Word: fi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...neurosis has been discovered: audiophilia, or the excessive passion for hi-fi sound and equipment. The discoverer: Dr. Henry Angus Bowes, clinical director in psychiatry at Ste. Anne's Hospital for veterans at Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Que., himself an audio fan. Tweet by tweet and woof by woof, at a research meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Psychiatrist Bowes spelled out how audiophiliacs behave...
Most of them are middleaged, male and intelligent, drawn largely from professions requiring highly conscientious performance (the church, accountancy, medicine, especially psychiatry). They are often single (or if married, childless). They rarely play any musical instrument well themselves. The hi-fi devotee, Dr. Bowes found, "is very frequently of compulsive personality, and tends to go through rituals in the playing of his recordings." What distinguishes the psychopathological addict from the enthusiastic followers of this (or any other) hobby? Dr. Bowes answered: "His tendency to become preoccupied with, and dependent upon, the bizarre recorded sounds . . . combined with the urgency...
This is what the trade calls "impulse buying," and it accounts for most of today's estimated $15 million children's record business. The impulse is felt by all ages. Nobody among the junior low-fi set knows exactly what he will hear when he takes the disks home (buying has actually been cut down by a phonograph playing samples in the store) but the riotously colorful jackets are enough to make sales soar. Packaging and merchandising are fancy and getting fancier-Cellophane windows, stereoscopic pictures with viewer, picture books with sound cues on accompanying records for turning...
...worked out by LIFE Magazine. Color transparencies of the masterworks were blown up on strips of 40-in.-wide film to the exact dimensions of the originals, and framed by light boxes containing fluorescent tubes. The brighter-than-life effect was like listening to symphonic music on a hi-fi recording. It was an exciting, highlit visual experience...
...Semper Fi (Contd...