Downsize, Upsize (Part I)

by Karl Nehring

 

We have lived in our rural home for 45 years. Within a year or so of settling in, I purchased a pair of KEF 105 loudspeakers. Although over the preceding years I had owned several pairs of speakers with good performance, the bass capability and overall sense of ease that the KEFs brought to my listening room increased my enjoyment of music and convinced me that large speakers were the way to go given my fondness for large-scale orchestral works by Mahler, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, et al. Since then, I have owned or had in house for an extended length of time (I was the editor of an audio magazine for nearly three decades) several pairs of relatively large loudspeakers. However, about a year and a half ago I decided that after all those years of large speakers, it might finally be time to downsize from the pair I owned at that time, my beloved Legacy Audio Focus SEs (pictured) – and therein lies a tale…

 

First, however, a bit of background. The first stereo my family ever acquired was one of those little systems sold by salesmen who would come into your home and give a sales pitch for stereophonic sound by playing some demonstration tracks, the highlight of which was the ping-pong track, where we could hear the ball flying back and forth across our living room. Amazing! The record player was made –or at least branded – by a watch company (Longine’s or Bulova as I recall), and came with boxed sets of records from Reader’s Digest. My parents purchased several of these boxes, which were organized by musical category. I can’t remember them all, but there was an orchestral set that served as my introduction to classical music; I can still vividly recall being swept away by Debussy’s La Mer and being amazed that someone could compose something so breathtaking.

 

Our new stereo system came right around the time of the British Invasion, so of course even though we now had several boxes of records to listen to, we begged for some rock & roll records to play on our new stereo. A few days later, my mother came home from work with Beatles ‘65 and Mr. Tambourine Man by the Byrds. I played them over and over again, soon knowing every lyric by heart. By hearing them in stereo, I was struck by how goofy the stereo mix for the Beatles was – voices in one channel, guitars in the other. What the heck?! I soon made my first record purchase, Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan. I thought it was the most profound thing I had ever heard; however, it drove my father up the wall, and before long, I was forbidden to play any Bob Dylan records when he was home. This system was also the one on which I played my first classical purchase, the Reiner/Chicago recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6. My high school band, in which I played bass clarinet,  was preparing a wind arrangement of the march movement for the Indiana state band contest, and I had become fascinated by the music and wanted to hear the whole symphony in its original form. Our band got the highest score in the state and the Pathetique is still one of my favorite symphonies.

 

Within a couple of years our family life was drastically changed when my father died suddenly from a heart attack. We wound up moving from our house on a one-acre lot to an apartment. I don’t recall what happened to our first stereo, but now we had one of those all-in-one TV/stereo consoles (a Motorola, I’m pretty sure). I was buying plenty records, mostly rock, although I also purchased my first jazz recording, New View by saxophonist John Handy, which also featured Bobby Hutcherson on vibes. A technological highlight of the console stereo was the reverb dial, which allowed you to add artificial reverberation to whatever you were playing. Adding just a touch to some of those rather dry rock recordings could make them sound a little more pleasant, but for whatever reason I would occasionally find myself getting into a mood that would result in my putting on Bob Dylan’s song “Visions of Johanna” and cranking the reverb dial way up. It was frightening.

 

Then it was off to college the first time with, alas, no stereo of my own in my dorm room, although I had taken some favorite LPs with me and occasionally got to listen to them on the console setup in the commons room. A really poor semester cost me my Honors Program scholarship and left me on academic probation (in hindsight, I now realize I was deeply depressed), I headed back home, where my mother and sisters had moved from the apartment into a house in another town. Then my mother got sick, couldn’t work, I worked full time and took care of her and my four younger sisters, and we moved into another house, where she became completely bedridden. On the good old Motorola console late some evenings evening I played the Blood Sweat and Tears album with David Clayton-Thomas, which my mother thought was wonderful until I showed her the cover and she was crestfallen to see they were “just a bunch of hippies.” Still, that console provided plenty of musical enjoyment for us both, along with mental and emotional sustenance that we both needed. 

But her condition continued to worsen. She was transported to a hospital in Chicago, then finally to a rest home in Rogers Park, near her father. Driving home from seeing her after what had been a deeply emotional visit, I listened to the Apollo 11 coverage on the car radio. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. On July 21, my mother passed away. By the end of August, my sisters had been taken care of and I had purchased a little Allied Radio stereo system to load into the trunk of the Chevy Impala I inherited from my mother so that I could have music in my dorm room this time around.

 

Unfortunately, I still could not get my academic act together. I got high grades in a couple of classes, but failed to complete the rest. I went from academic probation to academic suspension. The one bright spot of that whole experience was meeting a young woman named Marilyn, with whom I immediately hit it off. We began dating, discovering that we had a lot in common – especially our love for and tastes in music, and in the summer of 1970 I would drive from Indiana to Ohio to visit her. We were seriously in love, but there was one little problem: the Selective Service folks now realized that I was no longer eligible for the hardship deferment I had received for taking care of my sisters while my mother was ill, and my miserable academic record meant that a student deferment was out of the question. I had been included in the first draft lottery and drawn the draft number 111. In July, 1970, I visited my draft board to verify that the official change of my draft status to 1A was in the works and would probably occur within a couple of weeks – and they were drafting numbers around 150 or so. I asked the woman ay the draft board whether there was a recruiting office in town; she replied that there was one upstairs above the drugstore right across the street. 

I crossed the street, climbed the stairs, and asked the Army recruiter whether he had anything that would keep me from going to Vietnam. He asked me whether I could score well on tests – I may have been suspended from college, but test-taking was always a breeze for me. I scored high on the tests, which made me eligible to sign up for Pershing missiles, which meant I could only be stationed in Germany or Oklahoma. I joined the Army in August (Marilyn and I had a serious discussion and agreed we would get married when I completed my service in three years), called Marilyn from a phone booth at Ft. Lewis after about my third day of basic training to say we should get married sooner because I had found out it was feasible to live as a married Army couple in Germany), got engaged over Christmas, then I said goodbye and headed to Germany in January, 1971.

 

By now, my guess is that many – perhaps most – readers are wondering what any of this has to do with speakers. Quite a bit, actually. Because Marilyn and I were both devoted music lovers, I knew our future apartment would have to have a decent stereo system. So a couple of months before returning to the states to get married, I went with my best buddy and his wife down to the Audio Club at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart, where audio equipment was available at a discount to military personnel. There I bought my first component system, which comprised a Philips turntable with an Elac cartridge, a Kenwood receiver rated at 23 watts per channel, and a pair of Wharfedale bookshelf speakers. I can’t recall the model, but they were two-way sealed design with a woofer in the 6-8” range. We set up the system in my friends’ apartment (mine was not yet ready) so they could enjoy it until I came back with Marilyn. We put on American Beautyby the Grateful Dead and were floored by how good it sounded. The Wharfedales were surprisingly nice little speakers.

 

But life was changing fast. I was getting promotions, I was getting married and moving out of the barracks into an apartment, and I had discovered Mahler and Beethoven. Not only that, I had made some return visits to the Audio Club, started reading stereo magazines, and had caught the audiophile bug. As nice as the Wharfedales were, they would not remain in my system for long. Early in 1972, I re-enlisted for three more years in the Army and then used part of my re-enlistment bonus to purchase the speakers of my dreams, the original Bose 901s. Thus began more than 50 years of speaker madness.

 

(To be continued)