The inaugural issue of the quarterly Audio Accessory came out in April 1976. Personnel matters were soon cleared up, and I was appointed as chief editor of both that magazine and Audio Senka. I began planning for the second issue of Audio Accessory.
Just around that time, I took part in a golf tournament organized by Audio-Technica Corporation at the Sagamihara Golf Club. For the journey back to Tokyo, I was given a lift in his car by Mr. Ryuichi Oizumi, the chief editor of the Musen to Jikken (Radio Experimenters) magazine. I sat in the front alongside the driver. In the back seats were Mr. Umehara of the FM Fan magazine and the audio critic Saburo Egawa. Mr. Egawa was full of talk even before we set off. During the return drive, he suggested, in his usual inventive manner, that the rubber sheets on the floor in the car could be used as good turntable sheets.
After about 30 minutes had passed, I said to him, “Mr. Egawa, would you like me to sell 10,000 of those turntable sheets?” When he asked who I was, I turned around to him and replied, “My name is Wada. I work for Ongen Publishing.” “So you’re Mr. Wada?” he exclaimed cheerfully. “Well, well . . .” Naturally, he had seen the inaugural issue of Audio Accessory.
I was having a hard time selecting audio critics for our magazines. As well as Hiroshi Saito, who was an advisor at our company, I had roped in Kazuaki Iwasaki, Shunsuke Wakabayashi, Yoshiyuki Ishida, Kazuo Kanzaki, and Masamitsu Fukuda as writers. Mr. Egawa was considered to be a rather dubious fellow, because he liked to take makers’ products apart and experiment with them. Mr. Saito had not recommended him.
But listening to his banter in the car, I realized that even though it might be difficult asking him to do product reviews, he was a person with a good amateurish spirit. When we arrived in Shibuya and bid our farewells, I called Mr. Egawa over and said to him, “I’ll give you eight pages in Audio Accessory, and you can write about whatever you like. If we get any complaints from makers, I will handle them.” “Eight pages?” he beamed with joy. “Mr. Wada, do you really mean it?”
A few days later we had our first meeting. Mr. Egawa asked me to go to an electricity store and buy 5-meter, 7-meter, and 10-meter speaker cables of various brands. “Are you going to carry out a sound test of the cables?” I asked. “That’s right,” he replied. It sounded interesting, soI sent somebody from our editorial department out to buy the cables. “I’m going to do a blind test,” Mr. Egawa explained, and he hid them from view with an open umbrella so that he wouldn’t know which brand was playing. Then he tested each one of them for their sounds.
Other writers also brought in proposals, so we ended up with plenty of test reports for the next issue. Audio Accessory’s direction was decided. Among the contents, Mr. Egawa’s test article proved to be especially popular and was the main reason why the second issue of the magazine, which came out on July 15, 1976, sold out completely. I was so pleased that I had met Mr. Egawa.
The first and second issues of Audio Accessory had sold like hotcakes. Since the audio retail stores to which we had consigned sales were having trouble handling the stocks, I started visiting bookstores to get them to sell the magazine. In most cases my request was simply refused. Just when I was wondering what to do, a gentleman visited our office and, handing over his business card, introduced himself as Mr. Hoshino, an assistant manager in the purchasing department of Tohan, a distributor of various publications. “We want you to leave all of your sales to Tohan,” he said. “Thank you so much,” I replied, lowering my head in a grateful bow to him. Once again, just at the right time, a savior had appeared out of the blue, and our bookstore sales were realized.