Episode: 850
Title: HPR0850: Another Tech Giant Passes - Household Tech in the Pre-Micro Era
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0850/hpr0850.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:30:21

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**MUSIC**
Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. This is Mr. Gatchett. And the time has come for
me to speak out in regards to some of the technological greats, the founding fathers, if you will,
the technological age, the early innovators in technologies that are passing. And as we know,
no, we've had a symbol of those technological leaders pass in recent times. I have actually recorded
some shows that I ended up not actually saving because in some cases, some of these technological
leaders have caused a certain amount of, shall we say, strife and disagreement in terms of what
people were saying about these gentlemen. But it is time to talk about someone who has affected
your life. It has affected the years, affected the lives of literally nothing but people around the
world. And in this particular case, you probably never actually heard of them. I know I am,
but he has dramatically affected my lives because basically without the ideas that this gentleman
came up with and what he invented, I would literally not be the same technique Mr. Gatchett
that I am today. And of course, I am speaking of the passing of Edgar Wiltshire, who is the
inventor of the acoustic suspension loudspeaker and thus literally made high fidelity in the home
what it was. Now, it's kind of hard for you to realize. I know if you are of the underset,
exactly how important this was because you literally lived your entire life with the fruits of
Edgar Wiltshire's labor. But back in the day when he first came up with these ideas and he was a
ten year pregnant and built stereo cabinets and built high five stereo for people. During this
time frame, there were basically the only time you had speaker enclosures that had really,
really good bass response were those clips, style horns that I have talked to have a previous
quadcap that I regained to you with the story of the bachelor that I met in St. Louis. He had a
six foot tall speaker in each corner of his room and literally you would normally see those
movie theaters. But for home stereo and in fact this is pre stereo, this would be monochonic high five.
Most of those enclosures and the radios of the day did not have enclosures the back of the
radio cabinet or the high five cabinet was open. I actually happened to own a very lovely piece
of furniture that is also a very lovely bit of electronic gear that I acquired in the mid-60s from
my father's boss who was the self-manager here in the campus city area and his name was Mars Works
and I had gone over to his house to help my dad do some work or something that there was some
reason why I didn't do his house and I admired the radio because I was very infatuating the
radios in the 60s and so towards the end of the 60s there at 60s 69, Mars was retiring and he
was like removing and they were going to downsize and he wasn't going to take the radio with him and
so he asked my father if I would like it and of course I took it, it has an AMFM, I think there's
even a short-wave band for the radio that's along the left-hand side and on the right-hand side there's
a place for the turntable between them and then you would plug their turntable into an auxiliary input
and you just have mono high five as well as the AM, the FM and as I said I believe there's even short-wave
there and it's a lovely sounding device and has a totally open speaker cabinet though down below
and there was not very good response from these systems especially in the base
because in order to get the base that you needed you needed to have a enclosure that was
large enough to actually resonate that the frequency needed for the base and
I'm not sure that there was there's probably some bias thing and there was some tone controls and
things like that where people would try to boost the base electronically but it was a limiting factor
and even this was a rather large cabinet I mean it was a standard size radio cabinet of the day
and most of the high five would be a large piece of furniture that would be in your living room.
You could not have the bookshelf speakers that we all know today and the acoustic
the discovery right that that Mr. Biltcher came up with was the fact through experimentation
he proposed that having an enclosure and having a speaker that had a ring of rubber around it
so that they could deal with the sound pressures involved it would kind of act like a spring to help
in maintaining the acoustic factor of the speaker involved and give much better base response
from a smaller size cabinet and indeed it did you have never heard of them I'm sure or I'm
posturing because he was not one of those people who was out there in the limelight a lot
he didn't come up with several interesting ideas however in addition to the whole idea of the
base response with the the speaker and the invention of the the sealed speaker systems that
could be small enough to fit on a bookshelf he also then came up with the idea of the dome
because previous to that there was only one speaker and it was doing the high frequencies
as well as the low frequencies as well he improved the low frequencies with the acoustic
extension and then he moved on to improving the high frequencies also by having especially
designed speaker just for those high frequencies in addition to that there was a problem with
the rumble from the turn cables back in the day of course children we did not have CDs we have
these things called long playing records or LPs if you would refer to them as albums some people
still do they usually would be on the turn table that went at 33 and a third RPM where they come
up with that exactly I'm not sure the 33 and a third RPM was where you would how you would
run the record for it to sound properly there were also smaller records that would only have a
single song on them and those were 45 then they were called 45 because they would spin at 45
RPM revolutions per minute there were also some older usually non stereo older records that were
produced at 78 RPM and there were a few of those that I've owned to the years I had various turn
tables that had the multiple speeds sometimes there would only be 45 and 33 and a third and the
more expensive ones would also have the 78 and as I say those are usually monophonic and it's hard
to explain how much this is affected because it literally has allowed the the sound industry the
high-fight industry to go beyond just the purview of a few people that could afford a very expensive
piece of the furniture that also were essentially extended versions of radios in their homes and
provided were musical oriented rather than the more talk oriented of radio the day a lot of
radio back then but not necessarily you think it was radio plays pre television and that this
was how they were bringing entertainment into the home now another aspect of this to keep in mind
is not only was there this whole aspect of the possibility of having smaller sets of electronics
that would give you good sound in the home but the reproduction of the sound as I mentioned
the 33 and the third record was an improvement on the fidelity and the stereo would give you the
impression of having the orchestra or band or whoever you were listening to spread out across the
room as if you were on a stage things coming from the left-hand side things coming from the right
hand side we had to talk earlier about minor recordings and other methodologies to give you
accurate stereo reproduction three computers there were basically three types of electronics in the
home okay if you were really really techy so if you were a Linux and Android type it's a day's
world let's say if you were the super geeky super techy person you were a radio operator
and you were building in some cases your own transmitters and initially they had to build
their own receivers to the five at 60's excuse me the receivers were actually mostly pre-built
mind manufacturers because they were a bit more sophisticated than the average radio operator wanted
to endeavor to produce but a lot of building of their own transmitters was going on
if you were let's say the people who were working into design more fashionable and things like that
that's the approximate equivalent in today's world of what I would say was the audio police
the audio files the high-file stereo people and the type of equipment I can prove it the most
expensive stuff was nakintosh it's spelled differently and then the average windows person
would be equated to the television that was in your own all of these involved tools real electronics
glow okay and there were actually two testers that you could find at the grocery store and at the
the drug store even two test tubes and you would go in and you would run a test on the tube you
dial something according to a book based upon the numbers on the tube and it would test you know
what the currents were that it was measuring oh yes you got a bad tube you need to do what
there would even be a set of drawers underneath that would have the tubes that they would sell you
and then you would go back now if you were a windows power user you were competent enough to
open up the back of your TV set hasn't to be careful though because they're very high voltages in
a TV CRT and so if you were a power user you could test your own tubes otherwise you'd have to
have a TV repairman come out to your house or you'd have to take your TV in down when my grand
another lived in in the hills the Ozark Hills where my parents grew up at Dirt Poor Hill Nellies
there was a lady on the on the road up to the main highway Route 66 that repaired TVs for
everybody in several counties around there just a little place up on the ridge there on the
on the roads out there to the highway and somewhere along the line she had a net for electronics
and she repaired pretty much everybody's TV when it went bad this was a time frame where you
actually repaired things you did not just build them way by new and there were lots of things that
were involving tubes most of those really good stereos and when I got involved in music in college
and got really serious about sound there was a lot of this equipment that was available to me
you talk about reproduction there was actually that the invention of the real to real tape recorder
which was also part of this whole white stereo movement was another innovator who was a soldier
and when he was listening late at night he was intelligence officer when he was listening late at night
he was hearing orchestral performances from German radio station and it was midnight and how
are they getting an orchestra to play at midnight and he ended up during the invasion of Germany going
to investigate this and found that they had wire recorders so it was a tape real to real it was
literally wire that was being drug across a magnetic head and the changes of the magnetic flux
in the wire was where the sound was coming from and it sounded better than the equivalent 78
records he knew it was not a record because of the background hits the background noise of the
record and he was not hearing that and he took that idea and literally some of those machines
broken apart and shook back to california and grounded mpeg the first real to real and real to
real was a major portion of this whole stereo high-five kind of set you not only had records
but you also had a real to real stereo recorder that you could record your own recordings and
even playback recordings that other people had made by the time I came along
in the early part of the 70s and started getting interested in all this some of that was a
little used and there were still new high-five stores here in canvass city I talked about some of
the stories of bursting apple v was a local electronic store it's full of stereo equipment and
things like that I talked about building speaker systems and and the local electronics place that
sold the speakers they would use to build speakers and of course radio shacks had a two checking
station as well as more tunes that you could get at the local drug store they had a wider selection
of two so if they didn't have it there you take it to the radio shacks store and you could test
it out for a bursting apple v store various electronic stores that were available there
and they all made big business and it was still somewhat furniture related because even when
these were separate components instead of all being built into what big cabinets they were still
usually in a wooden cabinet and were a a piece of not furniture but but something that you put
on a shelf in your living room and it would look good in your living room with the rest of your
furniture and things like that and I purchased some of these things that were tubes I had a chance
once I'm fairly certain and I probably just by about four or five minutes being able to
purchase a Macintosh amplifier at a sale just didn't get down there in time but I'm very
I vote various tube amps through the years and have quite enjoyed them there there's a different
sound and tube amplifiers some people call it the softer sound there's there's more distortion
you cannot argue that it is a cleaner sound transistors and ICs have a cleaner sound in terms of
just measurement of distortion but there's something quite pleasant about the tube sound I'm not
to tell you about over driving of tubes the way a lot of guitar amplifiers are overgiven for rock
and roll guitars guitars and things like that I just tell you about the general sound of it coming
out that the distortion itself is a pleasant kind of distortion and the other thing about tubes
is it's much more forgiving when you press your luck and you go above what the tube is normally
thinking is what the limits of the the limits of the electronics are so when you're pushing it
on the tube amplifier it fails more gracefully than the rather jagged kind of sound that one gets
from semiconductor electronics when you push it it would you turn the amp up to 11 as it works
and and I quite enjoyed the tube sound I suppose in my old age I might actually try to acquire
a tube amplifier I tend to prefer ironically less though the acoustic suspension totally
enclosed and more they still have the acoustic suspension but it was partially ported because
those were a little bit more efficient and less wattage to acquire the same amount of sound pressure
level we talked about that in a previous show and so the I kind of tend to towards ported
rather than totally enclosed just because the amplifiers that you need to drive it to a certain
pressure level were a little bit cheaper there in terms of less wattage involved and there's
something hard to explain about those tubes glowing in a darkened room not totally dark but just
a darkened room and listening to the stereo it's just it was kind of a total experience
and a very pleasant one and two amplifiers are still much preferred in the you know people who
are still serious about i5 and there are some people who are still very serious about i5 by LP
records mostly instead of CD still have very extensive turntable one of the problems I don't think
I mentioned this before sorry if I'm repeating another problem that uh that uh mr.
villager sold was the turntable itself there was a lot of rumble because the turntables of the time
would directly run the turntable so there was a motor and the motor was directly connected to
the spindle and then there would be something that would cause that motor to spin at precisely
the 33 and a third or 45 or things like that even where sometimes there were gears involved
either of those kinds of things involved a lot more rumble and added noise and the cartridges
were either ceramic cartridges or the more expensive stereos would use magnetic cartridges and
these could pick up noise because literally the the vibration of the very narrow little pin the
little stylus in the grooves was where the sound came from and any kind of shaking of that
in low frequencies that was a part of the music would still be transferred to the speakers the
ironically more efficient more effective bass speakers that mr. villager invented and uh so
in the process he came up with a built dry system of rubber belts that would go around the edge
of the turntable or a flywheel in the middle of the turntable and by isolating the motor from
the turntable then that rumble went away and so he improved turntables and things like that
now years later people came up with direct drive that was not going to cause a rumble
and so then the more expensive turntables would go back to being direct drive rather than being
driven by a rubber belt so these things you know have them slow very serious though people are
still into back-and-trash amplifiers and other types of tube equipment and it's still a very
expensive hobby and I saw some of that actually when I was in our Bangkok office for a month a
few years ago and I would nose my way around various types of informants and shopping centers
that would feature electronics go figure and one of them was a very serious stereo shot not a home
theater kind of a shot but stereo equipment the reproduction of music through two speakers not
five dot ones and seven dot ones and however many numbers dot ones and I think probably most of the
if there are any stereo stores that have survived they probably have survived by making the
transition to home theater now because that's usually what people are interested in
there the biggest one here in Kansas City I was talking about Bursty Dappledy and and
Radio Shack and all these that sold them deep premier there were several different
high-fi stores that I bought some of this huge equipment I would go in and I would drool
I wish on the student salary I could you know students money I could afford you know some of the
new equipment things like that but the biggest one and the best one and the pre-imminent one here
was David Beatty audio David Beatty was on Westport Road which was the old road that went out of
Westport and it was basically the starting point for the Oregon Trail the Santa Fe Trail and the
California Trails all of which led off from the Kansas City area here from about the 1830s 1828
on those trails the river bench at this point and it wasn't any use going farther up river because
you weren't getting any closer to where you wanted to be so you got off you bought your wagon
and you bought your supplies and you headed west and the old Westport Road led off from there and
he was right along the Westport Road it was innovation place to go see there were salesman there
that were certified and I swear it was probably a certification that they made up just for David
Beatty audio because I never heard about it anywhere else but you know they were very knowledgeable
they were very knowledgeable on the equipment they were very knowledgeable on people's you know
applications of the equipment and it was kind of a specialized thing you you had some people
advice or types of equipment they would mix and match things and you would have a pre-amplifier
for your turntable that did special kinds of pre-amplification and then you fed that in to quite
often a separate well there was a pre-amplifier to go from your magnetic cartridges to your
level of sound that you could speed in to either what was called an integrated amp which was pre-amplifier
and power amp will fire in one or a separate pre-amplifier so there was a kind of a little box
that you would have a little electronics to do that some people didn't even like that to be in
the integrated amplifier or the pre-amplifier they would have an extra separate box just for that
purpose and then the pre-amplifier had all the knobs and the indicators the VU meters and things
like that in an integrated amp that also then had the power amplifier but the really serious people
would have a separate stereo pre-amplifier with the knobs and indicators and everything like that
and then see that into a separate amplifier that might have been a pair of mono amplifiers that
were matched exactly for a stereo amplifier and those are beautiful those are practically
pieces of art I mean the pre-amplifiers would have a knife lift to them quite often wouldn't have
the three and things like that but the actual power amplifiers that you would use especially
the backintotions but quite a few of the other ones also they would be chrome instead of just
the plain metal chassis there would be no covering on anything except any kind of high voltage
capacitors of power supply and that would be in some type of metal enclosure for that towards the
back but all the tubes would be a chrome chassis and all the tubes would be exposed and glowing
and it was really kind of a work of art and I miss glowing electronics in many ways
I suppose I could acquire some of that a bit cheaper I'm not made of money here even in my old age
uncomfortable and I could probably acquire maybe a tube amplifier if I really wanted to go in that
direction but it's hard for you to understand but this was all the way things were before computers
came along and the reason why I mentioned before basically I wouldn't be the tech that I am today
is that's how I got into computers I was a music major and I was interested in the recording studio
and the reproduction of audio and so I was heavily into the high five stereo that basically Mr.
Viltres inventions made those possible and so that was a big part of my initial kind of the
initial tech that I acquired and things like that this was in the very very early days of digital
and computers coming along with the digital audio that was going to revolutionize everything
and of course it did eventually it just took several years later and by then I was more a
computer programmer rather than being involved in the digital audio kind of things and so goes
Mr. Viltres did have a partner in terms of the commercialization of this and the reason why
you have seen this invention and it was there to be biased and thus lead to affect your life
in a possible way was the student of his name Henry Quas he made perfect of Mr. Quas he was the
more visible light think of the two he basically took the ideas and the research that Mr. Viltres
came up with and found ways to efficiently manufacture that they formed a company called Acoustic
Research which made some of the pre-evident speakers of the time all the way up to the 70s when I
was involved and were some of the best loudspeakers that one could purchase and also then he founded
several other ventures along the way including Cambridge Soundworks these are all in Massachusetts
because that's where Mr. Quas lived and even Tibbley Audio which to this day makes a extremely good
table radio which you can also buy a attachment to be able to hook your iPhone or iPad up and use
the speaker in that and it's expensive but have some of the best sound you can get in a small
tabletop radio you can hook up an extra speaker for stereo and as I say you can buy a rather
expensive add-on to be able to dock your iphone or ipod and have your music going through that
table radio so even to this day the the five by one speaker system that you have in your home
theater is basically the brainchild and the descendant of Mr. Edgar Milcher and Henry Kloss
who helped to provide the world with better living through music we are losing some of the pioneers
in the electronic world some of the giants some we know their names and some we do not
if you have a story about one of these people you should record it call in the way I do you can
record it on some electronic device and send it in I'd be especially interested if anybody has
any personal stories knowing some of these great giants of the industry that are passing
and I did notice hung the calendar today that Kim has very little scheduled so I'll probably
call in another show just in case that the well runs totally dry but we need your story you have a
story and you need to call in or record it and send it in so that we can all hear your story too
this is Mr. Gadget enjoying my electronic device and enjoying my electronic lifestyle
and I'm hoping you're having a good time as you go out on that trail like the Oregon the
California and the Santa Fe Trail they're blazing the way so that you don't have to be a
radio operator and highly technical you could even come along if you like things that are fancy
and have some extra money or or even just your average show who can barely unplug it to and
plug it in again to get the TV to work right and I thought that was a pretty good model there
pretty good analogy to the present day you be careful out here and I'll be blazing the trailer
ahead of you bye now
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