Noise Merchant

One recent Sunday the quiet of a back street in Brooklyn was shattered by an automobile crash that left both cars heaps of twisted junk. "Very satisfying," said the man with the tape recorder. His boss disagreed. "It has presence," he admitted solemnly, "but the thump is missing. Let's try it again."

The boss was a lynx-eared noise merchant by the name of Sidney Frey. Audiophiles alert for a vicarious thrill can hear awesome testimony to his demand for accuracy on a forthcoming Audio Fidelity album titled Sound Effects II. During his campaign in Brooklyn, Frey staged six crashes (by sending one wreck at the end of a tow rope hurtling into another), but the calculated carnage was a minor incident in his tireless pursuit of sound. Audio Fidelity's Frey, 40, has already trapped a hurricane (Donna), recommissioned an obsolete steam engine, provoked a Great Dane to vicious complaint, wooed mewing seagulls with a boxful of chicken guts, eavesdropped at a bullfight. His long-suffering friends are even accustomed to having him turn up with his equipment to record their squalling, hiccuping children. Wild animals have been Prey's most difficult subjects ("The only possible way to get an alligator to cut loose is by tooting a B-flat French horn; they think the damn thing's a female"). But one of his most memorable triumphs occurred in the lion house of New York's Bronx Zoo. There one spring day he roared at a hungry and puzzled lion until the beast let out a howl "like something out of Frank Buck."

Basic Craving. Frey, who refers to himself as "Mr. Stereo," believes that his taped sounds answer a deep-seated emotional need--"a basic craving to hear stereophonically." But for the unwary, Frey's effects are often more unsettling than satisfying. When played at top volume, the fizz of a freshly opened soda bottle on a Frey album explodes into the fury of a hurricane-whipped ocean; the gurgle of water washing down a drain becomes the belch of some prehistoric monster.

Riding the stereo boom with audio-manic items. Frey's firm has sold 4,200,000 records in the past four years, grossed $12 million. Customers for Frey's cacophony are children, camera fans who want authentic background sound for their home movies, and--most of all--the "pingpong trade," as diskmen call hi-fi buffs who delight in dramatizing stereo by playing such demonstration recordings as the sounds of a pingpong match. "Look," explains Frey. "A guy goes out and gets himself a Superduper Mark IV amplifier and what the mooch wants to listen to is something to prove to everybody that he has stereo."

Ultimate Sound. Bronx-born Sidney Frey's resounding horizons are limited only by the present state of public taste. Recently he reluctantly abandoned the sound of a belching baby for fear that it might offend potential customers, and he ruled out frying bacon and tooth brushing as not sufficiently dramatic. But he hopes soon to record an aerial dogfight between two World War I relics, the crash of a sprung gallows trap, the whack of a guillotine blade against the block. And his enduring dream is to catch on his own high-fidelity equipment the mid-century's ultimate sound--an exploding hydrogen bomb.

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