head on pillow, parents none the wiser. Those crystal ear buds placed the announcers and musicians completely inside my skull, making me feel like I was watching the orchestra from outside my head.

Fidelity-wise, these crystal earphones were noisy and shouty and easily clogged by earwax. I preferred the fuller fidelity of placing my ear against the radio's plastic speaker grille. This positioning put me back inside my head, and the orchestra back outside my head.

When I asked Kal if he remembered crystal earphones, he replied "My oft-stated desire to be in the space with the musicians is why I've never gotten into headphones."

In cars, classical orchestras appeared on a little stage inside the dashboard and the effect was quite polite. But rock'n'roll was different: It pumped sounds out of my dash and sprayed them aggressively over the windscreen into the space in front of my face. When Golden Earring's "Radar Love" started playing, it shook the whole dash and charged the car's interior before blending with wind from the windows (footnote 1).

When stereo arrived, I thought it was a crass gimmick. But I was an early adopter, because I loved hearing my mono recordings reproduced in the grille-cloth–free environment between two speakers. When launched into stereo's centrally located empty space, mono energy felt bigger, stronger, fuller, and taller—more detailed and tangible—and emotionally accessible with no box holding it in. Stereo felt like stretched-out mono with too-big empty spaces.

In stereo, those same orchestras and vocalists that were once inside the radio by the wall are now out in the room, appearing as ghostly phantasms on a stage of action as wide as the space between and behind the two speakers. This suited me perfectly. My favorite pastime has always been staring into space and dreaming things.

Fortunately for audiophiles, record companies (like RCA, Decca, and EMI) turned two-channel classical recordings into a wondrous, deeply satisfying art form that I still collect and admire.

Next came full-on multitrack recording. Accompanied by an avalanche of microphones, faders, and processors, it succeeded wildly in putting rock and pop across to young audiences but did nothing to broaden the appeal of traditional folk, blues, jazz, classical, or world music. You see, with multitrack recording, there is no there there—no time-based reality to anchor its preposterous depth, width, and height.

I believe that aftermarket under-dash reverb units for car audio (ca 1967) and early phase-inverting four-channel schemes like Dynaco's passive Quadadaptor for domestic audio were attempts to ameliorate some of the blunt fakeness of early stereo.

In the early '70s, media campaigns introduced Boomers to four-channel surround sound, aka Quadraphony. Like stereo, "quad" struck me as a poorly executed concept, but I liked the idea of putting listeners in the middle of a wall-to-wall soundfield.

I went to raves and dance clubs so I could drift into trance-mode dreaming inside a soundfield.

I remember how Wendy Carlos, who had championed the idea of surround sound since the inception of stereo, complained that Quadraphonics "destroyed what little 'fusion' existed before in front, as the pair along any wall must span the full diagonal length of that wall. No surprise to find black holes all over the place." (footnote 2)

When I asked Kal if he got into Quadraphonic when it came out, his answer did not surprise. "Never accepted it. I thought it contrived and misrepresented how I experienced live music."

Naturally, I asked why he thought it failed.

"Quadraphony failed because most musical purists found it offensive, and most casual listeners didn't care enough about it to bother."

In Kal's first Music in the Round column, published in June 2003, he described the first time he experienced stereo playback at a dealer on Radio Row. In this, his column's mission statement, he said something I think might be a key for readers to understand how Kal's experiments in surround sound have evolved over decades to become what I experienced that day in his delightful living room.

"As impressive as that (stereo) experience was, something was missing," he wrote. "The performers spread across the proscenium were vivid and solid, but I was not included in that space."

In a subsequent email, he emphasized that "the performers were in one acoustic environment; I was in another." An important distinction.

In his writings for The Absolute Sound, the late Harry Pearson employed a photography-based perceptual model that put listeners outside the performance space, in their own minds, behind a window or lens looking into the space where the recording happened. This useful, easy-to-understand metaphor defines "transparency" in terms of how clean is the glass.

For me, this so-called view into the recording space has always been there. The first acoustic recordings very effectively described performers in a three-dimensional space occupied by the listener, whose ears became surrogates of the recorder's diaphragm. As did electric recordings made with microphones. Right from the start, microphones reminded me of camera lenses, with various coverage angles and varying depths of field.

In my personal experiments with live recording, the most realistic "view" I've achieved was using a binaural recording head. Played back though headphones, a recording made with this two-ears, dummy-head vantage point generated a believable listener-centered, three-dimensional experience. But only with headphones.

As Kal opined, and I agreed: "My major point was that stereo (literally meaning solid) is good for recreating a real event but it is not sufficient." The most important point on which Kal and I agreed was that we are both seeking a range of sensations we would have experienced if we had been at the recording site.


Footnote 1: See youtube.com/watch?v=aRlSHG5hRY4.

Footnote 2: See wendycarlos.com/surround/surround2.html#quadfolly.

ARTICLE CONTENTS

COMMENTS
Solarophile's picture

Thanks for this interview and show-and-tell with Kal. Hopefully one day like how stereo became desirable for audiophiles, the same thing will naturally happen with well-done multichannel recordings.

Even if many audiophiles stay firmly in the 2-channel camp, for those with the room and the desire, there are already many albums to enjoy among the surround sound titles available.

For me, life is too short not to enjoy these!

Glotz's picture

I think the Kalman R Experience is killer. Hearing from a different perspective further cements that image of his system and it's really good just to hear about personalities having fun.

The soundstage-forward system enhancements that Audio Research employed for their analog surround processors accomplished similar presentations in the 90's but as Kal has stated to me in the past, noise was added to the experience. I definitely remember that as well and it was thrust back into the consciousness without worry back then. I think his approach now is a very smart realization of that idea and his choices in gear very satisfying. Oh those Blades! More pictures, visits, and friendships, please.

And that cart... oh man, AT is on a roll right now. Nice to see.

And I absolutely dig you brought up HP's lessons on transparency. It's great to get the past to teach us or further some tenets that help music lovers appreciate what's in front of them.

PeterG's picture

I hope to hear a great surround system like Kal's one day, but it's tough to envision buying one. It seems obvious that 5.3 would be better than 2.1. But if our budget is constant, then in Kal's case we're comparing $30,000 speakers to $100,000 speakers, (maybe worse after amps et al), and I'm feeling pretty good about stereo again. And that's even if one can place 5.3 speakers properly

Kal Rubinson's picture

I hear you but I am confident that expanding the speaker budget from $30K to $100K would reap much greater benefit and enjoyment by applying it to going multichannel than getting pricier and bigger speakers for L/R. Even with a "measly" $30K budget for all 5 main speakers, I'd make the same argument.

Archimago's picture

Very good to see this kind of common sense expressed in Stereophile when discussing potential benefits of multichannel.

Lovely article!

Cheers...

hollowman's picture

Well, the Stereophile forum went kaput in late 2023. What a shame! Kal posted a Lotta good stuff there.
I did save much of my own Stereophile forum content as html files, and have relocated them to Reddit.
Some Kal contributions in those. BTW, thx again, Kal for the DIY parts. Very useful. I am using them currently in a phono preamp project!
Some of my Stereophile forum content is here (adding more daily).
https://www.reddit.com/r/13hm13/comments/1ie8dyr/request_for_new_subforu...

jimtavegia's picture

A great read and I am sure that was on superb listening experience. Hope everyone is well.

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