by JULIAN D. HIRSCH
FTC POWER RULING REVISITED: I have received the following interesting letter from Robert Orban, chief engineer of Orban Associates, a concern well known for its commercial sound recording and broadcast equipment, and would like to share part of it with my readers for its viewpoint on matters that are still a long way from being resolved.
Dear Mr. Hirsch: This letter comments on your praise of the FTC power ruling for audiophile power amplifiers; I feel that your arguments (or apologies, as it were) are specious.
In a free market, the manufacturer devotes himself to giving the customer what he wants.
He must do so to survive competition. While he has the opportunity to try to affect the customer's desires by advertising, his competitors have the same privilege. If one manufacturer tries to deceive potential customers, another manufacturer can take out an ad de crying this deception, and in fact capitalizing on his own "honesty." The list of scenarios is endless, but as long as free competition prevails, things settle down. Only when manufacturers collude to fix prices and/or systematically deceive customers does the sys tem break down.
Now, once again, the Federal Government is engaged in the task of protecting the people from themselves. If the free market were left to its own devices, it would offer the customer the best sound for the least money consistent with reliability acceptable to the majority.
Those who wanted more reliability could pay for it; different manufacturers in this business have well-defined reputations for various ratios of quality, reliability, and value.
However, the FTC is now applying a hid den tax on the consumer. The consumer no longer has the option of choosing an amplifier or receiver which cannot pass the one-hour preconditioning, despite the fact that this receiver would have a significantly lower price than one which could pass the preconditioning, and further would almost certainly per form as well when playing music in the consumer's home. Your arguments that prices in terms of dollars per watt have not risen are specious; there is an added cost in terms of additional heat sinking and more rugged out put devices. This is as inevitable as the laws of thermodynamics or TANSTAAFL (that is, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). Sure, this may result in higher reliability. But would you argue that therefore the consumer should be forced to buy a heavy-duty restaurant-type stove or an industrial vacuum cleaner? Reliability should be his choice.
The power-output specification is even more absurd, in that it has only the vaguest and most casual correlation with how the amplifier sounds and with how loudly it can play music into real loudspeakers. The con sumer is being sold a bill of goods by the Federal Government. Average power is now Best by Government Test, despite the fact that it tells us only how good an amplifier might be as a power source for an incandescent lamp or a toaster. The IHF's Music Power, for all its faults and abuses, was at least an honest at tempt to specify an amplifier's performance reproducing high peak-to-average program material like music. And the further problem of how an amplifier deals with frequency-dependent reactive loads (Mr. Consumer's loudspeakers, that is) was just beginning to be attacked by certain innovative manufacturers when the FTC effectively shut the whole thing down.
In addition, I am sure you are aware that once THD goes below about 0.5 percent it stops having any effect in predicting the sound quality of an amplifier. THD is such a crude measurement psychoacoustically that about the best it can do is differentiate be tween an unlistenable amplifier and one that is mediocre or better. The fact is that despite the exercises you go through each month to verify or disprove manufacturers' specifications, neither you nor I nor anyone else has the foggiest notion of how to make measurements which will correlate psychoacoustically with the subtle differences in the sound of today's component-grade amplifiers. However, Total Harmonic Distortion is now Best by Government Test, and the lid is effectively clamped on developing new and improved ways to measure consumer amplifiers. Fact is, the government should have specified the clipping point as the reference level for power measurements if it wanted to use anything at all.
Let us sum up: The FTC, in the guise of protecting the consumer, has applied an un legislated tax on all amplifiers, has restricted the consumer from choosing the degree of quality and reliability he wants to pay for, and has cast in stone two measurements which have only slight correlation to how good an amplifier sounds when playing music through loudspeakers.
Until the American people give up the idea that the Federal Government can redress all grievances, solve all problems, and generally take responsibility for their lives, we will have more and more excesses like the FTC ruling.
This disturbs me greatly, because I see a strong correlation between this attitude and the general decline in the quality of American goods, in the output of American innovation, and in the ability of the United States to compete successfully in world markets on the basis of technological leadership. This leader ship can come only from strong, individual entrepreneurs who can innovate without being crushed by the weight of government regulation and who can reap the financial benefits of their ideas without being robbed by excessive taxation. As for the consumer, a bit more caveat emptor and a lot less hand-holding seem to me to be the healthiest roads to take.
-Robert Orban
Mr. Hirsch replies: Philosophically, I am in essential agreement with Mr. Or ban-I also emphatically do not approve of government interference with private actions that are not related to the public welfare, and this includes the bulk of legislation intended to protect the consumer from himself as well as unscrupulous businessmen.
There is another side to this coin, however: the average consumer is in no position to judge the validity of advertised performance claims. A case in point is the gross abuse of the old music-power rating, which resulted in almost no correlation between an amplifier's advertised power and its actual performance.
Reliability, or the lack of it, is one of the major problems facing the consumer whether we are dealing with light bulbs or automobiles. There may be room for argument as to whether this or that amplifier sounds better than some other.
There is no doubt that an amplifier that tends to blow up or break down is worth less, regardless of the impressive claims made for it while it works. I don't feel that reliability, where not related to safe ty, should be mandated by the government, but it is a good thing to have if the cost is not excessive.
As for total harmonic distortion, I must agree that measurements of this do not tell us much about how an amplifier sounds. Although this is not the time to go into the matter, I do not believe that any amplifier that is reasonably good and operating as intended has any sound quality of its own, at least not in the sense that phono cartridges, speakers, and listening rooms have their distinctive sounds.
My original comments were inspired by the realization that, whereas it used to be commonplace for amplifiers to fail to survive even a moderate amount of full-power testing, these catastrophic failures have become very rare since the FTC regulations took effect. (I am speaking only of my personal experience, of course.) I am convinced that the reliability of hi-fi amplifiers as a class has, at power levels up to their rated maximums, been dramatically improved since the power rating rules were promulgated. Perhaps this is mere coincidence, and perhaps it is not. Since I do not see any corresponding increase in the general price structure, I think I am entitled at least to suspect that this particular bit of government interference with our personal prerogatives has been a benefit to the high fidelity consumer. Perhaps it was an ill wind that blew some good.
I would also like to remind Mr. Orban that anyone who doesn't care to have that reliability forced down his throat can still buy a mass-produced, cabinet-encased "hi-fi," one not affected by the FTC rules because its power is not advertised, and get the same old shoddy junk that used to be available to a wider segment of the populace. It is, thank God, still a free country . . .
Technical Editor Larry Klein comments: In the fifteen years I've been working with Julian Hirsch, I've found that about every five years or so he and I will disagree about something. That time is once again upon us-at least in respect to the question of reliability. If a manufacturer's repair data indicate that, from the point at which their amplifying equipment began to conform to the FCC preconditioning requirements, there was an improvement in overall reliability for home use, then Julian would be correct.
However, my impression is that the failure rate of amplifiers used in the home, taking into account the normal evolution of improved technology, is at about the same level as it was before the FCC got into the act. In any case, the FCC did not intend to set up, with its rule, a life / ruggedness / reliability test for amplifiers; the intention was simply to "precondition" (meaning "warm up") the amplifier to prepare it for testing. The fact that many amplifiers could not handle the accidentally severe stress of the preconditioning period was the end result of a series of flukes and misunderstandings that took over a year to straighten out.
I have no question about Julian's personal experience with the amplifiers he has tested; my reservations concern the validity of generalizing from an amplifier's ability to survive a peculiar high stress, test-bench condition to its reliability in ordinary home use. I believe the two are not necessarily related, particularly in a case such as this one, where the stressing test was not designed to produce reliability data. Of course, in self defense, the manufacturers had to redesign their units to withstand the FTC's test procedure. But whether this ability has anything to do with reliability in normal home use remains moot.
In respect to the "free enterprise" question, I must disagree with both Juli an and Mr. Orban. To paraphrase Thom as Jefferson: "Educate and inform the entire mass of the people, for they are our only sure guarantee of freedom." Perhaps fortunately for him, Mr. Jefferson could not foresee a time when such education and information for "the en tire mass of the people" would be simply impossible; these days even an engineering degree won't guarantee that you will be able to make an informed decision be tween, say, two competing toasters, no less amplifiers. Technology has over whelmed us all, and we need protection from those who would foist shoddy goods (and, yes, shoddy ideas) on us through deliberate mis-education and misinformation. It is best that the con sumer get some protection against his unavoidable ignorance rather than none at all, even though that protection may occasionally be inept.
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Also see:
EQUIPMENT TEST REPORTS: Hirsch-Houck Laboratory test results on the: Audio Pulse Model One time-delay system, Avid 101 speaker system, Realistic SA-2000 integrated stereo amplifier, and Shure M24H stereo/quadraphonic phono cartridge, JULIAN D. HIRSCH
INSTALLATION OF THE MONTH, RICHARD SARBIN