The Admonitor, Comments on Current Ads (Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan/Feb 1977)

In this column, which we plan to be a regular feature, we monitor the ads addressed to audio enthusiasts, admonish (get it?) the ones that aren't telling it like it is, and occasionally give the good guys a pat on the back.

Pioneer HPM-200

In the March 1976 issues of the hi-fi slicks, Pioneer announced with gorgeous full color gatefolds its intention to stake a belated claim in the high-end market. The advertised item was the Pioneer HPM-200 speaker system, a big $500-per-side floor-standing unit featuring their "revolutionary" piezoelectric film tweeter and possessing no deep bass even according to the response curve shown else where in their promotional literature. (Maybe 30 Hz is bad for those Japanese paper walls.) "In the last 24 months," headlined the outer flap of the ad, "11 companies have introduced 'super amplifiers' that you can't fully appreciate until you hear them through these speakers." When you opened up the gatefold, it said inside: "Introducing HPM-200. The first speakers designed to deliver all the sound expensive, high-power amplifiers can produce." Imagine that. There you were with your Yamaha B-1 or your Dynaco Stereo 400 (these happened to be among the expensive power amps actually photographed with the Pioneer speaker for prestige rub-off) and you were asked to feel frustrated because so far you could hear your amplifier only through, let us say, Magneplanar Tympani ITIA's or Fulton J's or (in especially underprivileged cases) double KLH Nines. Holy credibility gap! We had a chance to hear the HPM-200 shortly thereafter, and our ears confirmed the response curve in the spec sheet. No bass.

The rest of the range wasn't bad, for a Pioneer speaker. Nor was it phenomenally good. But all that was long ago and this is a newsy publication, right? Well, here we are ten months later, looking at the January 1977 issue of High Fidelity.

Would you believe it-there's the same gate fold. They didn't even bother to change the words "24 months' and "11 companies." Apparently these super amplifiers come out with cyclical regularity, always 11 of them every 24 months.

Now the one thing that distinguishes sophisticated hype from amateurish bull is follow-through. We don't expect a bottom-line oriented company like Pioneer and their high powered advertising agency to talk to the consumer with the restraint of, say, a Dahlquist.

But when they stretch the credulity of the high end buyer to the limit, they could at least follow through and give him credit for a ten-month memory. Audiophiles read all the speaker ads all the time. The original ad was smooth double talk, at best. Repeating it ten months later unchanged is either the rankest cynicism or just plain incompetence.

(Incidentally, have you noticed that Pioneer has been running the same few full color ads over and over again? For a company that makes so many different products and has such a huge advertising budget, that's not very informative-nor imaginative.)

Dual CS-721

In our detailed article on tone-arm geometry in this issue, we have parenthetically commended Dual for their advertising stand on the superiority of straight arms over cosmetically curved arms. Here we just want to make it official.

Audio equipment advertising should be informative, and here's an example of solid engineering fact laid on the line by an influential company in a particular product area. It's nice to see simple high-school physics-class reality prevail where pseudo-technical fantasies are the general rule.

We haven't tested any of the new Dual turntables yet (it's really only the CS721 that belongs in a high-end oriented publication), so we can't possibly vouch for their advertising claims. But we're quite certain that the shape of the tonearm isn't one of the weaknesses, if any, of Dual's design approach.

B.I.C. "Dynamic Tonal Balance Compensation"

Here's a fatuous speaker gimmick with an advertising handle that probably works beautifully wherever the word "flat" is poorly understood.

Imagine a speaker that changes the shape of its frequency response curve from moment to moment while the music is playing! It has got to be the Fletcher-Munson mis-interpretation of all time-and there have been quite a few.

The B.I.C. Venturi ad (we last saw it in the December 1976 High Fidelity) shows a dead-flat response curve and labels it "The 'perfect' speaker." Superimposed on it is a hill shaped curve peaking at around 2.5 kHz and labeled "What your ear hears." The headline proclaims: "This is the 'flat' response curve produced by a theoretically perfect loudspeaker as your ear hears it!" The copy explains that the response of the human ear isn't flat and that it's un-flat to varying degrees at different sound pressure levels. Ergo, what you need is the exclusive B.I.C. feature that compensates for this obnoxious variation continuously in accordance with the dynamics of the music.

What the brainstorm troopers at B.I.C. apparently forgot is that in real life the frequency response of the concert hall remains constant even though the music varies in dynamics. And the hearing of the musicians and singers is every bit as unflat as yours, the listener's, so they instinctively adjust their loudness at different frequencies to make everything sound the way you ought to hear it. Without the necessity of varying the frequency response of the air between you and them dynamically.

So if in reproduction you make a further dynamic adjustment, it's in effect a double adjustment. That peaked curve in the B.I.C. ad is totally misleading. Through a "flat" speaker, you won't subjectively hear a 2.5 kHz peak. You'll hear the world exactly as it is. Not flat-because even ideally the world isn't flat.

( Columbus knew better than B.I.C.) Just real.

Only the reproducer is supposed to be flat.

Of course, the concept of a constant (not dynamically varying) loudness contour is an other matter altogether. If you listen at a level 20 dB below what the musicians had in mind, you could lose some of the low notes, so that fixed loudness compensation in accordance with the -20 dB equal-loudness curve would have some appeal for background music. That's probably at the root of the B.I.C. howler.

Even in their misinterpretation, though, the B.I.C. people were a bit behind the times, since recent research shows that the Fletcher Munson effect is valid only at low frequencies and that people with normal hearing respond to the higher frequencies quite equally at different levels. The B.I.C. contour is hinged in the middle and compensates for both highs and lows. 2 We called up the B.I.C. Venturi engineering department (cleverly disguised as the average gullible audio freak) and asked a few wide-eyed questions about all this. We were told that the automatic compensation is accomplished by means of a thermistor that responds very slowly, so "it doesn't breathe like an expander." But what happens when the music has been soft for a while, the thermistor circuit has settled down to a nice, fat bass boost and there's a sudden fortissimo with bass drum? Wow. Anyway, we were told, you can always switch off the automatic mode and use the manual control, which acts more or less as a conventional loudness control.

We have an even better idea. How about using another speaker? For the price of the top of-the-line Formula 7 incorporating this Mickey Mouse feature, you can buy a Dahlquist DQ-10 and have a nice piece of change left over.

Are we going to test the B.I.C. Formula 7? We doubt it very much. Maybe we're prejudiced, but so was the movie director who refused to audition Peter Lorre for the role of Abraham Lincoln.

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[adapted from TAC, Vol.1, No.1 ]

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Also see:

Sophisticated Speaker Systems, Large and Small: Continuing Our Survey --- Beveridge 'System 2SW' (follow-up) ; Canton HC 100 ; Dayton Wright XG-8 Mk 3 ; DCM 'Time Window' (Improved) ; Hartley 24' Subwoofer ; Innotech D24 ; Spendor BC1 ; Tangent RS2 ; Ultraphase 2501

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines