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I have several thousand LPs in my collection, but if I was asked which one has had the greatest influence on my life, I'd have no hesitation in answering: "This Is High Fidelity". That may seem an exaggerated statement to make. Can any recording have a 'great influence' on someone's life? Yes. This disk changed the direction that my career would take. And it switched me on to a lifetime's love of classical music. "This Is High Fidelity" ("TIHF") was released on LP by Vox Records in 1955, and was sporadically, expensively, and usually only with difficulty available in the UK for a few years thereafter. It was always an import, was never pressed outside the US, and cost twice as much as any 'normal' LP. It became legendary, especially when supplies ran out and it was clear that no more would be made. My best friend and I, in our early teens and wasting our youth by home-building amplifiers from second-hand military components and loudspeakers from discarded radiogram cabinets, were loaned TIHF by his uncle. To a teenager who had grown up in Cornwall and whose exposure to classical music had been almost zero, it was a revelation. There was all this wonderful music that I didn't know about! And from a technical viewpoint, I decided then that what I really wanted to be was a sound engineer - what the narrator on TIHF calls "a recordist". The loaned disk was returned, and disappeared. For over forty years I hunted intermittently for another copy, haunting second-hand record stores especially when I got the chance of working in the US. The usual response from dealers was, "Ah yes, I know of it, of course. But I've never seen one." (Try eBay and the chances are you'll search for a year without seeing a copy for sale.) Finally in 2002 I located a copy at a dealer in California. I bid for it. I won! I was warned: the box is tatty but the LP itself seems OK. The package arrived. There was the tatty box; there was the glorious full-size 28-page book with its extensive, opinionated, essay and its fascinating charts; and there was the disk - in almost mint condition. I could hardly believe it. That is the LP from which this transfer and restoration has been made.
"This Is High Fidelity" was the creation of three men: Tyler Turner who wrote and produced it; Arthur Hannes who narrates it and whose voice is the only one we hear; and Ward Botsford, music enthusiast and co-owner of Vox at that time. All are legendary figures in their fields. Thirty seconds into the first track and you know you're in for something special. Bang! - you've been hit by Ravel's 'La Valse' and then the basso profundo voice of Art Hannes declaiming: "This Is High Fidelity..." From then on you'll be guided through the audio hot topics of the day - frequency response, distortion, acoustics, microphone technique - with example after example illustrated by extracts from a wide range of classical music from Frescobaldi to Hershey Kay's 'Western Symphony'. It's important when listening today to remember that this disk was conceived more than fifty years ago at a time when the long-playing record was just six years old and 'high fidelity' a relatively new and unfamiliar term. The musical extracts - obviously - had to be taken from previously issued recordings and though some still sparkle, others definitely show their age. They are, of course, all in golden monophonic sound. The problems facing recording engineers as well as enthusiasts for 'music in the home' weren't then about subtleties of directional interconnect cables and green pens being used on the edges of CDs, but about major challenges like getting anything better than a shriek for sound above 5 kHz, or getting the hum down to a not-too-objectionable level, or even getting the pickup to stay in the groove during loud passages on the disk! (At one point in TIHF there is a demonstration of music with and without harmonic distortion, and I recall looking at my best pal as we played the disk on our supposedly hi-fi equipment and asking: well, can you hear any difference?) The Vox disk of TIHF contained three tracks on side 2 that are not included in this restoration. The first is a series of frequency test tones (which however we used to check the calibration of our pickup and pre-amplifier). Then followed two tracks whose topics are 'the choirs of the orchestra' and 'the nature of sound' (mostly about chord structure) which are, frankly, boring, and not really concerned with high fidelity reproduction. We don't think that omitting these tracks is much of a loss.
This transfer and restoration have been made over many hours at very high quality so as to preserve as much of the original sound as possible, without adding tweaks or gimmicks. It would have been tempting for example to re-make the restricted frequency range samples, because the analogue filters in use in 1955 were nothing like as precise as a modern digital filter and when you're told that here is the sound "below 100 cycles" there's actually an awful lot of sound still there that's way above that value. We've tried to resist 'fixing' that. We have not touched the frequency balance of the original. On the other hand we have attacked the clicks, crackles, rumble, hum, swishes, vinyl roar, and pre-echos - all of which are diseases that the long-playing record was prone to catch. Our objective was simple: to let you hear this vintage recording at a quality closer to the master tape than anybody has heard it outside Vox's studio in 1955. You will, for example, hear background hiss which varies in level between the musical extracts, and between the music and the narration. That's original tape hiss you're hearing: if you wish to hear the LP's background noise, listen to the few seconds between the end of one track and before the start of the next. It's rather quiet. Shining the bright light of modern digital restoration on the recording has also revealed some problems and deficiencies that even the best analogue hi-fi equipment of the day wouldn't have shown up. For example if you listen carefully it's possible to hear two faults with the recording of Art Hannes' narration: a low-level 3rd harmonic hum at 180 Hz; and a curious very low-level metallic tonality which I recall one particular type of microphone could create. I also wonder about one note in the 'intermodulation distortion' sample, for although I've never encountered a pickup that could reproduce it cleanly, all give precisely the same fluttering effect - could this actually be intermodulation distortion generated in the cutting room not in the playback, I wonder? And on one of the samples the very beginning of the first note has been chopped, presumably by scrappy tape editing. So this is not perfection, and by modern standards it's not really 'high fidelity' either. It's a historical record of the state of the audio art at a particular time, by a particular record company. But it can still entertain, fascinate, educate, and occasionally challenge (if you can identify every musical sample, you're pretty knowledgable!). I
hope you enjoy it. Peter
Harrison
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