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Solid Gone
I haven't written lately because my right hand has been in a cast from my fingertips to my elbow—rendering me, as a writer, essentially mute. Writing, thinking, and feeling are, for a writer, inextricably linked. How do I know what I think if I haven't written about it? Not being able to write about it, when I heard that Jim Thiel died on September 13, I could only weep. It's not that Jim and I were friends. As John Atkinson has written elsewhere, reviewers and manufacturers can't be friends—that poisons the well of dispassionate criticism. Nonetheless, Jim Thiel was one of nature's gentlemen: brilliant, engaging, and good company. He was one of us, an audiophile and music lover, always ready to talk about both for hours.
Changing Tastes
In my last post (and the story of why it was so long ago is an epic which I won't go into now), I observed that the listener I am today is a completely different critter than the one I was years ago. It's inevitable that time, experience, and liff its ownself change us—and change the way we perceive art. Two readers—KBK and RankStranger—wrote in saying that they had acquired collections of classical discs in the hope that they might eventually gain an appreciation of the genre. Another reader—our esteemed Alan in Victoria—wrote in incredulously: "You guys keep hundreds of classical records on hand, because you think one day a switch will flip somewhere and you will suddenly like classical music? Bizarre." I have to admit that a similar idea occurred to me for an instant and then I got it. First, as Jon Iverson likes to observe, audiophiles are hunter-gatherers. Collecting music is what we do. And our musical tastes do grow—and, in my humble opinion, our taste can change based upon our systems. (Owners of Quad '57s are far less likely to be into death metal than, say, owners of Duntech Sovereigns.)
The Same River Twice
Looking for a small, manageable paperback to read on a commute to Great Neck and back, I picked up a vintage paperback of Ross Macdonald's The Drowning Pool, a novel I'd read 25 years ago. I didn't exactly remember the plot clearly, but my recollection of my fling with Macdonald was that most of his plots dealt with the sins of the grandfathers being visited upon the third generation after. The Drowning Pool sort of meets that description, but I was startled by two elements I don't remember from my first reading: the intensely poetic description of the physical world and how hollow some of hero Lew Archer's machismo sounded. (The Drowning Pool, published in 1950, was probably serialized in the pulps; in later Macdonald novels, Archer eschewed the tough-guy stance for a more nuanced psychological/observational one.) Holy cow, I thought, how could I have missed that the first time I read it? The answer is, of course, that 25 years ago I wasn't the me I am now. I had fewer experiences and I read more for plot than all of the other elements that comprise good fiction.
Music Makes Us Human
I've been reading Daniel Levitan's The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, which makes pretty strong claims for the importance of those tones in time. (Neil McCormick conducted an interesting interview with Levitan in The Telegraph.) Music, Levitan argues, functioned as a means to store verbal information long before writing was developed, creates social bonds, and serves, like gaudy plumage, as a means of advertising genetic fitness. His thesis reminds me somewhat of one proposed by ethnomusicologist John Blacking, that primitive man could dance before he could walk—just watch a toddler learning to walk and you can see what he meant.
Did Shuffle Kill the Music Industry?
I stayed up late last on April 2—late for me, anyway: 11pm. I watched the last episode of ER in real time. (Hang in there, peeps, there will be an audio point after the jump.) I'm not going to defend my ER habit. I know the show wasn't remotely realistic, having worked in an ER myself (albeit long enough ago that the nurses still wore caps). People running around screaming "Stat!" doesn't happen so much. The ER is mostly an endless slog through folks with no primary care physician who come in when they have no other option—although the Friday and Saturday night "knife and gun club" hours between midnight and 4am could get quite hectic. I didn't watch ER because it was true to life (real ERs aren't very telegenic), I thought it was good narrative. We humans are programmed to like sequential narrative. And I didn't normally stay up Thursday nights watching it either. Technology has changed the way we can watch television, so I TiVoed the show and caught up with it some other time with a morning cup of joe or an evening adult beverage. That single change in technology might explain why a network like NBC is getting out of the 10pm adult drama business, replacing that programming with five nights of Jay Leno—that, and the fact that talk shows are cheap to produce. But don't kid yourself, a nation of TiVoers like me watching asynchronously and fast-forwarding through the commercials has changed network TV programming—much the same way that iPods and Shuffle have changed the way a lot of people listen to music.
Just Shoot Me
As an audiophile, one of my core beliefs has always been that, once they have heard better sounding music, everybody would want it. That's how it worked with me: My friend Bill sat me down in front of his Quad '57s and cued David Bowie's Heroes on the turntable and once I heard all of those new sounds coming out of my beloved old LP, I was a changed man. Of course, it didn't hurt that my wife, sitting next to me, said, "We're going to own a pair of these speakers, aren't we?" That's simply proof that I'm a very lucky man. But I digress, I was saying that I believed that choosing better sound was the natural reaction to being exposed to it. Not perzactly true, says "informal" research conducted by Jonathan Berger of Stanford University and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. For the last eight years, Berger has polled incoming students on their sound preferences—and I don't mean just asking them which format they preferred. He did demos. "Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 kHz audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128kbps, 160kbps, and 192kbps bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128kbps was preferred. I repeated the experiment over six years and found the preference for MP3— particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time."
Tube Toon
Here's an oldie but goodie: a vintage animated Telefunken ad. NOS roolz. A shame about the period racial stereotyping though. Hat tip to Cartoon Brew.
Candid Beatles & Stones Photos
The Telegraph has a slide show of 21 previously unpublished photographs of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, taken mostly by their US tour manager Bob Bonis. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (6)
Music Matters
In an economy that has many stores on the ropes, Definitive is doing well—and I could see why. The store is drop-dead gorgeous, the staff in really knowledgeable, and store owner Mark Ormiston has pared the lines down to a selection of brands known for solid engineering and superb customer service. (That's actually crucial—stores that have "everything" seem attractive, but stores that focus on what they perceive to be the best tend to actually know their products better. Which, in turn, means that they match components to customers with greater accuracy.) Definitive also has some of the best sounding demo rooms I've heard. I brushed against an end wall in the demo room I was presenting in and discovered on reason why: There was about 9" of bass trapping hidden behind what looked like an ordinary wall. For the Music Matters event, Definitive set up five soundrooms to present a wide range of options. For sensibly priced audio there were rooms with Rotel and B&W, in addition to Peachtree Audio and Magnepan. Linn was there with a single-brand system approach based on its Klimax DS. There was a home theater demo. Ayre was demonstrating its new DPS turntable and a prototype of its QB-9 USB DAC—through some very fine Magnepan 20.1s, reinforced by a pair of JL subwoofers. I was in the last two-channel room with the newest Wilson Maxx series 3, driven by all Audio Research gear, augmented by Peter McGrath's Sound Devices Model 722 hard disk recorder packed with McGrath's hi-rez digital recordings. All of the rooms were wired with Transparent Audio cable.
Remember/Imagine
John Lennon left the planet 28 years ago today. I have a hard time contemplating that without tearing up. It's not that I wanted to meet him, or hang out with him, or imagined that we could have been BFFs. I simply liked living in a world with John Lennon in it—a world where a song like "Norwegian Wood" could change everything simply by being played on AM radio. . . A world where the brutal honesty of "Working Class Hero" could revolutionize my conception of what or how much a "pop" song could say. . . Even a world where the two most famous songwriters on earth could carry on a bitter spat by mocking one another in serial record releases. I was in the fourth grade when the Beatles first performed on Ed Sullivan's show. I remember skipping school in the seventh grade to watch a double feature of A Hard Day's Night and Help. In junior high school, Sgt. Pepper's taught me to closely read an album in much the same way that I. A. Richards would later teach me how to close read a text. My junior year of high school saw the release of Abbey Road and I attended a faculty party at UVA and the director of the McGuffy Reading Center chatted with me over a glass of rose about the tension between the connotative and denotative meanings of words in "Because."It was the first time I'd ever experienced an adult taking "my" music seriously. Essentially, the Beatles greatly shaped the way I thought (still think) about words and music. The Beatles didn't just change the world, they changed the way I perceived it—and before December 8, 1980, I simply assumed that they would always be a part of my world. In one sense, they always will be, but Lennon's death hit me hard, not least because of its utter senselessness. Other rock stars had died—too many—but Lennon was murdered just as he was growing up. He'd worked through (or at least had worked on) many of the ghosts that had haunted him and was struggling to become a good husband, a good father, a better man . . . . John Lennon might have lived a long life and never again have produced a song, a sketch, or a story that would touch me. We have no way of knowing, but I still feel cheated that I will never again have a chance to stumble onto a new Lennon song and recognize a thought or feeling from my own life. Damn it all. Yoko Ono has posted a memorial site, where people can share their memories of Lennon. It has a lovely portrait of Lennon by Allan Tannenbaum, one that I've never seen before. If you miss John, it's a nice place to visit and reflect
In the world's eye,
The Two-Box Solution
My favorite audio product of 2008 isn't precisely an audio product—it's a home theater in a box. I'm referring to Polk's lovely SurroundBar 360, which sells for $1200 and gives you a low-profile 48" "sound bar" and a base station, which includes an optical disc player, DSP processing, and an AM/FM tuner. The base station, of course, contains all the amplification the sound bar requires. Also included is a special umbilical to connect the two pieces—and, in a savvy little detail that tells you a great deal about how much thought has gone into the SurroundBar 360, the connectors on that cable cannot be connected "wrong." That's important because the SB 360 employs Matt Polk's latest thinking about Stereo Dimensional Array (SDA), the technology he championed in the 1980s that blended a small amount of opposite channel information into the two speakers in order to create a more solid stereo image. SDA technology was probably ahead of its time, both n the sense that it wasn't widely accepted at the time (although try to buy an SDA speaker on eBay today and you'll have to cough up a bundle) and because the '80s-era levels of processing power and digital equalization weren't quite at the level to really make SDA work.
If There Were No Sun, You Would Have This Song
Like many perpetually adolescent, emotionally-stunted hipsters, I had a radio show at the campus station back in the day. Crafting a show that had flow was an arcane art—one that is virtually impossible to experience on commercial radio stations with limited play lists. Therefore, it was an art that, once mastered, would be of almost no practical use. It certainly wasn't going to get you a good paying job. But some of us were seduced by it anyway. Matching tempi and even keys was elementary, but a really masterful mix would link music that you never thought of as having commonalities and make you understand the unfamiliar stuff better and let you hear the familiar material in a new way. The masters at this have huge ears, encyclopedic record collections, and, it goes without saying, way too much free time on their hands. Last year, long time Stereophile reader Keith Spring sent me a pair of free-form CDs because I'd once said some nice things about a band he was in. They were a revelation. Mixing together all kinds of music, from J-pop to contemporary chamber music, jazz, gut-bucket R&B, and motion picture soundtracks, the discs covered a lot of ground—but best of all, they were logically constructed (it was a strange logic, but logic it was) and the song to song flow was masterful.
Program notes for If There Were No Sun, You Would Have This Song
Strange collection, but that's the point. How do you categorize that which is beyond category? Of course, Wittgenstein said, " Whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must remain silent." I say, "Eff off, Ludwig."
The Sound That Shouldn't Be
Interesting article on subharmonics. There are links to recorded examples, which are certainly interesting, but for me, the money quote is: "She demonstrated her ability to top scientists in the US, but they gave up trying to find out how the effect happens." Reminds me of some people I've met.
A Wizard, A True Star
I have always gotten a kick out of seeing Steve's latest opus when we cross paths at press conferences and product launches and, more recently, he's taken to sending me JPEGs of ones he particularly likes. Yesterday, Steve sent me his newest—and it was me. Wowsers. It may be only the second portrait of me that I've ever liked. Thanks, Steve.
Baby You Can Drive My Car
Most name brand car audio systems are either constructed out of parts supplied by OEM divisions over in the automotive sector or utilize a few brand-specific parts such as drivers or DSP, but the Naim For Bentley project started with detailed measurements of the sound levels involved in Bentleys at rest and on the road. Naim quickly realized that an in-car system would have to deal with varying noise levels and began an engineering initiative that resulted in Dynamic Equalization, a DSP system that automatically adjusts EQ based on the car's speed.
Dynamic EQ
You can also choose an "audiophile " mode that doesn't monkey with spatial reorientation—not that I reckon Bentley owners for hair-shirt audiophiles.
Control!
Power!
Acceleration Exhilaration
Another cool aspect to the 2009 Bentleys: Adaptive Cruise Control, which uses a grille-mounted radar sensor to monitor the upcoming roadway, If a slow driver cuts in front of you, refusing to yield right-of-way to a person of your class, the cruise control will automatically keep your car a preset distance from it. Best of all, there's a rolling thumbwheel on the steering wheel, so you can fine-tune on the fly.
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