Arthur Haddy

Arthur Charles Haddy (16 May 1906 – 18 December 1989) was an English recording engineer. His work as Technical Director of the Decca Record Company Ltd. caused him to be nicknamed "the father of hi-fi".

After working in the recording industry in the 1930s, Haddy was employed in wartime projects during the Second World War. These required new, sophisticated sonic developments that Haddy and his colleagues later put to peacetime use in Decca's innovative postwar recording techniques. He was an early proponent of the long-playing record, stereophony, video discs and digital recording.

Haddy was born in Newbury, Berkshire, and educated locally at St. Bartholomew's Grammar School. He became an apprentice with the radio equipment manufacturers C. F. Elwell Ltd, and moved to the Western Electric Company as a junior employee. In 1929, he became engaged to the daughter of Harry Fay, a popular singer who recorded with the Crystalate Company, makers of the Rex and Panachord labels. Haddy attended one of Fay's recording sessions, and, as he later recalled:

I was amazed at the primitive equipment they had installed. I commented that I could build something better than that on the kitchen table. About six months later I had a call from the company's managing director asking if my remark could be taken seriously. I said that it had been meant as a joke but none the less I would have a go. I built a set of amplifiers and cutting head for them on the strength of which I was asked to join the firm.

Haddy was reluctant to leave Western Electric, but Crystalate offered him twice his existing salary, and his fiancée insisted on his accepting the offer.

Together with a music director, Jay Wilbur, Haddy was in sole charge of the technical side of the company's work until the young Kenneth Wilkinson joined him in 1931. Although the company was based at Tonbridge in Kent, Crystalate made many of its recordings at the acoustically excellent town hall of West Hampstead in north west London. At first the company rented the hall, and was later able to buy the freehold for £1,250. During the 1930s Haddy gradually developed improved cutting heads and dynamic pickups, with the aim of widening the usable frequency range of his records. At that time, recordings were cut directly on wax, and the existing cutting heads were restricted to a bandwidth of about 50-8,000Hz. After experimenting with other techniques, Haddy opted for the moving-coil principle which Paul Voigt of Edison Bell and Alan Blumlein of EMI had separately advocated back in the 1920s. His first efforts were restricted to a 7,500Hz upper limit but the sound quality was nonetheless much improved. The repertoire recorded by Haddy for Crystalate was mainly light music and comedy records, with artists such as Sandy Powell, Charles Penrose, and Leslie Sarony.

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