Fidelity

I met a man yesterday who triggered a shift in my thinking. My girlfriend’s grandfather is in the process of moving from a large house into a small retirement village. The house is filled with what might be considered debris, but each thing is infused with layers of memories. As I scanned the piles of books, I saw lots of familiar titles. They were mostly self-teaching books about electronics from the late-seventies and early eighties. I had read many of them when they were new, because I used to be a stereo geek.

In the room with his computer were SSB transmitters, breadboards, and testing equipment. Old Commodore 64s could be seen in various locations. He was a radio man. On the wall of the kitchen, there was a certificate for the “old timers” club of the Radio Relay League. There was an oscilloscope, and a vacuum-tube voltmeter on the porch. There were jumpers and wires in those breadboards. There were still projects in the man’s mind. He was noticeably angry and sad when he spoke to his relatives. But when I talked to him he perked up, perhaps because I knew what all the equipment was.

“People don’t know that it wasn’t Marconi that invented radio, it was Maxwell—he did it fifty years before Marconi, but because he couldn’t put it to use Marconi got all the credit.”

This man started experimenting with radio in 1929, and from the look of things, he didn’t want to stop just yet. My girlfriend told me that he tried to teach her Morse code when she was a child, but it just didn’t stick. It seemed strangely poetic that there was a cell phone transmission tower in the front yard; the man was fascinated with communications. My interest in electronics was different. I was interested in high-fidelity first, and only later in communications.

It occurred to me that there was a split in electronics in the 1930s between communications and a unique and relatively short lived use called high-fidelity. Communications endures. High fidelity is a narrow niche pursuit, now far off the mainstream radar. It used to be that hearing “his master’s voice” in the living room was important; now fidelity is only a secondary concern. Music doesn’t need to be life-like. We live in an age of abstraction where electronic processing simulates live environments, rather than attempting to replicate them.

Photography is like that too. Its original inventors are lost to our memory, overshadowed by those who put it to use. There was a short bubble, when an emphasis on actuality (documentary) was important. Over the long term, communication has replaced any desire for that communication to match organic experience. We only want the highlights, or an abstracted moment of substance rather than the rich tapestry of nuance that is the life-like experience of sound, or the confrontation with a person from the past who was filled with hopes and dreams, not just material concerns. Perhaps its because the sounds and images of today are more richly synthetic. Humanism is in retreat, and lives only in quaint historical forms.

In music, there is “classical” and “folk”—divisions that belie their traditionalism and conservatism. They use analog rather than digital instruments. On the bleeding edge of communication, everything is broken up into spots of data, a sort of new Morse code, which we reconstruct into images increasingly distant from any sense of the real.

Fidelity seems so much more inconsequential now, while the urge to communicate persists unabated. Of course there are exceptions to any such effort to totalize—high definition television is on the rise; it seems to be the only consequential effort to retain some link with fidelity. But its colors are garish and blunt, designed more for shock than comfort. The window on the world wears Polaroid glasses to make the contrast between the real and the simulated more striking.

It seems to me that it will be a long time before there is enough bandwidth to pipe an experience through to reach another human being with the sort of force and impact that the confrontation with the real provides. But the real seems less important now—people are happier to talk on their cell-phones than to notice the people around them.