Sounds of our time
There are many people who have left their indelible mark on the study and appreciation of high fidelity sound reproduction.
In my last column, I talked about Emory Cook and his famous Rail Dynamic, one of the tracks from his highly acclaimed 78rpm vinyl album “Sounds of Our Time.” I wasn’t fortunate enough to actually hear it, but those who did were unanimous in marveling at its depth and the realism of his binaural sound reproduction technique. Between 1952 and 1966, Emory recorded, manufactured, and distributed some of the best audio recordings in the world. In 1990, he and his wife Martha donated their record company, master tapes, patents and papers to the Smithsonian Institution.
The source of sound, the vinyl album, is just a part of an entire sound system, which can only do justice to an excellently pressed vinyl when all its parts work together seamlessly. It’s impossible to appreciate an album’s magnificence without other sound gadgets giving it the necessary boost. The most critical of these gadgets are the loudspeakers. A good system must be built around them. This is the philosophy which Emory himself followed assiduously.
The story goes that Emory had to look for a speaker system capable of reproducing the entire dynamic range of his speeding train recording. He found it courtesy of his friend, Rudy Bozak.
Rudy left his job at Milwaukee’s Allen-Bradley Company, Cinaudagraph, and instrument makers C. G. Conn and Wurlitzer to peddle his first loudspeaker. It was told that he traveled from Boston to Buffalo, and traversed the coast from New York to Philadelphia, and made only a single sale. He was turning 40, but remained undeterred in making a dent in the then-flourishing high fidelity sound industry.
His big break finally came in 1949, during the “Second Annual Convention of the Audio Engineering Society” (AES) at Hotel New Yorker. Rudy was invited to participate in the audio fair. Although he didn’t buy space to showcase his creation (which was housed in a kettle drum), Rudy was told that a live comparison of loudspeakers would be held in the hotel ballroom, and AES wanted to hear what he had to offer. When interviewed later by the press, he said, “We put our 201 there, and it stood up with the best in the business at that time. There was Klipsch, Altec’s 604, JBL, the names that prevailed at that time, and we made a definite impression.”
Rudy was humble enough to declare that what really made him was his friendship with Emory. Both idealistic, their professional relationship clicked, and Emory and Rudy stole the limelight from other big names in loudspeaker design.
It was Emory’s penchant for dramatizing things, Rudy pointed out, that kept them on their toes. In 1951, Emory told Rudy that they had to steal the show during that year’s Audio Fair. The former asked the latter to come up with a loudspeaker with good bass and highs, which would enable Emory to flaunt his Rail Dynamics. It was this recording which caused quite a stir in Pound Ridge in New York’s Westchester County, where Emory’s neighbors would be roused from sleep by the distinct sounds of approaching and departing trains, in their quiet town, miles away from the next railroad track.
The recording did the trick again during the 1951 Audio Fair. Hotel guests were amazed by the rumbling sound wafting down the corridors and from around the corners. “Where are those railroad trains?” they wondered.
The dynamic duo surpassed this feat in the following year’s Audio Fair, by providing attendees with a spectacular bass. Emory had just recorded the works of English organist Reginald Foort, who had begun playing as an accompanist to silent movies in 1926, at the tail end of the silent era, and was a legend among enthusiasts of theater or cinema organ.
At a session in Boston’s Symphony Hall, Emory told Reginald that he would attempt to record him playing at 16 cycles. At that time, recording a tone that low had not yet been done. Reginald agreed.
Rudy’s role was to design a speaker that was capable of reproducing tones down to 19Hz to accurately reflect Reginald’s artistry. He then built a special pair of speakers, each of which had two cabinets. The lower housing, which contained eight 12-inch woofers, measured four feet wide, five feet high, and 21 inches deep. The second enclosure held two six-inch midrange drivers and a tweeter cluster.
Those who had heard the organ playing would gush at the thought — or more accurately, the feel — of the pedal frequencies swathing the entire hotel lobby. Emory and Rudy commented that “It’s not something you could resolve and say, ‘Oh, that’s an organ’ or whatever, but it’s strange how (the sound) would travel around the hotel up and down the elevator shafts then come out in the lobby. A feeling — not music, a feeling….”
Although the Concert Grand (CG) is Rudy’s grand achievement, the Bozak sound is also available in his smaller designs. The Concerto B-302A offers the CG’s midrange in a much smaller package. The Symphony B-4000A is closer in performance to the CG, but in a size that’s slightly easier to handle.
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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 for quick answers to your audio concerns.
