Looking back.

On a radio interview, Helen Forrest paused in her attempts to respond accurately to an interviewer's interest in her experiences as a singer with some of the greatest bands of the '30s. "You know," she said, "if I'd known I was living in an 'era,' ! would have paid closer attention!"

As I look back, I find that I may have traversed a few "eras" in electronics and music. I also find that, like Forrest, I wasn't always paying close attention. Dates, even to the year, are particularly hazy. I'll try to give general indications of when, and sometimes where.

I could look the date of this first one up, but I won't. It was the press conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York at which Sony (in the person of Akio Morita) and Philips announced the arrival of a new digital music delivery format--the Compact Disc.

I believe I recall that first piece of music I heard played from a CD. Certainly it was the one that made the greatest impression on me that day. It was "Bootie's Blues," by the Count Baste Orchestra. The telling moment was the utter silence after a loud rim-shot during the piano introduction. The assembled audio and electronic press burst into spontaneous applause in response.

Another press conference demo that elicited the same reaction was an analog moment. Shure was announcing the original V-15 Type V phono cartridge and that cartridge came in a plastic case that doubled as an accurate and infallible alignment tool. The person conducting the conference did an almost instantaneous alignment of a newly installed V15 Type V and the room went wild. Well, as wild as Julian Hirsch, Len Feldman, Ivan Berger, and the rest might get at these events.

Going back to the early '60s, I remember hitting one of the early hotel hi-fi shows in New York with a college buddy. Two presentations still shine in my memory: the Grado booth and the Scott suite.

Joe Grado had set up the best-sounding system I heard at that show. I don't recall which cartridge model he was showing, but I do recall the speaker systems that he'd hooked up. They were three-way lash-ups that wedded an AR-1W at the bottom end and a JansZen I-30 (I did just look that up) four-panel electrostatic tweeter array. The JansZen tweeters went up to 30,000 ...