Audiophile Musings: April 2012

Monday, April 16, 2012

Vacations

For those of us who work hard all year long, going on vacation is something to look forward too. Trips to a southern climate while looking at a snow packed driveway, or wading in a cool mountain stream with a fishing pole when looking at the end of a drought seem to be very welcomed thoughts, except for a true audiophile.

Even though trekking in the Himalayas is a great thing to do and an experience almost no one would pass up, an audiophile thinks about his/her system and what that rock you just dislodged that is now rolling down the cliff could sound like when played back through it. Out minds are not made from the same stuff that most everyone else's is.

The "blessing of the golden ear" is also truly a curse. You find yourself much like a photophile (I just made that up) who looks at life through a lens; audiophiles often listen at life through a speaker. My wife was a photophile for decades, so I know this to be true from first-hand experience. We loved cross country skiing and she would haul her Nikon gear (all 30 pounds of it) in a special backpack everywhere we went. Of course she took some amazing pictures, one of which I recall clearly.

In the outback of Colorado, you learn quickly to pass through avalanche chutes one person at a time and to do so quietly. the views from the chute are spectacular, but lingering there is risky since one can never know for sure when the mountain could come sliding down on top of you. One day, very close to the tree line (about 12,000 feet at this trail), we came across such a chute. Whispering out the plan at the edge of the trees, I went first and she would follow. This particular chute was a doozy; about a hundred yards across.

Skiing to the opposite side, I broke the trail over the top of its ridge so that it would be easier for her to follow with all of that camera gear and waited, and waited, and waited. Shouting was not an option since such sounds could dislodge the snow shelf looming precariously uphill. Finally she appeared with a big grin on her face. "What happened?" I asked glad to see her safely across. "Oh I paused to take a picture." The result was this.

I can relate to what her eyes saw while willingly standing in the middle of such a dangerous place. There was that moment when life's beauty is so awe inspiring, the attempt to preserve it, to lock it into one's mind forever, overcomes everything else, even one's safety..

On your next vacation, remember that your mind is tuned to listen. When hearing something spectacular, take pause. Listen with this same intensity at the natural sounds you hear all around you, bring those sounds back with you locked into your acoustic memory, and you will find a new appreciation for the blessing of your golden ears.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Look, up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, no it's...

Superman was one of my childhood heroes with muscles of steel and hey, who doesn't want to fly? The super-hero within us all at that age falls in love with the idea. As we get older a shift occurs at some point in all of our lives. Parents call it growing up or puberty or street smarts, but it's really much more than that. A shift occurs that changes your focus from the grand scheme and awe to the minuscule and pessimistic (or critical), and rarely does it return.

This "nose to the grindstone" attitude can even be seen in someone's body language and posture; the chin tilts down slightly and frown lines and wrinkles appear. It becomes harder and harder to look up and when you do, you hear bones creaking in your neck that never did before. Only while lying in bed do you ever really look at the ceiling and then only if you are lying on your back.

I recall the first time I entered the old Oklahoma City Civic Center Music Hall via a literal tunnel carpeted on all sides. As we walked through this portal, the usual chatter a crowd makes as they walk towards their seats was immediately absorbed by the plush carpeting. This effect was so striking that I had to look up to see what acoustical trickery the brilliant engineers who designed this hall had implemented. Tastefully done, the ceiling was carpeted with a pattern that escapes me now but the effect was unique

I never forgot that effect and always wanted to try some sort of sound absorption on our listening room ceiling that would not be intrusive or distracting. The reason ceilings are usually white is to make them appear to disappear. My wife-approval-factor (WAF) could never be hurdled and it was this obstacle that prevented me from carpeting the ceiling in our listening room.

BUT ONE DAY, I HAD AN IDEA. I had used polyester batting on the backs of our speakers for decades without a single objection and I had a small roll of it left over, enough to drape on the ceiling at strategic places. The plea was to "just try it, temporarily of course" in hopes to get my wife to agree to this test. She did!

Finding the first reflection points with her sitting at the sweet spot, I used painter's tape to note where to suspend the batting. Within minutes, a ladder and a few thumb tacks had the batting in place looking like a soft cloud dipping down into the room. The tasteful tapestries on the walls at similar positions already took care of their problems and the wall-to-wall carpeting took care of the floor. I finally had my Civic Center tunnel!

And now the acid test: how did it sound? I gave the first impression rights to her and put on one of her favorite pieces. As the needle dropped into the groove, the first thing she noticed was the increased height of the sound stage as did its width. Without any prompting, she expounded on improved inner detailing, solidity of the instrument positions, on and on. This was not one of those "I think I can hear a difference, can you?" questions; this was a "baseball-bat to the face" type of change.

Although the WAF was strained, we never took down the puffy panels until the day we put our home on the market. Ceiling treatment works folks and I encourage you to try a similar test for yourself. Overcome your ingrained conditioning not to, and look up. Use a mirror to locate where the first reflections are, tape the area off with painter's tape, apply the batting temporarily of course, and sit back for a real and amazingly inexpensive surprise.

One side note: if you have a coffee table in the room, temporarily remove it to another room for this test. All flat surfaces are highly reflective and contribute to the problem.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

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Friday, April 13, 2012

Audio Resolution and Football

I can hear some of you out there saying, "Now he's lost his mind..." but BEAR with me for a bit (no offense Chicago fans).

I was a season ticket holder for a while when living in the area to the Denver Broncos football team. My wife and I would enthusiastically bundle up on cold days and head off through the snow to be entertained by a bunch of big guys having fun playing with a weird-shaped brown ball. It was truly exciting at times, except for the location of our seats.

While not in the nose-bleed section of the old Mile High stadium, it wasn't - shall I say - on the first section of the 50 yard line. We were in the second deck on the west side just north of the south goal posts so players were a little tiny. Things were worse as the game moved toward the north end and numbers on the players just disappeared into a colorful blur. Compound this fact with my aging eyes and overdue appointment with an optometrist, and you get the idea of what the games actually looked like.

This was in the early 1990s and John Elway was making a name for himself in football history. I can still recall the first Superbowl win in 1997 when almost the entire town literally shut down for the parade (you have to understand football fever to understand why someone would not go to work but rather stand in the cold for hours waiting for a glimpse of a young man riding on top of a firetruck to appear). These are fond memories since we were two of those crazy fans.

The Crowd at the Denver Capitol for the Superbowl XXXII Celebration

It struck me just recently with all of this hubub about high resolution audio what a good analogy to the recording process could be. Imagine me sitting there in my seat and the game is on the opposite end of the field, the team trying to make a field goal. If you compare my inability to see numbers on the jerseys of the players to the inability of digital audio to preserve nuances in quiet passages, you have an idea of how 16-bit digital resolution limits musical enjoyment. The information is there, I just cannot see it. And with standard CDs, the information WAS THERE, but the 16-bit recording process just did not see it.

Enter my binoculars! So I changed and started watching the action through a pair of $20 binoculars. While better, the images were so smudgy from the poor optics that I enjoyed watching the distant players better with my unaided eyes. This is sort of like trying to coax more sound out of a 16-bit recording. While admittedly a weak analogy, you get the idea that the larger images were just that - not better, just bigger. So when playing a 16-bit CD on a 24-bit player, you may hear more but still not what was there in the original performance.

Enter my really good pair of binoculars. Now when viewing things far away, I can see grass stains on uniforms and scratches on helmets. NOW THATS what I'm talking about! Here, this is what high resolution audio offers compared to the ho-hum 16-bit 44KHz 30-year old standard. It's time to get a new pair of binoculars for the recording process and change the standard. Much like high definition television and my really good binoculars changed the way we watched football games, so can high definition audio change the way we listen to music.

I am a proponent of using the massive 4Gb of storage capacity of a Blu-ray disc to springboard this new format. From its capacity, we could preserve 32-bit source recordings and achieve a sampling rate
of 192KHz.

Now that would be a really great pair of binoculars!

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

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Saturday, April 7, 2012

Furniture as Part of your Stereo

There is a concept of acoustic design called the "Live End, Dead End" (LEDE) meaning that half of a room should be acoustically alive and the other half dead. The live half is where you sit and the dead half where your speakers are located. The midline is sort of the "no fly zone" of a listening room where bombs have been known to go off..

A classic example of this design everyone is exposed to at some time in your life is in a movie theater. Here the speakers are set behind a white porous screen (yuck!) surrounded by damping material on the floor, walls, and ceiling, and the audience sits facing this arrangement. Take away the movie screen and you have a nicely designed LEDE listening room.

Most people combine functions in rooms because of a lack of space to dedicate to one single function and so the listening room is combined with another, say the living room. Here is where differences of opinion collide.

The audiophile demands perfection in positioning of each piece of furniture meaning that no furniture can go past this midline (that imaginary line separating the room halves). The interior decorator is more concerned about socializing and arranges couches, chairs, tables, and lamps to suite a person's convenience. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I bet it does, unless you're living in a dorm or under a rock.

In the world of compromise, the audiophile complies with the interior decorator's requests and "allows" (boy this word is going to get me into trouble with a lot of interior decorators) furniture to cross the magic midline. Like the straw that broke the camel's back, there is a limit to which this level of compromise can bend.

One day, I came home and my wife had completely rearranged the furniture in our living/listening room (something she is fond of doing). She conveniently placed the couch along one wall and circled the chairs so that everyone could easily see each other. The problem was that two of the chairs were directly in front of the speakers (yuck!). Taking a deep breath, counting to ten, and allowing my disapproval to subside, I said to her, "That's a very interesting arrangement. This should work out nice for the visitors." Despite my loss of an LEDE room, we agreed to try this arrangement and see how it worked out. It was like a hiatus - taking a vacation from our stereo - but I had a plan...

Fortunately, the couch was in a place opposite the speakers so we could still listen to music, sort of. Things stayed this way for about two weeks (yuck!) until the next party. People were mingling and talking as usual and the kitchen was of course the focal point for lively conversation, but when someone asked her to hear our system, this is where things got interesting.

Parading her friend from the kitchen into the listening/living room, she first turned on the TV and put in a movie (fortunately, there were no chairs in front of the TV). People were already sitting in the nice little circle and chatting as she had hoped and all was well. She told her friend that the couch was the best place to listen so she sat down there and waited for the movie to start. But then it happened: she accidentally turned the volume of the stereo up.

Thundering fireworks from Disneyland interrupted an otherwise tranquil setting and the people sitting in front of the speakers leapt out of their comfy chairs like sprinters from the starting blocks at the Olympics. Drinks spilled, tables knocked over, and a general disarray prevailed. I was still in the kitchen talking with friends and at the sound rushed to the commotion.

Without saying a word, my wife looked at me and said, "Oops!" My plan worked.

The lesson is this:

Allow people the opportunity to discover things even when you know better, for it is in life's first-hand lessons where true and lasting understanding is learned.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Great Performances

Someone once asked me, "What is your favorite type of music?" to which I immediately replied, "Anything that is artistic rather than commercial." The person turned to me and said, "I never thought of it that way..."

Most folks align themselves with one style of music, folk, rock, classical, jazz, well you get the idea. But even within these styles there is good and there is bad, sometimes VERY bad, performances. Most are mediocre and there are quite a few that are good, fewer that are excellent. I'm sure that you all have your favorites.

My personal collection consists of music from Eddy Van Halen, Eric Bibb, Supertramp, Scott Hamilton, Norah Jones, AC/DC, Willy Nelson, Big Head Todd & the Monsters, Il Volo, Jimmy Buffet, Roberta Flack, and many, many others. Within these I have my favorite pieces and some call these a playlist.

But there are, on rare occasion, those moments that come together which are sheer magic and where even the performers themselves talk about the energy and emotion they feel pour out of their voices and down their hands into the instruments. It is these great performances that occur so infrequently that we all cherish. This is why most people attend live concerts and then listen to the studio version so they can recall that particular feeling, that particular sensation, that particular time.

A musician said to me that the reason he went into the recording studio is because there they could add tracks and create an effect where more musicians played simultaneously enhancing their performance. To this I concur, but to this I would categorize such a performance as one of the mediocre to good. Rarely, like hens teeth, do I find any record production even moderately moving to the same level that a live performance does.

Should they stop? No. Never. Should they aspire for greatness? Of course. They are musicians and this is why they do what they do. I just wish that there was a way for the two to be consistently mutually inclusive.

Harry P of the Absolute Sound regards the Dusty Springfield performance of "The Look of Love" on the album "Casino Royal" (Colgems COSO-5005 stereo, side 1, track 2) to be one of his reference recordings always rating it at the very top of his recommended record list. Every time I would go into a used record store, I would hope to find one of these copies. One day, I did. I rushed home to see what all of the hubub was about.

I carefully removed the record from the album being extra careful not to touch any part of the surface with my fingers (BTW, those of us who know this technique need to pass it on to those young audiophiles who do not). I remember meticulously cleaning is with my Discwasher and dropping the needle down. Once the performance began, I immediately understood what all of the fuss was about.

First, this recording itself was VERY different from anything I had ever heard on my system before. This attribute alone was enough to grab anyone's attention forcing them to sit up and listen seriously. Once the shock of the superb recording quality wore off, I began to listen to the emotion of the music rather than the usual nuances I normally focused on as an audiophile.

Dusty starts off immediately singing the words of the title and after hearing her voice, I understood why Harry was so enamoured with it. Gentle but authoritative, sexual but subtly so, it wasn't the innuendo that was so captivating but rather her entire vocal style. Her slightly nasal golden voice enhanced by the breathy nuances of masterfully sliding notes just off and then on key were an art form in itself. Usually I would focus on all of the instruments but I was so captivated by her voice I barely noticed them.

The saxophone was soft and masterful and its execution flawless. There was a rhythm that exuded from the reed that tugged at your ears, blessing them if you may. The brush whisks of the snare drum in the background and the double bass synergized with the saxophone setting up the tempo and the music dripped from the speakers like a fine fondue cheese waiting to be consumed. But the voice -- that incredible authoritative rebellious voice -- dominated the entire 4 minutes. Even during the break where you finally realized there were more things in the performance than Dusty, you only waited until her voice returned.

It's hard to describe what I felt when hearing it for the first time; it was so striking. Even today after spinning it dozens of times I still get those goose bumps. Despite the pops and ticks in my first copy, I eventually found another in much better condition. The entire album has a production style and quality that is uniquely different from anything else I have ever spun on my table before or since. I know now why this particular recording was Harry's favorite and is one of mine too.

If while cruising your local used record store or the bins in some corner of a Goodwill or Salvation Army you ever find a version of this album, pick it up regardless of its condition, even if it is the mono version. You will be pleasantly surprised by what you hear. And if this is not your style, send it to me!

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include: