The Sonodyne system

I left home in 1981, after Class 10, to join St.Xaviers College in Calcutta for my Plus-2, and live in a hostel there. I finished my Plus-2 in 1983, and joined BIT Ranchi. At the end of this stress-filled period, seeing me safely in an engineering college, my parents decided to exhale and spend a bit of money replacing our ageing music system. In the meantime, I had learned to peruse the used book and magazine shops on Free School Street (a street known for more adult entertainment than used books), and I had picked up a slightly moth-eaten copy of a fairly substantial catalog-cum-book called the "Audio Buyer's Guide 1982." Reading that book had taught me a fair bit about audio systems; I must have studied every word, every ad, in it about a hundred times. That book spoke of a different world: a world of 330W RMS/channel receivers and THD and IMD and what not.

The new system was purchased in December 1983, from Capital Electronics in Calcutta, for fifty-eight hundred rupees, and we persuaded them to even throw in a rack to sweeten the deal. The quoting price was sixty-one hundred rupees, I remember.

The biggest change we noticed in the "stereo system" market between the first-generation systems and now was the advent of component systems. Earlier, when you bought the HMV Model 1212, or the Bush System Seven, you had to buy a central chassis and a pair of speakers, as a set, much like the boomboxes of today. But in the second-generation music systems, you bought an amp, then bought a pair of speakers, and so on. Another interesting thing was the advent of these new Indian brands of "specialised" audio system manufacturers, notable of whom were Sonodyne and Cosmic. Earlier brands were either very insignificant in the market now, or had exited it altogether (e.g. Bush and HMV). We bought a turntable, and an amplifier, and a pair of speakers, all made by Sonodyne.

The turntable is still at home with me --- it still works. It was a direct drive turntable with a heavy cast aluminium platter, and a tonearm which looked like space technology after the Bush System Seven. This tonearm was made of carbon fibre, and had a dial at its rear end using which you could set its tracking force: 2.5 grams was recommended. There was another dial there using which you could also set its anti-skating force, a concept which took me quite some time to understand properly. All I could understand about this was that if I set the anti-skating force too high, the tonearm stopped tracking reliably, and began to skate outwards most dangerously, skipping tracks rapidly. The cartridge was now a magnetic one (I later realised that this was a moving-magnet one, not a moving-coil), and had a nominal output voltage level of 5mV. It was made by a company called EEI. The stylus was a diamond-tipped thing. The chassis was large enough to allow the playing of an LP with the transparent Perspex lid on.

One more bit which appeared to be like space-age technology was the stroboscope on the rim of the platter, and the small bulb which glowed all the time beside it. There was a knob to let me trim the speed of the platter using this stroboscope. I was the son of a power electricals engineer, however, and my dad worked in power generation and distribution. I had visited his power station control rooms, and I knew that one of the things they tracked in those control rooms was the mains frequency --- it was no God-given constant. I knew that this stroboscope was essentially working based on the strobing of the bulb (was it an LED?) at the mains frequency, and that my dad's colleagues would consider mains frequency acceptable if it varied +/-3% from the nominal 50Hz. Therefore, I knew that this would be the limit of the accuracy of my speed control for the turntable too. I was eighteen at the time; this was not unusual insight for a boy of my age.

This turntable was almost half the price of our full kit, and cost two thousand five hundred rupees.

The amplifier is what we would call an integrated amp today. Its power rating was 20W RMS/channel into 8 Ohms, and 25W RMS into 4 Ohms. (Yes, the power output change due to halving of speaker load is strangely small by today's standards.) It had a height of about 2U, and had a brushed aluminium front panel, with knobs in similar finish. Remote controls were still a decade away. And as was the rule of the day, a magnetic phono preamp was built in, though there was no support for an MC cartridge. I am sure there was no Indian turntable at that time with an MC cartridge.

The speakers were bass-reflex two-way designs, probably about two feet tall, and with a removable grille. I do not remember what the drivers looked like, but I believe they had a cone tweeter, not a dome, and a paper cone midbass.

I remember really enjoying music on this system. It was so much clearer than the previous one that we all began to discover instruments in albums we had owned for years, and had not noticed till then. The first few months after the system was purchased, we happily listened to most of our old favourite records and kept marvelling at the new-found sound quality. I have memories of summer vacation afternoons, after lunch, spent listening to BoneyM, Ventures, and the like. Summers in Bihar are hot; temperatures routinely exceed 45 deg Celcius. So rooms would be darkened and curtains would be drawn across the windows. The fan would be on --- air-conditioning was unheard of --- and all sounds were at low volume, so as not to risk being shouted at by my mom who would be enjoying her siesta in the bedroom. And in this silent summer afternoon, I would be playing the system real soft and lying on the cold concrete floor on my tummy, chin in my hands, listening.

If I try to understand my fondness for playing the system real softly at the time, I feel that I was perhaps reacting to the cleaner sound from the speakers at low volumes. Those speakers were even worse than mass-market speakers of today when it came to handling loud volumes cleanly. It is possible I was instinctively reacting to just this.

I went to hostel in Calcutta in 1981. I never got to spend much time at home after that, returning only during vacations. And since this Sonodyne system was purchased in December 1983, I was already in engineering college. So, gradually, I drifted away from my parents' home, and began to accept that I stayed somewhere else for most of the year, and this somewhere-else did not have any music system. I built a monophonic ampli-speaker in my hostel with my friends in 1986, and it served us well for two years and more --- I've described it elsewhere. And there was a music system in our hostel lounge which I helped select and purchase in 1985 when I was a callow second-year student of BTech. That was the system I became most familiar with from 1985 to 1988, when I graduated.

The Sonodyne system continued to function quite well at my parents' place. My father retired in 1992, and the music system shifted with them to their post-retirement home in Salt Lake, Calcutta, where they live today.