STATE OF THE ART

STATE OF THE ART

REWIRE YOURSELF

by

Richard Robinson

The majority of audio manufacturers spend their time coming up with new products to replace the new products they came up with six months before. Japanese audio and TV manufacturers have turned this self-imposed one-upmanship into an art. Last week’s newest product is this week’s oldest product. The brand new state of the art turntable that has all the latest technology is instantly replaced by a newer state of the art. Which leads this observer to remark that the state of the art in electronics has more to do with deluding the consumer than making technological breakthroughs.

What’s so grating about all these “new products” is that the advertising campaigns and press releases that announce them seem to imply that finally the breakthroughs have been made to give the buyer the best possible components. Yet, the turnover in “best possible” is such that one suspects a master game plan (or conspiracy) behind all this, and that these people know full well that they’ll be coming up with even more wonderful breakthroughs as soon as they unload their present products. Almost as if they’ve got it all planned out, months, maybe years in advance, with the consumer the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on.

There are new products, of course, that are improvements on the products sold last month or last year. But not all of them are better than the models that preceded them. In some cases, the new products are the same as the old products... only the faceplates have been changed to confuse the innocent.

Keeping this in mind, the new products described in this column are, to the best of my knowledge, genuinely new products—audio components that incorporate definite improvements and changes from similar units that came before.

The microcassette isn’t exactly putting the standard sized audio cassette out of business, but for many applications it’s just as good and decidedly more convenient. Because the microcassette is smaller than the normal cassette— about the size of a match book as opposed to the cassette which is the size of a playing card—the microcassette recorder is smaller. Olympus’ latest microcassette machine, the Pearlcorder S202, is an example of this miniaturization. This Pearlcorder weighs less than nine ounces and measures under five by three by one inch in size. The list price is $149.95, and you can probably do better than that if you shop around.

Microcassettes have two drawbacks. First, they aren’t so good for recording music because of their very slow tape speed and tiny tape width (butfrom experience they aren’t so bad, either). They will record okay, and playback is acceptable, especially considering how small the whole unit is. The second drawback is that microcassette tapes aren’t as easy to find or as cheap as standard audio tapes and there doesn’t seem to be any way around this as only a few manufacturers are producing microcassettes and microrecorders at the moment.

This particular machine at $149.95 list price is a real step forward in making microcassettes as inexpensive as comparable standard sized portable audio cassettes, like the Sony TC-55. If you’re looking for something really small and compact to take on your travels, stop by your local audio store and palm a microcassette machine.

Most of the time, when a manufacturer announces a “new” hi-fi speaker, it doesn’t mean that much. After all, speaker technology has nothing revolutionary going for it with the, exception of a few exotic panel and phase array systems. KLH, however, has come up with something new with their computer-controlled speaker systems.

KLH’s computer-controlled speakers have a computer that “reads” the output of the power amplifier, anticipates the motion of the speaker cone, and adjusts the signal accordingly to reproduce veiy deep bass signals with a sound and accuracy that is usually only present in speakers four times as large. Prices range from $420 to $1000.

When Crown comes up with a new product, the audio world usually pays immediate attention, since the company tends to stick with reliable and successful products that have proven themselves over the years. Such was the case when Crown recently announced their new power amplifier. Labeled the Crown PSA-2 Professional Self-Analyzing Amplifier, this unit is expensive, but it does some things no other amp does. Essentially, what happens inside the amp is that a computer pays attention to the outgoing signal and actually controls the output so that the amplifier never exceeds its safe operating limits. Since power output is 220 Watts per channel, you can knock down walls with this amp to start with, but the point of the new amp is that it will function at optimum levels underany conditions.

Pre-amplifiers are getting simpler and more sophisticated as time goes by. The pre-amp is a device which takes the signal from your turntable cartridge, and amplifies it sufficiently to feed it to the power amp. Some of the new generation of pre-amps don’t even have tone controls, just a volume and balance control since theoretically this is all you need.

Yamaha has introduced a new pre-amp, their C-2a (cost: $900), and is in the league of new “sophisticated” pre-amps. The specifications forthe C-2a are impressive, attaining the theoretical heights that a high-quality pre-amp should: no extraneous signals or noise.are introduced by the pre-amp in performing its function. However, unless you’ve already gotten the best cartridge, turntable, tone arm, amp, speakers, and gold tipped wire for your hi-fi system, this isn’t the kind of stuff you should be playing around with, especially at these prices.

The biggest “news” in the microphone biz is that they’re getting better for cheaper. One example is Audio-Technica’s new AT-816 unidirectional dynamic mikes. They’re supplied'in stereo matched pairs at only $60 a pair. Unless you’re Bruce Springsteen or Freddie Mercury, these mikes will handle most home and semi-professional recording situations and to make them a real buy, the mike stands, cables, and quarter-inch phone plugs are included in the extremely reasonable price.

Got $19.95? For that you can be the first on your block with this new gadget from AudioTechnica. What does it do, you ask? Well, for $19.95 you shouldn’t really be asking that question, but we’ll tell you anyway. It’s a Safety Raiserfor manual turntables. When the tone arm comes to the end of the record it automatically raises the tone arm to save unnecessary stylus wear and eliminate the annoying sound of your tone arm playing the label. Very handy.

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REWIRE YOURSELF

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The final new product this month comes from Carver and it’s called a Sonic Holography-Autocorrelation Preamplifier. It is very new; in fact, Carver has come up with something you can’t get anywhere else. What it does is create a greater sense of realism and more precise location of instruments in space than other preamps. It transforms ordinary stereo recordings into an exact likeness of a live performance. It isn’t cheap ($867), but of all the “new” products in your hi-fi store, I’d say thatthis unit alone can claim the title • of being the only genuinely new stereo unit in the past few years. And the nice thing about it is that you’vegotto hearittobelieveit.