Sir:
After several years of subscribing to Audio and successfully resisting the mild urge to pour forth my trivial dissentions with an occasional author's article, Mr. Edward Tatnall Canby has finally spurred me to action!
Despite my frequent skepticism and inability to duplicate many of Mr. Canby's subjective findings relative to two of his pet projects, earphone listening and FM multiplex reception, I must admit that I generally enjoy his approach immensely. Only his apparent disdain for the fundamental engineering approach and his nonchalant, indeed gleeful, comments on his personal abuse of equipment, become occasionally irksome. For example, some of his remarks as I best recall them: "...I never make measurements... amplifier manufacturers would faint at running their equipment into zero and infinite loads but I do it often... it says not to change speeds while the machine is running but I did it several times...either the truckman or I, probably I, dropped the tuner... ," and so on.
Mr. Canby's safaris into the realm of psychoacoustics (a most complex subject demanding exhaustive research and competency on the part of the experimenter in order to draw valid conclusions and generalizations) are quite amusing, I have never read of a subject such as two-channel earphone reproduction more beaten, flayed, buried, reincarnated, digested, regurgitated, and rebeaten as this one. I actually feel sympathy for the earphones, after reading one of his series, similar to what I would feel for a patient who had just undergone an operation for a non-existent ailment, diagnosed and performed by a high-school biology student! Yes, Mr. Canby, most earphone listening results in an artificial aural atmosphere. No, Mr. Canby, most of us do not emerge from a bout with the earphones dripping sweat and ready for a psychiatric treatment brought about by "one-eared distortion." No, Mr. Canby, most of us do not suffer dizzy spells from highly separated source material, nor do we feel a mystic ancestral urge to almost completely blend the channels to alleviate that unbearable "one-eared distortion."