So many systems were completely…

[OK, yes, you might call this a rant. But it is really a lament]

They spend all that money and effort to set up a room, and then they muck it all up. They sit there with their remote control enjoying how they can sit on their bums and play this track and that track - and it all sounds like itchy and scratchy, get me out of here, 1984 again [not the Eurythmics album, 1984, that was GREAT. Currently watching the associated movie it was the soundtrack for… But, back to the lament:].

Sorry to be such a curmudgeon, guys, but I spent my 20’s with early CD sound - and I do not intend to happily relive that particular audio hell again. Not without a fight,, anyway

You young folks… go for it. See you in 10 years [takes about this long] when you all are lamenting the youthful hours and disposable income misspent , along with all the previous generations of audiophiles - as the rest of us wait for the technology to mature and sound like music [or at least hack up something that pays attention to the actual musical nature of music].

Hey, the generation before me had to live though the solid-state amp / preamp ‘revolution’ - apparently each generation has to suffer [insert wild, hellish screaming here] … The reel-to-reel guys probably thought the same thing about the arrival of LPs - the first turntables probably sounded like poop. .

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?

————————————————————————————-

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.]

According to the vocal hordes on the Asylum and AudioCircle … nobody likes the New Audiogon [right now it is down, although you still can get to the forums if you are sneaky].

Having been on the receiving end of the ire of the same vocal hordes [e.g. w/r to Spintricity Magazine] seeing this happen to Audiogon is really fascinating. And we have also seen this backlash happen to Digg and Facebook, but not Twitter [which is bizarre because the Twitter UI changes by-and-large are non-intuitive, even after repeated use… much more like Facebook now, in fact]

It is fascinating because I think it allows us to rule out the validity of this or that particular feature and instead focus on the social dynamics of the situation.

Fact #1. Only techies like websites to change in any way

Many people claim to be techies, because they own a business that has a website, or they played with HTML some [and many have gotten paid for it!] , but really are not, are confused by web technology, and hate these kinds of changes. [This behavior really confused me for a long time]

Twitter is largely techies, so they got away with it. Digg, a counter example with supposedly a large techie population, has lots of people who, seriously, just like to be nasty and whine a lot.

Most of the home audio sites are horribly designed and implemented, but audiophiles love them because they are now used to them.

Rule #1. If you make a change to a site popular with non-techies, make it look exactly other sites they are comfortable with.

Stereophile changed its site to look just like an ordinary blog. This was largely accepted by audiophiles because they are now used to blogs. [I personally think it was nuts, they gave up their claim to fame - that of being a successful print magazine - to compete at the same level as 1M other blogs. Best thing they can do now is try to implement meta features like Engadget has done - but this will take time and be expensive].

When we recently changed Audio Federation, we copied a couple of other well-known luxury brochure sites as well as several very popular luxury shopping sites.

Audiogon is, unfortunately, making their site look like eBay - which is a quite unloved, albeit successful, site

Rule #2. Try to make a big change by making lots of itty bitty changes over time.

This is often extremely hard to do [i.e. very expensive], from a programming point of view.

Assuming Audiogon’s troubles go on for awhile, and even if they do not, I wonder if there is an opportunity here for a competitor to step in and break the Audiogon monopoly?

Opinions?

[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].

In case y’all didn’t notice, we are moving to a future where all music content is going to be downloaded, not bought at a store [and not stored on your local computer]. One fundamental way this will change how we buy music that there will no longer be used music available at prices much less than the price paid for new music.

There is [currently] no concept of USED digital content.

I first came across this disconnect when wondering why people were buying Kindles at $79 when Kindle books cost $18 while at the same time they can buy the best books of all time for $1 to, say, $8… used. And then later sell them. Same is true for music - I can buy the best music albums in the world for $1 to say, $3 while kids are buying music at $1 a song, about $20/album [yes, I have to search a bit to find cheap LPs and CDs - no immediate gratification here]. AND, I can sell it later.

Getting albums for $1 allows us to explore new music, find things we might like, and equally valid, things we do not.

In the digital world you can sample music cuts at Amazon and spend $1 for the full cut, or subscribe to Spotify, Pandora etc. and hear music in a hit-and-miss kind of way because of various listening restrictions [the dunderheaded RIAA are as retarded as they are evil - funny how often these two things go hand-in-hand.].

Content will then be moving to a 100% subscription-based service… but will you be able to play music for your friends, or will the RIAA police come to your door and arrest you for illegal sharing of THEIR content? Don’t know.

Spotify wants all your friends to subscribe to their service, and then Facebook wants you to listen to music on Facebook that your friends listen to, but not at the same time. turntable.fm allows you to listen to music at the same time, but with strangers who are picking the music you will hear.

This is all fun and all - and the peer-sensitive teens and 20-somethings are eating it up, but the 1) real solid social aspects of listening to the same music with other people in the same room and 2) the real artistic/aesthetic aspects of actually hearing all of the music the musician is playing, these require 1) a stereo system and 2) a decent source of high-res content aka, currently, a CD or LP.

So eventually the RIAA will figure this out [yeah right, no time soon] and try to outlaw CDs and LPs [I bet they are successful too] or, maybe, try to buy up the entire used CD and LP market [I’ll sell them my part of it for a cool $100M].

At least, that is how I am currently seeing things. Admittedly, things are still in flux out there and Accurate Predictions is an oxymoron

I think we can see some of the problems with defining the Absolute Sound by comparing Music Reproduction with Photography.

Both have something real they are trying to reproduce by technical means. Both involve some aspects of art and aspects of science.

I think it makes sense for this metaphor [or is it an analogy?] to compare a digital image file with a CD [essentially a digital music file].

Now lets consider Photoshop

You bring the image in and correct for any color issues that your camera has. You correct for inadequate lighting. You correct for lens aberrations because you were too close to, or at an angle to, your subject.

Then you can do some fancy layering filters to make the subject look more 3D. To make the colors more evident. To hide some of the grain in the original image….

You do all this because you KNOW what the subject [say it is a face] looks like. You know about flesh colors and that the head is a 3D thing. You want to bring out the [Einsteinian] sparkle in their eyes that you know is there. The affect their laugh lines have on people in real life, etc.

The point is two fold:

1. All this touching up is to make this technical artifact look more like the Real Thing. It flies in the face of ideological pundants that say “You MUST NOT Tinker With the Flaws in the Material”. Or “digital images just are going to look bad so don’t you do anything to make it look more real / better”.

Those pundants are silly, right? And so I think that the things people do to their high-end audio system are likewise OK if they bring out more of what reality is all about: 3D, rhythm, harmonics, etc.

2. The Real Thing is hard to define. Just how 3D is that face you saw last [imaging] ? Just how evident WERE those crinkles [dynamics] ? and those color blotches [harmonic color] ? And could you really see each hair on their head if you had the desire [and temerity to be OK with looking a little wacky while peering intently at someone’s hear follicles] to actually look at it and focus your attention trying to see each hair [detail and resolution].

So deciding whether something is the Absolute Sound or not is difficult if not impossible [another recent post on this topic posted about how all the room issues at any real Absolute Sound recitals making sure that no one has ever heard the Absolute Sound in all of history ] .

* Often, the Absolute Sound these days has become an ideological pursuit and has more to do with the technology and brands used and the means [looking at things like THD and progeny] by which sound is reproduced, whereas the Real Thing is a musical event, where being ‘like the Real Thing’ means that you create a musical event that is both musical(!) and in several important [to humans, not to some clunky measuring device] ways very closely resembles the Real Thing.

This attitude annoys me.
Many people believe “The better it sounds the less Real it is”.

Another say to say this: “The better a system is, the worse it sounds”.

That the ‘Absolute Sound’ produced by a audio reproduction systems [aka hifi] should usually sound aggressive and unpleasant and, conversely, if the music produced by a sound system is enjoyable and engaging - it must not be the Absolute Sound, it must not really be sounding like the real thing.

This sentiment has been a commonly held doctrine since solid-state mugged audio in the 60s, and wildly expounded and pontificated upon [albeit implicitly] since digital smashed into audio in the 80s.

It has two underlying extremely pessimistic assumptions:

1. that the current state of high-end audio reproduction is so poor, that if it actually attempts to be accurate, it will of course sound unpleasant most of the time, and

2. that the quality of the source material is so poor, that even were the reproduction to be flawless, the sound would not often be all that pleasant to listen to

There are many, many people who believe this, people in important positions in our industry, and they are a very vocal group. In a large sense, they are the ones who, after selling this idea to themselves to explain all the horrible sounding gear that passed for ‘the best’ for so many years - they then proceeded to sell it to everyone else.

This is not just “Krell on Wilson”, that was only a symptom. This is JV’s snidely comments about ‘As You Like It’ systems that actually [can you imagine?] sound good. This has even impacted JA and Mike Fremer, as one looks at their choice of systems over the years. [HP has been less infected, IMHO]

What does it do to an industry when the most prominent figures think that, by-and-large, the goal of the products produced by that industry should NOT be enjoyable? Maybe it does to that industry the same thing that, uh, has happened to ours?

Seriously, if we somehow just sent all the press, dealers and manufacturers who think this way to Tahiti for 5 years and only presented and sold systems that actually sounded good [and, I would argue, actually sounded like music], it would be [I hypothesize] the start of another Golden Age for our hobby.

[in the next post, we will talk about how it is perhaps the misshapen and gnarled misinterpretation of the Absolute Sound that has kept the industry in this cul-de-sac, sonically if not economically]

I’d like to start a discussion about which parts of a system a particular music genre taxes the most, not just these genres but others as well, but first an aside…

I think these 3 genres really have a lot in common. This seems kind of strange mostly because, I think, the people who like these various genres only like one and usually dislike (or hate with a passion, the others).

The commonalities:

* The foremost one is that they are all about voice, and not just voice but the story the voice is telling us about. Yeah, Opera has it’s orchestra and Folk its harmonic and guitar and Rap its bass rhythm, but seriously, it is all so forgettable [I would say Rap is less so, but that may be my prejudice].

* Not a lot of people like these genres, being kind of inaccessible in various ways, both in terms of content and with the difficulties in understanding a singing voice.

I think that Opera, however, because it was commissioned by the powers-that-be (or were), is delightfully risque sometimes but not, I would guess, controversial in its day.

However, because Folk and Rap are created by the disenfranchised among us, and can be characterized as ‘protests’ or just plain ‘angry’, they cause(d) some discomfort.

Neli does not like Rap. She thinks the songs, the musicians, are angry AT her. Me? I think they are speaking FOR me. Since about, what? 25%? of Rap is about male-female relations and the way society has gummed up the works [:-)] she is probably right.

But the other 75% is much more interesting, for me anyway, especially the ones about The Struggle of life. And this struggle is something that is also present in Folk and Opera…. [and the Blues. Maybe Blues is a firth primarily vocal genre as well…?].

Anyway, although I consider myself interested primarily in instrumentals, I have been listening to a lot of vocal music in the last year or so. Seems like we all probably ebb and flow through various genres as the years go by…

I was listening to our Audio Note Kegon amplifiers, which use a 300B tube.

Now, in general, I prefer the sound of the 211 tubes, found in the Ongaku and Gaku On, and now the Jinro, amplifiers.

But there was something about the 300B sound that really appeals to me.

It *seems* like it reminds me of the sound and feelings I get when I think of the 60s. Nostalgia is an interesting emotion - and hard to describe and hard to know how other people relate to their own nostalgic feelings. And a lot of it is probably just ‘lost youth’.

But this particular 300B sound - and all 300B amps will be sound different, and very few will have the kick-ass control these amps have over the speakers [making for tighter, more accurate dynamics] - but this sound reminds me of old James Bond movies [which seemed luxurious and futuristic back-in-the day], and people who smiled on the street [in Boulder, people walk around in this preoccupied, politely apathetic state-of-mind], bright colors [what happened to all the colors, anyway?], and endless possibilities [they are still endless, but I am too tired to consider all of them realistic anymore].

Of course, this nostalgia giving rise to enjoyment of the 300B is not limited to ’sound’, but to music genres as well [classic rock anyone?]. Even Jazz leaves me nostalgic - for the time 10-15 years ago when we were just starting out on this audiophile journey.

And, check this out… if you want to like Rap, or Opera [and don’t already]. Just play it for awhile, the wait a few years, and then play it again. The nostalgia you will feel THEN for the music you play TODAY will make the music much more enjoyable. Weird but true, huh?

… to all sorts of pleasant and annoying noises in our environment?

Is traffic noise getting louder and louder and getting more and more resolution? Kind of a pisser this is.

Are you able to identify the many missing frequencies in the music they play at the gym or at Whole Foods [just fill in the places where YOU experience ambient music]. Kind of shocking that music can still be identified and sometimes even enjoyable in all its sparseness.

Do you find yourself hearing the various resonances in peoples voices and comparing their subtle differences to the singers you listen to most often? Cool huh?

… etc.

We are not X-Men (or Alphas) but we do enjoy a degree of extra sensory hearing power. Lovin’ it.