Malcolm Steward: audio journalist

I first met Laurie Fincham some twenty years or more ago when I had to interview him for another magazine. That turned out to be an interesting experience. Laurie was thoroughly charming throughout the process but when I sent him a draft copy of my article for checking I received a call from his secretary saying: “on page so-and-so you have Mr Fincham saying ‘XYZ’. He didn’t say that.” I replied that he did and that I would be very happy to post the tape recording of the interview so that she might listen to it herself.

Laurie Fincham, THX Chief Scientist

She called me back after speaking to him and said: “Well if Mr Fincham did say that, that wasn’t what he meant: you’ve clearly misinterpreted him.” I apologised for my failure to read his mind and made a mental note to be very careful the next time Laurie and I met. That happened about ten years later when we found ourselves waiting for taxis after a KEF-sponsored industry dinner. “Fancy a drink?” he asked me. “Yes, I’ll have a single Malt.” “Oh good, another single Malt fan! I didn’t realise you enjoyed Scotland’s finest,” he said. At this point my heart sank, realising that Laurie’s fearsome intellect might extend to whisky as well, and that I might be in for a grilling. Why hadn’t I just asked for a pint of bitter? “Which would you prefer?” he asked, indicating several shelves full of various whiskies, many of which were completely unknown to me. “I’m spoilt for choice by the selection,” I said. “Well, I have an idea,” he ventured. “Why don’t we start on the left and work our way through to the right.” Whether he had sensed my wariness or was just being pragmatic I don’t know but his suggestion certainly lifted my veil of trepidation and we sat down to a very enjoyable drink and a conversation about jazz and all manner of topics until our cars arrived.

Laurie currently holds the rather grand title of ‘Chief Scientist’ at THX and has certainly, as some would say, been around the block a few times. Perhaps best known for his tenures at British loudspeaker manufacturers KEF (well, at least it was British while he was there), Celestion and Goodmans, he was also a semi-professional jazz bass player – who has played with many jazz greats and ran a London club at night while designing loudspeakers full-time during the day. As well as appearing to possess boundless energy, he is a charming and fascinating person with whom to sup coffee and chat, which is exactly what I did when he paid a recent flying visit to the UK from his home in California. He was in England to deliver an AES lecture “Experiments with a Multi-Element Steerable Loudspeaker Array” with colleagues from THX, and cramming in re-unions with friends and family along with meetings in what seemed to me a torturously hectic schedule that most men forty years his junior would deem challenging. To set the scene for this interview I must explain that Laurie and I met at his hotel just as he was finishing his breakfast, at an hour when my body is usually just starting to ponder the desirability of actually clambering out of bed. It was way too early for me: and, as is typical, I hadn’t done any preparation and was fully into my usual ‘stream of unconsciousness’ mode of interviewing: Laurie graciously told me that as a jazz player he was completely comfortable with improvising and would find it quite acceptable to conduct the interview in a free-form fashion.

MALCOLM STEWARD: You’ve had four or five decades of speaker design so I guess the obvious question is why haven’t you retired to Spain to play golf? What drives you to persist with a schedule that would see most people buried?
LAURIE FINCHAM: I just love it. And I think it’s just begun. I know that sounds a bit smug but I think that loudspeakers are a huge technology and we still don’t know as much about them as we ought. We still hear things we don’t understand and measure things that we can’t correlate: as long as that situation obtains I’ll keep on doing what I do. Everybody gets mad with me because I work round the clock but they don’t have the same priorities as me. The problem with being really interested in something is that you tend to do it at the expense of the people round you. You have to ask yourself ‘This is really interesting for me but do I have the right balance?’ Fortunately for me my wife is 100 per cent behind me but she does remind me occasionally that I ought to do other things. I am thankful for that. You can’t fight battles on two fronts: you go to work and deal with the technical battles and you really don’t need conflict at home. It’s your home life that keeps you up and keeps you going

MALCOLM STEWARD: How much did the BBC designs department influence what you were doing while you were at KEF?

LAURIE FINCHAM: As a sidebar to this, one of the things people don’t do now because we’re all so busy and it’s all about information and sound-bites, we don’t take the time to read the literature just because it contains funny spelling or funny grammar or it talks about different units – Ergs and so forth. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good. In fact, it’s quite the contrary: because they didn’t have today’s equipment they really had to think about what they were doing.

I don’t think that there are any ‘giants’ in the audio industry now in the way that there were in the ‘thirties, ‘forties and ‘fifties. I suppose the last major figure in audio at that level is probably Ray Dolby, a very smart guy with his noise reduction system: he single-handedly allowed the recording industry to change – even if not always for the better. I’m not entirely convinced that multi-channel recording is necessarily a good thing even though it is in economic terms. But if you listen to recordings made in the 1950s when they didn’t have enough microphones to make a mess of things, you find they were still able to do amazing things. Why is it that in those days, when all they had was rudimentary equipment, that they could make wonderful recordings and yet today, with 24-bit/96Khz digital and everything else, engineers still manage to miss many aspects of the sound? I don’t think there’s any secret: I think that people aren’t encouraged to listen to the characteristics of the sound they’re recording. Digital is great in that it allows you to do things that were impossible in the analogue days, but you still have to listen and think about what you are doing.

The BBC single-handedly influenced the whole of the industry and especially KEF. Before one gets carried away thinking we were the pioneers of plastic cones it pays to remember an economic fact of life: in the old days if you made a cone in paper it cost an absolute fortune so if you wanted to make a new speaker you had to do it with the cones that you had: you probably got a new cone about once every six years. Now, of course, KEF couldn’t buy in the sort of quantities that interested cone manufacturers so the real reason behind the use of plastic cones – and it wasn’t a bad reason – was that it allowed the company to make its own cones: you thought of a shape and you could have it produced the next day. There was a good deal of serendipity about why things happened.

Laurie Fincham, Chief Scientist at THX and mean bass player

One of KEF’s most famous drive units, the B139, for example, wasn’t 13-inches by 9 for any acoustic reasons. It was heavy merely because they wanted to put it in a small box and it seemed like a good idea. And it was that elliptical shape because it avoided Purchase Tax – and Purchase Tax was the difference between life and death in those days. You should read what the magazines said about it at the time: knowing the inside story puts things in a very different perspective!

The Beeb remained influential and spawned Chartwell and Spendor, who licensed its designs, and later Harwood went off and founded Harbeth and certainly KEF continued to do its thing. What happened with the plastic cone thing was that while it was very consistent and enabled you easily to try new ideas, in the end programme material demanded more output, which meant much bigger amplifiers, which weren’t around then, or you had to make the cones lighter. I remember Raymond (Cooke) saying one day that we were going to go down-market and make a pair of speakers costing £100 (this was in 1972, remember). He said it had to be really sensitive to which I replied, ‘Well we can’t use our ¾-inch T27. We’ll need a 1-inch soft-dome and we don’t have one so buy one from Audax, and the bass cone has to be paper.” That put everybody up in arms but I said why didn’t we just do it and worry about whether people cared afterwards. That was an interesting exercise in which we learned that the public only cares about whether a speaker works or not: they’re not fixated with a company sticking rigidly to plastic cones or any other technology. That speaker proved to be a major breakthrough for us, although I forget the model name: if it wasn’t a Coda it was a Cresta and then we went through all the names we could come up with beginning with a C until we eventually ran out of them. Nonetheless, that speaker was valuable in that it taught us not to get caught up with dogmatic design principles. There is no sacred cow: you can make anything work provided you understand the limitations of the design approach. People say to me, for example, “Reflex-ported cabinets don’t work,” which is nonsense. As I said, you can make anything work but you have to understand the particular technology’s limitations.

You have to keep an open mind and I suppose that KEF was unusual in that the technical department had an unreasonable influence on that product policy. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I realise that it was probably an unhealthy influence because what a company really needs is to be in a kind of dynamic tension with its economic needs but at that time I wasn’t taking any prisoners so if they were prepared to allow us to do these things…I now know that we probably should have been more focused on the market. As I get older I think much more about what the problems are and whether people know what the problem is… Take the iPod, for example: nobody ever said what they wanted was a nice little white thing that went in their pocket and downloaded tunes but when they saw it they immediately knew they wanted it. So there are two types of buyer now. There are those ‘how do I get rid of these damn wires?’ types, which everybody is saying nowadays and which I find fascinating. I’m really at the stage nowadays where I’m asking what it is that people really want from their loudspeakers. And it isn’t the totally male preoccupation that it was when I started: it was always men who were on their own and dissatisfied with their systems because they never enjoyed the music. It was always failing in some way and when they went to their dealer it was always a case of “I’ve bought so-and-so: do you have anything better.
Now, when I’m at work I’m on duty and I’m listening to the sound. When I’m at home I relax and listen to the music. And that’s a fundamental difference. If it’s good music then it’s good to listen to. It’s regrettable that Charlie Parker was never recorded in digital but he wasn’t and that doesn’t mean I’m not going to listen to his records because they’re noisy and scratchy: it’s the music that I want to hear.

MALCOLM STEWARD: It fascinates me that despite all this ‘progress’ one of my favourite albums – both from a musical and a sonic point of view – is still the wonderful Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section from 1957.

LAURIE FINCHAM: I know it well. About that time I was playing the bass and I was trying to take down the bass lines. In league with a very good friend, a piano player who had perfect pitch, I’d play the 33 1/3 album at 78rpm and he would tell me what the notes were and I’d write them down. It’s really difficult to pitch bass notes when there’s other stuff going on: it wasn’t so bad with mono but when you went to stereo and had softer cartridge suspensions the bass tended to go out of the window. There was this funny period where you had LPs with great bass on them but the replay systems weren’t up to reproducing it properly. To this day for me, one of the best tests of a speaker is whether you can tell the pitch of bass notes because they’re so often obscured by resonances and so on.

I agree with you about the Art Pepper album, though. That emerged from a sort of heyday when they were making excellent recordings, a lot of which came from Hollywood – where they obviously had the best facilities for recording for the film business. Then there are other great recordings like the Miles Davis’ 1963 Concert, where they didn’t have time to do lots of fancy stuff: they just put the mics up and the band played.
Then you got into multi-track and … Progress? I think what’s going to happen, when I look at guys who mix programme, and the same is true to a certain extent of people who play in pit orchestras, it’s almost the same as people playing in studio orchestras, at least the ones I knew when I was growing up, because basically as long as you turn up and hit the right notes, you had a job for life. Well I think it’s like that in the studio: you made the tea and did all this stuff, got beaten up left right and centre and you had the star mixer who eventually retired and you’d hope to get his job. Now what’s happened in the meanwhile is we’ve gone from analogue to digital and then to the workstation. They now have fantastic tools but you need another generation to work out how to use them. The older generation – people are always nervous of new technology and I guess I’m as guilty of that as the next person – feel that they’ve somehow acquired all this expertise and that if they go off and do something new they’ll lose it. Maybe they could learn a lesson from Miles Davis who just jumped off the high board four or five times during his career – he didn’t always hit the right thing but he still produced some incredible music. I am really hopeful that there’ll be a new generation of savvy kids who were weaned on computers and don’t have this technical hurdle, and that they’ll be able to get straight to the heart of the music because they know how to do it. I’m really hopeful plus I think that the fact that you can make such a good sound as a semi-pro today – I would have given my back teeth for the tools they have now. When I was playing it was really hard; you had to write out your charts by hand whereas now you can write out your manuscripts and transpose them for every instrument in the band just by pushing a button on your Mac keyboard. You can’t imagine how long that job used to take me.

Plus the big studios are no longer interested in having any depth in their catalogues, just as long as they have two or three ‘stars’. But now, of course, musicians can create their own music and put it up on the internet and it’s going to be the same with movies. There’s a whole new generation who don’t have to depend on Hollywood saying “You haven’t got Brad Pitt lined up for this movie so we don’t know if we’ll be able to consider making it,” to get their films aired. I find it very exciting that the new generation will be able to make great music and movies with not a lot of equipment. And there are still some good musicians out there but they don’t have the same training ground that I had growing up as a player. Typically a band player would learn to read music, spend years on the road and learn his craft and then perhaps progress further if he were any good. Today, you’re nothing until you’re a star. One day you’re nobody, the next the whole world knows your name. Some of those people make it but most of them end up being forgotten very quickly because they’ve never had the chance to learn their craft. It’s the same with theatre, where you had repertory companies that created a whole breed of fine actors in the UK. Nowadays you have to go straight into a soap opera because you can’t survive being in repertory.

That’s what’s good about this new internet generation of music and movie producers. And one of the champions and protagonists of this movement is George Lucas, who was always a maverick and an outsider in that he did stuff that he wanted to do. He’s been lucky enough to be successful and that allows him to remain independent.

MALCOLM STEWARD: Is that what attracted you to working at THX?
LAURIE FINCHAM: No, not really. I was asked and I thought “Terrific” because, although I’ve done hi-fi all my life, I’ve always been a film buff: I used to go to the cinema three or four times every week.

All the people at THX love what they do: they love music and movies so it’s a great place to work. And you also get the opportunity to play with all the greatest equipment and discover what works, what doesn’t and why. It’s like spending every night in a hi-fi store and being allowed to play with everything in the place. And, of course, there are definitely worse places to live than Northern California. I can tolerate blues skies and sunshine for three quarters of the year! Going back to loudspeakers and, as I said to you earlier, many products come from the process: they shouldn’t, of course, but they do. People tend to shoehorn things in and try to justify them retrospectively. And if it works, you know, all other things being equal, an interesting and visually different element can be what makes a good product… as long as nothing else is sacrificed just so that that element can be included. You have to be noticed. You can’t just be self-effacing and okay. The market is too unforgiving. When I was at KEF we made speakers that were different. The reason for that was that there wasn’t anyone to tell us we couldn’t do it that way. People seemed to like it: the salesmen certainly did because each new model gave them a different story to tell. It wasn’t a case of “Oh! Wow! We have Rosewood veneers this year.” There was always stuff going on that made for a good tale.

MALCOLM STEWARD: Do you feel that the buyers have changed since those days when sound performance was all?

LAURIE FINCHAM: Audio as we know it pretty much peaked in the late 1980s for many reasons, including political and economic factors – the first Gulf War, for example – and we saw the introduction of surround sound in cinemas, which migrated into the home in the 90s. This didn’t happen overnight but you could see the mix changing as home cinema became established. People wanted pictures and sound, which had two effects: firstly, the display device perhaps consumed a large proportion of their budget leaving them less to spend on the audio, and the nature of watching TV and movies is a much more social event than listening to your stereo: you sit where you want and not necessarily in the ideal listening position, so the idea of stereo, left and right speakers and only one person in the room has gone. So the way that surround sound integrates with the household is critical because now you not only have all the family there you also have the distaff side so they will want a say in how it looks, how it performs and how you operate it. Audio will never go away but I don’t think it’s the economic driving force it was and video is wonderful with its large screens and really high quality pictures and so forth. And I think we’re at the beginning of video, not the end. The nature of new product is that it’s driven from invention to commodity status and only after that time does it qualify for cult status.

Look at the phonogram and radiogram and you’ll see that the high-end originated with products that people built to improve on the performance of these 1950s’ commodity items. The beginnings of audio came out of the dissatisfaction with the ‘big’ companies’ ideas of what was good sound. I think you’re going to see it again with sound, with video and with computers. Computers have been commoditised to such an extent that what you can buy now for your money is absolutely unbelievable. The trouble is that there’s nowhere for their makers to go because everybody has one and so now what you’re going to see is people starting to customise them. Whatever we did in the old days to our hi-fi we’re going to start doing to our computers: parallel tracking tone-arms on our PCs or whatever. It’s going to become a hobbyist thing. It won’t be a big market but in a way it’ll be more interesting because we’ll suddenly realise just how good our computers can be, their potential for really good sound. But as long as someone wants to sell you a £300 computer to get you on the internet there will compromises, but it will happen. At the moment, of course, no-one can decide whether it’s computers that make amazingly good sound or things that make amazingly good sound that are like computers. Neither side has been able to cross the divide because you really have to have been brought up to understand the thinking of what people expect from their equipment. It’s too complicated: a computer is not a device to play music on, even if you can, because it’s very unfriendly. On the other hand an AV receiver that’s more complicated than a computer without any of the saving graces is even worse – with its myriad menus and sub-menus. Unless you’ve got your wits about you, it’s easy to get mired down in a pit of gimmicks. The adding of gimmicks just says to me that the manufacturer doesn’t know how to differentiate his products for those of other manufacturers. That is not an unreasonable thing to do, however, because differentiating with sound quality is not for everyone. In fact, we probably ought not do it. The fact that you and I might be able to hear differences is not relevant in the scheme of things. It might amuse us but does it really matter ultimately? The key thing is the integrity of the product. My analogy is that I would love to sell Porsche motor cars and the fact that nine out of ten people who buy them can’t drive them to the level that the Porsche can attain doesn’t alter the fact that the Porsche is a wonderful car. If you can drive it to its limits that’s great but if you can’t it doesn’t truly matter. I would like hi-fi to be like that: if you really could tell the difference, it’s there but up to that point you can show off for whatever reason you have for doing it. I’d like to see that third element put back into consumer electronics: you have price and you have appearance, and I’d like to see performance back in there rather than perming any two from three, which is what you see at the moment. You can buy items that are fantastic value for money but the things that matter seem to have been sacrificed on the altar of low price or attractive styling. I sincerely hope I’m not alone in thinking that people will pay more for products that offer greater performance. Anecdotally, I believe that to be true but the market is the only place that can tell me whether I am correct in thinking that way.

MALCOLM STEWARD: While you were at KEF you were instrumental in introducing leading-edge computer systems to the design and manufacturing processes and you developed the now well-established Uni-Q driver that has become the company’s sort of USP. Could you tell us more about that?

LAURIE FINCHAM: We did find by using computer aided measurement and controlling the processes that we could produce drivers that were extremely consistent so you didn’t have happenstance performance. Having got that consistency you have to ask yourself what you wanted: you could make speakers that were arbitrarily flat but the problem was that they didn’t always sound the way they measured – and this is the perennial problem. It was sort of tacitly understood that the reason was because you needed to look at the response on more than one axis. Now if one were to characterise approaches to design – remember earlier we talked about the BBC and primarily what they did was teach you to put speakers on a stand, move it way from the wall and get very close to the speaker so pretty much the direct sound dominated and that became the design objective for the for the large part of the English school of speaker design. In America they always cleaved more to the idea that the bulk of the sound comes to you through an indirect path – obviously popularised by Bose – but before them there was AR on the East coast who essentially said that if so much of the sound reached the listener that way then one should look at the power response, and certainly the Germans did, while the Scandinavians, who had very live rooms, and they found that with such rooms you couldn’t ignore their contribution so they produced omni-directional speakers such as the Sonab. As inevitably happens with all these things neither side was right and neither side was wrong. It turned out that they were both right and they were both wrong. In a sense we’ve gone full circle. Floyd Toole (formerly at Harman but now retired) really has a handle on this. He’s spent a lifetime figuring out how to listen to speakers and designing them: he concludes that the response of many angles is appropriate and indeed it is but we’re now getting to the point where we’re beginning to understand the set of data to be extended. You can’t guarantee that it’s good but if you were a gambling man you would say that the likelihood that something that measured like this would sound pretty good. And that’s about as far as you can get. As a result of that you can say Yes; on- and off-axis matters, and it matters in different ways. It matters where it comes from and what the relative levels are. It’s not just simple measuring. You have to weight it with psychoacoustic factors. Now, if that is the case, the point about something like Uni-Q, for example, was to say if we can do this we can have a device that has matched directivity and it did and the interesting thing about it was that its response was worse truly on-axis: it was very good everywhere else, in contrast with other speakers that were good on-axis but crap everywhere else. So, there was a steep learning curve: Uni-Q was not a slam-dunk by any stretch of the imagination. If you think that it’s been around for nearly twenty years and it’s only earned a modicum of respectability in that time. KEF has resolved a lot of its problems – edge reflections causing a ragged response, for instance – but it’s still an on-going process: that is how can you effortlessly control directivity? I suppose that what I’m working on now, which is how you can do that interactively…I mean, in the old days you had a speaker but you didn’t have any real options to change it with: all you could do was put it into the room and sit down and like it or not like it. At best you were able to re-equalise it but now you have the potential, in theory at least, not only to change the balance but also to change the directional aspects. That, to me, is most exciting because now we’re having to rediscover what really matters and then we’re right to the heart of things. The microphone is like a camera: it records what it sees and hears but it doesn’t reflect how it sounds, so I use a microphone to say when I’ve got a speaker to be how I want it and expect it to be. I capture it and that’s a guarantee that if it measures the same it’s likely to be the same as the one I originally thought or listened into existence. You will see, I’m absolutely sure, a sea change in the way speakers are developed, and also in the recording process. Ah, the recording process: ‘There’s magic in microphones’. Well, yes and no. I always say that if somebody hears it and they’re known to have sensitive hearing, you should absolutely listen to what they have to say. If they give you an explanation that differs with your own scientific understanding, ignore that because you’re still in danger of disregarding something because you simply don’t like their argument. The fact of the matter is it ‘does do that’ so the job of the engineer or scientist is to understand why that observation was made and not to disregard it because it’s inconvenient or goes against their understanding or technical background. Where we are now with the formidable array of recording and processing tools that are available is that we can easily discover whether an idea we have is going to make something sound better. In the old days, two iterations and you were already three months behind so you had to stop and get on with the business of getting the product to market. You don’t have to do that now and I think that we’re facing a wonderful voyage of discovery – for those people who are still interested. If this has to be a run-away business that’s after making a billion dollars within six months then you need to pick another subject: hi-fi never was that kind of business. It has always been a tiddly business run by self-made entrepreneurs, some of whom were good and some who weren’t. It changed when it attracted the interest of big industry when somebody saw the potential of a new market. They climbed on the gravy train and drove it for a few years – not necessarily in the right direction, though perhaps they did in terms of revenue. I think that they’ll leave it alone now and it will go back to people who like good sound. What goes around comes around. It’s periodic – like good times and bad times. I think that if you like good music – or art or literature – then you never lose the love of it. It’s simply that sometimes it’s okay to like it and at other times people are more interested in TV programmes.

MALCOLM STEWARD: Talking about TV, I was chatting with a distributor recently who told me that he is fed-up with selling flat screen sets because business is so cut-throat now that he has to sell them to retailers at cost. He makes his tiny profit only when he pays the manufacturer and receives his settlement discount. My reaction was why bother? Why not go back to dealing with hi-fi?

LAURIE FINCHAM: You were talking earlier about white goods and the situation there is the same. Hi-fi has changed and varied distribution has almost disappeared: everybody has been taken over and there’s been an homogenizing and we’re really in the age when there’s no selling, there’s just access to buying stuff. In that climate you won’t have people selling stuff. The question to ask is whether the specialist hi-fi store can survive. I don’t know but out in the country you do find that the ‘old-fashioned’ village store still exists because the benefit of such shops far outweighs the schlep involved in going to a supermarket just to buy a few potatoes or whatever. Maybe the supermarket mentality will decline or go away. I don’t know. You certainly won’t get it on the internet because that’s worse than the supermarket. You can’t really buy speakers on the internet: you still need to hear them and see them.

MALCOLM STEWARD: One of the problems I see with the speaker market is the consolidation of formerly independent brands now becoming parts of large conglomerates. Will this drive the innovation, for want of a better word, out of the market?

LAURIE FINCHAM: No. If you look at history what you see is periods where companies take other companies over and then they dispose of them and then they are reborn. It’s the nature of this industry and it’ll happen. It’s very hard to manage brands in our business because brands – certainly hi-fi brands – are very personal things: you’d be hard pushed to name a single brand that you don’t associate with one particular individual at the company. Everybody is a lemming in the financial world and under tremendous pressure to achieve the so-called performance of their competitors: the fact that they may be on the slippery slope to nowhere doesn’t matter at the time. Ultimately you’re not doing what you want to do for the right reasons: you’re not in charge of your own destiny if you’re being driven by the market. The owner of a company has the freedom to pursue his ideals if he’s prepared to grow his business slowly: and there’s not a single brand, in my experience in the audio business, that didn’t take about 20 or 30 years to establish its reputation. And, strangely enough, even in big business you see companies such as Sony, Microsoft and HP: these are not Johnny-come-latelys and they’ve all been around for years building their corporate ethos and so forth. I’m not so sure about the audio Enrons, these huge conglomerates: they may or may not survive. It depends partly on how well they’re managed, but I think they’re a temporary thing. You can’t really ‘manage’ something that needs a bit more love and passion. And nobody who wanted to become really rich would go into audio, would they? You venture into it because of a passion, a determination, a dedication, an amateurish enthusiasm, or any reason other than to make a vast fortune. The upside of the business is that you can enjoy doing what you’re doing and you get to meet like-minded but diverse people united by their love of sound.

MALCOLM STEWARD: Has the growth in custom install affected the way that you design loudspeakers?

LAURIE FINCHAM: Custom Install is a geographic thing and is important in certain markets. It relates to the audio visual experience which, unlike hi-fi, tends to involve the whole family and the ability to hide things (like loudspeakers) becomes important. I actually believe that you can make install stuff sound just as good as any stand-alone hi-fi as long as you understand what the parameters are and how you do it. Having spent far too long remodelling and figuring how to incorporate speakers into my home without ruining their sound, I think anyone can do it.

Our discussion continued to meander and eventually settled on the internet and magazine publishing after we had discussed photography and printing at some length.

LAURIE FINCHAM: The AES gives its members a choice between its printed journal or the downloadable version and I always opt for the former. The reason is that when one reads a magazine one sees the things that basically one is interested in. And when you go back to the magazine you find yourself seeing things you hadn’t noticed before. In the old days I used to spend a lot of time in the reference library at the Science Museum and I discovered that the number one rule of research was that the most interesting article was the one preceding the one you’d just been reading! My eyes would scan the page and I’d see a reference and I’d be off on another journey of discovery. The problem with the internet is that if you do a search by Google you’re sort of saying that you know where you want to go. Well, you don’t! You know when you’ve arrived that that was where you wanted to go but you’re not that organised. There’s a certain happiness about finding stuff that only comes through leafing through books. And one of the main problems with stuff on the internet is that, unlike the content of reputable magazines and books, it’s not edited: it just happens and appears there.