Bottleneck

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 549, 30 December 1949, Page 9

Bottleneck

OMPTON MACKENZIE recently complained in The Gramophone that all the ingenuities of the engineers had not rid the gramophone of its fundamental difficulty-that of making large bodies of sound issue with verisimilitude from a small box. The same is true of our radio sets. There is a technical problem, and there is a psychological problem, From the first of these-the problem of sound waves issuing from a small centre instead of from a diffused area-there may be some scientific way of escape. But when, for example, radio or gramophone tries to condense and reissue the sounds of a full orchestra, the psychological barrier is insuperable. ‘To préduce Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic out of a 10-inch speaker is like conjuring a genie out of a bottle. We do not really believe what we hear. Even when, as on a Sunday from 4YA, the conjurer reproduces the voice of the maestro himself, uttering his familiar paradoxes and absurdities, the illusion of reality can hardly be sustained. The bottleneck is too narrow. Chamber music is simpler. It is not hard, on Tuesday evenings from 4YC, to imagine, say, the shadowy presences of the Philharmonia Quartet, bowing away busily in the corner behind the loud speaker and producing the sounds that issue so mellifluously from the speaker cone. Shut your eyes, and the problem of the bottle-

neck aimost disappears,

K.J.

S.