Word: hi-fi
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...atmosphere. This week Piano Virtuoso Artur Rubinstein (see PEOPLE) enthusiastically echoes Barzun's point that "in spite of our perennial croaking about America's neglect of the arts, the country spends more money for music than the entire rest of the world." Since the hi-fi revolution, a growing slice of that money has been spent on records, which have created a magnificent "concert hall without walls" not only for the classics but for the moderns. TIME'S Music editor listens to the vinyl outpourings, from two dozen record companies, selects the best and most interesting items...
...Hi-Fi. The Mapleson recordings are not for the casual listener or the audiophile ("This is not a high fidelity record," says the album jacket testily). Most of the performances are so badly flawed with a variety of grindings, thumpings and banshee wails that the singers and orchestra are barely audible. Solos break off at tantalizing spots. But for all that, the records offer invaluable testimony to the student of singing on the style, range and phrasing of such otherwise unrecorded golden-agers as Jean De Reszke, Albert Saléza and Georg Anthes, and such better-preserved stars...
...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...
Those who are not well organized emotionally, said Dr. Bowes, "will treat their hi-fi set as the emotionally immature treat a car-as an expression of aggression, as a power symbol." To many it has a sexual connotation: addicts may be seeking a "sterile reproduction without biological bother," and in extreme cases, a record collection becomes a "symbolic harem." Significantly, says Psychiatrist Bowes (married, no children), an addict's wife almost always demands that the volume be turned down: "Perhaps in the male's interest in hi-fi she senses a rival, as shrill and discordant...