A Conversation with Avery Fisher
The Apartment building has the air of a Manhattan San Simeon. From the corner of 92nd Street and Park Avenue, on the northern edge of the city’s silkstocking district, it seems no more imposing than any other 20-story, block-long building, particularly in a city of such structures. But once you’ve been guided through the driveway in the center of the block, you’re confronted with a courtyard that’s large enough to swallow many another of New York’s prestige residences. This building is not among the town’s most chic, but that makes it all the more baronial — the people here may not be famous, but they are wealthy and powerful. It’s written all over the sooty, Gothic gray walls. By the time you’ve found the proper entrance, it’s impossible to repress a certain reverence.
This is a fitting home for Avery Fisher, America’s original baron of high-fidelity sound. Fisher is an American classic (he started out in much less comfortable circumstances) and a genuine pioneer. Tall and white-haired, he looks only middle-aged though he’s nearly 70. His bearing is elegant and without ostentation, like his home. And since his $8 million endowment to Lincoln Center (and the renaming of Philharmonic Hall in his honor), he is surely the most famous figure in the sound business.
At home, he spends most of his time in a white-walled living room that seems altogether cozy although it’s spacious enough to hold several chairs and a couch, some music stands, a wall of books and records and a grand piano without crowding.
It’s a musical room. Over in the corner, Fisher says, is one of the nation’s finest libraries of chamber music. The music stands are set up, semipermanently, for the weekly string quartet recitals of Fisher and his friends. Like everything else, the Fisher stereo components are modest in stature, large in power. And hidden behind a screen, nestled in the fireplace, is a mammoth, three-foot-square Western Electric speaker — the sort Fisher used in his first radio/phonograph console back in 1937.
It is music, after all, rather than hardware, that fascinates Fisher. “I was born into a musical family,” he says. “Every one of my parents’ children was given an opportunity to learn an instrument. Papa would go down the line: violin, piano, violin, piano, violin.” Papa was also something of a record collector, and that is how Avery Fisher got involved.
In the mid-Thirties Fisher worked as a book designer for Dodd, Mead, the publishing house. But after work, he’d visit a friend who had a job playing piano in a movie house. “After the show, he’d come out on the stage and play Bach while the maids cleaned up the place, picked up the diamond rings that had fallen under the seats,” Fisher remembers. He became interested in the electrical amplification equipment then in use, and when sound-on-film came into play, he picked up parts, cheaply, from movie houses that no longer needed them. Among those parts were the RCA Photophone amplifier and the Western Electric loudspeaker. That’s how Philharmonic Radio was born in 1937.
“This was my hobby,” Fisher explains. “I started putting these things together for friends and before I knew it, it looked like it could be a supplemental income. I still didn’t dream it would become a full-time occupation and, in fact, I stayed on at Dodd, Mead until 1943.
“But while I was still at Dodd, Mead I established Philharmonic Radio Company. I worked from 5:15 until two o’clock in the morning, because I couldn’t give up the job — it was my income, you see.” Fisher produced consoles exclusively at this time (although the components were available separately); they were limited in quantity, high quality and quite expensive for the day (they cost $200). In 1939, the company enjoyed an upsurge in sales, based upon an extremely favorable review in Consumer Reports. But World War II nearly put Philharmonic out of business.
During the war, consumer-electronics manufacture was out of the question: materials were in short supply and everyone’s energies were supposed to be devoted to the war effort. Philharmonic was given several electronics subcontracting jobs by larger military manufacturers. The largest was to develop an instrument landing system for La Guardia Airport in New York.
“We found out very quickly that we didn’t have enough capital to swing this stuff, so the company was sold to American Typefounders. I stayed on as president until 1945 but when the war was over I resigned and, taking certain key people with me, started Fisher Radio.” Philharmonic, Fisher says with something of a sneer, was then turned into a table-radio manufacturer “and of course, I had no interest in that.”
Truly a musical and high-fidelity purist, Fisher explains the success that would follow in the Fifties and Sixties completely in terms of his devotion to quality. “Back in the Fifties, seeing the burgeoning of our quality instrument business, RCA came out with a line called the Berkshire, with prices ranging from $2500 to $4000. Bell and Howell also came out with high-quality radio/phonographs. Ampex came out with high-quality radio/phonographs. And they all failed.
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