mobanmarketPull down the shades, find a comfortable seat, and come with me on an imaginary journey to the year 1956. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket wins reelection, the United Methodist Church begins to ordain women, and a can of Campbell’s tomato soup costs 10 cents. Elvis Presley’s two-week residency at Las Vegas’s New Frontier Hotel and Casino is received so poorly by the middle-aged guests that Newsweek likens it to “a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party.” And a Seattle couple gives birth to Kenneth Bruce Gorelick, who will become known professionally as Kenny G.
The hobby that will become “high-end audio” is still called plain old “audio.” The top marginal tax rate is 91%, the US boasts more income equality than present-day socialist Sweden, and most of the country’s top earners are not panic-room wealthy but merely rich. The prices of hi-fi gear reflect this: Two of the finest power amplifiers you can buy—the McIntosh MC-60 and the Marantz Model 2 (both monophonic, of course)—retail for $198. That’s about $2266 in today’s dollars, and while certainly not cheap, these products are accessible to a far larger group of hi-fi enthusiasts than “the best” of today (including from McIntosh itself).
As it happens, perfectionist audio components come not only from the kind of niche producers that populate today’s hobby but also from some of the largest companies in the world, including RCA, Western Electric, Philips, and Siemens—which means that a sizable share of the brightest engineers are working on audio gear. Stereophile‘s first issue is still six years away, and hi-fi reviews appear not only in specialized publications but also in general-interest magazines like The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Saturday Review.
But the largest difference between then and now may be the aesthetics of good sound. In 1956, a great hi-fi sounds appreciably different from many of today’s systems. If you flip through the August issue of Audio magazine, you will find Edgar Villchur’s article about his acoustic suspension speaker cabinet. In the not-too-distant future, this innovation will transform the industry by enabling manufacturers to dramatically shrink the size of their speakers while truncating their sensitivity and dynamic range. Villchur’s revolutionary AR-1 is about 10% as sensitive as many of the larger speakers of the time, meaning it requires considerably more watts to play at the same loudness. In the following decades, audio journalists and enthusiasts listening to small monitors driven by powerful solid state amps will make the pursuit of flat frequency response, holographic imaging, and sonic detail the quintessential hi-fi experience.
But Villchur’s transformation still hasn’t happened. In the pages of that magazine, beside Edward Tatnall Canby’s review of Robert Craft’s Madrigals of Gesualdo, Vol.1—with liner notes by Aldous Huxley—you will find plenty of information about speakers from the likes of Altec Lansing, JBL, University, Bozak, Electro-Voice, and Sherwood. Most are large cabinets containing horn-loaded high-frequency drivers mated to 12″ or 15″ woofers with relatively simple crossovers: High fidelity still means big!
A typical high-quality home audio system still delivers the kind of near-lifelike dynamics—and the resulting sensations of excitement, liveness, and jump—that few 21st century systems aspire to. These midcentury speakers’ compression drivers, doped-paper woofers, and heavy alnico magnets, powered mostly by relatively low-powered tube amps, can also create a haunting impression of presence, physicality, and texture. Though they may not measure flat from 20 to 20,000 cycles, music played through them sounds natural, without the high-excursion bass, “sparkly” treble, and congested dynamics today’s audiophiles have become used to. To someone weaned on the high-end audio of the 21st century, a mono record played through a JBL Hartsfield or an Altec 604 Duplex speaker can be a revelation.
In that issue of Audio, you will also find an ad for the 225-A phono cartridge manufactured by the Fairchild Recording Equipment Corporation of Whitestone, New York. (For non–East Coast readers, that’s Queens.) The son of a man who founded IBM and served in Congress, Sherman Fairchild is one of the most enigmatic figures in American industry. He is obsessed with cutting-edge technology and is bright—and rich—enough to capitalize on it. A trailblazer of American aviation, Fairchild designs the first modern aerial surveillance camera and founds more than 70 companies that bring to market everything from semiconductors to satellites. In 1960, he will appear on the cover of Time. He is also a jazz enthusiast and maintains a recording studio in his New York City home, an International Style mansion at 11 West 65th Street that features two grand pianos mounted on a vibration-reducing sprung floor. The audio company he named after himself is known for making expensive, no-compromise equipment, none more iconic than the 660/670 series of compressor-limiters, which will be heard on records by everyone from the Beatles to the Supremes to Pink Floyd (and which sells on today’s used market for loopy amounts of cash).
The company’s 225-A cartridge is nearly as well regarded, used in some of the country’s top studios. This mono device is one of the earliest commercial moving coil cartridges (Ortofon introduced the first in 1948), a result of an encounter between three founding fathers of American hi-fi. As the story goes, after Fairchild’s engineers struggled with a moving coil cartridge, Sherman Fairchild asked Saul Marantz for advice. Marantz introduced him to a 20-something watchmaker and operatic tenor named Joe Grado, who ended up designing cartridges for Fairchild, including the 225-A. He left two years later to start his own company, the much-beloved Grado Labs, where he abandoned the moving coil to pursue moving iron cartridges. (Thank you, John and Rich Grado, for this story.)
Fairchild didn’t skimp on the 225-A. It features a 1mil diamond stylus, an aluminum cantilever, a coil made from 825 turns of gold-plated silver-copper alloy wire, and a robust alnico magnet. The output is a hearty 5mV, the internal impedance 200 ohms, and—because the tonearms of the 1950s had to work with 78s and the newfangled microgroove LPs and 45s—the specified tracking force is a whopping 4–8gm. It sells for the nontrivial sum of $37.50.
Even among fans of vintage equipment, the Fairchild remains poorly known. Yet perhaps not surprisingly, hardcore analog heads tend to revere it. Its fans include tonearm designer Frank Schröder as well as cartridge surgeon and retipper Joseph Long. In an online exchange I had with Long, he wrote that he considers the 225-A and its phono-cartridge siblings—known affectionately to their fans as the Fairchildren—”still the best-sounding mono cartridges I have heard.”
I confess to having only a cursory acquaintance with Fairchild cartridges when, rather unexpectedly, my friend J came over with a 225-A. I’d been telling anyone who would listen about the fun I was having with single-channel cartridges, and it turned out that J was way ahead of me in the conga line of mono appreciators. To be precise, he brought three Fairchildren—a bog-original 225-A in excellent condition and two “restored” by Aidas Svazas of Lithuania’s Aidas Cartridges. Svazas had replaced these units’ suspension and dampers, allowing them to track at a VTF more suitable to modern tonearms, then retipped one with a 0.7mil nude spherical diamond and the other with a decidedly more modern MicroRidge tip. I’ll touch on the differences between these units later, but what follows applies to listening with my favorite of the bunch: the Aidas-retipped 225-A with the good old spherical stylus.
Before I tell you about listening with it, let me get some possibly obvious observations out of the way. The 225-A is a creature of its time and decidedly not “neutral”: It has a well-documented predilection for sounding bright and can make poorly recorded sibilants feel like you’re cleaning your ears with a paring knife. It isn’t the world’s best tracker. And it isn’t soothing—if your idea of analog heaven is mainlining a Patricia Barber record played back with a Koetsu, this experience may not be for you.
For some of the reasons mentioned above, my expectations of this chunky little antique were not high. I love the sound of certain vintage gear, but a 70-year-old phono cartridge? With the Fairchild tracking at 3.2gm in a Schick 12″ arm on a Garrard 301 turntable and routed through the resistive input of the Manley Steelhead loaded at 47k ohms, I put on “Delilah” from Introducing Kenny Burrell (Blue Note B0029974-01), a 2019 Tone Poet reissue of an LP first released in 1956. The flurry of conga beats played by the great Cuban-born percussionist Cándido that kick off the track sounded so explosive that I jumped out of my seat and dashed to the preamp, thinking I had set the volume too high.
I hadn’t. The Fairchild was simply providing the most dynamically unconstrained playback I’ve heard in my home, regardless of source. In terms of dynamic range, both the conga and Burrell’s amplified guitar sounded uncannily lifelike not just in terms of overall volume but also microdynamics: Each instrument sounded maximally expressive and capable of startling with transitions from quiet to loud.
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