I’m amazed that the hi-fi business continues to prosper and proliferate, considering London Calling is the only album worth listening to loud— everything else sounds as good on the radio as it ever will. Perhaps, in these troubled times, it’s encouraging that people still want their own record players to dance to their own music, even if it isn’t the Clash.

At the moment, hi-fi manufacturers are vaguely coping with past, present, and future. On one hand, they’re manufacturing fantastically expensive components to follow up obscure electronic theories. On the other hand, they’re trying to bring prices down to sell more of everything. Neither hand pays particular attention to what the other does, and the confusion is multiplied by wholesale price breakthroughs in integrated circuits that have, for example, made last year’s $600 cassette machine into this year’s $300cassette machine.

Don’t, however, expect any bargains at your local hi-fi store. All you can reasonably expect these days is rampant confusion. The individual components—turntable, tape deck, pre-amp, amp, tuner, speakers—that the consumer must choose to acquire a complete stereo system are such that it’s nearly impossible to walk in off the street to buy a stereo with any confidence that you’re doing it right. Speaker design doesp’t have anything to do with amplifier design, amplifier design contradicts turntable design, pre-amps don’t necessarily match amps, even speaker wire and connecting cables are in technical chaos— one current theory is that the best speaker wire is that which sells for $75 per hundred feet and the ideal connecting cables are those whose ends are coated in pure gold.

Most confusion results from hi-fi manufacturers’s search for the “perfect” sound. These are a dozen schools of thought on the matter—each resulting in stereo components that don’t necessarily match up with the components of rival manufacturers.

The underlying problem that’s created the current mess is the relative nature of sound. What sounds good to you today at the stereo store, may not sound good to you tomorrow at home. Despite computer-assisted design teams and theoretical perfection, hi-fi manufacturers are constantly faced with the fact that what looks good on paper, and maybe sounds good in the lab, sounds mighty peculiar at my house when I’m playing the Clash album.

I’m not going to get into the morass of technical confusion that exists. Current hi-fi tech is complicated: so-called “progress” has created as many problems as it has solved, essentially because of the archaic basis of all music reproduction: the needle riding in the pressed plastic groove.

The major mistake being made is that the final solution for good sound is to build speaker boxes jammed with three to five separate speaker components. Such speakers are complicated, and therefore expensive. More important, they are of such low efficiency in reproducing sound that very powerful amplifiers are needed to get them to work properly, and powerful amps are extremely expensive. In part, manufacturers have created complex, sophisticated, and costly speakers and amps in an effort to provide the best possible sound from the smallest possible speaker. And the smaller the speaker, the more power needed to drive it so it sounds good.

The result of all this is that if you want a decent hi-fi these days, and you have the ability to match the right amp to the right speakers, the final cost is high: in the neighborhood of $1,000 for just the speakers and amp.

There is a solution to all this technical mumbo jumbo that won’t please hi-fi manufacturers but will please you if you want to spend as little money as possible for the best sound.

The solution is to buy your hi-fi at your local musical instrument store, not your local hi-fi store. An amplifier and speaker set-up from a musical instalment store will cost around $600.

In the days before transistors, integrated circuits, and space age technology, a classic speaker design was developed that used only two speaker components in one box, operated at a very high efficiency (ie: worked with a low power amplifier), and produced fantastic sound. These speakers, patterned after The Voice Of The Theater speakers used in movie theaters and concert halls, are great except for one drawback: they’re three or four times larger in size than the ‘bookshelf type of speaker at your hi-fi store.

Voice Of The Theater type speakers are made by many manufacturers for use as p.a. system speakers. Among the best are those made by Yamaha, Cerwin Vega, Klipsch, and Strand Century. Recently I got a pair of Cerwin Vega’s for $225 each at my local music store, and they sound as good as anything I could have gotten at my hi-fi store for $500 each.

Using a pair of these highly efficient speakers means that you only need a power amplifier that puts out 20 to 50 watts per channel (and you’ll hardly use even that much power unless you want to blow your neighbors out of their living room). Again, I’d recommend buying a p.a. amp at your music store. Yamaha, for instance, makes a really excellent 50-watt amplifier that will cost under $300.

An additional benefit of buying the type of system I’ve outlined is that the components are made for rough usage, being on the road, getting knocked around. So sitting quietly in your room the odds are they’ll work longer and better than eomparable hi-fi equipment.

Finally, I’ve yet to hear a hi-fi speaker and amp combination, no matter how expensive (and some are in the $3000 to $5000 range) that is ultimately as pleasing to the ear as a Voice Of The Theater folded horn speaker box run by a moderately powerful amplifier. There is something about the design of the Voice Of The Theater that produces a warmer, fuller, more exciting sound, be it rock or classical, than any so-called “revolutionary” speakers piled up at your local hi-fi store.