THE MEANS TO REVIVE THE QUALITY OF MUSIC IN OUR LIVES

THE FIRST PHONO-PICKUP THAT CAN RETRIEVE

ALL THE INFORMATION ON OUR RECORDS

For most of this century, records have been our chief source of music and the other sonic arts. They contain a treasure of past master-performances of great artworks not soon to be equaled. Accurate retrieval of the information contained on those records is not just the means of getting back to the epitomes of human experience contained in those performances, it also represents mankind's only hope of saving the important unwritten musical traditions of the past that had been transmitted from master to master but are presently in danger of being lost. Although the knowledgeable have seen to it that those traditions were preserved on records, in the past it has not been possible for the playback equipment to resolve enough fine detail to hear them.

The source of the sound is the most important component in any sound system. With records, what is not reproduced by the phono-pickup cannot be replaced by the rest of the sound system, and any distortions in the pickup determine the quality of the sound of the whole system. Therefore, The Anstendig Institute has particularly investigated the sound of all the various types of cartridges and searched extensively for improvements. It has made enough comparisons to be convinced that a substantial improvement over past cartridges is contained in a completely new theory of pickup cartridge design invented by Dr. Sao Win.

Until the last decade, records were the only practical source of potentially high-quality sound. Cassettes, originally developed only for dictation, are limited by a slow tape speed, which restricts the resolution of fine detail, and by a high noise level. The extraordinary engineering efforts in modern cassettes and in the decks to play them, while showing much improvement over past results, have not yet overcome this limitation.

Only in its infancy and released long before it was perfected, the present-day form of digital recording has many shortcomings that do not allow it to resolve fine, delicate expressive details nor can it capture low-volume-level information which provides richness in most sonic events. The system is too coarse in its design, having a fundamental mathematical limitation inherent in the choice of sample rate and sample detail. Correcting these basic deficiencies of digital recording would involve changing the system and thus the hardware itself. In other words, a completely new digital recording system would have to be used which could not be played on existing machines. But, since the whole industry is locked into the present hardware, these deficiencies of digital recording will not be corrected for many years to come.

These limitations remain still a basic characteristic fundamental in the design of the newly released Digital Audio Tape-recorders (DAT). These recorders differ trivially in the sampling rate and digital detail from the CD system.

Therefore, there is still reason to argue the importance of a device that perfects the technology for playing records.

Traditionally, music not only has been considered the highest of the arts, it has also represented the epitome of human endeavor. It provides the largest, most finely differentiated source of the uplifting influences necessary in our lives. If Dr. Win's cartridge really is a major breakthrough that allows sound reproduction to very closely duplicate the communicative aspects of the original performance, it would follow that it has important implications for humanity. It enhances our access to those epitomes which human endeavor has already achieved and preserved on records. And, thereby, it also provides access to examples of the great artistic traditions which are presently in danger of being lost. The future development of mankind depends upon this.

The research papers of The Anstendig Institute contain discussions explaining the importance of the quality of the sounds in our lives and the importance of real improvements in recorded sound quality. For instance, although the negative effects of bad sound manifest themselves most noticeably in the sonic arts, they permeate every aspect of modern life; the present feeling of crisis throughout society is at least in part a further ramification of the deterioration in the quality of the sounds with which we are surrounded. Implications such as this have not yet been realized because the pertinent points are the results of separate institute researches and are, therefore, scattered throughout many papers.

It is important to combine these points into a coherent whole in order to show the importance of sound in our lives and, thereby, prove the immense importance of a development that, for the first time, allows us to retrieve essentially all the information on our records.

The Anstendig Institute is not commercially involved with nor does it financially benefit from the manufacture, sale, or distribution of any product made by Dr. Sao Win or Sao Win Laboratories, Inc. Based solely on the Anstendig Institute's research in sound reproduction of analog recordings, this FET cartridge, invented by Dr. Win, has been found to be an epitome of technical accomplishment in relation to its ability to reproduce the sonic information on analog records. This unique invention is cited because of this fact. The Anstendig Institute is making known an advance in technological theory, which is the use in the pickup itself of a FET transistor instead of magnets and coils. It hopes this principle will be taken up by the rest of the industry, eventually manufactured at lower cost, and thereby made more accessible to the public. The institute wants this paper to make the point that records remain the most accurate means of preserving sound and that advances in record-playing technology are of much greater importance than the public realizes. It is not endorsing a particular commercial product per se.

The Anstendig Institute is a non-profit, tax-exempt, research institute that was founded to investigate the vibrational influences in our lives and to pursue research in the fields of sight and sound; to provide material designed to help the public become aware of and understand vibrational influences; to instruct the public in how to improve the quality of those influences in their lives; and to provide the research and explanations that are necessary for an understanding of how we see and hear.