When I was a kid the audio world was still in the monophonic hi-fi stage, for the most part. Stereo recording was already in existence, but stereo LPs were extremely few and far between, and almost nobody had stereo players. (Some of those very early stereo recordings have been re-issued of late, and they’re surprisingly good, by the way.) We weren’t a rich family with audiophile types who could afford anything in the way of a fancy record player. In fact, my parents’s taste in music was average; they had various popular singers like Sinatra, Edie Gormé, Glenn Miller, that sort of stuff. They played it on an RCA Orthophonic Hi-Fidelity player, a blondewood affair with a grill in the front and lid you lifted to get to the record changer inside. If you ever want to see one in action, it’s in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” — Jimmy Stewart’s girlfriend (played by Barbara Bel Geddes) has one playing in her apartment all the time, usually Mozart.
I had various small record players in my room as a kid, of course. They were pretty bad — plastic tone arm, cheap mechanism, tinny speaker. But that’s how I first listened to orchestral music and got hooked. I remember getting to know the Nutcracker Suite almost note-for-note via a Capitol recording, conducted by Roger Desmoré; I’m not sure what the orchestra was. It was an LP that, I think, must have been a reissue of some earlier 78-RPM disks since it boasted that it had both the Nutcracker and Swan Lake right on the same long-playing disc! Quite the phenomenon for those days, I guess.
So recorded sound, while available, wasn’t particularly glamorous. It was nice enough, I think, but I there were some big surprises in store. Those came in the way of the big Cinerama theater, first in Houston, and then in Dallas. I have incredibly vivid memories of “How the West Was Won” in that big Cinerama theater, and almost losing it due to the gigantic sound. Cinerama was the first movie medium to use what we would now call “surround” sound — a seven-channel speaker that included rear surround type speakers. And those being the big, high-power days, I can well imagine that the playback equipment was loaded with big heavy vacuum tubes, probably generating enough heat to cook a turkey, and probably using up enough power to light up an entire third world village. The sound was absolutely huge, sharply realistic, and downright orgasmic from my point of view. In all likelihood it would seem less thrilling to me now — as hearing the completely restored “Lawrence of Arabia” in a big first-run movie theater some years ago proved; it wasn’t as good as I remember, but I didn’t have modern THX, Dolby-surround modern movie sound as a base of comparison. For the early 1960s Cinerama sound was sine qua non in audiophile thrills.
So part of my teen years involved a frustrating search for better sound. It was frustrating primarily because of the almost total lack of funds. I just couldn’t have a “real” stereo set for quite a while. At one point my parents decided to retire the RCA Orthophonic Hi-Fi (they weren’t listening to records any more), and so I got it. The turntable wasn’t working by that point, so my Dad and I got together and bought an old cheap secondhand turntable, and I used some car-style speakers for an eight-track player that my sister had been given by a boyfriend (I think he stole them). Using the amplifier in the Orthophonic, with the turntable and the speakers, I was able to wire it all together (hardly difficult — input here, output there) and get a working record player. Which didn’t sound all that good, but at least it worked. But there it was, the mid-1960s, and I was still monophonic. Mono LPs were becoming scarce, and the stereo ones tend to distort quite a bit when played on a mono player. (You could use a stereo cartridge in the mono turntable and wire the two channels together for mono, but I didn’t know that. And besides, I couldn’t have afforded a stereo cartridge, anyway, so it’s best that I didn’t know.)
Finances improved and in high school I was given a nice modern RCA stereo record player. Again, it was hardly high quality — and by that point (about 1969), you could buy audiophile-grade equipment that is still used by people today. But of course we didn’t have that kind of money. But it was the best I could get at the time, direct from Target. I also developed a passion for headphones, although the RCA didn’t have a headphone jack. Eventually I pestered my Dad enough so that he took the RCA to an electronics guy who actually rigged a headphone jack into it, and I got a set of Radio Shack headphones. Again, they weren’t very good, but it was a big improvement for me so I could fill my head with big sound without driving the rest of the family crazy.
Interestingly enough I never became an audiophile type who insists on the absolute ultra-expensive best, like those incredible $11,000 Linn CD players or the like. But it did take a while before my ear was reasonably satisfied, and then I was able to cool it and stop worrying. Nowadays I play most of my stuff off the computer (ripping the CDs to the hard drive using fairly high bit-rate mp3), through a nice digital amplifier, with some really fine British loudspeakers (not particularly expensive ones, but clean and warm.) I remain incredibly fussy about headphones — my main ones are top of the line Sennheisers, expensive puppies but worth every penny.
I think my current sound system would have sent the 10-year-old me into a state of bliss. Too bad I can’t revisit that mindstate, though. It would be fun to go through it all over again.