Hail to the chief
The allure of audio is the complete recreation of past sonic events. It is the only medium that comes close to a ‘suspension of disbelief’ of our sensual experience. Advances in equipment have brought our audio experiences to a level of incredible realism. Yet, if I may hazard a guess, we’re only halfway ‘there.’ I believe that the reproduced and the real are still worlds apart. Not even the best of recording can come close to what we hear in the real world: the cry of a baby wanting attention; the bursts of pyrotechnics on the 4th of July, or the noise created by firecrackers during New Year’s Eve revelries,” environmentalist and audiophile Armando “Mandy” V. Mariño declares.
Seventy-year-old Mandy knows whereof he speaks. He is after all the acknowledged grandmaster of audio and the most revered person in various audiophile communities. But it took a while before Mandy re-discovered his passion for audio. An electrical engineer from Mapua Institute of Technology, he left the country for the US after passing the board exam. He eked out a successful career in Zenith Radio in Chicago, took an early retirement at 55 and went back to the Philippines, only to be utterly disappointed by the degradation of the once pristine Sampaloc Lake in San Pablo, Laguna.
It was in the same lake that he frolicked with his friends. Mandy decided that he could not and would not let environmental decay totally destroy the lake of his youth. Together with his wife Emma, he actively fought for the lake’s rehabilitation, tirelessly seeking public and government support. Always passionately pursuing the causes he believes in, it is therefore not surprising that Mandy succeeds in whatever projects he undertakes. And it shows in all of his audio masterpieces: a cart body chiseled out of a mammoth tusk (the tusk was acquired by a friend long before the ban on the sale of ivory); a tone arm sculpted to perfection from a kamagong wood, and a brass casing for the cartridge, among many other custom-built audio accessories.
Mandy grew up during the golden years of audio. He was a witness to the birth of high-fidelity gears in the late ‘50s. To him, hi-fi was a giant leap toward musical realism. “The sound was so beguiling,” Mandy recalls. “We took to building high-fidelity amplifiers (especially the one from the old RCA receiving tube manual) and big speakers — the bigger, the better it seemed.”
He thought it was his busy work schedule in the US that caused him to drift away from audio. He belatedly found out that what really drove him away from audio was the industry’s technological shift from tube to transistor amplifiers. “I had junked my obsolete tube gear in favor of the (supposedly) state-of-the-art, highly efficient transistorized amps greatly praised by the tin-eared audio reviewer Julian Hirsch. I kept playing musical chairs with my components, trying to find the combination that would please me. I never succeeded, and my stereo system remained mostly unheard, except during rowdy parties.”
A friend named Al Daniels changed his view. Apparently, Al was into tweaking gear — replacing some components such as capacitors, resistors and tubes, among others. Mandy was dumbfounded. He couldn’t believe that changing some parts of an already “perfect” and expensive electronic unit could change anything. And he wasn’t prepared to hear the music coming out of a Dynaco Stereo 70 amp that Al tweaked: “My jaw dropped, or was it a lockjaw? I heard the cleanest, sweetest sound that I was most familiar with, the kind of sound that I grew up with in the ‘60s. After much begging, he agreed to sell me the amp on the spot. From that moment on, I said goodbye to the world of super hype, and the bells and whistles.”
Thus began his love affair with DIY audio. Back in San Pablo, Mandy began creating his own audio gear with the perfect inspiration — a magnificent view and an enchanting ambiance. His property is nestled along a slope overlooking Sampaloc Lake and the beautiful garden that surrounds his workplace, which the audiophile community fondly call the dungeon, with him as the “dungeonmeister.” Mandy has successfully turned his dungeon into a place where dreams for musical bliss are made into reality.
Mandy says it is easy to think that audio has gone as far as it can go, given the performance of the most modern high-fidelity equipment and the apparent leveling off of improvements. But using his strictly personal rating system, he explains that, “The old RCA Victrola phonograph machine would rate an RQ (realism quotient) of 10 percent, the crystal/ceramic sourced phonograph 20 percent; hi-fi, 50 percent; and stereo, 60 percent. All other advancements for the past 40 years have raised the RQ by a mere two percent!”
The Last Word
“I suggest that they consider the fact that, in spite of the great strides in audio, there are multitudes of audiophiles who prefer the sound of vintage equipment. Their choice is not really a matter of economics since some of the ancient gear carries modern price tags. Audio needs a breakthrough similar to the advent of hi-fi. There is a wide window of opportunity, and I believe it will be in the area of electromechanical devices,” he says. “Electronic devices and circuits have largely been defined, and passive components have been improved to the point of diminishing returns. Turntables, cartridges, tone arms and loudspeakers have remained more in the realm of art rather than science. To date, there are neither scientific formulas nor specifications to describe or predict emotions. This scenario fits well with the psyche of the Filipino inventor who has not totally lost the power of human intuition. The mighty Western meter readers have contributed their two percent share; maybe, just maybe, Eastern tea-leaf readers can do better?”
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For comments or questions, please e-mail me at audioglow@yahoo.com or at vphl@hotmail.com. You can also visit www.wiredstate.com or http://bikini-bottom.proboards80.com for quick answers to your audio concerns.
