Homecoming

It feels great to be home again!
This newspaper was where I spent some of the best years of my career. I’m proud to be part of The Philippine Star’s early years, when e-mail and computers were unheard of in a country trying to stand up and dust off the ugly spoils of the 20-year Marcos dictatorship. It was the era when wearing yellow was both fashionable and perilous, as this newspaper’s first banner story proclaimed: "Wear yellow and die!" It was here that a lot of opportunities opened up for me. I took one of them, and left the Star and my friends with a very heavy heart. The tremendous growth of this paper has been exceptional, and its efficient people bring to reality day after day its avowed credo, "The truth shall set us free." I just hope I still fit in.

As the title of my column suggests, this space will try to take you into the fascinating world of people whose ardor for good music is supreme. They are called audiophiles or audio purists. To them, music is trash if it is not reproduced faithfully as one would hear it from where it was recorded. They are passionately interested in high- quality sound and enjoy experi-menting with sound equipment to find the best possible music reproduction, thus the term "hi-fi" for high fidelity.

Hi-fi certainly does not mean music being compressed into digitized files such as MP3s. For audiophiles, this is the worst that can happen to recorded music. This column will try to teach you how to distinguish quality sound from bad, and the simplest methods of evalua-ting various sound equipment. An audiophile is expected to at least have the basic technical knowledge of how sound is reproduced. A suc-cessful marriage between an objective science and very subjective music appreciation is, after all, what audiophiles have long been after.

The music industry owes a huge debt of grati-tude to audiophiles who came before us. Their unfli-nching dedication to bring Carnegie Hall right into the comfort of our music rooms spelled billions of dollars in earnings for music artists from the early days of Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzge-rald, The Beatles, and today’s Black Eyed Peas and the Pussycat Dolls, among others.

Had audiophiles not fiddled with amplifiers and stereo speakers to try out high-fidelity recordings in the comfort of their homes, we would not have a vibrant music industry today. They were first audiophiles before becoming entrepreneurs. Names such as Avery Fisher, Jim Lansing, Sidney Harman, Hermon Scott, Henry Kloss, Amar Bose, Paul Klipsch and Saul Marantz made sure hi-fi equipment would be a major part of our living rooms.

Other major audiophile achievements were: the first high-fidelity corner horned speaker by Klipsch in 1946; Kloss’s acoustic-suspension speaker in 1956; the first transistorized amplifier from Fisher Electronics (conceived in a factory at the site now occupied by the Lincoln Center symphonic hall that bears the company founder’s name); the first audio receiver by Harman-Kardon; and the first commercial stereo headphones from John Koss in 1958.

Philips Electronics N.V’s audiocassette in 1963 made music affordable to the masses. Four years later, a college student named Ray Dolby came up with a system that removed the hiss noise from the tape. Dolby was also credited with helping invent video recording. We welcomed Earl "Mad Man" Muntz in the mid-’60s for his four-track endless-loop tape. He later bought the rights to and mass-produced William Lear’s eight-track audiocassette format which first made its mark in Ford cars in 1965.

So, allow me take you on a wonderful journey to the marvelous world of audiophiles. Who knows? You, too, may take on a hobby that you would never wish to get rid of.

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For comments or questions, please e-mail me at vphl@hotmail.com