The Electronic Engineering Community and the “Hi-Fi Social Movement”
In this final section, I will investigate the role the electronic engineering community played in the formation of a coalition, which called itself społeczny ruch Hi-Fi (the Hi-Fi social movement), that aimed to promote an audiophile culture (Radioelektronik 1979: 160; 1980: 209). The name of this coalition itself reveals part of its function. There is a significant difference between the social identity and function of circles of audiophiles in Western countries and a coalition that called itself a “social movement.” Such social initiatives were formed to influence some form of social, economic, or legislative change, and it was also the agenda of this movement. In contrast, the Western audiophile culture was an elitist microculture with no interest in promoting its values among other social strata or appealing for more mass-produced and affordable HEAs. In this particular case, this movement’s central objective was the mass popularization of HEA, and I propose referring to this movement as a “technology-oriented social movement.” As David Hess, who coined the term “technology- and product-oriented movements” (TPMs), notes:
TPMs are mobilizations of civil society organizations that generally are also linked to the activity of private sector firms, for which the target of social change is support for an alternative technology and/or product, as well as the policies with which they are associated. (Hess 2005: 516)
In my study described in this article, such a movement was linked to the state-owned electronics industry instead of the private sector, however, its agenda of promoting HEA technologies fits into the TPM description. The coalition encompassed several social groups: the electronic engineering community, which was interested in popularizing the electronics-related technical culture and strengthening its position as an expert group; the editors and columnists from several technical and music periodicals; and audiophiles, who became activists promoting the audiophile culture in their local social milieus.
The availability of HEAs from the retail trade in the first half of the 1970s, and the wide promotion of the term Hi-Fi in the state media, stimulated the emergence of a network of rather ephemeral Kluby Hi-Fi, or Hi-Fi clubs in the mid-1970s. Such clubs received support from Radioelektronik, the periodical of both DIY electronics hobbyists and ham radio communities. In the late 1970s, Radioelektronik, aside from covering recent innovations in the audio electronics industry, started publishing notes about such clubs with a short outline of their goals and an encouragement to join them. I was unable to find any information that would suggest that these clubs left any archived source material, for instance, club bulletins, so I can only reconstruct their activities from information provided in Radioelektronik and, to a lesser extent, other relevant periodicals.
The first club was established in the port city of Gdańsk in 1976, and the second one, which became the leading club in the movement, was established in Warsaw shortly after with circa eighty members, including electronic engineers, music lovers, and journalists. In a press interview, Zygmunt Gutowski, an engineer and the chair of the club in Warsaw, (Razem 1980: 7) claimed that the inspiration for this club was The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, the oldest organization dedicated to the propagation of a specific technology-based auditory culture (LeMahieu 1982).
In the public presentation of the Gdańsk club, we can find the agenda of the movement:
- Popularization of technical culture linked with the usage of home audio technologies through gathering experience, exchange of information, and consultancies between club members;
- Collaboration with the electronics industry through organizing meetings with representatives of the industry to share opinions, forward opinions of the members of the Club about merits and flaws of manufactured products, and submit postulates concerning manufacturing profiles, culture in the retail trade, quality of the repair services, etc.;
- Guidance and advertising of new Hi-Fi technology systems;
- Guidance on choosing products when making purchases domestically and abroad;
- Spreading music culture by listening to music together and examining its quality, evaluating domestically released records, and evaluating music programs of Polskie Radio [Polish national broadcaster], etc. (Radioelektronik 1979: 160, my translation).
One of the key goals of the club in Gdańsk was to begin collaborating with the industry in an attempt to influence the technological choices regarding the design of new audio systems. As mentioned before, the decision to introduce HEAs production was made within the central power structure, and it is doubtful if such clubs had any level of agency to influence the technological choices made by the UNITRA enterprises.
In the centrally planned economic system, there was little place for consumer feedback. However, such clubs played an important role in influencing users and popularizing audiophile culture in public discourse. Moreover, not only did they promote certain audio technologies but also certain music genres, primarily classical music; progressive rock, including Mike Oldfield’s highly popular Tubular Bells; and electronic music, such as Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre. At that time, these three music genres were most embedded in the audiophile culture ethos of the importance of experiencing the quality and nuances of recorded music. However, as Ng and Skotnicki note, audiophiles “are more concerned with the sound reproduced than the music that the sound recreates” (2016: 10). The politics related to the popularization of specific music genres within the local audiophile culture of the era and the strong rejection of other genres such as Italo disco, considered to be low-brow music, would require a separate study. My focus here is on HEA technology, but I would like to point out the connection between this technology and music as a possible area for further studies.
The electronic engineering community played a pivotal role, not only in support of the production of HEAs but also in the popularization of the audiophile culture as an attractive hobby, mostly for young males. The most important platforms for this popularization were Przegląd Techniczny and Radioelektronik. These magazines published a substantial number of articles that popularized the audiophile culture, regularly included reviews of recent UNITRA products, and presented introductory courses in acoustics and electronics regarding recording and listening to music. Some of the authors of these articles were at the same time working as engineers in the industry or governmental R&D bodies or as polytechnic university lecturers.
A central figure in this community, who played a crucial role in the formation of the Hi-Fi movement, was Jerzy Auerbach (1920-2012). Auerbach was an electric engineer who, at different stages of his career, served as lecturer at the Warsaw University of Technology and an employee of various governmental radio technology institutes, where he helped co-design the first Polish radar system. During the 1970s he held several positions as a senior engineer at UNITRA, and in 1978 he was appointed as the director of the UNITRA R&D unit (see below) that strongly supported the Hi-Fi movement.
Auerbach was also a prolific writer who covered developments in audio technologies, particularly the emergence of Hi-Fi during the 1970s, and experimental music. Additionally, he was a seasoned press correspondent who regularly delivered reportages from the three major European consumer electronics trade shows: the Internationale Funkausstellung in West Berlin, the Festival Son & Image (previously Salon de la Hi-Fi) in Paris, and Hi-fi-VideoDüsseldorf. Auerbach also edited a popular lexicon of audio and video in which he not only explained the technological nuances of the HEAs but also instructed local audiophiles on how to pronounce Hi-Fi properly in Polish (Auerbach 1984: 88). Shared knowledge of vocabulary related to the HEA forms a central element in structuring the audiophile community. As Ng and Skotnicki note:
audiophiles have developed a linguistic register that features an expanded technical vocabulary and specialized lexicon to articulate the subtleties of sound. Knowing how to talk the talk, that is, describing different aspects of the sound produced by high-end equipment, is an important social ritual for entry into the audiophiles’ world. (Ng and Skotnicki 2016: 9-10).
Not only Auerbach but also other authors who popularized audiophile culture offered readers an entry-level presentation of key terms and jargon related to sound reproduction and acoustics.
To summarize his role, Auerbach was an engineer, who at the same time supervised the design of new technologies and, with his regular publications, played a pivotal role in the creation of a specific social role of the technology user. Referring to the classic work in the history of technology by John Law (1987), we may call Auerbach a “heterogeneous engineer” since he not only played a central role in the R&D of HEAs but also offered potential users access to technical and cultural knowledge necessary for the creation of a new identity: the audiophile.
In 1978, at the peak of the “consumer socialism” policy period, UNITRA established a large (circa 300 employees) research institute called Centralny Ośrodek Badawczo Rozwojowy Elektronicznego Sprzętu Powszechnego Użytku(Central Institute for the Research and Development of Consumer Electronics, hereafter COBRESPU). It was directed by Auerbach. Officially, this institute had two goals: the first was to conduct R&D and provide UNITRA enterprises with the know-how for technical innovation. The second was to provide external quality control for the electronic products made by these enterprises.
Moreover, Auerbach and his colleagues also intended for COBRESPU to play a role in promoting technical culture related to electronic technologies. From 1984 on, a circle of electronics engineers linked to the COBRESPU started publishing Hi-Fi Audio Video, a periodical supplement to Radioelektronik, and Auerbach became its editor-in-chief. The editorial in the first issue mentions that the decision to publish this periodical came about due to the growing popularity and interest in HEAs and that a substantial number of letters about such topics had been submitted by readers to Radioelektronik (Hi Fi Audio Video 1984: 1). The magazine was subtitled “progress in consumer electronics” and informed readers about global trends in audio and video electronics and any recently launched products of domestic manufacturers. It also regularly covered technical issues related to sound reproduction, but there was no information about the growing spread of HEAs or any activities of the Hi-Fi social movement. This is not surprising, as in the 1980s, along with the deepening economic crisis, the industry retreated from its goals regarding the mass production of HEAs. In the first half of the 1980s, audiophile culture disappeared from mainstream media, and the Hi-Fi movement evolved into a niche group gathered around Hi-Fi Audio Video, primarily interested in rather esoteric technical issues related to HEAs, for instance, DIY projects related to the modifying of domestically made audio systems.
Here we can see how an interest group with an agenda to promote electronics in society supported the development of the audiophile culture in the form of developing a new type of audio technology user. This community had intrinsic connections to the industry, and their campaign involved an attempt to attract new consumers who would seek to purchase new products made by this industry. Drawing from the history of technology we may interpret the electronic engineering lobby objective as an attempt to configure a new type of HEAs user (Woolgar 1991). Later, through the expression of “social demand” for new generations of HEAs, such users would actively support this industry. They would become allies of the electronic engineering lobby in their struggle for resource allocation in the centrally planned economy. Such support could be provided directly by asking for new HEAs in retail stores and stimulating the social demand for such goods and indirectly by presenting electronics as the technology of the future.
Aside from the technical press, such as the aforementioned Przegląd Techniczny and Radioelektronik, there was also a third periodical that played a significant role in the promotion of the audiophile culture. That magazine was Razem(Together), a weekly published in collaboration with a host of communist youth organizations, the most important one being the ZSMP, Związek Socjalistycznej Młodzieży Polskiej (Polish Socialist Youth Union). Razem was the Polish counterpart of the Soviet Ogoniok, which was used by the Komsomol, the equivalent of the ZSMP, to promote its agenda. Razem addressed adolescents and young adults, and its editors promoted positively valued social roles, hobbies, and cultural trends and advised young readers on how to approach their careers as adults.
The editorial staff of Razem attempted to show how the mass spread of interest in High Fidelity provided an opportunity for integration and music education for adolescents and young adults, the so-called młodzież pracująca(working youth), a social stratum with lower cultural capital (Razem 1980: 7; cf. Masłoń 1980; Lipowski 1983). The magazine also supported young audiophiles by attempting to influence the electronics industry. One of the articles urged UNITRA to pay attention to improving the quality of its products to improve the satisfaction of its young clientele, the magazine attempted to promote “the respect of young clients by Unitra” (Wyrzykowski 1980: 4). Similarly to the aforementioned engineering lobby, communist youth organizations also had an agenda of becoming intermediary actors in facilitating access to knowledge on HEAs. Including regular publications on audiophile culture in Razem was intended to make this magazine more attractive to readers, to attract a larger audience for other propaganda-laden content and simply increase the income from paying customers.
Similar opinions supporting the view that audiophile culture could provide an attractive and accessible form of informal music education and cultural uplift can also be found in the content of other youth-oriented technical and lifestyle magazines. Importantly, such materials describe the path toward becoming an audiophile through self-education in electronics, acoustics, and progressive music genres. There was no place for gifted elitist golden ears, since, in this case, the audiophile culture was appropriated within an “official setting” (Hagen and DeNora 2012: 441) as a non-elitist hobby that offered youth, regardless of their social background, highly valued engagement in technical culture and the chance to obtain cultural capital.