The Business that did not exist

The Business that did not exist
an interview with Avery Fisher
By Martin Mayer

High Fidelity was a strange and wonderful thing when Avery Fisher set up a shop a quarter century ago. Twenty-five years ago this month, a soft spoken, broad-shouldered young man with a degree in English and Fine Arts left the advertising and typography department of the publishing house of E.P. Dutton, and went into a business that did not exist. The business was the supply of custom radio-phonographs, put together from equipment manufactured for use in movie theatres, to that fraction of the American community which cared seriously about the quality of the sound received from broadcasts and records. The young man was Avery Fisher, and he set up a shop with two partners in 300 square feet of rented loft space on West 21st street in New York, under the name of Philharmonic Radio Corporation.

Today, very much one man’s company, Fisher Radio is a major producer of high fidelity components as well as radio phonographs. It still caters to an unusually sensitive fraction of the community; but the fraction has grown. Fisher-now fifty-six, a large man with a round, youthful face under a fine mane of gray hair- is a member of the first generation that grew up with phonograph records in the home. An amateur fiddle player with a strong sense of his own shortcomings, he wanted something more like real music from his records and from radio broadcasts. Impressed by the difference between the sound he heard in the movie theatres that played “talkies” and the sound he could get out of conventional home equipment, Fisher in the 1930´s began purchasing professional audio components. Among his first purchases were two Jensen 18- inch woofers (the former, field-excited; the latter, one of the earliest permanent magnet speakers). Fisher has never believed in modernity for its own sake; he still uses these woofers in his speaker systems at home. Visitors to Fisher’s house heard sound such as they had never heard before in an apartment, and friends began asking him to build them something like his own rig. Among the people Fisher had met, while asking amateur’s questions around the second-hand part stores in lower Manhattan, were two young engineers named Victor Brociner and Leo Bogart, who where also being importuned by the friends who wanted special radio-phonographs. The three men decided to that if they were going to put together high fidelity sets anyway, they might as well build them for a living, and thus Philharmonic was born. The new company offered a chassis that combined a top-quality AM receiver, a newly designed 35-watt amplifier (incorporating, the first brochure announced, “two of the sensational new 6L6 beam power tubes operating in push-pull with standardized inverse feedback”), and a choice between two theatre speakers, a Jensen A-12 or a Cinaudagraph “Magic Magnet.” The price for the lot was $128, with the Jensen Speaker, (“You look at all the stuff on that chassis, and remember you sold the whole thing for $128, and you wonder how you managed to stay in business.”) Cabinetry and phonograph equipment was extra. One of the early sets, including a rather lavish custom cabinet and an automatic record changer, sold for $286.35. Or Philharmonic would build the equipment into your own furniture if you desired. Whichever way the customer bought it, the Philharmonic came with a three-year guarantee. If the customer lived out New York, Philharmonic arranged with a local repairman to service the machine. “We did an astonishing mail-order business,” Fisher says, “I don’t know how people ever got courage to buy.”

After the war, when Fisher went into business under his own name, he was able to boast that “no Philharmonic has ever worn out.” The first Philharmonic, to Fisher’s great pride, is now in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, and a couple of others are in his private audio museum (together with such oddities as a 32-inch Japanese woofer). They still work. The file of Fisher’s letters to his early Philharmonic customers is a page of the history of high fidelity. Purchasers who followed Fisher’s advice added FM (first on the 42-50 megacycle band, then on today’s band), bought the first GE variable-reluctance pickups and a Fisher-made preamplifier equalizer to go with them, substituted for their old speaker the first Altec Duplexes (the letter proclaimed “a 300% improvement”). For those who lived in New York, Fisher sent his own service staff, at a charge of $2.00 an hour, to make the necessary changes. Many of Philharmonic’s customers were prominent figures, and Fisher kept a careful list of their names for promotional purposes. Today he will send prospective purchasers, on request, an impressive roster of satisfied customers. “Quite a number of these people became friends,” Fisher says. “When I traveled, I would visit them. Music was very important to them- we had no casual customers- and I had made a contribution to a pleasurable aspect of their lives.”

A Company like Philharmonic could not survive a war or the breakup of its major partners, and both occurred. The company was sold (not long ago, Fisher repurchased the name), and at the end of the war Fisher reopened under his own name. From offices in New York’s now defunct Hotel Marguery, Fisher offered “a 23 tube instrument” (including short wave) with the Altec Duplex speaker and an intermix changer (“People paid a lot of money for that feature, in service charges,” he recalls). Prices ranged from $670 to $786 for the innards alone, to be built into the purchaser’s cabinetry. “The Fisher”, as a console, was available for $885. It was unquestionably the best piece of goods on the immediate postwar market. Fisher sampled the musical community, and received letters of tribute from Sir Thomas Beecham, among others. Fortune ran Fisher’s picture in its businessmen-on-the-rise section, and called his console “the only set on the market that would completely satisfy a golden ear.” Fisher was his own salesman. He hopped around the country in DC-3s (seventeen hours, coast to coast), carrying the brochures he had written and designed himself. “I remember how moved I was by Death of a Salesman,” Fisher told me recently, “because that is the way things are. I had my own company. But the men I´d meet on the road, they were tortured in just that way. I remember a man who ran a radio-phonograph department in a store, and the accountants came in-you can’t imagine the scorn a salesman puts into the words “the accountants”, who don’t sell anything, don’t produce any business. They closed down his department. He’d given his whole life to phonographs, he was over fifty, and they’d closed him down. Well....”

Though the product was luxury goods, requiring the air of prosperity, which Fisher simulated, the late Forties were not cheerful years for his company. Fisher’s natural market was in the big cities, where television was scooping up all the loose change of people who were in the market for electronic equipment. Fisher developed a distaste for television, which he has never lost. “They’d tell me that for the same money they could get a television set and a radio-phonograph. It’s only recently that people have begun to appreciate that television and the phonograph are two different things. Television is an appliance. It belongs in the bedroom, where more and more people have it. The radio-phonograph is a music center, for the living room. But in the Forties, television gave us an enormous knock on the head. If the LP record had not come along, I don’t know what would have happened. The LP saved my business.”

Knowing how few of his friends were interested in audio as such. Fisher did not go into the component market immediately; but when he did, in the early 1950s, his knowledge of that the sound fancier needed gave him a marketing edge. Fisher’s elaborate self-powered preamplifier-equalizer (or “Master Audio Control”) was a particularly strong support to his efforts to sell the line as the cream of the cream. The pride and joy of the Fisher catalogue, however, then, as now, were the tuners. Until the late 1950s, Fisher made electronic equipment almost exclusively, regarding other components as “machine-shop work”.

The one exception to the rule was a “universal” speaker enclosure, the product of Fisher’s close contact with the concerns of the audio hobbyist. Though the enclosure was allegedly universal, people kept asking Fisher what speaker to put in it – and customers for the electronics parts had always requested recommendations of loudspeakers. “I began to feel.” Fisher says, “that we were sending other people a lot of business.” Small-box speakers were already on the market and selling handsomely, and Fisher believed that the speakers of the future would have to fit into small enclosures –particularly since stereo was on the way. (Fisher likes stereo, incidentally, mostly because he feels it has forced record pressers and pickup makers to get on the ball.) As for Fisher’s consoles, these units required relatively high efficiency speaker systems-also suitable for small enclosures. In 1959, Fisher brought out the “free piston” design, for the better consoles and as separate component item. The recent XP4-A actually is the fifth improvement of this product (though its basic principle, the woofer cone attached directly to the enclosure rather than to its own basket, has remained unchanged). Fisher gives no figures on sales, but says the speakers are now a “substantial fraction” of his total business. Nobody really knows how large

Fisher Radio is today, except Fisher, his accountants, and his bankers. A privately owned company need publish no figures, and Fisher sells in two separate markets, console and components, neither of which is known for supplying statistics to inquiring reporters. (Both are also subject to relatively heavy inventory fluctuations, so even honest figures may be misleading.) Fisher will say, however, that the proportions of console and component in his total sales have varied enormously from year to year – “some years one of them is bigger, some years the other, and it’s always more of a margin than sixty-forty.” And he is willing to describe the growth of the company in terms of square footage occupied – from 750 square feet in the Hotel Marguery right after the war to 165,000 square feet today, about half of it in Long Island City (where Fisher has his own modest, walk-up executive offices), the other half in central Pennsylvania.

“In this company,” Fisher says, “ I have always represented the discerning amateur. I keep looking back to my early days, when I was a buyer, not a seller.” Because Fisher has continued to be an audio hobbyist, with a consumer mentality, his company has placed extraordinary stress on the things the amateur values most –packaging, durability, and quality control. At one time, most audio components were packaged only to the extent that assured minimum damage during handling and shipping. The boxes were hard to open and unpack, and often there would be excelsior all over the unit when the purchaser finally pried it out. The instruction manuals were written in a language comprehensible (if never elegant) to the initiate, but frightening or worse to the newcomer. Fisher sweated over his manuals, and had people design packages that would present, as well as preserve, the shipment. He wrapped his components in plastic bags, to assure that they would come out sparkling and dust-free. “The smell of buying something new,” he says, “is part of the fun.” Durability is Fisher’s pride, and he is a proud man. Among the design features he points out specially when going over his display of former models is the “two-level” chassis, which improved the physical rigidity of a heavy tuner-amplifier unit (and probably added as much to the cost as many more glamorous and easily advertised features). Indeed, Fisher sometimes becomes a little embarrassed about the flow of new designs from his company.

“People say to me, “Now you’ve got this new model. Why? What’s wrong with the old one?” All I can reply is. “there’s nothing wrong with the old one, but we’ve got new and better tubes to work with.” The tube manufacturers set the pace.” Quality control, the eternal bugaboo of all assembly-line manufacture, probably takes more of Fisher’s own time than anything but selling. “You get quality,” Fisher says mildly, but with savage implication, “by hanging around people’s necks.” All Fisher parts are tested before they are put into the hopper. On the assembly line itself, one of every seven workers is an inspector, and each unit coming off the end of the line undergoes a rigorous electrical and mechanical checkout. Additionally, Fisher executives often take new sets home to sample the product themselves in familiar surroundings. Though Fisher firmly respects his engineers´ test instruments, he puts first priority on the evidence of his own ears, particularly where speakers are concerned. His own “reference standard” speaker in his home installation, two- thirds of which is prewar. The low frequency foundation, as noted earlier, is an 18-inch Jensen woofer made for theatre use in the early Thirties; Fisher thinks that, though not necessarily better than some others, this is a good a woofer as anybody has ever made. But the glory of the system to Fisher – the section he will talk about lovingly and at length, claiming is the most remarkable loudspeaker in the history of audio – is the midrange driver, a 36- pound, field-excited, handmade brass unit with a 4 inch voice coil, produced by Western Electric for the audio system at the lagoon in the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940.

“They had batteries of them out at the lagoon. You know how these things are, these Fairs – they’re going concerns until one day they close, and then everybody forgets about them. The projectionist at the Beacon Theatre, a movie house up on the West Side, offered the wreckers fifteen hundred dollars for all the audio at the lagoon, and got it. Today you’d have to spend fifteen hundred dollars to duplicate just one of these WE597 drivers.” This system , in any case, represents a final hurdle that every new Fisher design must pass in addition to all the engineering tests conducted at the factory. As for his own new speakers, Fisher often will pull models off the assembly line to see how they sound against his music system at home, which takes about ten times the cubic volume of a XP4-A. “Believe me,” he says, “you have to use A/B tests, switching back and forth, or you can’t tell anything. Even then, very few people will know what makes the difference between speakers. You have to be able to listen selectively, to hear each range separately in each speaker, or you won’t know.” To switch from speaker to speaker, Fisher uses an old Western Electric microphone selector, built for a broadcasting station, picked up for 75 cents at a Canal Street junk shop, and modified by Fisher himself for its present use.

“You can buy one now ready made,” he said, showing it off, “but it isn’t any better.” He had spent much of that day planning equipment for people who – to quote his brochure – “do not even want to bother plugging a connected cable into a plainly marked receptacle.” And he makes much of his living out of consoles. “You know,” he says wistfully, turning the knob on this battered old gadget, “the manufacturers have really made things to easy for people. They’ve taken a lot of the fun out of this....”