The Uphill Battle of an Audio Prize Winner
Thirty-five years ago, New York's
Grand Central Station featured two landmarks: a renowned oyster bar and the Acoustic
Research showroom, where weary travelers could retire and listen to classical music on
such memorable audio equipment as AR3a speakers. However, on a March afternoon in 1996, I
was less interested in bivalves and Beethoven than a discovery I had made at the station's
newsstand: a copy of Tape Recording magazine.
In my youth, I was interested in all aspects of audio, but
I was particularly fascinated with tape recording, and had picked up quite a few
production techniques, mostly by reading between the lines of conventional audio
magazines. Now, here was a publication devoted entirely to taping, and it was a wealth of
information.
Even more intriguing, however, was that I had chanced upon
the issue in which the magazine announced a major tape-recording contest. Such
competitions were standard fare in Europe and Japan, where active tape recordists were a
prominent subset of audiophilia, but in North America most hi-fi fans were content to
regard their hobby as a passive one, and the desire to roll one's own was not much in
evidence. In fact, the editors at a Canadian magazine that ran such a contest several
years later told me that they had received so few entries, and that the quality was so
poor, that they didn't even award the first prize.
But this American contest was definitely a big deal. For
one thing, the prize list was 350 items long; the bottom 250 were reels of tape, but the
top 100 were real components, such as microphones, headphones, mixers and, at the top, a
number of top-ranked tape decks. The grand prize was unbelievable: a complete Ampex
open-reel video-recording system worth some two thousand 1966 U.S. dollars.
Bearing in mind that this was almost a decade before the
real start of the consumer-video era, this prize was inexpressibly exotic. It included a
massive video recorder, a pro-style monitor, a video camera and a supply of videotape. I
had dreams about this setup. So, not very surprisingly, I decided to muster my taping
skills and submit an entry.
The theme was "Pop Sounds," and the idea was to
create something that used real sounds for some of the impact, rather than simply
recording the local string quartet. Shortly before I had learned about the contest, I had
encountered an LP by someone called Dean Elliott, called "Zounds! What Sounds!"
How could I resist a disc whose jacket boasted "A sonic spectacular presenting Music
with...cement mixer, air compressor, punching bag, hand saw, celery stalks...."
Listening to the disc, I concluded that the engineers had
simply edited together a series of pocketa-pocketa noises, which the band then played
along with. I decided to create something similar but without the cornball "big
band" instrumental. My composition was called "The Waltz of the Demented
Sound-Effects Man" and consisted of a string of precision mechanical edits (I cut the
tape and stuck it back together with the unwanted material removed) that rhythmically
brought together such sounds as dogs barking, hammers on anvils, locomotives chuffing, and
so forth, all in a pattern based on the "Skaters' Waltz." My mother claims to
this day that there was a toilet in it, but I swear it's not true.
Once I had completed this painstaking assembly job, I sent
it into the void and sat back to see what would happen. I waited more than a year with no
reaction whatsoever. The magazine wasn't available in Canada, and there was no phone
number in the issue I had. Nor did directory assistance offer much help. I concluded that
the magazine was defunct and I had wasted my time.
Then one afternoon I received a telephone call from a man
who lived in a nearby town who wanted to discuss the contest. It seems that his father in
England had won a prize and was curious to find out how the company would handle an award
outside the United States. He called his son, told him there was a Canadian on the list
who might have the same concerns, and asked him to call me to find out if I knew anything.
This was news! But what had I won? A few days later, I
received a form letter from the magazine congratulating me for winning a prize
(unspecified), and suggesting I contact them if it hadn't arrived in about 30 days. Now
that I had an address, I wrote and asked for a copy of the magazine in which the winners
were listed, which they obligingly sent.
Turning to the appropriate page I discovered that I hadn't
just won a prize, I had won the Grand Prize! Even my father began to wonder whether all
that time spent with my hi-fi gear had really been wasted after all. Money talks, and I
had just landed a chunk of electronics worth something like $3500 Canadian.
Ian Masters' Grand Prize: a 1966 Ampex open-reel
videotape recorder.
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Getting it was another matter. The 30 days passed, and then
60. Nothing. I wrote to the magazine, with no reply. I wrote to the other winners and
exchanged some lively correspondence, but no satisfaction. I wrote to Ampex Corporation,
which had donated the prize, with no answer. Finally, I resorted to the consumer help
column of one of the local newspapers. All that got me was a letter from some editorial
functionary at the magazine asking for a copy of whatever I had written for the paper.
Years later I became a close friend and colleague of the
editor of Tape Recording and he told me what a nightmare all of this was. Ampex had
donated the recorder under the assumption that they'd just have to ship it somewhere in
Tennessee or North Dakota and that would be the end of it. Instead, they were faced with
customs, import licenses, and Canadian electrical safety approvals (the model was never
offered by the Canadian wing of the company).
Even so, one day in February 1968, I received a call from
Ampex of Canada in Toronto's ‘burbs saying I could come and pick up my prize. The
recorder alone weighed more than 100 pounds and, in its box, was about the size of a
refrigerator, but we wrestled all of it into my family's car and I took it home.
It was wonderful. Clear, crisp pictures (black-and-white
only), great sound, even stop-frame. There was only one tape -- a second one would have
cost $90, out of reach of my student resources -- but I was content to use it over and
over.
But the thing was a mechanical nightmare. After one minor
repair cost me $200, I realized that any further problems would be final. Sure enough, the
recorder ground to a halt a few months later and has never been resurrected. It worked for
less time than it took to win it and receive it.
But who cares? I still think of myself as one of Canada's
first videophiles.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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