THE 1969 AUDIO FAIR IN ITS OLYMPIA HOME

A preliminary review by JOHN BORWICK

BY the time these words appear in print, the 1969 Audio Fair (I can't get used to tacking on the "Photo-Cine" bit) will have packed its tents and made way for some other extravaganza in the great halls of Olympia. But 1 am having to write this report while the show still has several days to run and my ears are being assailed as much by the hum and rumble of controversy about the venue as by the strains of the high fidelity demonstrations.

The show could hardly have got off to a less auspicious start. Due to a hangover from some earlier labour upset, the stand erectors were already about 24 hours behind schedule on Wednesday, October 15th. Still the Exhibition might have been nearly ready for the scheduled Trade opening next day if the workers had carried on through the evening and night. Unfortunately, with dark mutterings about that basic tenet of high principle -no adequate canteen facilities" they all packed up and went home.

So Thursday's opening had to be cancelled and visitors from all over the country arrived to find the entrances barred. Overseas Trade

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visitors were actually allowed in but they could have gleaned very little of profit from the chaotic conditions. Things looked worse, I suppose, because many exhibitors could not accept the inevitable lost day and were valiantly trying to set up their displays and demonstrations while men with gallon cans of 'crushed strawberry' paint (the prevailing colour) and mouths full of carpet tacks sploshed and hammered all round them.

A Show to remember

Exhibitors and visitors alike, then, will wish to forget that non-opening day. Certainly at 10 am on Friday, October 17th the grim acres of the National Hall, Olympia had put on a very attractive face. Audio exhibitiors were paying several times the space fee they had been used to at the Hotel Russell and they all seemed to have decided that, as long as they were spending so much, they might as well invest a little more in beautifying their displays. Appearance-wise, two further fillips came from the photographic exhibitors (small in numbers but strong in eye appeal ) and the larger radio groups—British Radio Corporation. Rank-Bush-Murphy, Decca and Philips— whose exhibition expertise and outsize publicity budgets were evidenced in graceful colour schemes and flower arrangements that would have done credit to the Ideal Home Exhibition or even the Chelsea Flower Show.

Also on the Friday, I was amazed at the very large number of visitors pouring through the turnstiles—more than 10,000 of them by early afternoon, as against a total attendance (non-paying) of only about 40,000 in four days at the Hotel Russell. The exhibitors found themselves submerged with enquiries and with long queues forming for their demonstrations from the very beginning of the day.

The booths were successful

A main talking point, of course, was the effectiveness of the 50 special listening rooms. These had an acoustic board inner skin, with an air space and plywood outside. The inner surface was whitewashed over and this lessened the amount of high frequency absorption but the panels must indeed have soaked up a fair amount of bass sound and this, together with the carpets, the seats and the 30 (maximum) people sitting in the seats, produced an acoustic environment that came close to simulating typical home conditions. Room resonances were an ever-present danger, as they must be in any four-square enclosure, but reached nuisance value only when the music was bassy and turned up too loud.

As for their insulating properties, we must remember that the overall background noise at a show like this is almost incredibly high. It is compounded of footsteps, innumerable conversations, doors banging and the filtered mush from nearly 100 demonstrations. Under such conditions, you are never going to design an inexpensive, collapsible studio in which you can hear a pin drop. The best you can try for is the creation of relative quiet, when the door is shut, in which visitors can sample the various reproducing systems, with as few distracting noises as possible.

To try out both aspects of this listening room problem—the acoustic balance of the 'wanted' music and the degree of attenuation of extraneous liaise—I went first to the Quad (Acoustical) room. It was my idea to move from the known to the unknown, a well-tried scientific principle. I have heard the Quad equipment in so many different rooms that I feel I know what it can

Philips GA 202 do. Here, in the 1969 Audio Fair standard demonstration room, I can say quite definitely that reproduction was very satisfactory. The treble was not being mopped up unduly and bass was pleasantly solid. Appropriately enough. the lady demonstrator played the Prologue from Pagliacci (Decca SET403-4, 9/69) and this served as a pleasant prologue to my tour. The room became very stuffy as the demonstration proceeded (an extractor fan was switched on afterwards): but outside noises were not a serious distraction. could hear no other music, only bursts of conversation as people passed near the doorway.

Encouraged by this, I then went from room to room and, particularly where sit-down recitals were in progress, I decided that the rooms were functionally acceptable. About half of the exhibitors had opted for a go-as-youplease presentation and here too the rooms did give the necessary isolation for one to assess the sound quality. It was perhaps a pity that a few systems were turned up too loud, so that sound spilled outside. But, in spite of this, I doubt very much if Cyril Rex-Hassan, the Organiser of the Exhibition, was ever obliged to carry out his threat of "pulling out the fuses on any decibel pests" and I felt that this was about the least cacophonous Audio Show I had attended anywhere.

To sum up, the unfortunate delays on opening day—to some extent compensated by adding an extra day at the end—gave us all a slightly jaundiced view of the Audio Fair's new venue—and there were many exhibitors who were ready to go back to "Victorian hotel bedrooms" in 1970. Now I am not so sure: the healthy ticking of the turnstiles, the reasonable effectiveness of the pre-fabricated rooms and the brisk pre-Christmas trade activity has produced a fair climate of opinion in favour of a similar date and venue next year. Maybe the pattern will be the specialist "Soncx 70" show at the Skyway Hotel in April and another "Exhibition of Home Entertainment" at Olympia in the Autumn. We must wait and sec.

Time has not permitted us to present a detailed discussion of the new equipment and trends at this year's show. Instead, we shall devote space next month to the many new products now coming on to the market— including a comparison of the prospects for reel-to-reel, cassette and 8-track cartridge tape systems.

Telefunken Acusta system of matching units