#absolute sound

[audio-luddite]

How we hear things.

It is all an illusion. Our ears consist of funny external structures that collect and direct acoustic waves into your skull. It is an acoustic transformer to match your impedance, just like a horn loaded speaker backwards. The waves go to a tiny diaphragm that keeps the outside world outside. The back of the eardrum has tiny bones. Yes Bones! They transmit the vibration from the air to fluid filled canals.

"Medical gallery of Blausen Medical 2014". WikiJournal of Medicine 1 (2). DOI:10.15347/wjm/2014.010. ISSN 2002-4436. - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29025009

Once the vibration is in the fluid it runs past arrays of tiny hairs each tuned to a particular frequency. That is where "sound" is converted to electrical signals for your brain to process. It breaks the sound down into its component parts very much like a FFT. It has the frequency, the amplitude and the start and stop of the sound. That is all your brain has to go on. Really cool actually.

Your brain does not hear anything it hears a breakdown of the components of the original signal. The condition of those tiny hairs determines how well you hear. When the tiny hairs wear out you either cannot hear those frequencies at all or you hear them as a constant background. That is annoying, but does not prevent you from enjoying sound.

Bass is fun in that your ear is only part of the response your whole body responds to very low sounds and your brain integrates that information. You feel deep bass.

When you hear a recording through a "good" system there are many factors in play. The biggest thing is the room you are in. Hard surfaces reflect sounds. Carpets suppress sounds. If you walk into a room it has a sound you may even recognize with closed eyes. The room has a voice and your system works within that.

How far are the speakers from your seat, and how close to the wall do you sit? Is the room big or small? Does it have high ceilings? All that makes a difference. It has a frequency response and a passive sound of its own. The fancy expensive music machines are secondary. Fortunately your brain knows some tricks. You can separate the first sound to reach your ears from reflections of the same sound. Those reflections become part of the background. Your brain does that. If the signal is there your brain sorts it all out.

What you hear is a massively processed and digested experience that takes place in your head. You imagine it!

Back in the old days the Absolute Sound magazine was founded on the idea that high end sound should be compared to live music like jazz clubs and symphony orchestras. It appears a good idea, but it is fundamentally flawed. I have heard quite a few symphony orchestras and a few Jazz club shows, and some Arena shows. My experience tells me that it is a poor standard. I do not need great imaging to know that there is an orchestra in front of me. I can see it. Your mind integrates the whole experience. It is not just sound.

About the only superior technical aspect live music has is frequency range. That applies only to un-amplified music. It also depends on where you are sitting. The bass is deep because the drum is right there. The highs are high because the piccolo and metal triangles are right there. But the room and where you are in it determines the balance of the whole thing.

The sound from your stereo can be much better than those standards. Microphones are carefully placed and "good takes" are used rather than poor ones. Everything is done with great care. IF you have a perfect seat in the auditorium and it is a good auditorium you MIGHT hear something about as good. Generally that is not the case.

A recording is pretty much the best seat in the house.

Also my latest Jazz club experience used far from high-end Sound reinforcement equipment. It is usually well below that level. It did not sound as good as my albums by the same band. But it was really fun live.

It is all in your mind and your mind works really hard to make it work.

Back in the day I heard almost all of the SOTA audiophile stuff. The electronics were mostly Audio Research, or Crown, but some other players too, mostly gone now. Speakers included the big Magneplanars, the legendary Fulton J Modulars, and Infinity Servo Statics. They sounded impressive. And that is the operative word they impressed you. The bass hit you in the chest. The highs went up and never came down. AND they were BIG.

If I could go back in time and do that all again I wonder if any would be as detailed and revealing as what I have in my living room now. I think they would not. CD players did not exist. Phonographs were pretty good, and I owned one of the best ones. Pickups were not quite as good as they are now, but really close. Preamps were not as good, but amplifiers were OK to really good.

My ears are not quite as good now, but they are adequate. My brain paints a convincing picture across the room using the signals my hardware delivers.

[audio-luddite]

Eric Clapton, Paul Horn.

I went to the little LP store on the corner and browsed.  I grabbed one disk from the used bin and one from the new rack.

Old Bin; Paul Horn “inside” probably the original new age record even before whale sounds.  Mr Horn, and his flute in the Taj Mahal.  I had the CD of this years ago.  It is fun.  It is relaxing and meditative.  Well he was in India hanging with the Beatles at that Ashram.  I suppose you could stream it.  But this old LP was in remarkable shape.  Good sound even if it is mostly echo and natural reverb.  Gotta love hard stone construction.

New bin: A reissue of Eric Clapton’s “Slowhand”  Yes there are a couple of hits and yes he had someone else play the trickier guitar bits.  Overall a document of the time.  180 gram as is the fashion now.  Good solid recording.  Yes the band was drunk most of the time, but for some that works.

The AT 440 is still on duty.  Nothing wrong with that.  I ran through both albums twice.  Part of that is to plow out the mold release stuff and give it a good clean.  I suppose I should invest in a record cleaning machine.  I am impressed with how quiet my system is.  My big amplifier has a fan that is pretty quiet, but now it is almost annoying.

In a related thing I just read a 2 year old article in Absolute Sound of all places about moving iron and moving coil phono pickups. (Sept 6, 2018 Paul Seydor)   One take of it was the move to moving coils may have been a mistake.  They distort and that is what the reviewers liked. A rising treble is called inner detail and on and on. Another item is that the founder of A.S. HP went over to the dark side and dragged all the lemmings with him to moving coils while loading them incorrectly.  Such comments would have HP spinning in his grave I imagine.

Aside from the stupid cost of moving coils there are a couple of recognized phono pickup gurus who swear by more conventional design.  Grado and Soundsmith.  They can (and do) build whatever they want and it aint MC.  Soundsmith for one touts that their design is much much lighter than moving coil armatures which reduces several serious artifacts. Grado concentrates on simplification and vibration damping in their expensive units.

There is that fundamental bias in people where they assume cost and quality are proportional and they then pick the experts they already agree with. If they have the money fine. I have long been impressed with what people will spend their money on dare I say foolishly.

I am protected from such explorations by cost.  One more thing, is the article reviewed the bottom line Grado Black and liked it.  (Read the article)  The one I got was the green which is selected units of the Black.  And I liked it.  The top of the line prestige gold is just under $300 usd.  Well its the top of the line of the lower level.  Grado sells 5 figure moving iron units.  Well you need to to be credible, but even those are moving iron. Note that Grado invented moving coil pickups.

In my modest exploration I find there are what I think are big differences in sound. I try not to go this is better than that too often.  All the cartridges I have are different from one another.  I like natural sound and detail. I think the 440 is really good but it has things about it.....  The 7N was interesting.  In my system it misses some things. I have some new headshells on the way.  The goofy twisted ones I got are just wrong. 

I figure in an even fight the 440, the Signets, and say a Grado Gold would all be about the same to my ear.  Different in small ways, but basically really good. 

Oh and my Sony TT is on the Audio Mart listing for 1750.00 CDN. I am throwing in the Shure Cartridge.  Now that is retro.

[audio-luddite]

Expert Reviews vs Truth.

There is a thing that if an expert says things you previously agreed with, you respect their opinion.  And of course the opposite is true.

In Audio many experts do not actually have to pay for their equipment or at least not retail.  They expound on the subtle improvements that $10,000 wires make on the system.  They feed thousands of dollars of NOS Vacuum Tubes into glowing ranks of amplifiers that cost more than a good car.  They say nice things and get invited to the right parties.  Being cut out of such privilege means you are not as valuable to your publisher so best to say nice things.

Magazines will leave you with the impression a sound system requires a mortgage or a lottery win to get quality. Not so, not even a little bit.

If you have read any of my old Bumph you will recall I was an early subscriber to TAS magazine.  I think I missed the first two issues, so almost a charter subscriber.  They were extreme in devotion to truth and purity and even prohibited advertisements to avoid even the hint of a conflict of interest. Since the old Long Island days are long gone they have carried gobs of Ads. In that golden age though they had many opinions. I respected many of them until I was able to form my own from personal experience.

My friends and I by some twist of fate either owned or heard much of the good stuff from the era.  Our personal experience did seed doubt about some things. The first thing was the idea of absolute purity.  For example the best preamplifier of the era bar none was the AR Sp3a1. My friend had one.  We spent hours listening to it. It was to quote TAS, “a straight wire with gain.” Yet it really never was.  That model is VERY valuable on the collector market, but it is now considered flabby and inaccurate, but very nice sounding. That really is the key.

The thing about playing recordings is preferences.  I prefer this to that.  I like the sound of this instrument on this recording.  It is taste rather than accuracy.  A common trap is a symphony recording that seems to capture a concert hall just so, but only when played on this particular set up.  Hey if the sound is on the recording you should hear it on almost any setup.  If the setup is somehow creating or emphasizing or masking the sound that is not accuracy.

I do not recall if I told this story before but here it is anyway.  I was reading a review of a system interconnect. A wire. The person had really expensive equipment and said only with this particular wire between his CD deck and his amplifier could he hear this particular sound.  The CD was the famous Trinity Sessions by Cowboy Junkies.  The sound was the subtle rattle of an air duct down to one side on the first track.  Wire A worked wire B did not.  Both A and B were expensive and well thought of but obviously A was superior!

Err but hmm no.  My CD player was less expensive than either wire.  It was a mid grade consumer Philips player (They invented CD).  My preamplifier was a tweaked OP Amp unit, my wires were consumer grade coaxial, my amplifiers were vacuum tubes and also tweaked. I had built my speakers. I heard that sound on my system.  So it was not the wire was it.

I have no doubt he was being honest, but what he claimed was not true, and was not a valid test of the product.

The issue and the problem is that all the experts work like this.  They say things that probably are only true for a very very narrow set of circumstances if they are true at all.  The are demonstrating what they favor, not which is better. Oh and there is psychology.

Here is an example of that.  In an OLD TAS article I think it was Harry Pearson was reviewing Magnaplanar Tympanis.  In that he said his first encounter was in a room that had a grand piano on the other side of these strange room dividers and they were listening to piano music. He honestly thought he was listening to a live performance, BUT it was a recording and the strange room dividers were the speakers! REVELATION!

Piano is notoriously hard to reproduce.  It is hard to record usually taking several microphones on a mix.  It is a powerful instrument with huge dynamics.  The Magnaplanars are large and couple well to the air in the room and when provided with enough power are very dynamic.  But not as much as a real live piano. Thing is when you walk into a room with a piano and weird room dividers you are presupposing assuming and accommodating the idea that the piano music you hear is live.  That is psychology. That experience made him believe perhaps that these devices were better than they actually were.

OK I know that Magnaplanars are really good devices.  But nobody will claim that the units from 1970s are as good or better than current products.  They were and are flawed and if “properly” set up they will put sound into a room that is objectively very different to the signal that is going into them by their dipole radiating nature. I do like them, but I will never accuse them of accuracy.

This process occurs all down the line.  I just read a buyer guide to new turntables and it took all of one paragraph to judge that they were rating devices pro and con by the presence of a USB outlet.  That is similar to rating an automobile by the ease of touchscreen use. ( think ergonomically speaking touchscreens should be banned in cars by safety authorities)

Oh they had some multi-thousand dollar units listed and assumed as good because they cost so much.  A shame no USB.

I have a nice system.  If I had to replace my turntable it would cost a few grand. A lot of that would be the no longer made cartridge.  The equal is about a thousand bucks by itself.  My preamp could be replaced for $1500 ish.  My amplifier that is a problem but lets go with $2000.  I would just build another set of my speakers for a thousand all in.  That comes to 7.5 kilobucks.  People can spend 10 times that and do but it does not sound better.  Perhaps it sounds a bit different.  But recordings are not reality.  It is fun to try though.

[audio-luddite]

Advent Speakers (again)

It may be the time of year, but for some reason there are a lot of Advents listed for sale around here.  They are respectable if the right vintage and there are a few of the good ones out there.  There is even one set of double Advents.

If you do not know about doubles I am going to tell you.  Back in the day somebody put one pair of the original Advents (later called the Larger Advent) on top of another.  Why they did it is lost in the mist of time.  It may have been a cheat to get more power out of an amplifier.  If you hook them up in parallel they go from a nominal 8 Ohms to 4.  That doubles the power until you hit current limiting.  That is a good possibility.

For whatever reason something happened.  No less a golden ear than the editor of Absolute Sound praised them as very good.  Good enough to take an enviable place on the list.  They said it took a lot more money and size to actually surpass the quality of this simple expedient. A LOT MORE MONEY.

Back in those days the Ne plus Ultra speaker was the Infinity Servo Static.  A close competitor was a three panel system called the Magneplanar Tympani. Also there were the Quad ESLs and not many more.  One was chosen over the other by what the listener preferred as opposed to which one was better.  There is an important difference you know.

The Double Advents were considered by these estimable people as just below that top level, but still really really good.  I had a DA setup in my College Dorm Room. One Pair was mine the other belonged to a friend who was flirting with a strange speaker made in Brazil or was it Argentina?

I learned a lot about sound and music and actually electrical engineering with those.  My friend was an electrical engineer.  He was learning about all sorts of equations to describe what happened inside the boxes that contained our hobby.  It was interesting.

Double Advents had twice the area of speaker driver.  They pushed twice as much air around.  The ideal speaker surface should be the size of a wall.  It will push evenly over the air surface and have perfect matching to the room acoustics.  This is called impedance matching.  The bigger the surface of the speaker the better the match. 

No speaker is the same dimension as the room wall.  Some try.  Arguably the best try was a speaker first built in the 1930s as a folded horn.  An Acoustic Horn is like a transformer that converts small drivers areas moving a bit to large areas moving a lot less.  That is why brass instruments can get so loud.  The relatively minor size and motion of a players lips is converted to a large area.

If you double the size of the speaker you get twice as good impedance matching.  Still not perfect, but better compared to not doubled.

Another thing is it made the speaker sound bigger.  Well it is bigger.  That stretched the perception of the image of the musicians over a bigger stage.  If you listen to classical music the perception of the physical layout of the orchestra is a big part of the experience.  This is less so in multi-miked or tracked recordings of popular music, but if decently engineered you appreciate it.

At the time this set up was considered about 85 to 90% of the way to audio nirvana.  The law of diminishing returns is especially cruel in audio.  That last 10% is a minefield of contradictory opinions and if you have to ask the price you cannot afford it.

I am tempted.  I have a pair of Advents.  I could have another pair for a few hundred bucks.  Then I would have the DAs once again.  My real problem is I have a better system already.  I really should sell the ones I have.  I will talk to my daughter again.  I thought of gifting her my vintage system and Christmas is coming.

[vgaudio]

Absolute Sound snapshot talked about our Starlet integrated power amp at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2013

[dobrydendsp]

Nicki Minaj - "Va Va Voom" (Absolute Sound Mix)

I haven't been Nicki Minaj's biggest fan recently - I think her ego has gotten in the way of her talent, and that E! documentary special she did was a disaster.

With all of that aside, I'm really happy she released "Va Va Voom" - it's definitely one of the standout tracks from her latest album. The song was written by Max Martin, famous for writing pretty much every #1 pop song from the last 15 years (google him).

Absolute Sound remixed this Nicki track in to an electro club banger that brings a fresh new dimension to the song. 

Enjoy!