Sandy Stone is a world renowned Professor in New Media. She has a vast background in multi-media, dating back to zines and pirate radio’s she ran out of her parents basements. She worked at Bell Labs where she was on the development teams for “core memory” and “touch tone” technologies. She also worked as a rock and roll engineer at the Record Plant, specifically working with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and other “oldie moldies” as she calls them. She also owned her own stereo shop and worked with many “innovators” in the 70’s and 80’s.
She currently resides at the University of Texas at Austin, in the Radio, Television and Film department were she teaches in the ACTLab. This semester along with Joseph Lopez, she is teaching a course called “sound scapes” where they will explore sound theory, sound making and the electronic playback.
The article below are her remarks to the article by Joseph Lopez about hi-fi history:
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That’s very nice work, very informative and useful.
I don’t know if this is useful, but Advent was actually a late development. Ed Villchur invented the acoustic suspension loudspeaker when he was a researcher at the American Foundation for the Blind in New York City. AFB wasn’t interested (they explained all this to me when I accidentally reinvented the thing for them years later for the same research purpose that Ed originally did). After Ed moved to Woodstock, he started AR with Henry Kloss, because Kloss had been his student and showed promise. After a while Ed bought Kloss out because they couldn’t work together; Kloss was a strong personality who kept wanting to run the whole show. Kloss then formed KLH with Malcolm Low and Tony Hoffman, who at the time were also AR employees. Eventually they sold the KLH name and Kloss, who was really driven to be a mogul, somehow managed to avoid noncompetition problems and went on to start Advent, which made essentially the same speakers as KLH, which were essentially the same old AR3. Ed held the patent, but he tended to be easygoing. And eventually Kloss sold Advent for much the same reasons of incompatibility and moved on to Cambridge Soundworks, where he’s managed to keep it together so far.
AR made its turntable much later, after it had a solid reputation as a speaker manufacturer and in fact was shipping something like 35% of all high quality speakers manufactured in the 50s and 60s. Ed patterned his turntable on the Components Corporation turntable, which was designed by Jerry Minter at his company in Denville, New Jersey, and also on Paul Weathers’ turntable. The two couldn’t have been further apart in concept: Jerry’s was a huge cast-iron slab that weighed close to 30 pounds and was driven by a beefy synchronous motor and a special belt that stretched in only one direction. Its prototype was a 24″ monster that weighted 80 pounds and was driven by an old Ampex capstan motor bolted into its own floor stand four feet away. Its thrust bearing was a glass marble, though Jerry claimed he eventually switched to an industrial diamond. (See my note below.) Paul’s turntable was an ultralight stamped platter driven directly at the rim by a clock motor via a soft, floppy toothless rubber gear. It weighed practically nothing, and with a properly balanced Weathers tonearm you could actually pick the whole thing up and turn it upside down while it was playing a disc and it would keep right on playing. The platter, motor, and tonearm mount were attached to a metal Y-frame that floated on springs within the case. Ed wanted the silence and stability of the Minter design together with the lightness and portability of the Weathers design, so he took the suspended Y-frame and the clock motor and combined it with a drastically lightened cast iron platter to create the AR turntable.
Anyway, never mind that. I just want to mention that virtually none of that stuff happened in isolation. All the players knew each other and were riffing off each other and being jealous or admiring of each other in one way or another. Again, Sol Marantz learned from Avery Fisher, who was selling his stuff mounted in polished wood consoles that blended in with conservative living room furniture, and they both knew Rudy Bozak, who hated the idea of acoustic suspension, and in turn that larger group admired Ed Hafler’s Dynakit amplifier, which was the first affordable amplifier to use the Williamson Ultra Linear design output transformer. and all of them liked to swap tall tales with Paul Klipsch, who, with his pointy cowboy boots and Resistol hat, was likely the most eclectic character of them all. It was a big, sprawling conversation.
(My Note Below: Jerry’s motivation for the 80-pound turntable was that he’d designed a recording lathe that used a hydraulic piston in place of the leadscrew, because he wanted to get rid of the random low-frequency noise introduced by the leadscrew. He was experimenting with records having pitch in excess of 600-800 LPI with the eventual idea of producing 12″ vinyl records that could play for 24 hours at 8 RPM. This meshed very well with work going on at the American Foundation for the Blind, which was being funded by the U.S. government to develop talking books that could be mailed more cheaply, since the government picked up the postage bill for recordings mailed to or from the blind or vision-impaired. (In fact, we had a prototype disc that worked at 4 RPM with reasonable intelligibility, and could save a ton of money in postage, but we were having trouble designing a cheap turntable to play it.) Jerry’s behemoth could keep random low frequency noise well below one microinch. You could see the sound of traffic on the street outside, via the earth and the concrete foundation of the building, in the oscillographs of the groove noise. Don’t get me started.)
