Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain
Lynn Olson

The audio, high-end, and home-theatre industry are filled with silly fables and outright fibs that the folks-in-charge would like you to believe. When trying to find the source of these fairy tales, the ancient rule of "follow the money" serves us well. Is somebody or some corporate entity making a lot of money from a commonly-held belief? As Ben Franklin said more than 200 years ago, "Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own the press."

Most of what we read in this industry (and everything else in the industrial world) is printed on very expensive four-color presses that cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single press run. (Having just printed a book, I’ve gotten acquainted with the price schedules of the printing business.) Does this mean the publisher has a direct financial interest in influencing your thoughts? What do you think?

One of the fun things about Positive Feedback is its sort-of-nonprofit status. A couple of years ago, we really were a 501(c)(7) non-profit, and acted as the "newsletter" of the Oregon Triode Society. The tail started wagging the OTS dog (I think we actually had more editors than the OTS had members!), and the two organizations had an amicable parting of the ways. Now we make enough to pay the printers and Lila Ritsema, our faithful business manager, but there ain’t nuthin’ for David, the publisher and Editor-In-Chief, and of course zero for the writers, editors, Senior Editors, Associate Editors, Grand Poo-Bah Editors, and other assorted members of the far-flung Positive Feedback Tribe.

Like most magazines bigger than a 16-page newsletter, we get about 2/3 of our revenue from advertisers. Unlike other magazines, though, we make no pretense of establishing the next Hearst publishing empire, so we aren’t driven by the kind of button-down-suit "business plan" that drives other audio magazines. In practical terms this means: No style guide for the writers (I guess that’s obvious). No $500 fee for writing a boilerplate review. No $3,000 fee for writing a piece with genuine technical content. No "in-group" of favored vendors that advertise in every issue, and always get good reviews. No cynical "damn-with-faint-praise" reviews that are meted out to the great unwashed who can’t afford the full-color full-page ads. (Those four-color ads cost the buyer about $5,000 to $10,000 per issue. Exhibiting in the CES costs about $20,000 to $50,000. Breaking into the "mainstream" high-end is very, very expensive, thanks to the gatekeepers of the industry.)

Looking at the consumer-audio industry as a whole, you find mass-fi, home-theatre, and high-end. (Although the ultra-fi horn/triode movement is giving the high-end a good scare, actual sales of finished products are still minuscule. It’s mostly a DIY phenomenon, which is perhaps just as well, considering the state of the rest of the industry.)

Once upon a time, the industry consisted of mass-fi, which was serviced by very large and openly corrupt slick magazines (every review was favorable and paid for in advance), and the fledgling high-end, which was assisted by two "underground" magazines. These magazines were assembled with smaller staffs than we now have at PF (which is on the small end these days), and were run for the love of the new industry, without benefit of "business plans." The underground magazines, and the fledgling high-end industry, were amateurs in the best sense of the word: they did what they did for the sheer love of creating beauty, and to create a legitimate and honest alternative to the corruption of the mass-fi market.

Well, anyone who’s followed the evolution of rock music from the Sixties to the Seventies knew this scenario couldn’t last for long. What started out as an sincere and idealist alternative eventually became just another machine to grind out the bucks, complete with gatekeepers to keep out the misguided idealists. Home-theatre, born in the corporate boardroom, skipped right over silly notions of idealism and went straight to the mass-fi business plan.

To preclude any diversity or true innovation, the multinational home-theatre architects devised a marketing plan that dictated mass-fi technical standards, along with truly whimsical speaker-design criteria. Like the "kow-tow" of ancient Asian emperors, it was meant as a test of loyalty. If the most prestigious manufacturers of true high-end were forced to design top-dollar equipment with mass-fi technical standards, and do it all with a grateful smile, the entire raison-d’être of the high-end business could be removed over time.

And you know what? It’s already happened while nobody was looking. It is possible to pay $10,000 to $100,000 for a top-reviewed home-theatre system that is incapable of reproducing lifelike music. This isn’t surprising, since the home-theatre licensing criteria fly in the face of 40 years of experience of the BBC, ORTF, NHK, and other world broadcasting organizations.

Let’s start with the innocent-looking "center-channel" speaker that sits comfortably atop many a TV set in a home-theatre system. The side-by-side MTM (mid-tweeter-mid) layout is approved by the home-theatre industry, and every manufacturer of home-theatre speakers would be wise to keep with the pack and make center-channel speakers just like everybody else, right?

Wrong!

Laying the drivers side-by-side in an MTM array is absolutely guaranteed to give poor image quality with a "sweet spot" no more than a foot or two wide at the listening position. That’s why a sensible designer of MTM speakers always puts the driver array in a vertical line. That way, the "sweet spot" is a broad horizontal beam about 2 feet high, which is fine provided the center of the beam is about listening height (36 to 40 inches high).

Unfortunately, when you turn the array on its side, all of the MTM benefits turn against you, especially for stereo listening, so you end up with a vertical beam and narrow horizontal dispersion. This guarantees stereo that is very sensitive to small left-to-right changes in listener position ... the precise opposite of what a center fill-in speaker should do! After all, the function of the center speaker is to stabilize the image, not make it worse!

Here we see speaker vendors, both big and small, many of whom ought to know better, all following each other like elephants in a circus, none dare questioning the wisdom of the corporate giants. I know by writing this article, I’ll never get a job in the home-theatre industry. If the licensees are that frightened, what self-respecting engineer wants to work there anyway?

What’s more unsettling is that the purported "audiophile" magazines haven’t seen fit to mention this elementary fact of MTM acoustics in more than a decade. This isn’t rocket science, guys. All it takes to hear the lateral instability is to play pink noise (or FM interstation hiss) through the center speaker alone, and listen for the change in tonal quality as you move side-to-side. This quick pink-noise assessment is about the most elementary test for any speaker manufacturer, yet the "audiophile" magazines haven’t discovered it in 10 years of reviewing home-theatre speakers. So much for looking out for the interests of the consumers.

You want a bigger surprise? Try connecting a "Front" home-theatre speaker to the Left channel of a conventional stereo amplifier, and a "Rear" dipolar speaker to the Right channel of the same amplifier. Cost no object, by the way. Go ahead and try this experiment with the most expensive home-theatre speakers you can buy.

Notice how ordinary stereo (you pick the tunes) sounds through this mishmash. Is there any stereo effect at all? Notice how fatiguing and weirdly unnatural it sounds? Notice a growing desire to throw the whole overpriced mess right through the window?

Well, you know what? 5-channel home-theatre setups do that to everything that you play through them, every single time! The reason you don’t notice the bizarre image distortions is that they occur in the front-to-back plane, where you’re not expecting trouble. Indeed, most of us are trained by many years of listening to stereo to only expect a defined image at the very front of room. And that’s what you get from a home-theatre setup; a crisp frontal image, and an intentionally diffuse and unstable image everywhere else in the room. The little experiment of listening directly to one each of the "Front" and "Back" speakers without the aid of logic-steering monkeyshines lays the truth bare.

The source of the fatigue and intense annoyance in the listening experiment, by the way, is the major difference in the polar pattern of the front and back speaker systems. A third experiment confirms the point: using the same stereo amp as before, compare:

A) the two "Front" speakers connected to the L & R channels of the amplifier

B) the two dipolar "Rear" speakers connected to the L & R

C) the "Front" connected to the L and the dipole "Rear" connected to the R

The source of the listening fatigue should be obvious by now. Home theatre is screwed up – by design, not by accident. The reason is surprisingly simple: audio systems that comply with the design requirements of the home-theatre industry are the enemy of high fidelity, not its friend.

Consider this: Would you agree with the proposition that a good yardstick for a high-fidelity audio system is its true-to-life quality? Reflect on the dismal results of the three experiments you just conducted a few moments ago. Remember, if a home-theatre system uses identical speakers for front and rear, it cannot receive the icon of mass-market approval.

Reflect a little further on the magazine reviews that cover home-theatre systems. Is there much discussion of realism, in the mundane sense of describing everyday sounds in realistic terms?1 Or is the "realism" used by the magazine reviewers actually a code-word for un-realism, for bigger and more bizarre special effects? Foley sounds in movies are – by definition – synthetic creations that sound more convincing than the real thing.

Assessing the sound of home-theatre by using the latest Claude Van Damme FX extravaganza is no different than a restaurant reviewer giving top marks to the establishment with the most tasty artificial ingredients. In the world of food, a reviewer who praised a billion-burger fast-food chain as the touchstone for all cooking would be seen as deranged; in the world of audio, weirdly enough, the priorities are exactly reversed, with the most artificial and unnatural sound-tracks becoming the standard of reference for home theatre sound systems.

But perhaps that gets us right back to the underlying problem with home-theatre; it has nothing to do with high fidelity in any sense of the word. Fidelity, after all, literally means "faithful to." And when the dominant concern of the large-scale manufacturer and the slick magazine publisher is market-share, the old word "fidelity" goes through a wondrous sea-change.

In an age when democracy is being skillfully redefined as just another marketplace, the Newspeak definition of fidelity (and corporate loyalty) is fidelity to the shareholders. Shareholders, like all rational investors, seek the maximum return with the minimum risk. Obviously, investing in the Marketing Department provides a quicker and surer return on investment than tedious, difficult, and unpredictable Research & Development.

I live in a Northwest suburb where an apparel manufacturer makes sneakers for about $2 each in miserably poor Third-World countries and resells them in the USA for $120 a pair. Less than a mile away a maker of electronic test instruments has some of the finest engineers and R&D labs in the world. Guess which company has shrunk to a third of its former size and which company has tripled in size in less than a decade?

This lesson has not been lost on the consumer electronics industry. R&D and putting value into the product is less cost-effective than high-powered marketing when it comes to keeping the loyalty – the fidelity – of the shareholders. Why bother to deal with trivial issues like good sound when advertising seen on movie screens all over the world can make the sale with so much better effectiveness?

So let’s pull the curtain aside, pay no attention to the pitchman holding the microphone, and see what drives the new-and-improved high-end industry. Oh, you thought I was only talking about home theatre? What kind of "underground" market are we dealing in when a glossy four-color magazine appears in airport newsstands? That display space isn’t free, any more than shelf space in a supermarket is free. The magazine publisher, just like a cornflake vendor, has to pay upfront for every inch of display space. Products don’t appear in that space unless they have been paid for in advance. The reason you don’t see obscure and weird little magazines at the airport is the same reason you don’t see obscure and weird brands at the supermarket. It takes serious money to be visible in the mass market.

It’s time that magazines in the high-end stopped being coy about the reality of doing business in the high-end audio publishing industry. If a magazine won’t publish reviews unless the manufacturer advertises in the magazines, the readers have a right to know this is the standard business policy of the magazine. Similarly, not many readers know that manufacturers that can’t get top ratings in the dominant magazines won’t even get the time of day from 90% of all retail stores ... even the stores that take six months to pay.

Unless a manufacturer is in the "inner circle" that never gets bad reviews, submitting a product to the "Big Two" is playing real-life Russian Roulette with your life savings, your employee’s jobs, and very possibly your marriage. When one magazine has over 80% of the high-end magazine readership, one review written in a moment of boredom by a reviewer can be a death sentence for the company involved. The start-up company (which may have been around for 15 years before the publication deigns to notice the product) suddenly can’t talk to dealers, distributors, product reps, or overseas agents. All it takes is one tired and bored reviewer trying to fill up space and looking for that just-right clever phrase to give the review a little zing.

And the recourse for the company? The "Manufacturer’s Comments" section, right next door to the one-inch personal ads. Of course, we all have Freedom of the Press in a free society, and the company could drop everything and start up a magazine of their own with just as many readers and influence.

Uh huh. And pigs could fly if they had wings.

Didn’t I hear something way back there in the peanut gallery about that magic word, "competition?" Isn’t it true that we all get better and better products every year because of the intense competition to get good reviews? We all know that competition improves the breed, selection of the fittest, and all the rest of the rewarmed-for-the-Nineties Social Darwinism horse manure.

Funny how the wonderful advantages of competition never seem to apply to corporate monopolies and near-monopolies. Did you know that when Ma Bell submitted to Federal regulation in the 1920’s, it "only" had a 80% market share in the US domestic market. Back then that was considered a de facto monopoly ... by pro-business courts and Presidency, I might add.

These days, computer operating systems, CPU’s, and major segments of publishing are controlled by enterprises that have even higher market-share, yet you never see or hear the dreaded word "monopoly." It’s even more interesting these same corporate entities that control entire markets devote quite a bit of PR to the wonderful virtues of "competition" — except for themselves, of course.

The decline of sound quality in the modern high-end business has everything to do with an imbalance of economic power. One magazine has a near-monopoly, and a second magazine (with a rather similar editorial philosophy) picks up the table scraps. All of the "underground" magazines — including the gang here at Positive Feedback — don’t add up to the circulation of the second magazine, much less the first. There’s plenty of competition amongst the manufacturers – and almost none on the publishing end. And with dealers running scared on razor-thin margins and hard-to-move inventory, they don’t dare contradict the dominant magazines. This is a classic recipe for stagnation, lack of innovation, and a declining industry.

And that’s what we have.

This is Economics 101, folks. The interests of the monopoly-holder and the rest of the market (dealers, manufacturers, and customers) are directly opposed. Nothing will change unless the power relationship is altered. Monopolies distort markets; it’s that simple. What an economist terms a "distortion" is a term of art that actually means that the free market is replaced by a simulation of a free market.

You see, "free market" is a political term, not an economic term. All real markets have varying degrees of inequity of power, the limiting case being where one buyer or seller controls more than half the total market. (A controlling share, in effect.) When this happens, the dominant player sets the terms of trade for everyone else, since there is nowhere else to go. In the worlds of politics or economics, it is in the interest of the monopoly-holder to create an illusion of power-sharing, equity, and a benign paternalism.

Back in the days of the Bell System monopoly, yes, the phone service was very good, but if you wanted to connect your own phone, or plug a modem into the "Bell System," they would immediately disconnect you for tampering with their system. And that would be that. No appeal. The nice advertising and sponsorship of good works by the Bell System didn’t change the fact that the terms of trade were set by Ma Bell.

Sound a bit familiar? A nice warm-n-fuzzy business takes care of us, anticipates our needs, carefully nurtures the industry, and never fails to remind us what golly-gosh deep-down good folks they are. But a monopoly is a monopoly. They set the terms of trade; in terms of power, it boils down to "My Way or the Highway." Don’t like Ma Bell? Don’t make a phone call. Don’t like the Redmond Empire? Don’t use a PC. Don’t like the only paper in town? Watch TV news. Want to sell a product to any high-end dealer without the blessing of the dominant magazine? Good luck!

Whether you like Positive Feedback magazine or not, one of its cardinal virtues is that a piece like this can get published in the first place. That’s why I write for David. The man plays straight, and the rules at PF are aboveboard and no secret from the readership. Still, I have no illusion that PF alone can move the industry. Even Sound Practices, Vacuum Tube Valley, Bound For Sound, VALVE, the new generation of e-zines online like SoundStage!, the Dell group, and all the other "underground" magazines aren’t enough. But all of these magazines are a start, and the doors are swinging wider every day. Although our combined circulation is a tiny fraction of the monopoly-holder, we have profoundly altered the direction of the industry. Don’t think so? Look at what’s happened since 1990:

* The rise of a whole group of "underground" magazines operating from radically different editorial policies of the "Big Two."

* The stagnation and decline of transistor amplifiers, with no new semiconductors available for new designs. At the same time, several new vacuum-tube manufacturers have re-entered the business, and worldwide demand for tubes has increased significantly.

* The stunning success of a new do-it-yourself magazine devoted to vacuum-tube audio, at a time when DIY was confidently (and wrongly) predicted to be a dying market. Two years later, an even more specialized magazine appeared, championing a technology that was seventy years old — direct-heated triodes.

* The Japanese, French, and Italian esthetic of single-ended triode amplifiers with zero feedback and very simple circuits suddenly invaded the high-prestige North American and UK markets. Considering the unchallenged forty-year dominance of the high-feedback Williamson (and its variants), this is an astonishing turnaround. For the first time in forty years, amplifier designers are free to reach into the past, the present, and the future for good ideas.

* The boutique-era paradigm of "Bigger & More Expensive is Always Better" is receiving serious challenge as well. No longer is it axiomatic that $60,000 speakers driven by 200-watt amplifiers represent the pinnacle of the art, or that a prestigious name combined with a good review is a guarantee of good sound.

The "inner circle" of good-review manufacturers aren’t too sure how to fit all of these changes into their marketing model, and the Big Two magazines aren’t exactly sure how to deal with the threat either.

First the undergrounders were ignored; when that didn’t work it was the damn-with-faint-praise treatment (how cute, a magazine printed in a garage), now the current tactic is editorial name-calling ("shrill Jeremiads," anyone?). It was just up to Positive Feedback, Bound For Sound, and Sound Practices, I’d be worried; the next phase is usually a direct assault on the business by "any means necessary," followed by buyout offers at a knock-down price. (You don’t think this happens? How many newspapers did your home town have 20 years ago? And how many does it have now?)

Fortunately, there’s way more than the three of us listed above. There are scads of new magazines coming out all the time, not to mention Web sites that cater to the most eccentric audio tastes imaginable. (See my letter in the "Reverberations" column elsewhere in this issue for some site recommendations.) Even the most sophisticated business planner is at a loss how to control this market, with barriers to entry falling lower every year. The chaos and disorder is good; it’s the breeze of fresh air the audio industry has needed for the last twenty years. New magazines and Web sites are breaking out all over and piping up in their tiny voices, "The Emperor has no clothes!"

You know what? It’s true! He’s butt-naked — just like the rest of us.

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