Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you? So? I alluded to this in the prologue to last week's rerun. Listener Ron McCallie reached out to the show on Twitter. Remember the handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W and asked that I do an episode about San Sui, which is great because it's time for me to make a confession. I don't believe I had ever heard of this company. Now. I just felt all the audio files out there switching off this show immediately, although who am I kidding? Most of them probably can't stand the low fidelity of the podcast medium. So I'm having a little fun at the expense of audio files here. I'll have more to say about audio files throughout this and it's not it's not like um all sligging off on audio files. I think that they take it very seriously, this idea of creating as perfect a sound playback system as they possibly can. But there's a lot that goes into that, and I might touch on that a little bit in this podcast anyway. San Sui was past tense and electronics company that has become particularly well known for audio and to a lesser extent, video system components. Now, if you do a search for san Sui, by the way, that's spelled s A N s u I, you will find numerous articles and videos that mentioned San Sui in the company of other big name companies like Pioneer and Sony. You all so be on the precipice of a huge drop into the sometimes crazy world of hi fi or high fidelity, and just know that if you do slip over the edge, there's a chance that you will never come back. Hi fi is one of those pursuits that can consume you and more to the point your bank account. We'll talk about that today too. And just know I'm being a little flip in about all this, But what I mean is that there are a lot of people out there who they are obsessed with finding that perfect high fidelity experience, to the point that some of them are are spending tens of thousands of dollars in the pursuit of it. Uh and they may never achieve it. So our story begins in the nineteen forties in Japan. They're a man named Kosaku Kikuchi was employed in a company that was a radio parts distributor. And you know, the word district reader is one that I think isn't clear for everyone. So let's get ready for our first little buddy trail. Uh. And first let's start with the idea of a supply chain. And let's say it's the nineteen seventies and you want a new sound system so you can listen to the transgressive glam rock sounds of artists like David Bowie, Lou Reid and the New York Dolls. Or heck, maybe it's you know, just a year or two later in the decade, and you want a rocking system so that you can listen to punk bands like the Ramons, the void Oid's and the Heartbreakers. Or maybe it's the late seventies and disco is king, so you want to groove out to the b Gs or Casey in the Sunshine Band or earth Wind and Fire. I'm getting a bit of a nostalgic kick here, can you tell? Anyway? You want to buy a stereo system, So you go to your local electronics store and you take a look at what's on display. Every single product you're looking at can trace its history back through a chain of production. So there are certain companies that mine the raw materials that ultimately find their way into our tech. Some of them might also process those raw materials and refine them, or maybe they send the raw materials onto refineries that are dedicated just to doing that. And then you've got fabricators that take raw or processed materials and then build components with them. And then you've got factories that take these components that are made by the various fabricators out there and assemble them into larger products. And then you've got distributors that take these finished products, which could be just a component for an even more complicated product down the line, and the distributors are in charge of getting that finished thing, typically to a wholesaler, and wholesalers then sell large lots of finished things to retailers, and then the retailer sells it to you, the final customer, who wants to buy the best stereos them. This, by the way, is one of the reasons we see such challenges in supply these days, because COVID really messed up the links in the supply chain, and if just one link falls, well, then everything that goes behind that that link has a delay, and things get worse and worse as it goes along. So a distributor, like I said, is a link between manufacturers who might fabricate or simply a symbol stuff and then the rest of the supply chain. And distributors sometimes act as vendors as well, or they might supply products to wholesalers and directly to retailers. Anyway, just in case you ever want to know what a distributor was in the sense of the supply chain, there you go. Uh. It also means something totally different, and we're talking about car engines. Those are different distributors, but that's another podcast. So it's the nineteen forties and Kikuchi is working for this company, which obviously became a critical entity during World War Two. Radio parts were, if you pardon the pun, instrumental in the war effort. Cakuchie founded a radio part manufacturing plant that he named the san Sui Electrical Plant in nineteen four And a quick word about that name. From what I can tell, san Sui is not a Japanese term. Rather, it actually comes from China, and it's a style of painting, and in China it's called shan Shui and it has the style has two key components to it. Artists use brushes and ink instead of brushes and paint, and they paint landscapes that those are the two things that that identify Shanshui paintings. Shanshui translated literally means mountain water and a lot of the landscapes that are painted feature images of waterfalls and mountain streams and such. So San Sui the company its first products were transformers, and again not the kind that are more than meets the eye. We're talking about an electrical component that can both transfer electric energy from one circuit to another, as well as changed the voltage of the current running through the second circuit or to increase it or decrease it. So audio transformers also get a bit more complicated because they could be designed to do other stuff like split audio signals apart or join them together, as well as to block radio frequency interference, among other things. But this gets super technical, and if I dive into that, we won't have a chance to talk about San Sue at all, So we're gonna save all that for some other episode. So in Kikuchi was ready to launch a company that would go beyond just manufacturing transformers. This would be the sen Sui Electric Company, and his initial starting capital, like the amount of money that was in the company was on eight thousand yen. Now, I wish I could tell you what that was worth today, but the inflation calculators I found only dated back to the nineteen fifties. Uh. I do know that in nineteen forty six, the occupation forces that were in Japan after World War Two had set the yen to dollar exchange rate at fifty yen to a dollar. So using that conversion rate, thousand yen in nineteen forty seven would be equal to about three thousand, six hundred bucks again in nineteen forty seven dollars. Now, if we adjusted that in the US for US inflation, you would get about forty five thousand dollars, which is a pretty modest initial capital for a company. But I also have to point out that you know, inflation and exchange rates change so much over time that you can't just say, like, oh, it had forty five thousand dollars in capital back then, because that it's too simplistic of you to be able to say that appreciation of one currency against another changes things dramatically, and appreciation of currencies doesn't necessarily reflect in let's say, inflation or deflation within a country. So yeah, I just know that it was a fairly modest starting capital for this company. Now, I don't have very much information on what the company was doing in its first few years. In fact, documentation about San Suey in general is sparse. I looked at a lot of different sites, many of them run by audio files, and so a lot of the information I have is second hand or third hand information, and I don't usually like running with that, but I kind of didn't have many other options for this particular episode. But the next point of data that I could find on San Suey actually comes in at nineteen fifty two, So this is several years after the founding. The founding was in nine seven, So in nineteen fifty two, and sue was producing voltage stabilizers and a few dozen different kinds of transformers, and at that point the company employed fifty two people. In nine four, San Sui introduced the HPR one hundred and electronic tube amplifier. Now, last week, again I reran an episode that talked about how speakers and amplifiers work, so we're not gonna go into deep detail again here, but you should know an amplifier's job is to take a weak incoming signal as an input and then send out a much stronger, but otherwise identical outgoing signal to other components, typically things like speakers, and reproducing the quality of the input signal is absolutely key with an amplifier. It's not just enough to boost the signal. You want to make sure that you are as true to that incoming signal as you possibly can be. Otherwise the amplifier can become an element that decreases the quality of that signal, and it can introduce noise into the output, and that's a big problem. So with audio gear, we're talking about actual noise, right, like stuff that's coming out of the speakers that was not part of the original recording. You do not want that. In general, audio files absolutely do not want that. They want to create a listening experience that is as faithful to the original recording experience as is possible, So you do not want to introduce noise. However, I should say that noise also just means like unwanted signal, and it applies across all of technology, not just in the audio world. But you know, you don't want to introduce unwanted signal because that means you're gonna get errors in whatever it is you're doing. So amplifiers in general, you want to be able to of good output, a strong outgoing signal without introducing unwanted components, unwanted noise, and that is a real challenge. Like that's why San Sui ended up getting such a great reputation in the sixties and early seventies because their products were known to produce a pretty powerful output without introducing noise. So that was a great thing for audio files. Uh Now, I might also add that when I'm talking about noise, I am not making a commentary on the quality of the music that someone might be listening to. I mean, I personally think a lot of so called music is noise, but that's because I'm an rapidly aging glam punk rock new wave music lover. So that's just you know, my prejudice and biases in that regard. But another quick note about amplifiers. When we're talking about boosting an electrical signal that represents sound, we have to remember that sound ranges across a pretty broad range of frequencies. Sound when you boil it down is vibration, and we can measure it in one way we can measure it is how frequently is the stuff vibrating. The faster it vibrates, the higher the pitch that we experience in listening to it. Human hearing typically ranges from twenty hurts or twenty vibrations or cycles per second on the low end, those are the deepest pitches that we can perceive with our with hearing, like you can feel lower frequencies, but you can't hear them, and then it goes up to twenty thousand hurts or twenty killer hurts on the high end, so vibrating twenty thousand cycles per second. Those are the highest pitches we can typically perceive, and that that range decreases as we get older. Typically we we start to lose those higher pitches first, So as an adult, you may not be able to hear stuff that's up in that twenty thousand hurts range. It may be much lower. This is also played into when various places like convenience stores will play out sounds at higher pitches that young people can hear, but older people can't. In order to uh discourage young people from loitering fun times anyway, amplifiers typically have a sweet spot and uh in a range of frequencies that they can really boost effectively. So this would be a range of electrical signals at which the amplifier is most effective. That is the amplifiers bandwidth. That's one of the things that affects an amplifiers quality. If the bandwidth is really narrow, well, the amplifier might be work great for a certain range of frequencies, but anything outside that, you're not gonna get the same umph, which means that you're listening experience is going to be ideal, right, because those those signals aren't going to be amplified, You're going to lose out on some of the range of the sound as it's being played back. Okay, we're gonna have some other stuff to chat about in a minute, but before we get to that, I need to take a quick break. Okay, before the break, I was talking about the kind of sound that most people are capable of hearing um and how that plays into amplifiers, and that certain amplifiers might have a particular range that they're very good at reproducing and others that they aren't. Often with amplifiers, you'll have multiple amplification components, each with a different sort of sweet spot range to try and reproduce the whole of a recorded or broadcast audio signals quality, because again, otherwise you would lose parts of it when you were sending that signal along to the speakers. And there's other stuff we could talk about. For example, the way we contextualize how an amplifier can increase the amplitude or volume of a signal. That's called gain. So if you've ever heard people talk about needing to adjust the gain on their microphones or their amplifiers, that's what they're talking about. And I'll have to do a full episode about gain and clipping and stuff like that in the future because if I stick to it here, it will take up the rest of this episode. But gain is super important. Whether it's because you want to make sure your voice sounds nice on a podcast well any clipping, or maybe you want to purposefully introduce certain effects like clipping or distortion in your output, like that's part of your artistic expression. You might want to do that. Um, So, yeah, it is important, but it goes beyond this episode. Well, then we also have to talk about pre amplifiers, because that's something that San Suey was getting into in this time period. So pre amplifiers or pre amps are amplifiers that take very weak signals, like say from a microphone, which produces a very weak electrical signal, and then boosts that into a stronger signal, but not super strong, like not strong enough to drive speakers. So pre amps signal would then feed into an actual amplifier, and that would take the pre amps boosted signal and then boosted even further. But then you might wonder, well, why would you use a preamp at all? I mean, couldn't an amplifier just do the whole thing by itself. Well, pre amplifiers are necessary to cut back on that noise thing I was just talking about, and to cut back on interference. The pre amp typically boosts voltage gain, but not current gain. Remember, voltage and current are two different things. Voltage is kind of like the pressure in electrical system. Current is like the amount of electricity that's passing through a system. So you're increasing the pressure with a pre amp, but not the current um and this will then boost the gain to what is called line level. That is, a signal that's strong enough to send onto a power amplifier, which will then boost the signal further, ideally without introducing noise into it. And a power amplifier will boost voltage and current, not just one or the other, and it will send this boosted signal out to power speakers and monitors and stuff. And by monitors I mean a type of speaker, not a display, you know, not a not a not a computer monitor in other words, and amplifiers do this by having power directed to them from outside sources. Now, I say this because I do not want to give you the impression that somehow amplifiers magically create energy, because we know from the law of conservation you cannot do that. Instead, amplifiers are taking an incoming signal and then boosting that by taking advantage of electrical power from another source, like say a wall outlet, and then pushes out this stronger outgoing signal that's otherwise identical to the incoming one. Now, the reason I even went into this is that preampts and amplifier tubes would sort of open up the possibility of a high fidelity industry, which is where San Sui would have its biggest impact, So it's good to have a basic understanding of that technology. Now. Nineteen fifty four was also a year when a company called Harmon Cardon became the first to introduce a receiver. So you need to know what a receiver is and consider for a moment the various components you might need. If you really loved audio in the nineteen fifties, well, you would need a radio typically that would consist of at least, you know, one antenna and a tuner that lets you tune into specific radio frequencies. You would also need an amplifier or more likely a couple of amplifiers, that would take the incoming electrical signal from the radio broadcast and boost it so that it can drive the radio's speakers. And then you would also need speakers. Uh. The radio's way back in the day were pretty big. They were reliant on vacuum tubes to serve as amplifiers, so the old radios were essentially pieces of furniture. By the nineteen fifties, they were slightly smaller than they had been in the thirties and forties, but it wouldn't really be until the adoption of the transistor that we would see them shrink down. But as an audio file, you wouldn't just stop with the radio. You would also need a record player, a turntable or phonograph really in those days. Uh. This consists of the turntable itself, and if the turntable is not an all in one unit with its own speaker, you would also need a separate amplifier and separate speakers so that the weak electric signal that was coming from the record player could be boosted enough to drive the speakers. All in one units had all the components built into them. Uh. But those components are still all right there, and it's possible you might have some other audio sources as well. Uh, and you would again need the amplifiers and speakers for each of them. So your home is gonna get really crammed with gear because you might want something that can play back tape. For example, now in the nineteen fifties we would be talking about real to real tape. A lot of the tape players had their own speakers incorporated into them in this form factor, but you would so you could have a standalone player that would have everything, But you could also have one that just have the tape deck itself and would still need to go through an amplifier and speakers before you could actually listen to it. So you have all these independent components, each of their own dedicated speaker systems and amplifiers, just so you can enjoy your tunes. That ends up being way too much for most people. So then enter the receiver, and a receiver collects a lot of these components into a single piece of equipment that you can then use to switch between different incoming audio signals. Nearly all receivers have a radio tuner built into them. Some might not, but we typically would call those amplifiers rather than receivers, so they've got the radio tuner. They also typically have a full amplifier inside them. Some might just have a preamp that you then have to send out to an amplifier, but a lot of receivers have the amplifier built into them as well, and they can accept multiple audio inputs. The number and type depends upon the receiver, but it was pretty common for them to accept incoming signals from a phonograph typically labeled phono on most receivers, as well as tape decks. So now you can connect multiple audio devices like a turntable, a tape deck. You've got your radio tuner built in right there, all through this one device and use a switch to go between them to feed out to your speakers, so you don't need speakers for everything. You've got one says speakers, and these all get directed through the receiver which then sends that signal onto the speakers, and you use dials, buttons, or switches to switch between the different inputs. You also typically have controls to set things like ranges of frequencies that you would prefer to emphasize. So, for example, you may want the base notes to come through more clearly, so you use a little knob that's labeled base. That essentially means that the base signals will get a bit more ooth when sent to the speakers than other frequencies are. Um, you have the balance, which can affect which speakers get more signal than the others. So maybe you have left and right speakers, but the left speakers are further away from you than the right speakers. You might want to tweak the balance a bit so that the left beakers get a little more umph, so that you get a balanced output based upon where you're actually experiencing the music and so on, and of course volume, right the amplitude, how loud do you want the stuff to be. So the Harmon Cardon receiver in nineteen fifty four cost a hundred eighty nine dollars and fifty cents, which, if we were to adjust for inflation, would be just under two thousand dollars today, And it wouldn't be long before other companies, including san Sui, would get involved in manufacturing receivers. But San sue wouldn't produce receivers right away. In the late nineteen fifties it started producing tube pre amplifier and amplifiers. Now I can't get too specific with years here because the various sources I find have conflicting information about that, but certainly before the end of the nineteen fifties, San Suey was producing tube receivers, pre amplifiers, and amplifiers. So in some cases these amplifiers were full units that you would buy, you would bring home, and you would connect to your sound system. They just wouldn't have a radio built into them, but they had all the other amplification elements as part of them. And Kikuchi also began to explore the possibility of exporting his products to overseas markets, and by nineteen fifty nine the company had grown to five seven employees. It was nineteen sixty one when san Sui would be listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and that's also the year that the company registered its name in the United States. In nineteen sixty four, the company released its first receiver. This was the SACKS one D the s A X one. This was a stereo receiver with FM and A M radio tuners, and it had vacuum tubes for everything but the preamp. The preample solid state, but everything else was vacuum tubes. There were knobs to adjust the trouble and base referring to the higher and lower sound frequencies respectively. There was an for the balance again the comparative signal strength for the left versus the right speakers, and there was a volume knob as well, plus some other switches and dials to select things like input signal and mode of operation. Uh. I guess we should remind ourselves that stereo is referencing the fact that you could send different audio signals to two different speakers or sets of speakers if you preferred so that you would have a left channel and a right channel. This opened up a lot of new ways to experiment with sound. Mono, by comparison, sends the same audio signal out to every speaker, so with mono output, you get the exact same sounds at the same volume on the left and right speakers unless you change the balance, in which case you would still get the same signal, but one speaker would get more a stronger signal than the other, so you would have more volume coming from one side versus the other side. Stereo change and change that entirely. Though it would take a while for stereo to really take off, not everyone embraced it. There's a pretty famous anecdote that the Beatles band that was really an international for phenomenon by they were really hands on during the album mixing phase, but only for the mono releases of their albums, so they really wanted to make sure that their vocals, their instrumentation, any effects that they were adding, we're all mixed just right for the mono release of their albums. When it came to their stereo releases, they just left that to the audio engineers. You might wonder why why wouldn't they take the same care well, their fan base consisted mostly of young people who had record players with a mono speaker on them, so they were just concerned with crafting music that was going to sound good to the majority of the people who were buying their albums. Stereo was not that right most of their most of their audience didn't have stereo systems. However, stereo was the way of the future. In nineteen sixty six, San Suey established a corporate presence here in the United States, founding the San Sui Electronics Company, Limited here in the States, and the following year ninety seven was when the company would release a solid state pre amplifier called the a U seven seven seven using transistors. So I've talked about transistors a lot in other episodes, but the transistor is an electronic component that can operate either as a switch, so in other words, that can allow current to flow through or prevent it from passing, or it can also work as an amplifier, and transistors would have a massive impact on the audio landscape as a transistor could potentially replace a vacuum tube. This was important because vacuum tubes are relatively large they are fragile, they're made out of glass, and they can they do heat up when an operation like they can get really hot. Uh. They can also so eventually burn out, which means you eventually will have to replace vacuum tubes. It might take decades, but you will eventually have to do it. Transistors would also allow for mentorization. In fact, the development of the transistor is why we're able to have things like smartphones and modern computers. But in the audio world, there's a pretty deep divide over whether tube based amplifiers produce a better result or if solid state or transistor based amplifiers are the best. And you'll hear audio files swap terms like warmth or brittle or a round. These are descriptors that don't immediately seem to apply to sound, right like, when you're talking about sounds something you're hearing, it's kind of odd to think of calling it warm or brittle or round like. These are descriptors that we would use for other stuff that we sense through other ways. But that's kind of the language that the audio world has adopted, and it's difficult to to contextualize or to understand unless you actually experience what people mean when they say that. When you hear it and you say, oh, that's what warm means or that's what round means, you kind of get it, but it's very hard to to conceptualize without that experience. Anyway, there's a whole discussion we could have on solid state versus two amplifiers and whether one is superior to another. There are some people who say the solid state ones create a much more faithful reproduction of sound. There are others who say that, you know, the vacuum tubes create a lot more character and depth of sound, which is more satisfying to listen to. There are camps on either side that are passionate about their perspective. And I'm going to leave it there for now. Us again, we're talking about Sun Sue or at least I'm trying to. In fact, let's take a quick break and I will refocus on Sound Sue when we return. Okay, before the break, we were getting into the late sixties. I do need to backtrack a little bit because in n Sun Suey had introduced the AU one one one amplifier. This was a piece of audio equipment that to this day is highly revered and sought after. And it looks awesome. Uh. It is an amplifier and all in one amplifier, so it's not a receiver. It doesn't have a radio tuner in it, but otherwise behaves the way a receiver would and that you feed your different audio components into this. It amplifies the incoming signal and then puts that out to speakers or headphones or whatever. It has a black front panel on this set top type device, and the panel has these silver and black controls on it, so you've got knobs and dials that are all silver and then a few switches and buttons that are in black. So black on black it's very spinal tap. Uh. This was a stereo system amplifier, so again part of a high end audio system. And I've read a lot of reviews about the a U one eleven from various audio files, and it it almost comes across like the recruiting literature used by cult members. No offense audio files, We y'all could come on a little strong anyway, The a U one eleven to this day remains a coveted piece of gear. Typically you're looking at spending a couple of thousand dollars and that's on one that needs you know, some some tender love and care, some tweaks and some uh, some maintenance to make it work at the way it's supposed to. If you're looking for one that's in really like like good performance condition, you're talking maybe four grand, sometimes maybe more, depends on really the market you're looking at um. And also, you know, I gotta keep in mind there's a limited number of these. They're not making new ones, the ones that exist, that's it. But they are highly valued, largely because they are known to have an excellent ability to boost the signal to a pretty strong one while still maintaining a very low noise ceiling, and has the added benefit of all these different controls that you can tweak and work your specific audio set up so that you can produce the most accurate replication of sound or the best experience of sound that you can possibly manage. In nineteen sixty six, San Sui got into the speaker business. It released the spe SP two models of speakers. Now audio files seem to mostly dismiss Sue's speakers, so the company was really well known for the quality of its receivers and its amplifiers, but as for other stuff, it produced, such as speakers and turntables and much later things like CD players. Most of those get a resounding me from the audio loving crowd out there. In nineteen sixty seven, that's when we got the a U seven seven seven. That again was the first solid state integrated amplifier. So again a U one eleven used vacuum tubes, the a U seven seven seven used transistors. Following the seven seven seven, we got the a U five five and the a U n and then a whole bunch of different amplifier and receiver variants up. To go into all of them would kind of be pointless. UH. They're all different amplifiers and receivers with different UH specs to them, and the specs start to get meaningless unless you're looking for a particular piece of equipment in your vintage audio set up. So I'm not going to go into all of that. It really wouldn't be any benefit to anyone. It would be like I was reciting numbers and figures out of a catalog. But in the early nine seventies, San Sui began to produce quadraphonic sound amplifiers, so stereo sound sends separate channels to the left and right speakers, you have two channels. Stereo Quadraphonic, as the name suggests, was meant to do a very similar thing, except now you're talking about four channels of audio, so four separate speakers left front, right front, left rear, and right rear. So you could argue really that this was an approach to surround sound. That's kind of what it was. Now. To achieve that, you had to follow special processes and use special electronics to generate records, word and handle or play back the signals in order to get this sort of effect right. You couldn't just plug and play like you had to specifically engineer all this in order to take advantage of it, just as you had to do with stereo. So the nineteen seventies saw a whole lot of experimentation in this realm. For home theater use, quadrophonic sound had actually been around since the fifties in studios, but for home setups it was a new thing in the seventies and we might as well address it here. Quadrophonics didn't really succeed, largely because there were tons of technical issues that made recording, broadcasting, and playing quadrophonic recordings difficult. Plus there were competing formats in encoding and decoding quadrophonic signals. Now that's not to say that there weren't examples of quadrophonic systems. There were, but on the whole, quadrophonic systems only saw modest success, And that's typically gonna happen when you have lots of different formats. Some hardware might support format number one but not format number two. Some media might only be available on format number two, not format number one. So you could have a quadraphonic system, get a quadraphonic recording and find out, oh, these are using two different encoding decoding formats, so I can't actually get the quadraphonic experience on my system because they aren't compatible. So the lack of a universal standard was a real problem, and ultimately the the the music industry as a whole moved away from quadraphonic sound. Now, one neat thing that San Sui did was create a quadraphonic synthesizer which could take a two channel audio source a stereo audio source and simulate a four channel signal. And I kind of think of this as sort of the modern ultra high definition television UH trend we see where like ultra high definition like four KSE sets and stuff up scales images from lower resolutions so that they look better on an ultra high res screen. We're kind of talking about the same kind of process back in the day with san Sui, except obviously it's a different medium, right, We're not talking about visuals like a high resolution screen. We're talking about audio. But yeah, it's kind of the same idea. We take this stereo input and we produce a quadraphonic output that just thinks. I think it's kind of cool. I don't know what it sounded like or how effective it was because I've never experienced it, but I think it's a neat idea. So in nineteen seventy four, Kikuchi, the founder of san Sui, retired. Kinzo Fujiwara became the new president of the company, and while Kikuchi oversaw san Sui during its early days, it's expansion, the development of the AU one eleven, and kind of cementing san Sui as a go to in high fidelity audio equipment. Fujiwara would lead during a tumultuous era in which various audio companies were really competing in the high fi space, and then things took a dramatic turn for the company. So one thing San Suey did was it introduced a whole bunch of different circuit designs that it patented in the late seventies and early eighties, all really in an effort to create more powerful and more accurate amplifiers and receivers. So the idea was the circuit designs would allow for even less noise to come through while you're boosting the signal. That really was the goal. So there's no need to go into each of those because uh, you know, they were all meant to do generally the same thing. They just did it in different ways. But one really big change that hits San Suey came in nine eight The company had been producing its own transformers up to that point for the most part, anyway, and many felt that the transformers San Sui was making were contributing a great deal to the quality of the San Sui audio products, the finished you know, amplifiers and receivers. But in nineteen San Sui sold off its transformer technology and its transformer business to a company called Hashimoto Electric, and a lot of prominent San Sui engineers moved from san Sui to Hashimoto. So arguably this was a step towards San Sui's a ventual failure, although it's ultimate failure, like the complete disappearance of San Sui, wouldn't happen until two thousand fourteen, but the company itself was kind of a non player well before the two thousand's. So let's give a quick rundown of how things generally played out, because finding actual details at this point became almost impossible. Bowl I found a lot of assertions but very little hard data to be able to explain exactly what happened with San Sui. But I've got a big picture. So one big thing was a global economic trend that San Sui was, you know, affected by, and that was that the Japanese yen began to appreciate in value against other currencies. That made the export business in Japan a lot more difficult, particularly for like high end luxury stuff like the equipment that San Sui was making, because the the cost in Japan for building this stuff was largely uh stable, so your cost to make something ends up being about the same. However, because of the appreciation of the Japanese yen against other currencies, it meant that if you were exporting stuff the amount of money you were getting back from these exports once it converted into Japanese end, it was less because the end's value had appreciated. So you're getting less money back from your sales once it gets back to you because of these these changes in the value of the end versus other currencies. So you have you have very few options. You could try to increase the cost the final sales price of your of your items and your export business, but then you might price yourself out of the market. Right if if a two thousand dollars set is now a ten thousand dollars set, how many people are actually going to go out there and buy it? You know, you are already marketing to a pretty limited customer base. How do you manage that? So this was a big blow to companies like san Sui. Also, there were other companies that were competing in the space that We're doing really well, companies like Pioneers and Sony. So that was a big issue for San Suy was that it was facing some pretty stiff competition from other brands. Some of these were also dealing with the same issues. Sony in particular, dealing with the same issue of the appreciation of the end versus other currencies. They responded by trying to reduce the cost of production, which meant going with cheaper components, and this resulted in San Suy trying to produce what some people in the audio file world referred to as bpcs or black pieces of crap. In other words, you they were putting out these sort of black plastic audio components that had cheaper things in them, cheaper pieces in them, cheaper transformers, cheaper amplifiers, cheaper transistors, and so the output, the actual performance of these components was suffering. Sansu His reputation took a hit and people began to kind of migrate away from current San Sui products. They would still go after the vintage stuff because that was still performing really well, but the vintage stuff was that was like an aftermarket, right, that was resell market. San Suey wasn't making profits off of selling these things because they weren't making them anymore. They weren't making those older models anymore, so that was a real issue for the company. Eventually, it got to a point where the company made the decision to cut ties with exports because it just couldn't make money in that market. Anymore, and they really focused on trying to cater to the Japanese market. However, by this point, in the late nineteen eighties and into the nineteen nineties, we were starting to see a shift away from high fidelity. People were starting to move off of that. They were moving to world of convenience as opposed to fidelity. So with the City, you're talking about these big systems that have lots of different components, all designed to create this ideal listening experience. But convenience is saying, you know, listening experience is important, but wouldn't it be nice if you could take your music with you? And that was where we see the birth of things like cassettes and the Sony Walkman, which really revolutionized the audio industry to a point where audio files felt it like a stab in the back because, yeah, you could now take your music with you, which was convenient, you could listen to it in ways that you never could before, but it was had a much lower quality than what you would get with one of these, you know, kitted out audio systems that you would have at home. But for a lot of people, convenience was more important and also was considerably cheaper, and so Because of this shift in values of what you know, the music buying public want it. You started to see a decrease in interest in the high fidelity audio component world, and as a result, San Sui Star faded even more. It tried to get into things like producing CD players and turntables and stuff, but often it was very late to the game and it was not marketed very effectively. At some point, and I could not find a definitive answer as to win, the company ended up selling it's it's brand name to other entities. I believe currently a Chinese company owns the right to brand stuff as san Sui. The stuff that comes out branded as san Sui has no other connection to the actual San Sui company that we've been talking about. It just is a brand name that has been assigned to a product. So there was some point where that happened. Exactly when I cannot tell you, because again I could not find any definitive documentation, but it happened between the nineteen nineties and two thousand fourteen. Sometime in that twenty years span, it happened, and I don't it's very sad for people who were fans of the San Sui brand that this happened UH, and a lot of it. I would argue, like, I think a lot of people could point to Cokuchie resigning like like retiring, as being the turn. But honestly, I think that that economic issue, the fact that the yen's value appreciated, that was probably one of the big big blows, and the other one being this shift towards UH preferring convenience over to fidelity. That's a shift that we've seen over and over again. By the way, like the whole adoption of m P three's audio files early in the MP three days, we're not super happy about MP thres because the quality of the MP three could be much lower than what you would get on say a vinyl album that was taken from a really pristine master recording. You could say, well, this is far superior to what you get with an MP three, but again MP three's far more convenient. Anyway. That is the rise and Fall of San SUI hope you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on the Twitter handle text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you? So? I alluded to this in the prologue to last week's rerun. Listener Ron McCallie reached out to the show on Twitter. Remember the handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W and asked that I do an episode about San Sui, which is great because it's time for me to make a confession. I don't believe I had ever heard of this company. Now. I just felt all the audio files out there switching off this show immediately, although who am I kidding? Most of them probably can't stand the low fidelity of the podcast medium. So I'm having a little fun at the expense of audio files here. I'll have more to say about audio files throughout this and it's not it's not like um all sligging off on audio files. I think that they take it very seriously, this idea of creating as perfect a sound playback system as they possibly can. But there's a lot that goes into that, and I might touch on that a little bit in this podcast anyway. San Sui was past tense and electronics company that has become particularly well known for audio and to a lesser extent, video system components. Now, if you do a search for san Sui, by the way, that's spelled s A N s u I, you will find numerous articles and videos that mentioned San Sui in the company of other big name companies like Pioneer and Sony. You all so be on the precipice of a huge drop into the sometimes crazy world of hi fi or high fidelity, and just know that if you do slip over the edge, there's a chance that you will never come back. Hi fi is one of those pursuits that can consume you and more to the point your bank account. We'll talk about that today too. And just know I'm being a little flip in about all this, But what I mean is that there are a lot of people out there who they are obsessed with finding that perfect high fidelity experience, to the point that some of them are are spending tens of thousands of dollars in the pursuit of it. Uh and they may never achieve it. So our story begins in the nineteen forties in Japan. They're a man named Kosaku Kikuchi was employed in a company that was a radio parts distributor. And you know, the word district reader is one that I think isn't clear for everyone. So let's get ready for our first little buddy trail. Uh. And first let's start with the idea of a supply chain. And let's say it's the nineteen seventies and you want a new sound system so you can listen to the transgressive glam rock sounds of artists like David Bowie, Lou Reid and the New York Dolls. Or heck, maybe it's you know, just a year or two later in the decade, and you want a rocking system so that you can listen to punk bands like the Ramons, the void Oid's and the Heartbreakers. Or maybe it's the late seventies and disco is king, so you want to groove out to the b Gs or Casey in the Sunshine Band or earth Wind and Fire. I'm getting a bit of a nostalgic kick here, can you tell? Anyway? You want to buy a stereo system, So you go to your local electronics store and you take a look at what's on display. Every single product you're looking at can trace its history back through a chain of production. So there are certain companies that mine the raw materials that ultimately find their way into our tech. Some of them might also process those raw materials and refine them, or maybe they send the raw materials onto refineries that are dedicated just to doing that. And then you've got fabricators that take raw or processed materials and then build components with them. And then you've got factories that take these components that are made by the various fabricators out there and assemble them into larger products. And then you've got distributors that take these finished products, which could be just a component for an even more complicated product down the line, and the distributors are in charge of getting that finished thing, typically to a wholesaler, and wholesalers then sell large lots of finished things to retailers, and then the retailer sells it to you, the final customer, who wants to buy the best stereos them. This, by the way, is one of the reasons we see such challenges in supply these days, because COVID really messed up the links in the supply chain, and if just one link falls, well, then everything that goes behind that that link has a delay, and things get worse and worse as it goes along. So a distributor, like I said, is a link between manufacturers who might fabricate or simply a symbol stuff and then the rest of the supply chain. And distributors sometimes act as vendors as well, or they might supply products to wholesalers and directly to retailers. Anyway, just in case you ever want to know what a distributor was in the sense of the supply chain, there you go. Uh. It also means something totally different, and we're talking about car engines. Those are different distributors, but that's another podcast. So it's the nineteen forties and Kikuchi is working for this company, which obviously became a critical entity during World War Two. Radio parts were, if you pardon the pun, instrumental in the war effort. Cakuchie founded a radio part manufacturing plant that he named the san Sui Electrical Plant in nineteen four And a quick word about that name. From what I can tell, san Sui is not a Japanese term. Rather, it actually comes from China, and it's a style of painting, and in China it's called shan Shui and it has the style has two key components to it. Artists use brushes and ink instead of brushes and paint, and they paint landscapes that those are the two things that that identify Shanshui paintings. Shanshui translated literally means mountain water and a lot of the landscapes that are painted feature images of waterfalls and mountain streams and such. So San Sui the company its first products were transformers, and again not the kind that are more than meets the eye. We're talking about an electrical component that can both transfer electric energy from one circuit to another, as well as changed the voltage of the current running through the second circuit or to increase it or decrease it. So audio transformers also get a bit more complicated because they could be designed to do other stuff like split audio signals apart or join them together, as well as to block radio frequency interference, among other things. But this gets super technical, and if I dive into that, we won't have a chance to talk about San Sue at all, So we're gonna save all that for some other episode. So in Kikuchi was ready to launch a company that would go beyond just manufacturing transformers. This would be the sen Sui Electric Company, and his initial starting capital, like the amount of money that was in the company was on eight thousand yen. Now, I wish I could tell you what that was worth today, but the inflation calculators I found only dated back to the nineteen fifties. Uh. I do know that in nineteen forty six, the occupation forces that were in Japan after World War Two had set the yen to dollar exchange rate at fifty yen to a dollar. So using that conversion rate, thousand yen in nineteen forty seven would be equal to about three thousand, six hundred bucks again in nineteen forty seven dollars. Now, if we adjusted that in the US for US inflation, you would get about forty five thousand dollars, which is a pretty modest initial capital for a company. But I also have to point out that you know, inflation and exchange rates change so much over time that you can't just say, like, oh, it had forty five thousand dollars in capital back then, because that it's too simplistic of you to be able to say that appreciation of one currency against another changes things dramatically, and appreciation of currencies doesn't necessarily reflect in let's say, inflation or deflation within a country. So yeah, I just know that it was a fairly modest starting capital for this company. Now, I don't have very much information on what the company was doing in its first few years. In fact, documentation about San Suey in general is sparse. I looked at a lot of different sites, many of them run by audio files, and so a lot of the information I have is second hand or third hand information, and I don't usually like running with that, but I kind of didn't have many other options for this particular episode. But the next point of data that I could find on San Suey actually comes in at nineteen fifty two, So this is several years after the founding. The founding was in nine seven, So in nineteen fifty two, and sue was producing voltage stabilizers and a few dozen different kinds of transformers, and at that point the company employed fifty two people. In nine four, San Sui introduced the HPR one hundred and electronic tube amplifier. Now, last week, again I reran an episode that talked about how speakers and amplifiers work, so we're not gonna go into deep detail again here, but you should know an amplifier's job is to take a weak incoming signal as an input and then send out a much stronger, but otherwise identical outgoing signal to other components, typically things like speakers, and reproducing the quality of the input signal is absolutely key with an amplifier. It's not just enough to boost the signal. You want to make sure that you are as true to that incoming signal as you possibly can be. Otherwise the amplifier can become an element that decreases the quality of that signal, and it can introduce noise into the output, and that's a big problem. So with audio gear, we're talking about actual noise, right, like stuff that's coming out of the speakers that was not part of the original recording. You do not want that. In general, audio files absolutely do not want that. They want to create a listening experience that is as faithful to the original recording experience as is possible, So you do not want to introduce noise. However, I should say that noise also just means like unwanted signal, and it applies across all of technology, not just in the audio world. But you know, you don't want to introduce unwanted signal because that means you're gonna get errors in whatever it is you're doing. So amplifiers in general, you want to be able to of good output, a strong outgoing signal without introducing unwanted components, unwanted noise, and that is a real challenge. Like that's why San Sui ended up getting such a great reputation in the sixties and early seventies because their products were known to produce a pretty powerful output without introducing noise. So that was a great thing for audio files. Uh Now, I might also add that when I'm talking about noise, I am not making a commentary on the quality of the music that someone might be listening to. I mean, I personally think a lot of so called music is noise, but that's because I'm an rapidly aging glam punk rock new wave music lover. So that's just you know, my prejudice and biases in that regard. But another quick note about amplifiers. When we're talking about boosting an electrical signal that represents sound, we have to remember that sound ranges across a pretty broad range of frequencies. Sound when you boil it down is vibration, and we can measure it in one way we can measure it is how frequently is the stuff vibrating. The faster it vibrates, the higher the pitch that we experience in listening to it. Human hearing typically ranges from twenty hurts or twenty vibrations or cycles per second on the low end, those are the deepest pitches that we can perceive with our with hearing, like you can feel lower frequencies, but you can't hear them, and then it goes up to twenty thousand hurts or twenty killer hurts on the high end, so vibrating twenty thousand cycles per second. Those are the highest pitches we can typically perceive, and that that range decreases as we get older. Typically we we start to lose those higher pitches first, So as an adult, you may not be able to hear stuff that's up in that twenty thousand hurts range. It may be much lower. This is also played into when various places like convenience stores will play out sounds at higher pitches that young people can hear, but older people can't. In order to uh discourage young people from loitering fun times anyway, amplifiers typically have a sweet spot and uh in a range of frequencies that they can really boost effectively. So this would be a range of electrical signals at which the amplifier is most effective. That is the amplifiers bandwidth. That's one of the things that affects an amplifiers quality. If the bandwidth is really narrow, well, the amplifier might be work great for a certain range of frequencies, but anything outside that, you're not gonna get the same umph, which means that you're listening experience is going to be ideal, right, because those those signals aren't going to be amplified, You're going to lose out on some of the range of the sound as it's being played back. Okay, we're gonna have some other stuff to chat about in a minute, but before we get to that, I need to take a quick break. Okay, before the break, I was talking about the kind of sound that most people are capable of hearing um and how that plays into amplifiers, and that certain amplifiers might have a particular range that they're very good at reproducing and others that they aren't. Often with amplifiers, you'll have multiple amplification components, each with a different sort of sweet spot range to try and reproduce the whole of a recorded or broadcast audio signals quality, because again, otherwise you would lose parts of it when you were sending that signal along to the speakers. And there's other stuff we could talk about. For example, the way we contextualize how an amplifier can increase the amplitude or volume of a signal. That's called gain. So if you've ever heard people talk about needing to adjust the gain on their microphones or their amplifiers, that's what they're talking about. And I'll have to do a full episode about gain and clipping and stuff like that in the future because if I stick to it here, it will take up the rest of this episode. But gain is super important. Whether it's because you want to make sure your voice sounds nice on a podcast well any clipping, or maybe you want to purposefully introduce certain effects like clipping or distortion in your output, like that's part of your artistic expression. You might want to do that. Um, So, yeah, it is important, but it goes beyond this episode. Well, then we also have to talk about pre amplifiers, because that's something that San Suey was getting into in this time period. So pre amplifiers or pre amps are amplifiers that take very weak signals, like say from a microphone, which produces a very weak electrical signal, and then boosts that into a stronger signal, but not super strong, like not strong enough to drive speakers. So pre amps signal would then feed into an actual amplifier, and that would take the pre amps boosted signal and then boosted even further. But then you might wonder, well, why would you use a preamp at all? I mean, couldn't an amplifier just do the whole thing by itself. Well, pre amplifiers are necessary to cut back on that noise thing I was just talking about, and to cut back on interference. The pre amp typically boosts voltage gain, but not current gain. Remember, voltage and current are two different things. Voltage is kind of like the pressure in electrical system. Current is like the amount of electricity that's passing through a system. So you're increasing the pressure with a pre amp, but not the current um and this will then boost the gain to what is called line level. That is, a signal that's strong enough to send onto a power amplifier, which will then boost the signal further, ideally without introducing noise into it. And a power amplifier will boost voltage and current, not just one or the other, and it will send this boosted signal out to power speakers and monitors and stuff. And by monitors I mean a type of speaker, not a display, you know, not a not a not a computer monitor in other words, and amplifiers do this by having power directed to them from outside sources. Now, I say this because I do not want to give you the impression that somehow amplifiers magically create energy, because we know from the law of conservation you cannot do that. Instead, amplifiers are taking an incoming signal and then boosting that by taking advantage of electrical power from another source, like say a wall outlet, and then pushes out this stronger outgoing signal that's otherwise identical to the incoming one. Now, the reason I even went into this is that preampts and amplifier tubes would sort of open up the possibility of a high fidelity industry, which is where San Sui would have its biggest impact, So it's good to have a basic understanding of that technology. Now. Nineteen fifty four was also a year when a company called Harmon Cardon became the first to introduce a receiver. So you need to know what a receiver is and consider for a moment the various components you might need. If you really loved audio in the nineteen fifties, well, you would need a radio typically that would consist of at least, you know, one antenna and a tuner that lets you tune into specific radio frequencies. You would also need an amplifier or more likely a couple of amplifiers, that would take the incoming electrical signal from the radio broadcast and boost it so that it can drive the radio's speakers. And then you would also need speakers. Uh. The radio's way back in the day were pretty big. They were reliant on vacuum tubes to serve as amplifiers, so the old radios were essentially pieces of furniture. By the nineteen fifties, they were slightly smaller than they had been in the thirties and forties, but it wouldn't really be until the adoption of the transistor that we would see them shrink down. But as an audio file, you wouldn't just stop with the radio. You would also need a record player, a turntable or phonograph really in those days. Uh. This consists of the turntable itself, and if the turntable is not an all in one unit with its own speaker, you would also need a separate amplifier and separate speakers so that the weak electric signal that was coming from the record player could be boosted enough to drive the speakers. All in one units had all the components built into them. Uh. But those components are still all right there, and it's possible you might have some other audio sources as well. Uh, and you would again need the amplifiers and speakers for each of them. So your home is gonna get really crammed with gear because you might want something that can play back tape. For example, now in the nineteen fifties we would be talking about real to real tape. A lot of the tape players had their own speakers incorporated into them in this form factor, but you would so you could have a standalone player that would have everything, But you could also have one that just have the tape deck itself and would still need to go through an amplifier and speakers before you could actually listen to it. So you have all these independent components, each of their own dedicated speaker systems and amplifiers, just so you can enjoy your tunes. That ends up being way too much for most people. So then enter the receiver, and a receiver collects a lot of these components into a single piece of equipment that you can then use to switch between different incoming audio signals. Nearly all receivers have a radio tuner built into them. Some might not, but we typically would call those amplifiers rather than receivers, so they've got the radio tuner. They also typically have a full amplifier inside them. Some might just have a preamp that you then have to send out to an amplifier, but a lot of receivers have the amplifier built into them as well, and they can accept multiple audio inputs. The number and type depends upon the receiver, but it was pretty common for them to accept incoming signals from a phonograph typically labeled phono on most receivers, as well as tape decks. So now you can connect multiple audio devices like a turntable, a tape deck. You've got your radio tuner built in right there, all through this one device and use a switch to go between them to feed out to your speakers, so you don't need speakers for everything. You've got one says speakers, and these all get directed through the receiver which then sends that signal onto the speakers, and you use dials, buttons, or switches to switch between the different inputs. You also typically have controls to set things like ranges of frequencies that you would prefer to emphasize. So, for example, you may want the base notes to come through more clearly, so you use a little knob that's labeled base. That essentially means that the base signals will get a bit more ooth when sent to the speakers than other frequencies are. Um, you have the balance, which can affect which speakers get more signal than the others. So maybe you have left and right speakers, but the left speakers are further away from you than the right speakers. You might want to tweak the balance a bit so that the left beakers get a little more umph, so that you get a balanced output based upon where you're actually experiencing the music and so on, and of course volume, right the amplitude, how loud do you want the stuff to be. So the Harmon Cardon receiver in nineteen fifty four cost a hundred eighty nine dollars and fifty cents, which, if we were to adjust for inflation, would be just under two thousand dollars today, And it wouldn't be long before other companies, including san Sui, would get involved in manufacturing receivers. But San sue wouldn't produce receivers right away. In the late nineteen fifties it started producing tube pre amplifier and amplifiers. Now I can't get too specific with years here because the various sources I find have conflicting information about that, but certainly before the end of the nineteen fifties, San Suey was producing tube receivers, pre amplifiers, and amplifiers. So in some cases these amplifiers were full units that you would buy, you would bring home, and you would connect to your sound system. They just wouldn't have a radio built into them, but they had all the other amplification elements as part of them. And Kikuchi also began to explore the possibility of exporting his products to overseas markets, and by nineteen fifty nine the company had grown to five seven employees. It was nineteen sixty one when san Sui would be listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and that's also the year that the company registered its name in the United States. In nineteen sixty four, the company released its first receiver. This was the SACKS one D the s A X one. This was a stereo receiver with FM and A M radio tuners, and it had vacuum tubes for everything but the preamp. The preample solid state, but everything else was vacuum tubes. There were knobs to adjust the trouble and base referring to the higher and lower sound frequencies respectively. There was an for the balance again the comparative signal strength for the left versus the right speakers, and there was a volume knob as well, plus some other switches and dials to select things like input signal and mode of operation. Uh. I guess we should remind ourselves that stereo is referencing the fact that you could send different audio signals to two different speakers or sets of speakers if you preferred so that you would have a left channel and a right channel. This opened up a lot of new ways to experiment with sound. Mono, by comparison, sends the same audio signal out to every speaker, so with mono output, you get the exact same sounds at the same volume on the left and right speakers unless you change the balance, in which case you would still get the same signal, but one speaker would get more a stronger signal than the other, so you would have more volume coming from one side versus the other side. Stereo change and change that entirely. Though it would take a while for stereo to really take off, not everyone embraced it. There's a pretty famous anecdote that the Beatles band that was really an international for phenomenon by they were really hands on during the album mixing phase, but only for the mono releases of their albums, so they really wanted to make sure that their vocals, their instrumentation, any effects that they were adding, we're all mixed just right for the mono release of their albums. When it came to their stereo releases, they just left that to the audio engineers. You might wonder why why wouldn't they take the same care well, their fan base consisted mostly of young people who had record players with a mono speaker on them, so they were just concerned with crafting music that was going to sound good to the majority of the people who were buying their albums. Stereo was not that right most of their most of their audience didn't have stereo systems. However, stereo was the way of the future. In nineteen sixty six, San Suey established a corporate presence here in the United States, founding the San Sui Electronics Company, Limited here in the States, and the following year ninety seven was when the company would release a solid state pre amplifier called the a U seven seven seven using transistors. So I've talked about transistors a lot in other episodes, but the transistor is an electronic component that can operate either as a switch, so in other words, that can allow current to flow through or prevent it from passing, or it can also work as an amplifier, and transistors would have a massive impact on the audio landscape as a transistor could potentially replace a vacuum tube. This was important because vacuum tubes are relatively large they are fragile, they're made out of glass, and they can they do heat up when an operation like they can get really hot. Uh. They can also so eventually burn out, which means you eventually will have to replace vacuum tubes. It might take decades, but you will eventually have to do it. Transistors would also allow for mentorization. In fact, the development of the transistor is why we're able to have things like smartphones and modern computers. But in the audio world, there's a pretty deep divide over whether tube based amplifiers produce a better result or if solid state or transistor based amplifiers are the best. And you'll hear audio files swap terms like warmth or brittle or a round. These are descriptors that don't immediately seem to apply to sound, right like, when you're talking about sounds something you're hearing, it's kind of odd to think of calling it warm or brittle or round like. These are descriptors that we would use for other stuff that we sense through other ways. But that's kind of the language that the audio world has adopted, and it's difficult to to contextualize or to understand unless you actually experience what people mean when they say that. When you hear it and you say, oh, that's what warm means or that's what round means, you kind of get it, but it's very hard to to conceptualize without that experience. Anyway, there's a whole discussion we could have on solid state versus two amplifiers and whether one is superior to another. There are some people who say the solid state ones create a much more faithful reproduction of sound. There are others who say that, you know, the vacuum tubes create a lot more character and depth of sound, which is more satisfying to listen to. There are camps on either side that are passionate about their perspective. And I'm going to leave it there for now. Us again, we're talking about Sun Sue or at least I'm trying to. In fact, let's take a quick break and I will refocus on Sound Sue when we return. Okay, before the break, we were getting into the late sixties. I do need to backtrack a little bit because in n Sun Suey had introduced the AU one one one amplifier. This was a piece of audio equipment that to this day is highly revered and sought after. And it looks awesome. Uh. It is an amplifier and all in one amplifier, so it's not a receiver. It doesn't have a radio tuner in it, but otherwise behaves the way a receiver would and that you feed your different audio components into this. It amplifies the incoming signal and then puts that out to speakers or headphones or whatever. It has a black front panel on this set top type device, and the panel has these silver and black controls on it, so you've got knobs and dials that are all silver and then a few switches and buttons that are in black. So black on black it's very spinal tap. Uh. This was a stereo system amplifier, so again part of a high end audio system. And I've read a lot of reviews about the a U one eleven from various audio files, and it it almost comes across like the recruiting literature used by cult members. No offense audio files, We y'all could come on a little strong anyway, The a U one eleven to this day remains a coveted piece of gear. Typically you're looking at spending a couple of thousand dollars and that's on one that needs you know, some some tender love and care, some tweaks and some uh, some maintenance to make it work at the way it's supposed to. If you're looking for one that's in really like like good performance condition, you're talking maybe four grand, sometimes maybe more, depends on really the market you're looking at um. And also, you know, I gotta keep in mind there's a limited number of these. They're not making new ones, the ones that exist, that's it. But they are highly valued, largely because they are known to have an excellent ability to boost the signal to a pretty strong one while still maintaining a very low noise ceiling, and has the added benefit of all these different controls that you can tweak and work your specific audio set up so that you can produce the most accurate replication of sound or the best experience of sound that you can possibly manage. In nineteen sixty six, San Sui got into the speaker business. It released the spe SP two models of speakers. Now audio files seem to mostly dismiss Sue's speakers, so the company was really well known for the quality of its receivers and its amplifiers, but as for other stuff, it produced, such as speakers and turntables and much later things like CD players. Most of those get a resounding me from the audio loving crowd out there. In nineteen sixty seven, that's when we got the a U seven seven seven. That again was the first solid state integrated amplifier. So again a U one eleven used vacuum tubes, the a U seven seven seven used transistors. Following the seven seven seven, we got the a U five five and the a U n and then a whole bunch of different amplifier and receiver variants up. To go into all of them would kind of be pointless. UH. They're all different amplifiers and receivers with different UH specs to them, and the specs start to get meaningless unless you're looking for a particular piece of equipment in your vintage audio set up. So I'm not going to go into all of that. It really wouldn't be any benefit to anyone. It would be like I was reciting numbers and figures out of a catalog. But in the early nine seventies, San Sui began to produce quadraphonic sound amplifiers, so stereo sound sends separate channels to the left and right speakers, you have two channels. Stereo Quadraphonic, as the name suggests, was meant to do a very similar thing, except now you're talking about four channels of audio, so four separate speakers left front, right front, left rear, and right rear. So you could argue really that this was an approach to surround sound. That's kind of what it was. Now. To achieve that, you had to follow special processes and use special electronics to generate records, word and handle or play back the signals in order to get this sort of effect right. You couldn't just plug and play like you had to specifically engineer all this in order to take advantage of it, just as you had to do with stereo. So the nineteen seventies saw a whole lot of experimentation in this realm. For home theater use, quadrophonic sound had actually been around since the fifties in studios, but for home setups it was a new thing in the seventies and we might as well address it here. Quadrophonics didn't really succeed, largely because there were tons of technical issues that made recording, broadcasting, and playing quadrophonic recordings difficult. Plus there were competing formats in encoding and decoding quadrophonic signals. Now that's not to say that there weren't examples of quadrophonic systems. There were, but on the whole, quadrophonic systems only saw modest success, And that's typically gonna happen when you have lots of different formats. Some hardware might support format number one but not format number two. Some media might only be available on format number two, not format number one. So you could have a quadraphonic system, get a quadraphonic recording and find out, oh, these are using two different encoding decoding formats, so I can't actually get the quadraphonic experience on my system because they aren't compatible. So the lack of a universal standard was a real problem, and ultimately the the the music industry as a whole moved away from quadraphonic sound. Now, one neat thing that San Sui did was create a quadraphonic synthesizer which could take a two channel audio source a stereo audio source and simulate a four channel signal. And I kind of think of this as sort of the modern ultra high definition television UH trend we see where like ultra high definition like four KSE sets and stuff up scales images from lower resolutions so that they look better on an ultra high res screen. We're kind of talking about the same kind of process back in the day with san Sui, except obviously it's a different medium, right, We're not talking about visuals like a high resolution screen. We're talking about audio. But yeah, it's kind of the same idea. We take this stereo input and we produce a quadraphonic output that just thinks. I think it's kind of cool. I don't know what it sounded like or how effective it was because I've never experienced it, but I think it's a neat idea. So in nineteen seventy four, Kikuchi, the founder of san Sui, retired. Kinzo Fujiwara became the new president of the company, and while Kikuchi oversaw san Sui during its early days, it's expansion, the development of the AU one eleven, and kind of cementing san Sui as a go to in high fidelity audio equipment. Fujiwara would lead during a tumultuous era in which various audio companies were really competing in the high fi space, and then things took a dramatic turn for the company. So one thing San Suey did was it introduced a whole bunch of different circuit designs that it patented in the late seventies and early eighties, all really in an effort to create more powerful and more accurate amplifiers and receivers. So the idea was the circuit designs would allow for even less noise to come through while you're boosting the signal. That really was the goal. So there's no need to go into each of those because uh, you know, they were all meant to do generally the same thing. They just did it in different ways. But one really big change that hits San Suey came in nine eight The company had been producing its own transformers up to that point for the most part, anyway, and many felt that the transformers San Sui was making were contributing a great deal to the quality of the San Sui audio products, the finished you know, amplifiers and receivers. But in nineteen San Sui sold off its transformer technology and its transformer business to a company called Hashimoto Electric, and a lot of prominent San Sui engineers moved from san Sui to Hashimoto. So arguably this was a step towards San Sui's a ventual failure, although it's ultimate failure, like the complete disappearance of San Sui, wouldn't happen until two thousand fourteen, but the company itself was kind of a non player well before the two thousand's. So let's give a quick rundown of how things generally played out, because finding actual details at this point became almost impossible. Bowl I found a lot of assertions but very little hard data to be able to explain exactly what happened with San Sui. But I've got a big picture. So one big thing was a global economic trend that San Sui was, you know, affected by, and that was that the Japanese yen began to appreciate in value against other currencies. That made the export business in Japan a lot more difficult, particularly for like high end luxury stuff like the equipment that San Sui was making, because the the cost in Japan for building this stuff was largely uh stable, so your cost to make something ends up being about the same. However, because of the appreciation of the Japanese yen against other currencies, it meant that if you were exporting stuff the amount of money you were getting back from these exports once it converted into Japanese end, it was less because the end's value had appreciated. So you're getting less money back from your sales once it gets back to you because of these these changes in the value of the end versus other currencies. So you have you have very few options. You could try to increase the cost the final sales price of your of your items and your export business, but then you might price yourself out of the market. Right if if a two thousand dollars set is now a ten thousand dollars set, how many people are actually going to go out there and buy it? You know, you are already marketing to a pretty limited customer base. How do you manage that? So this was a big blow to companies like san Sui. Also, there were other companies that were competing in the space that We're doing really well, companies like Pioneers and Sony. So that was a big issue for San Suy was that it was facing some pretty stiff competition from other brands. Some of these were also dealing with the same issues. Sony in particular, dealing with the same issue of the appreciation of the end versus other currencies. They responded by trying to reduce the cost of production, which meant going with cheaper components, and this resulted in San Suy trying to produce what some people in the audio file world referred to as bpcs or black pieces of crap. In other words, you they were putting out these sort of black plastic audio components that had cheaper things in them, cheaper pieces in them, cheaper transformers, cheaper amplifiers, cheaper transistors, and so the output, the actual performance of these components was suffering. Sansu His reputation took a hit and people began to kind of migrate away from current San Sui products. They would still go after the vintage stuff because that was still performing really well, but the vintage stuff was that was like an aftermarket, right, that was resell market. San Suey wasn't making profits off of selling these things because they weren't making them anymore. They weren't making those older models anymore, so that was a real issue for the company. Eventually, it got to a point where the company made the decision to cut ties with exports because it just couldn't make money in that market. Anymore, and they really focused on trying to cater to the Japanese market. However, by this point, in the late nineteen eighties and into the nineteen nineties, we were starting to see a shift away from high fidelity. People were starting to move off of that. They were moving to world of convenience as opposed to fidelity. So with the City, you're talking about these big systems that have lots of different components, all designed to create this ideal listening experience. But convenience is saying, you know, listening experience is important, but wouldn't it be nice if you could take your music with you? And that was where we see the birth of things like cassettes and the Sony Walkman, which really revolutionized the audio industry to a point where audio files felt it like a stab in the back because, yeah, you could now take your music with you, which was convenient, you could listen to it in ways that you never could before, but it was had a much lower quality than what you would get with one of these, you know, kitted out audio systems that you would have at home. But for a lot of people, convenience was more important and also was considerably cheaper, and so Because of this shift in values of what you know, the music buying public want it. You started to see a decrease in interest in the high fidelity audio component world, and as a result, San Sui Star faded even more. It tried to get into things like producing CD players and turntables and stuff, but often it was very late to the game and it was not marketed very effectively. At some point, and I could not find a definitive answer as to win, the company ended up selling it's it's brand name to other entities. I believe currently a Chinese company owns the right to brand stuff as san Sui. The stuff that comes out branded as san Sui has no other connection to the actual San Sui company that we've been talking about. It just is a brand name that has been assigned to a product. So there was some point where that happened. Exactly when I cannot tell you, because again I could not find any definitive documentation, but it happened between the nineteen nineties and two thousand fourteen. Sometime in that twenty years span, it happened, and I don't it's very sad for people who were fans of the San Sui brand that this happened UH, and a lot of it. I would argue, like, I think a lot of people could point to Cokuchie resigning like like retiring, as being the turn. But honestly, I think that that economic issue, the fact that the yen's value appreciated, that was probably one of the big big blows, and the other one being this shift towards UH preferring convenience over to fidelity. That's a shift that we've seen over and over again. By the way, like the whole adoption of m P three's audio files early in the MP three days, we're not super happy about MP thres because the quality of the MP three could be much lower than what you would get on say a vinyl album that was taken from a really pristine master recording. You could say, well, this is far superior to what you get with an MP three, but again MP three's far more convenient. Anyway. That is the rise and Fall of San SUI hope you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on the Twitter handle text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.