Lynn Olson: a Tiny History of High Fidelity
A Tiny History of High Fidelity, Part 1 A Rainy Night in Portland, 1936. Thanks to the restoration movement, much of downtown Portland still looks like this. Where do I come from? Where am I going? Who am I? These ancient questions are with us still. With only the slightest of changes, they can be recast into a form that provides a guidepost to the music lover, the audiophile, the hobbyist, and the artisan-engineer. Where does the art of sound reproduction come from? Where is it going? What do I seek from this art? Radio! 1900-1930 In the first years of Electrical Amplification, engineers had their hands full just trying to master the complex and non-intuitive mathematics of vacuum tube amplifiers and oscillators. It is worth keeping in mind that vacuum tubes were electronics in the first half of the Twentieth Century; before Lee DeForest modified Edison's light-bulb, the only form of "amplification" were relays that could repeat and rebuild telegraph signals. Radio relied on tuned circuits, massive brute-force spark-gap transmitters, large long-wave antennas, and crystal-diode rectification that directly powered the headphones. The faint signal that wiggled the headset diaphragm was a infinitesimal fraction of the megawatts that poured in all directions from the transmitter. Records, of course, were purely mechanical and acoustic, and wouldn't work at all if it weren't for horn-gain in recording and playback. What we now think of as electronic engineering back then was electrical engineering, focussed on keeping AC power transmission systems in phase and specialized techniques for pushing a telephone-audio signal down hundreds of miles of wire without benefit of amplification.
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