The Obsessions of
Audio Journalists
Audio magazines have always attracted their fair share of
eccentrics as writers. That's undoubtedly true of other publishing endeavors as well, but
I imagine the technical complexity and sheer volume of audio writers' obsessions must be
fairly unusual. Here are some true stories about what some freelancers do (or did) when
not actually writing.
I won't exclude myself. At some point in the 1970s, a group
of acquaintances decided that they would hold a big party with a 1950s theme. That was a
fairly unusual thing for the time, as the decade had been held in some disfavor throughout
the hippy-dippy generation, but was now being rehabilitated as the kids who grew up then
were settling into grownup life.
In those days, the boom in oldies reissues was long in the
future, as the record companies felt that old records had about as much market appeal as
old fish. But the organizers of the event knew that I had hung onto all my old 45s, so
they approached me to provide music. I didn't much feel like lugging hundreds of discs and
a couple of turntables to the party, so I put about four hours' worth of music on tape and
took that.
I don't remember much about the party, but the tape had a
life of its own. Over the years, a number of people asked me for copies (I know, I know,
it was illegal to make them, but the music companies weren't selling the stuff then). A
couple of dubs I made for my office were even stolen, a fact I took as a sort of twisted
compliment.
But the tape, though fun, was a pretty haphazard affair,
thrown together in real time over the course of an evening. Many of the records used were
in pretty rough shape and not improved in the taping, and the selection was a random
sample of what I could put my hands on.
In subsequent years, reissues became common and I became a
major customer, filling in gaps in my collection and replacing 45s that had become (or
maybe always were) unlistenable. The collection grew, and consisted of original 45s, new
45s, LP collections, tracks on various artists' LPs and so forth. I liked having all that
stuff, but actually playing it was always a pain.
I decided it was time to put the best of it on tape, so I
could just push a button and sit back. But that involved cataloguing virtually everything,
picking which of several versions was in the best condition, arranging them into programs
that made sense musically and came out to an exact time, and actually recording them,
cleaning up the grotty ones as best I could.
The process took the best part of a year. When I wrote
about it, I suggested that the total was about three hours, which would fit on a couple of
C90 cassettes. In fact the whole works was 20 hours long and contained more than 500
tracks.
Then I did what I swore never to do: I started to buy CD
reissues of most of it. Now I could just load them in a multi-disc changer and let it do
the work.
Then there was Ray. Ray was a university professor who
loved opera. But, although he had a substantial collection of mainstream recordings, his
passion was for bootleg recordings of operatic performances. I recall reading an article
at the time detailing how they were made: in the days before portable tape recorders were
small enough to be smuggled into an opera house, the trick was to book a couple of seats
mid-house spaced slightly apart; each would be occupied by someone wearing a wireless
microphone, and the signals would be picked up in a van near the theater and taped.
Ray played a few of these and I was astonished at how good
the recording quality often was, and that they circulated in the opera underground not as
tapes but as properly-pressed LPs. Even more astonishing was how many there were: Ray
lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and every inch of every wall was lined with shelves full
of these bootlegs. There were thousands -- far more than he would ever be able to listen
to. No matter: he had 'em.
Bob was also an opera fan but of more conventional stripe,
with ordinary recordings. He did belong to an underground of sorts, though, trading things
like long-dead radio shows, historic recordings (the first stereo tape, recorded in 1936),
and -- strange for an American -- obscure early Canadian discs.
Understandably, a lot of this material was on very noisy
tapes and very scratchy records, but Bob was determined to transfer practically all of it
to recordable CD. At considerable time and expense, too, although the expense is mitigated
somewhat by the fact that Bob's a master scrounger and has talked a lot of blank discs out
of their manufacturers. But now he's finding the majority of what he's archiving is coming
out on commercial discs anyway, which are far better in quality.
Perhaps Paul takes first prize, though. Paul worked as an
audio technician for a TV station in northern Ontario, and he became fixated on Stanley
Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Paul was no acidhead groovin' on the
psychedelia; it was the other-worldly fantasy that appealed to him. So much so that he
drove down to Toronto to see the movie dozens of times: so many that movie critic Clyde
Gilmour kept a running tally of viewings in his column. Big news to Paul was "they've
got a new print," although he always noticed if they clipped a couple of frames from
the end of reel 3.
He determined early on that some of the musical selections
on the soundtrack album were not the exact performances used in the film. Further,
although the recordings used were identified in the movie's credits, down to the record
numbers, Paul discovered errors there too, and sought out the right performances.
The crowning moment came some time later when 2001
played at a local drive-in theater. He and a buddy borrowed a portable tape recorder and
took it to the drive-in. There they took the back off the speaker box, clipped wires to
the speaker, and plugged that into the recorder. He already had all the music; now he had
the dialogue, and he painstakingly assembled a complete recreation of the soundtrack from
these elements.
The last time I saw Paul, he invited me to check out his
latest 2001 incarnation. A short time before, the movie had run on television for
the first time, and on the strength of that showing, Paul had run out and bought a Betamax
VCR -- the first I'd seen -- for something like $1500. He'd synchronized his own stereo
soundtrack to the off-air pictures of the movie in what has to be a very early attempt at
home theater.
Now he could buy the DVD. But what would be the fun of
that?
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
|
