4/7/11
MY ADVENTURES WITH MUSIC AND SOUND--THE BEGINNING
I’m going to try to give a short summary of the beginnings of my history with music and sound. I guess I should start by saying that my mother was a soprano and sang with the Jenny Lind Choir. She had made several recordings in the 1940’s and continued to sing in choirs well into the 60’s. My father played tuba in the town band, which was conducted by Dr. Harold Hunt, who also was instrumental in getting me involved in music around the 6th grade. At this point I began to do audio-visual work for the school system, showing movies, running stage lighting and making recordings with early tape recorders. In 1959 I graduated from junior high school with an award for service to the school. This was given mainly for all the years of audio-visual work that I did in various classes and for working with stage productions.
As I got into high school, I became connected with Johnny Hanks and Steve Killiani, who were at that time putting on county-western shows at the New Milford CT theater. I continued in high school doing audio-visual work and also working for Trail Dust Enterprises, which was Johnny and Steve’s business. This is also the time that I began playing in bands. It was during this time period that I met Dave Freeman who was the local guy that did sound for all the events taking place around New Milford and spent quite a bit of time learning from Dave. Dave was also a wonderful guitar player. During this time period, most of the stuff that is used today in what we now call media art had not been invented. We were using tube-driven amplifiers, usually 2 or 3-channel. In some cases this public address system was hitched up to horns mounted in the ceiling. In other cases, there would be a set of 12-inch speakers on either side of the stage. All of these units were between 30 and 100 watts of power. They were very mid-sounding and for the most part were very portable and could be used in multiple locations.
As new equipment came on the market, I was there to learn about it, understand it, and in some cases even help people with design ideas and technology. I began all of this before I had even graduated from high school. By the time I graduated from high school while playing in bands, I got to use all of the new equipment as it came out. I was even privileged to be involved with several pieces of equipment which were prototypes that are considered state of the art today. It was during this time that I met Aldo Gizalbert, who was an expert on high fidelity and sound equipment. He was my first mentor and helped me build my first high-fidelity sound system. Mr. Gizalbert has been gone quite a while, but a lot of his design ideas and concepts have been brought into being today by outfits such as Bose and Altech Lansing. To my knowledge, there is still one of his sound systems in the musical department of Northville Elementary School, New Milford CT.
When you look at sound equipment today you very rarely see the word “high fidelity.” But there is a higher fidelity. A high-fidelity system is described as a system that will propagate a wave form from zero Hz to 100,000 Hz. Now you may say to yourself, why on earth would we want a sound system that would produce these frequencies when most human beings can hear only from 40 or 50 Hz up to about 16 K? While this is true that this is the normal range of human hearing, the human skin—which is the largest organ in the body—can hear from 0 to 100,000 Hz. What has happened over the years is that we have decided because of cost to settle for less. If you go into most electronic stores nowadays you will very rarely see the term high fidelity because most of the equipment is not capable of reproducing that width of frequency ranges. But we have become accustomed to it—which is why MP3’s have become so popular. MP3’s are actually a little bit better quality than what used to be on cassette tapes. But for most people, that is a high enough quality. When you experience true high fidelity, which very few people have experienced, it gives you a little bit different slant on what is possible with sound.
So not matter whether you’re dealing with analog or digital, we have certain limitations that we’re always dealing with. It is said that the steel of a sound man is a person who can work with limited equipment and give you good sound. Nowadays, thanks to all the wonderful editing features, algorithms and plug-ins that are available to us, we can really make the most out of the sound that we have to deal with for the equipment that it’s going to be played on.
This is about as negative as I’m going to get during all of this because there are a lot of wonderful qualities that we have in our digital realm. And the digital realm is improving day by day. Many, many, years ago when I sat with Isaac Stern and listened to the first digital recording made on CD, he was one of the first people that I knew who had a CD player. We both agreed at that point that there was quite a bit missing. Since then, the digital domain has improved quite a bit and nearly everybody knows what a CD or digital recording is.
In the next post, I will deal with my ventures into the world of digital and how I got from an analog high-fidelity world to a digital, not-so-high-fidelity, but more pristine world.
Doug Travers
LuvSounders Studios
4/07/11
