We have NOT gone over the the Dark Side

I have been talking about streaming music here a bit lately. While bored waiting for CES to get here, I surfed around a bit and came across an article on Audiostream.

Audiostream,com is Stereophile’s new spinoff computer audio zine.

Some of the perspective there on this stuff got me to thinking that you all might think we’ve gone to the Dark Side.

Nope.

Not us.

Not ever.

Not to pick on anyone in particular, but lets look at this article on the Musical Fidelity V-DAC II.

He does a excellent job describing the Musical Fidelity family sound and hints at their version-itus. But the overall context of the review reveals even more about how we are are experiencing yet another…

Worse is Better - Don’t You Clueless People Out There Get It?

… event in high fidelity audio.

Kool Aid Flavor #1 - If you don’t get it then you must be old or stupid

Now, about the AARP crack in the article… and that young people being are comfortable with ripping, no wait burning, no wait… downloading? streaming? digital music? computer audio? online music?

Heaven help me but I agree with Sam Tellig - “There’s so much uncertainty and confusion surrounding computer audio and high-resolution downloads.”

First, I think young people, the under 23 crowd, think all this junk is for middle aged geeks who have a lot of extra time on their hands. The desktop is seen as old school and not seen as an entertaining piece of hardware.

Second, if one tries and follows where the big money is going, what is being invested in, it is not,… well, it IS really confusing.

Kool Aid Flavor #2 - There is no confusion

First, there is Amazon and Apple and Google investing in their cloud services - which are, in this context, essentially, places to store music and videos and photos on a website somewhere. This is all because they figure this is currently the best way to monetize music and videos [they can make money off of subscription services (my prediction as the winner of the end game) - but not nearly as much. I mean, otherwise, how are they going to sell you the same pieces of music, over and over again… DSOTM say, about every 3 years we have to buy a newer better one right? ].

But you have all these blogs talking about ripping your CDs and saving them in some format or another across hopefully striped terrabyte drives on some noisy PC and playing it back using clumsy itunes or some such software. Seems like a big disconnect to me. Besides ripping being illegal [another stupid law written by corporate lobbyists, I agree, but…] and the RIAA and unscrupulous lawyers happy to use these laws to extort the most harmless of people, this is just a Transitional Technology - people making some money as we all make the transition from physical media to online media.

But on the hardware side, there is real confusion, IMHO. You have Google TV and Android TV versus Apple TV versus Smart TV versus the now ancient iPod and several thousand it seems boxes that sit on your network and pump music from place to place.

There IS a lot of confusion here because nothing is winning [although I heard that 9 million people have now permanently dropped cable and moved 100% online - aka cutting-the-cord - to netflix et. al…. so people WANT a solution now, they are diving in even without one], The idea being that music is online and coming back to the family living room from a long hiatus - and if 99.99% of people are going to be listening to music in their HT then that is the hardware source we maybe should be looking at making high-fidelity hardware work with.

Kool Aid Flavor #3 - The cheapest of the new sounds better than the most expensive of the old

Remember those $200 CD players back in 83 and 84? How they were better by far than any turntable? Well, they’re… back…. [here is where the horrified scream needs to be forcibly suppressed so as not to freak out Neli].

You really going to let yourself be fooled again?

Here is the quote [and I see this kind of thing said EVERYWHERE by the computer audio crowd, not just on this site] “That’s because I can enjoy a bargain as much as the next guy and the idea that you can buy a device for $349, connect it to your computer on one end and your hi-fi on the other and play music that’ll make your CD player weep with envy is cause for celebration. ”

[OK. Hard to hold back that scream huh?].

Be interesting to put up an $200 Oppo DVD/CD player [the cheapest player that is widely recommended] against this combination of several thousands $$$ [check audiogon if you do not believe. Well, when they get a category for this, anyway, until then search CD players and these show up] computer audio system with $349 external DAC. Interesting also to see which wins on the typical - usually bright sounding - solid-state system most computer audio people have and an ultra hifi system and see if the Oppo weeps or, perhaps, kicks ass. I think it would be close, but it would be a fun shootout, huh?

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In conclusion, We are Not Drinking no Darn Kool Aid.

As we explore various approaches and solutions for incorporating online music into our casual, or exploratory, focused, or ultimate music experiences we will do the following:

1. We WILLfocus on fidelity fidelity fidelity

2. We will NOT lie and tell you it is Better than what it is not better than [ *sheesh* ]

3. We will NOT say people are stupid if they do not see how obvious all this non-obvious stuff is

4. We will NOT throw away the good of the past [but we do expect to see a lot of very cheap CDs at yard sales in a few years. Can’t wait. ] but we will NOT hang on unnecessarily to past assumptions that are no longer as important [ultra flat screens now allow video to be brought into the high-end audio listening room, similarly the tablet/smartphone now allows more interactivity with our music in the listening room, etc.]

[I found this on a blog that looks at a lot of business charts…, The Understatement]

The music industry is down 64% from its peak.

The music industry is actually down 45% from where it was in 1973.

The CD peak was only 13% better than the vinyl peak.

10 years ago the average American spent almost 3 times as much on recorded music products as they do today.

26 years ago they spent almost twice as much as they do today.

Kind of a ‘This Was Your Life’ chart, isn’t it? Memories…

Whoa. 10 years ago CD sales jumped off a cliff [just about the time Neli and I turned our hobbyist tendencies into business. Doh!].

Not sure why the recording industry is so dependent on ALBUM sales. Why not singles too? [see original website to see what I am talking about, if you care]

Apparently the iPod killed the CD. Presumably the smartphone will kill the iPod.

Not sure how the ultra high-end is affected, but mid-fi better support the smartphone as a source, or else.

The current trends.

[Personally I think online subscriptions will win the day, albeit apparently the current trend is flat. I think the flat trend is a damping factor provided by the iPod generation who has not yet switched to listening to music on their smart phones].

I was driving in the car a few days ago and heard a song [classical, but with a lot of trumpets and with a Latin flair] that I knew was not going a be a song that I liked… and I loved it.

At that moment.

I’ve had enough of these experiences like that to know that if I went home and looked this piece up on Amazon and played a few clips, or worse yet, bought the CD, I would not like it all that much.

I remember hearing Bolero in the car one day, loving it, and then looking up the particular piece and… could take it or leave it.

All this is to say, for sake of argument, that at any time during our lives, there is an optimal song we could/should be listening to. That we would just LOVE at the particular moment.

You see, usually we just say we like a particular piece of music, a song, a group of musicians, because on average, we enjoy listening to their work.

Maybe we have listened to them enough that we have experienced this ‘right song at the right time’ phenomena while listening to them, which is some very positive reinforcement that we have chosen the right ‘favorite thing’ to be listening to a lot.

OK. So here it is, 12:05pm the Wednesday before Christmas. What would be the optimal song for me to be listening to now?

Is there any way to actually determine what it is?

Jerry Maguire: it takes a few tries, but he finally finds his Right Song at the Right Time

At the time of the most recent experience in the car, I was kind of spacing out, kind of bored, the landscape, albeit strikingly beautiful snow-covered pines in the Rocky Mountains, was black and white and dark green and coming across my brain as forbidding and soporific. The music, on the other hand, was upbeat and kind of tongue-in-cheek and simple enough to render OK on the Bose stereo.

So, can we just examine our mood and narrow down our choices of what to listen to, thereby increasing our chances of being able to hear The Right Song?

Through experience and observation, I think one can narrow down the genre where the Right Song, on average, might be found in the following circumstances/mood (YMMV):

Drunk: George Thorogood, Elvis Costello and other bar-band music
Tipsy: Country Music, Everything!
Morning brews: Bluegrass
Morning hangover: New Age
Leisurely long-term boredom: Classical
Stoned: Reggae, Everything!
Hallucinogens: Grateful Dead
Sad: The Blues [weird, I know]
Happy: Any one of your all time favorite songs [see Jerry Maguire clip]
Angry: Heavy Metal, Rap
Energetic: Rock & Roll

Are their other ways to narrow down and quickly find the Right Song? If you have ever tried to do this, and who hasn’t, you soon realize that the very process of trying to find the right song, even listening to a few that are NOT the right song, affects us so much that the Right Song will no doubt have changed from what it was to something completely different.

When we complain about ‘there is nothing to listen to, with 5000 CDs here, and untold 100,000s of songs online, we are really saying: “I have no idea what my Right Song for this moment is, and not knowing SUCKS!”

I think these guys have started something new in ‘music’ - it is highly visual, however, and very reference-heavy with a kind of mix-tape approach culled from society as a whole and not just other people’s music.

It is like Funkadelic meets Sun Ra meets Y2K. I do not think audiophiles in general will appreciate this genre so much. Just sayin’…

Yes, I did see them first on Conan [so it does translate to a live presentation… people switching instruments with each other at random during the song, a Michael Jackson looka-sounda-like, etc.].

A new Radiohead album was released by the band:

The King of Limbs

Last night we heard the uncompressed WAV file burnt on to a black CD at 10X speed. We played it on both the Audio Note CDT-5 transport with the Fifth Element DAC, as well as the Emm Labs XDS1 CD player. Both digital front ends were going through the Audio Note M9 Phono and Audio Note Ongaku into the Coltrane Supreme loudspeakers.

The MUSIC

There are 8 songs for a total of about 38 minutes. They are a pretty direct descendant of their last album ‘In Rainbows’. Most of the songs have the recent signature Radiohead sound vis-a-vis an evident extreme attention to the detail of every single note and sound.

There is with a lot of stuff going on in these songs. creating an enveloping sonic ocean that, for me, appeals to the heart in equal proportions to the mind. The last song was a little different from the others - sounding a lot like Cocteau Twins but with the addition of a drum machine.

We liked it quite a bit, although it was much too short.

The SOUND

With all the evidence that CDs burnt from LPs and Reel-to-reel tapes can sound better than commercial CDs, I had wondered before I heard this whether this CD burnt directly from the WAV files directly from Radiohead might sound better than the typical commercial Radiohead CD.

In my opinion, this CD did not sound better than the typical Radiohead commercial CD. We need to do more back and forth listening, and I will update this if my opinion changes, but this CD is more reflective of the CD quality of, say, circa 1997-99. Plenty good for listening to - and enjoying - but not outstanding [for example, things like soundstage depth and harmonic purity were just average… actually a little below average].

Follow us on High End Audio Mattters

I’ve watched this movie a few times in the past, but just recently found that I had somehow purchased the DVD in a bargain bin so watched it again, twice, just this week.

I really like this movie, for both the flavor of the early 70s and the music: mostly Led Zepplin, Neil Young, Elton John, and some Yes, Dylan and Jimi, etc. The way people grip and throw around their vinyl in this movie is atrocious, but at least they play music. Back in the day, that is what kids did - play music. They visited their friends houses and played LPs. I Have No Idea what kids do these days when they get together, but they rarely have anything on which to play music bigger than a cigarette pack, so I do not think they play music.

Cameron Crowe [Jerry McGuire] wrote and directed this movie. It is about a young teen who interviews rock stars for the Rolling Stone magazine in the early to mid 70’s. Apparently this is semi-autobiographical. Cameron Crowe’s actual articles are here, which he wrote, mostly for the Rolling Stone, starting when he was 15 years old:

Cameron Crowe: 1972-1978 Rock & Roll Mega-Band Interviews

It makes for fascinating reading.

JIENAT ‘Mira’

Been meaning to post about this for way too long.

More to come on this SACD & blu-ray music disc combo with some amazing sound and music:

96/24 DSD Stereo + 5.1 SACD
92/24 Stereo + 5.1 Blu-Ray
Blu-Ray Video

Picture forthcoming - but the music itself is, well, here in the U.S. it sounds much like Native American chanting. But unlike Native American chanting that we heard in Santa Fe last August at Indian Market, say, which is filled with anguish and regret - the music on the disc is full of mirth and joy and is quite playful.

Just about everyone who hears it asks where they can get one [even though Neli insists on playing the ‘dog barking song’ - which is really not that weird or funny - nor is it representative - I think she likes to see all the expressions on people’s faces]. The fact that so many different kinds of people [including us by the way!] like this disc speaks well of the music.

The sound is excellent as well. This is fairly complex music - and the liner notes describe to what lengths the recording engineers went through to get it right. A lot of emphasis has been also on the 5.1 surround aspect of the recording - which we were not able to experience. Similarly with the blu-ray music disc - my blu-ray setup is probably better than most but the bar is so low [and comparing it to what I normally listen to thru that system - Comcast Digital Cable TV, the BEST example of why we need anti-trust laws that one could imagine - the bar is just so very, very low. Well, I should probably listen to it there anyway. TBD.]

If you are like us - and have / enjoy a lot of different kinds of music and are always looking for something that is not the same old derivative this or that - and yet at the same time is very very high quality sound - then you need this.

OK. Personal opinion here… but… the first half of this movie was written by a 10 year old boy for an 8 year old boy [well, British humor… you know. What can a person expect? Outside of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the books. The 1st and 3rd books.) Red Dwarf, Dr. Who, the Avengers, Sherlock Holmes… The Brits would have nothing to show for themselves on the literary front ;-P]

But the last half hour or so… lots of mid 60s music. Lot of love of good old Rock & Roll, and LPs, and Music with a capital M. I was literally going to just stop watching the movie entirely but I am glad I didn’t [I kind of expected a documentary-style semi-fictional account of some very interesting times… instead what we get is a parody].

Funny, when I hear a lot of 60s music [okay, a little early 70s too] I wonder what we would really miss is we just lopped off the last 45 years of music altogether. Sometimes I do not feel this way… But… seriously - is what we have these days is a wasteland with a few oasis scattered about here and there? Or am I just a product of my generation? [or are the people who disagree just a product of THEIR generation and all music really HAS been pale derivatives and shadows of 60s music since then?]

We were sent this nice CD from www.QuartetEquinox.com.

It is definitely audiophile grade. Lots of separation and very quiet backgrounds.

The music itself is a mix, mostly quiet jazz but a few numbers are, well, now as quiet. Still, every song would do well at an audiophile show. Sort of in the Diana Krall kind of genre but without any singing.

I played this for a group of people the same night we heard the new Frampton and new Hendrix.

This Quartet Equinox SACD is definitively a very high quality recording. As good as the new FIM? Yes, could be. A little hard to tell with just this one CD, and with not very complex music. But it is indeed very close… a contender!

Some of the most fun I have had on Mattters is learning more about what is out there in the Opera Music and Classical Music genres.

These channels are actually quite popular, especially considering their lack of overwhelming popularity in our youth-centered culture. Especially considering that in my learned opinion it takes a relatively high fidelity system to make opera, and especially classical, sound decent [today’s word must be ‘especially’].

By sound decent I mean that it, well, when it does not sound decent, classical music, and uh, esp. opera sounds irritating to me. Without resolution, uh, esp., Classical becomes a mish-mash and when there isn’t a easily identifiable melody, like say Beethoven’s 5th, is becomes boring.

Resolution also helps Opera not become some women screeching at ya. Harmonic structure, and whatever else that goes into hearing the emotion is the singer’s voice is what makes opera ‘come alive’ for me. Opera, uh, in particular, has been heard so many times on inferior equipment that I, personally, have a hard time unlearning that opera is, well, horrible. Each time we sit down and listen to opera here - I say to myself, look self, listen to the music and see if you like it - do not just automatically tune it out because you have hated it all these years.

To the rest of you, I might suggest you listen to some Heavy Metal and even hip hop, if not rap [which turns some people off because of its political overtones], and see if on your awesome setup it doesn’t have some redeeming musical value that you may have over-looked because most of the time you hear it, often in the back ground, on inferior equipment.

As you all know, Jazz and Pop sound good on about any system… or at least it is accessible and doesn’t completely offend even the sad-sack ears of the average listener [oh, there I go being a ’snobbish audiophile’ [sorry, I do not save links to all the people who describe audiophiles with this adjective]. Have to say it is hard not to be snobbish when the average person thinks so little of themselves that all they think about is LOW LOW PRICE when thinking about when making buying decisions of any kind (though the iPhone and iPad seem to do OK- but besides Bose, who does marketing like this to the general public in our industry? Hardly anybody].

[Putting in all these links to everywhere is so much fun. I would add one of those previewer widgets so you can see what the links point at, but I usually find the one most people use annoying. We’ll see…]