Opinion

After a visit to a showroom that left him bitten by the ‘hi-fi bug’, Barry Fox was soon shopping for amplifier kits, designing his own loudspeakers and writing for HFN under a pseudonym

I’ve lost my CV but reckon I must have been in the RAF learning electronics when HFN launched in 1956. I was reading Melody Maker and Amateur Cine World and interested in audio only as the means to several ends, like playing Sinatra’s Songs For Swingin’ Lovers and trying to synchronise home tape recordings with 9.5mm home movies.

The hi-fi bug bit when I first heard stereo for the home in Edinburgh in 1958 or 1959, when playing in bands for uni reviews on the Festival Fringe. Our MD, and fellow student, Herbert Chappell (who went on to big musical things like making the Three Tenors concert happen), found a hi-fi showroom in Edinburgh that offered the chance to hear stereo. We were at guilty pains to explain that we wouldn’t be buying anything, but the owner decently let us sit and listen.

Agent Adrian

Back in London, I started reading Hi-Fi News and tried building amplifier and tuner kits bought at Proops on Edgware Road. Some kits worked better than others. Some never worked at all. I risked instant death by taking audio from a TV set and feeding it through an amp and speakers. In those days TVs used mains droppers rather than transformers, so there was a chance the chassis, and any external connection, would be carrying over 200 volts.

At around the time I first read HFN I was working for a patent agency, drafting descriptions of inventions for official filing at the government Patent Office. Bored out of my skull, I hit on the idea of writing about new patent filings when they were published. Although patents were printed for all to see, obscure indexing and legal jargon effectively hid their content. To avoid the wrath of the patent profession I chose Adrian Hope as a pen name, as I had printed notepaper left over from a failed band led by a fictitious Mr. Hope.

One of the HFN writers I remember most fondly was Donald Aldous, because he encouraged young blood. I’m also grateful that the editor, John Crabbe [pictured above], let me/Hope write for the mag about newly patented audio ideas. One still sticks in the mind. Wharfedale suggested a speaker with hollow walls. It was light to move but weighed a ton when the walls were filled with water or sand. I still wonder why no one has ever done that.

Pipe dreams

Something Adrian Hope wrote about was how to make speakers from sewer pipes. Buy two big, heavy concrete pipes, stand them on a pair of bricks to create ports, stuff them with Dr. Bailey’s long-haired (sheep) wool to damp resonances and put woofers on the top, firing down.

You then balance up-firing mid and HF drivers on top of the woofers, and be sure to bolt the pipe securely to the room wall. The resulting omni-directional audio is not good for stereo but what matters most is that the bass is beautiful. To tweak it I used a Ferrograph mono reel-to-reel with Reslo ribbon mic to record the acoustic string bass I was then playing. This enabled live-versus-recorded comparisons, and iterative tuning of the port gaps and wool packing density.

I demo’d my pipes to anyone who would submit. I only replaced them when I could afford a pair of Spendor BC1s, which HFN had praised for neutrality. I packed in some wool to tighten the bass, and loved them madly for years.

I had family connections with a professor of acoustics, and wanted him to audition my pipes. But he was peeved because some of his students had quoted Adrian Hope’s articles in HFN at him. His response, I later learned, was, ‘his name’s not Hope and his degree was in Botany’.

This was absolutely true. But once I discovered hi-fi’s pairing of music and electronics, which is what HFN has always done so well, I never could find any enthusiasm for Linnean classification.