It used to be that great things were invented by one great man. Edison, Morse, Tesla, Bell, McCormick, Whitney, Fulton, and countless others all—at least until they became established—worked alone, or with just an assistant or two, to bring their wonders to the world.
In most fields, that no longer seems possible. Maybe it's because, as one U.S. Patent Office official is reported to have said in 1899, "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Obviously, that's not the case.
Or maybe it's just gotten to the point where we know so much that diminishing returns have set in, and now only groups of highly trained researchers backed by huge corporate budgets can ever learn anything new. Even Edison said that genius is "…one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." Maybe now, and for at least a good part of the last century, the percentages have changed. Maybe the perspiration part now needs to come from more people. Or maybe significant new discoveries have simply gotten so expensive that only a well-funded large group can ever hope to find them.
That certainly seems to be true for our industry. Edison invented the phonograph all by himself, but it seems that all of the big stuff—all of the major innovations since then—including the LP record, the transistor, magnetic recording, digital recording, CDs, DVDs, and the lasers to read them, took big corporations to invent, to fund, and to bring to market.
That's certainly true as far as it goes, but the fact of it is that, had it not been for dedicated and inspired individuals taking the basic products, concepts, and technologies invented by the big companies, turning them in our direction, and making them both usable and appealing to an audiophile market, our industry and the level of sound recording and playback that we now expect from it would never have come to be.
In the beginning, HiFi itself was not a corporate goal. Instead, it was the unplanned child of a marriage of radio and the phonograph, with the telephone company as its midwife. And the people who caused it to happen weren't the inventors of the basics but were, instead, individuals like Avery Fisher, H.H. Scott, Paul Klipsch, and others who had the vision to see what those basics, brought together and improved, might achieve.
It was all a matter of improvement. The big companies did the basic research, and the small companies or individual designers took what they had done and made it better or more applicable to a music purpose. Starting with circuitry and technologies originally developed for other things (radio, the telephone, and the cinema), all of which had, themselves, been made possible by discoveries and products of companies like Bell Labs, Western Electric (the telephone company's manufacturing arm), and RCA (Radio Corporation of America), the pioneers of HiFi created better-sounding equipment and better-sounding speakers to play the better-sounding electrical recordings that had—not for music at all, but for the benefit of radio and the movies—been developed by the big companies to replace Edison's original wax cylinders.
Everything from the microphones to the recording and playback systems of the original researchers had been invented by somebody else for some other purpose, but the founders of what eventually became the modern HiFi industry took it, tinkered with it or brought their best educated minds to it, and came up with new products and new knowledge that they could truthfully and confidently say offered higher fidelity to the sound originally recorded. Music that, in short, finally did start to live up to the Victor Talking Machine Company's early 1900s slogan "His Master's Voice," and sounded more like real music than ever before.
For the big companies, it was and remains all a matter of business. Big companies have big overheads and need to sell big numbers of product at the maximum possible profit margin in order just to stay in business. Because of that, their products must always be good enough for people to want to buy them and reliable enough that there won't be troublesome warranty or product liability issues but, other than that, they must always protect their profitability (and the R&D budgets that allow them to keep on making new basic discoveries) by shaving their production costs wherever possible. That can and often does mean that the search for absolute performance must be set aside in favor of other considerations.
With small companies, it's something else, entirely. They don't sell the sheer volume of goods that the big companies do, so they can never achieve a big company's economies of scale. That means that their parts cost is higher. They also tend to use a higher percentage of expensive hand labor, and their per-unit-sold overhead and marketing costs are likely to be higher, too. The result is obvious: with higher costs, the prices of their goods need to be higher, too.
So how can they compete with the bigger companies?
There are really only two ways: either they must sell higher-priced, higher-performance, better quality or better-looking goods than the bigger companies do, or they must offer specialty products, in market areas or categories that the bigger companies either aren't aware of or, for whatever reason, don't go after. High-End audio is full of both.
A perfect example of the first approach—"higher-priced, higher-performance"—is the CD player. Originally developed (as it had to be) by big companies who could afford the massive costs involved, the original CDs and CD players players were perfectly functional, entirely reliable, and sold as "perfect sound forever," exactly as you would expect from a big company.
They also didn't sound very good, and that provided the opportunity for small companies to make them better. And that's exactly what happened.
Small companies, which may very well have a world-class designer as their principal, but seldom have the funding to bring out something as complex and capital intensive as a CD player on their own, bought rights and CD transports from the big companies and modified them, adding better power supplies, better parts, and upgraded circuitry—all of the things that the big company accountants could never approve—and brought out, as specialty products, CD players that could compete with analog for sound quality, blow their big company competitors into the weeds from a performance standpoint, and easily justify their higher prices by the greater musical enjoyment they provided.
CD playback equipment wasn't the only part of your system to be invented by a big company and improved by smaller ones. The same is true for many other parts, as well, including the bringing of tube electronics to their present level of performance, long after the so-called passing of the tube era, and almost every aspect of LP recording and playback. (Remember that it was one man, Joe Grado, who invented the moving coil phono cartridge—the audiophile's choice for High-End phono playback.)
Other areas where the small companies have made big improvements to the sound of your system are those that the big companies have chosen to ignore. Cables and other "accessory" items are good examples of that and, generally, the big companies don't get involved with them for just one of two reasons: either the market or its potential profitability seems too small (as did High Fidelity sound, itself, until the 1950s) to attract big company interest, or the big companies don't even know that a potential market exists.
Who but an audiophile would have thought that the mat on an LP turntable platter can, by passing, controlling, or contributing to resonances, affect sound quality? Who would have thought that spikes (or more currently EVPs) under speakers and other system components could affect their sound? Who could have imagined that the power cord on an amplifier—or a turntable, or (yeah, really truly) electrostatic speakers—could make an important difference? Certainly not the big companies. It's the little companies, with audiophile staffs and open minds and a willingness to use them that, fully as much as the big companies that do the initial research, make our systems as good as they are.
We are an industry of improvers.
