Canadian Audio Publishing Hits 40
Volume 1, number 1 of Electron, Canada's first
serious consumer-electronics magazine, launched in February 1964.
On Electron's tenth birthday, it became AudioScene
Canada, under which name it gained worldwide recognition.
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Newsstand staples in my youth were
those small broad-based techie magazines like Popular Science and Mechanix
Illustrated. Some of them are still published, of course, but now they share the
shelves with zillions of high-tech mags on all sorts of subjects. Back then, however, they
were about the only way laymen (and boys) could keep tabs on the booming '50s technology.
My favorite was Popular Electronics, in spite of the
fact that its combination of Ls and Rs made it practically impossible for me to pronounce.
One feature I liked was the ongoing saga of a couple of teenage electronics wizards named
Carl and Jerry -- the Hardy Boys with soldering irons -- who every month came up with a
way to stretch a kid's balloon over a wastebasket and use that to detect volcanic activity
on the other side of the globe, say, or to wrap miles of wire around a milk bottle and use
that to tap the public phone outside the town drugstore.
What I liked even more, however, were the snippets about
audio tucked in between articles on analog computers and build-it-yourself voltmeters.
Audio didn't take up a lot of room in this magazine, but it was covered to a degree, and
as far as I was aware, nobody else talked about it. It was years before I discovered on a
trip to New York that there were whole magazines devoted to nothing but hi-fi.
Over the last few decades, Canadian audiophiles have been
very well served by the magazine publishing industry, but until 40 years ago, there was
nothing. The change came in February 1964 when a Montrealer named Tom Graham brought out
the first issue of Electron magazine.
For as long as Graham was associated with it, Electron
was a strange mixture, directed at both consumers and professionals, and covering the
gamut of electronics from ham radio to television servicing to electronic theory. Audio
formed a small part of the mix but it was always there and it was Canadian. And you could
also count on lots of coverage before and after the annual hi-fi show because the magazine
ran it.
In 1970, Graham sold Electron to a major publishing
conglomerate and moved to Toronto to be its publisher (or, as the function was then more
accurately known, its manager). This was not a happy arrangement as it turns out,
reportedly because Graham was adamant about maintaining the editorial mix he had
established. Whatever the reason, Graham left the magazine in 1971, and the reins were
handed to a new boss who was determined to bring the publication up to date.
A readership survey revealed that something like three
quarters of the audience was interested only in audio, and this tallied with the amount of
advertising that covered the same topic. But the magazine was woefully low in audio
editorial, given the numbers, so management decided to convert the magazine gradually into
an all-stereo magazine.
The task fell to editor Ernie Welling, who had been with
the mag since the early days. He agreed with the decision, but as his own expertise was in
radio rather than hi-fi, he hired me as resident audio nut (I eventually succeeded Welling
as editor when he transferred to another magazine within the company, but he continued as
a technology columnist to the end).
Under Welling, Electron was transformed into AudioScene
Canada (on its 10th anniversary, February 1974), and it gradually took its place as
one of the most respected hi-fi magazines in the world. This had partly to do with the
caliber of writers the magazine attracted (all Canadian except the U.S.-based
international correspondent, who had largely grown up in Canada); virtually all the
country's competent hi-fi writers of the day wrote for AudioScene at one time or
another.
What really set the magazine apart, however, was its
ambitious product-testing program. At the time, Dr. Floyd Toole at the National Research
Council in Ottawa was developing a loudspeaker-evaluation program but often found it hard
to obtain the sample speakers he needed. The magazine could funnel products to him for his
listening sessions, and he could impart his wealth of knowledge and insight to the
magazine's readers.
The result was a series of test reports, not only of
speakers but of phono cartridges, headphones, and microphones as well, that have rarely
been bettered by audio magazines anywhere. At the same time, the facilities of the Ontario
Research Foundation in Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto, were employed for similarly
thorough evaluations of purely electronic components.
Everyone associated with the magazine was extremely proud
of what it had accomplished, but it was all very expensive. And by the beginning of the
1980s, the hi-fi market was becoming somewhat saturated just as other products --
computers and video equipment and the like -- were beginning to compete seriously for
consumers' dollars.
The recessionary year of 1982 saw an industry where there
were four English-language consumer-audio publications in Canada, along with two trade
magazines and one French-language title. All of these were drawing from the same limited
pool of ad dollars as, increasingly, were mainstream media.
Something had to give, and it turned out to be AudioScene.
The competitors were mostly run by one-magazine companies that were hardly going to give
up and die if they didn't have to. But AudioScene's parent, with something like 100
titles at the time, could simply pull out of a market that wasn't prospering.
In the end, the company sold the magazine's assets -- its
mailing list and the right to use the name -- to its main competitor, which later became Sound
& Vision (not to be confused with the current U.S. magazine with the same title),
and that might have been the end of it.
But shortly after the death of AudioScene, Alan
Lofft, who had been a long-time columnist and feature writer for the magazine, became
editor of S&V (and, more than a decade later, senior editor of Audio magazine
in New York). He took with him much of the philosophy of his former publication and
recruited many of its writers. And he maintained the speaker-testing program using the
NRC, which continued until the publication ceased in 1996, and which is still an important
part of SoundStage!'s
content.
The names changed and the people aged and in some cases
died, and the direct line of publications that began in February 1964 is now defunct. But
audiophiles in Canada and, indeed, the worldwide audio community, continue to owe a debt
to Tom Graham's first Electron in 1964.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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