And here’s my favorite: Every culture that has created wheeled or water-going vehicles has come up with something very like a tiller, for use in steering them. And as those inventors became more mechanically sophisticated, and as they saw the need to alter the steering control’s range of motion and mechanism’s ratio between input and output forces, they added intermediate gears or pulleys—which likely influenced those inventors to use wheels rather than levers as steering controls: first as ship’s wheels, then as steering wheels for automobiles. Literally all automobiles.
Good ways of doing things—one could go as far as to say the right ways of doing things—are irrepressible: They make themselves known1 and they endure. This is true in the vast majority of human endeavors.
But it isn’t true in the world of hi-fi, which by comparison looks like a weed-choked lawn full of old toilets and abandoned washing machines. From its acoustical beginnings, when two incompatible forms of physical media—Edison’s cylinders and Berliner’s flat discs—slugged it out for primacy, domestic audio has attracted an almost incalculable number of iconoclasts, heretics, mavericks, nonconformists, lone wolves, enfants terrible, and hidebound kooks.
This story is from the March 2020 edition of Stereophile.
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This story is from the March 2020 edition of Stereophile.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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