Audiophile Musings: May 2012

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The Sandbox

As a child, I loved playing in the sandbox. Hours were spent carving paths, building hills, and arranging cities for imaginary visitors. Planting small tree branches around the thoroughfares topped off the illusion and added character to the sight. One day while playing baseball, a stray ball landed in my little village smacking into a taller mound. I noticed an interesting thing at an age of 8 that the ball did not bounce, in fact, it just stopped completely. I never forgot that baseball and its behaviour in the sandbox so when it came to applying things later in life, I found myself still playing in sandboxes with my stereo.

High-end turntables attempt to remove the tiniest stray vibrations from reaching the cartridge via the base or tonearm. Huge damped shock towers magically transform taps into nearly immeasurable blips and massive plinths deaden and smooth out circular motions.

Audiophiles spend a lot of time on assuring that only the best cartridges are used and then put all of it on top (not the bottom) of a rack or tower where any mechanical vibrations are mechanically amplified by the height of the rack itself. Note in the picture below the great pains to assure that the rack does not move: the tiptoes and spikes minimize what instability such platforms yield but why try to fix xomething that is already broken?

Some mount them midway up walls but the height to which such mounts are attached do similar things to mechanically amplify air-borne and floor-borne vibrations. What's up with that? Why would one spend thousands on trying to eliminate vibrations at the turntable and then only to sit it on top of something that adds the same vibrations you are trying to eliminate?

It's beyond me but it is easy to solve: a sandbox. As mentioned earlier, sandboxes are inherently dead. Drop anything into it and the sand does its job and absorbs the energy. Sand's inherent high mass is not easily set into motion as is a long wall stud or tall tower. So why not use a sandbox underneath your turntable? Great idea...glad you thought of it.

I have built three of these sandbox contraptions and both have worked very well. Each time, I've located a small coat closet, gutted the shelves and coat rod, and mounted a 2x4 box on the wall exactly the width. A plywood bottom glued to the frame and there you have a box hanging from several wall studs in a small space. Filling this box with 50 pounds of play sand to just below the top edge yields a good starting place. Top it off with a 2" thick piece of granite that matches your other table tops and you have an acoustically dead surface on which you can place anything, especially a turntable.

Here is the what mine looks like. I use a piece of 3/4" plywood to sit on the sand and to provide a surface slightly above the sides of the sandbox, a rubber isolating mat on top of the plywood. and then another plyuwood top self that hides the sandbox completely:

The above pictures show the second version using two pieces of plywood. Note the small gap at the bottom of the top shelf showing it raised up off of the sides of the sandbox. The top shelf is also slightly smaller than the closet so nothing else comes in contact with the top shelf. The picture below shows the latest version using one piece of plywood and one piece of granite. Again notice that the granite shelf is slightly smaller than the opening.

As you can see, such a closet is also a great place to store your records adding even more mass to the same studs that hold up the sandbox. The pre-preamp is attached to the wall underneath the turntable and hidden behind the records. I have also added white LED rope lights around the perimeter of the door to illuminate the entire closet. And you can close the door after starting a record to keep stray young fingers from messing with the gear.

If nothing else, I would try adding such a sandbox to the top of your existing rack. It's easy to build but it does weigh in at over 100 pounds before the turntable is added so be careful and make sure that your rack can hold up this much weight.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

I do not use ads in this blog to help support my efforts. If you like what you are reading, please remember to reciprocate, My newest title is called Where, oh Where did the Star of Bethlehem Go? It’s an astronomer’s look at what this celestial object may have been, who the "Wise Men" were, and where they came from. Written in an investigative journalism style, it targets one star that has never been considered before and builds a solid case for its candidacy.

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Friday, May 25, 2012

Sorting the Sheep from the Goats

This old expression, sorting out the sheep from the goats, comes from herders who allowed sheep and goats to graze together. In the evening, one pen held the sheep, another the goats, and a lone shepherd stood at the entrance between both. Another shepherd would drive the mixed herd toward the one standing between the two gates and the first would use a staff to nudge the oncoming beast into its proper pen.

This expression literally means to put things in order; a ranking, so to speak. And when it comes to audio equipment, someone should one day sort the gold from the junk - someone should sort the sheep from the goats. Just as it is easy to recognize a goat from a sheep, so should it be easy to recognize junk from gold.

The sound of one type of equipment can vary all over the board and there is little to give it away from external appearances how a pice of equipment should sound. For example, a preamp can have two chassis or one, can be made up of tubes or transistors or integrated circuits, can be dual mono or stereo, one can cost a thousand times more than another, and all of these can sound different - and in fact they do. But none of these external physical attributes tell you a thing about how they sound.

But is there a hint from the component selection that implies how something can sound without even listening to it? If you were to "pop the hood" like you can in an automobile and look at its engine, can you take the cover off of a piece of gear and tell if it is even worth your time to listen to? Yes there is!

While these hints in no way tell you exactly how it sounds, it can help you separate the sheep from the goats. When a designer creates a design, it is done under controlled conditions inside of a laboratory. The initial design looks like junk but in order to quickly change things about, it makes no sense to make it pretty - at least at first. Here is where the component selection is easily seen.

What type of resistors are used?
What type of capacitors are used?
How is the circuit board made?
What brand of tubes are used?
What kind of wire is used internally?
What are the contacts for the switches made from?
What style of power transformer is used?

All of these (and more) tell you if you could be listening to a thoroughbred or a nag, a sheep or a goat, a piece of gold or a potential piece of junk. Each of these are selected at first without a budget in mind, and then after the design is finalized, the quality of each component - sheep grade or goat grade - are then carefully selected for the design that makes it into your listening room.

Sheep grade components cost more - sometimes a lot more - so they can be used sparingly in order to compete with similar products with similar features. So if there is a price point, say $3,000, and the competition has four models in that range, this model must "fit in" with the price point of those other models in order for it to sell.

Audiophiles, just like economical drivers, are frugal to a point and equipment manufacturers know this. In order to sell anything they must be careful what the designer spends on any of these components. If the pricing is close, the designer eliminates the most expensive one of the sheep so that the potential success of the product is better assured.

So what is the single most expensive element in a design? What feature in a manufacturer's product line is the first to drop out and the last to show up? What one feature tells you that you could be listening to a sheep or a goat? The transformers! There are two styles of transformers used in all equipment: the round toroid and everything else (usually called the I-E transformer, which BTW is a rectangular solid).

The toroidal transformer always appears in the most expensive high-end gear of any manufacturer's product line. It is the single most expensive component a designer can add to the design and adding two of them in a dual mono configuration drives the prices up astronomically. Using one transformer dedicated for one function and another for another function again drives the MSRP to stellar heights. These little guys are just flat expensive to use but are the best sounding of all.

Toroidal transformers have more punch, lower noise, lower stray electromagnetic radiation, and extended frequency response. They are heavy and come in multiple grades, just as do the other styles. But if one were to look under the hood of any piece of the highest end audio gear, you would find these little round babys snuggled somewhere in a chassis.

So how can you quickly sort out the high-end sheep from the low-end goats? Think round! Look for that gear using 100% toroidal transformers!

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Deep Bass: Volume 2

In volume 1, I talked about transient response and mass where the best transient response came from low mass cones. I also said that it is not possible to get low mechanical resonance AND low mass therefore bass under about 40Hz was a compromise, but I did not say why.

A speaker - actually everything - has a point where it resonates. An impedance curve shows this clearly where the natural resonant point of a speaker occurs. As the frequency goes down, at some point the electrical impedance rises sharply. It at this impedance peak that the resonance occurs. Measuring the impedance of a speaker in free air (not inside an box or enclosure) reveals its natural resonant frequency.

Speakers produce sound uniformly at frequencies above this resonant frequency (here, to the right or at frequencies above the peak). If the resonant frequency of a speaker is say 35Hz, either you must operate the speaker above that point or do something to change the resonant peak to get the speaker to produce notes lower than 35Hz. Stuffing the speaker inside a simple six-sided box (such as with acoustic suspension speakers) only raises the resonant frequency meaning that it will never produce notes down to 35Hz. Something else must be done.

Raising the mass of the cone lowers the resonant frequency (shifts it to the left - a good thing for deep bass) but the added mass makes the sound slower to respond to electrical signals and the resulting sound is muddier.

So what is one to do? Changing the kind of box you put the speaker into is another option. A properly designed bass reflex enclosure is tuned to this resonant frequency and splits the peak in a cute acoustical trick that permits the air inside the box to function as part of the speaker (feeds the back wave of the speaker to the front at the right point). This lowers the natural resonance peaks and introduces two smaller peaks instead.

Now the resonant peak shifts left (lower) allowing operation down to that point. Such a box does change the way a woofer sounds, just like adding mass, and to some it appears hollow or muddy. Such a box does allow deeper bass response than a conventional sealed box.

A.N. Thiele and Richard H. Small extensively studied the measurable electrical and mechanical parameters of speakers in free air and developed a set of data (commonly called the Thiele/Small parameters) that accurately predict the behaviour of a speaker inside of any kind of enclosure. Subsequent computer programs were created that take this data and apply it to a box simulation to predict the response of a speaker inside of a certain type of enclosure (a great application for a computer).

Now that you understand this a bit about boxes and resonance, you can do a simple test to see how low your speakers can respond without any electrical measurements or sweep frequency CDs. Take off the grill and gently tap the woofer cone. The note you hear is the lowest note your speakers can reproduce.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

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Sunday, May 20, 2012

Cone Materials and Transient Response

Modern drivers are made from some pretty cool materials each claiming to be the next breakthrough in technology. Some do offer better characteristics in stiffness, others in damping, others in lower weight. And they all in fact do sound different. There is a sonic signature associated with certain materials that is quite revealing, not of the music, but of the contribution the material makes to the actual coloration of the sound.

The linear motor (coil in a magnetic field, AKA dynamic driver) speaker has been around since 1924 (yes folks, these are the ancestors of the present speaker technology meaning that this fundamental design has not changed in 89 years). Much like internal combustion engines, it seems like once a good idea is found, humans just stay with it and keep tweaking the fundamental design to make it better (this applies to just about everything, not just speakers and car engines).

Most advances have been made in cone materials. Originally, cones were made from paper because paper is light weight, easily molded to various shapes, and still retained good stiffness when molded into a conical shape. It also sounded a lot like the real things.

Low weight is directly proportional to transient response so back in the early 1950s, Rudy Bozak tried aluminum cones. The first generation cones rang like a bell but were incredibly snappy and showed promise. The second generation added a latex coating, bonded to the front and back with small holes through the cone helping to retain the bond, that tamed the tinniness. A third generation replaced a foam piece placed around the edge with a edge suspension tweak to again remove edge ringing.

Lightweight drivers have impressive transient response and very low coloration bringing the dynamic driver technology closer to the real thing. Bozak woofers, made from a concoction of paper and wool, weighed in at a resounding 40 grams INCLUDING the voice coil and former, inner spider suspension, and outer edge suspension. The sound was (and still is) striking. If you ever get a chance to hear a pair of restored Bozak Concert Grands, listen to the difference in bass transients these refrigerator sized speakers create. It is quite different and extremely low in coloration. The bass drums are especially impressive even though the low frequency limit of the system is only about 40Hz.

Bozak B-410 Moorish Cabinet

Newton's second law of motion states that F=ma. This means that the amount of energy it takes to get something moving is directly proportional to its mass. Newton's second law is why low-mass drivers have such excellent transient response.

The compromise with low-mass cones is that the mechanical resonance is rather high meaning that very low frequency response is not possible (as compared to higher-mass cones with low mechanical resonance). Lower mass cones also demand a larger box and since most of the mass market did not have room for two more refrigerator-sized speakers in the listening rooms of their homes, this approach proved to be a challenge. As the public demanded deeper bass and smaller speaker boxes, this low-mass cone technology fell by the wayside.

Then came along plastics, specifically polypropylene. Such cones added their own sonic colorations (a hollowness) that was very different from paper or its composits (a thinness), although paper still retained good transient and impulse characteristics because of its lighter weight. PP so unnaturally colored the sound that another solution was needed.

The lessons learned from the paper-to-plastic transition fueled the search for unconventional cone materials. Without covering each, the memory of the transient response of light weight cones keeps coming back to the ears of their designers. Today, even exotic ceramics are being tested with excellent results.

So in summary, to get good transient response from a dynamic driver, cone mass must be kept low at the compromise of deep bass. When looking for new speakers to improve the sound of your system, your now mature ears may be telling you that it's the bass region you need to work on.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Friday, May 18, 2012

Speaker Positions: Elevating Your System to a New Height

You have to be pretty much brain dead to not appreciate that when repositioning a speaker in a room, such changes produce desirable or undesirable effects. For example, major movements create shifts in the width, height, and depth of the soundstage and emphasise or de-emphasise certain frequency bands. This stuff is old hat, but what people usually do when repositioning a speaker is to move it about the room on its speaker stand changing its position in only two dimensions (L-R or F-R).

The last time I checked, we live in at least a three dimensional universe which adds up-down to the number of choices you have when repositioning your speakers. Yup, I looked outside again just now to make sure and yes it is still a 3-D world.

SOOO, why even bother? That's sort of like asking "Why not just leave the speakers in the box they came in and hook up the wires." But before dismissing this possibility as snake oil, ask yourself this: When was the last time I changed my speaker stands? I bet the resounding answer is never.

Speaker manufacturers take great pains to choose the distances speaker drivers are from each other on the baffle board, some using the effects of inherent phase distortion in crossover networks to place the resulting acoustic wave produced by both drivers involved at the crossover point in phase with each other. Placing your speakers at the proper height for the room is equally as important.

Several folks have already written terrific books on the subject of room tuning and their success in business demonstrates that such attention to detail is worthwhile. They too may have overlooked this third dimension. So what's up with that (pun intended)? Why is it OK to swap a preamp but not speaker stands? Why is it OK to move a speaker left or right but not up or down?

There is a bit of science behind why the height off of the floor impacts the sound; the same science used to position speakers on the baffle board with respect to each other: acoustic phase. From my previous article on "Speaker Dispersion and the Sweet Spot," you saw how a speaker begins to beam as the frequency rises for no other reason than the physical length of the acoustic wave begins to match the diameter of the speaker driver. A similar phenomenon goes on between the drivers and the room boundaries, one of these boundaries being the (often overlooked) floor and the length of the acoustic wave interacting with the speakers (the sound bouncing off of the floor and then back to the speaker).

My recommendation is this: once you get the speakers in that "right place" by moving then L-R and F-R, see what effects moving the speaker up/down has on fine tuning their positions. Just as small movements of 1/4" (6mm) can make the difference between a good and great sound stage in the horizontal plane, so can raising or lowering your speakers off of the floor in the vertical plane.

I would start by placing small pieces of granite under the tiptoes or speaker spikes and listen primarily to the bass. Again, small changes should make noticeable differences so find chunks of granite of various thicknesses to give this a try. Going to a Custom Granite Counter store and picking up discarded pieces is an easy thing to do and one where they will most likely not charge you a dime for helping get rid of this small waste.

If your spikes are adjustable, try extending the spikes in 1/4" increments and listen to the results. You may find that what you were previously satisfied with as a speaker's "best place" can in fact be improved upon again. The good thing about repositioning, is that if the effect is undesirable, you can always back it out.

So here is a tweak that you can do for free and one that may have a huge impact on music appreciation. "Give it a go!" as our friends the Brits would say.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Speaker Dispersion and the Sweet Spot

All high-end systems have a place where the sound coming from the speakers sounds the best. That one seat where everything comes together and a performance is recreated to its fullest experience. Move away from the sweet spot - either left or right - and you lose that intense experience.

So why does this happen? Part of the reason is the room but the larges, single-most contributing factor is the ability (or lack thereof) of a speaker to widely disperse the sound it emits. There are a few physical issues that designers typically compromise upon to create a loudspeaker.

The first issue is asking a driver to reproduce a frequency that is higher than is should. It is not the fact that the speaker driver CAN produce uniform and accurate sounds above a certain point, it is the fact that it SHOULD NOT to maintain wide dispersion. Let us take into consideration a two inch extended-range driver, common to many systems today and see what I am talking about.

The physics involved are not that complicated: as the frequency rises, the pistons (whatever material the speaker driver uses to push against the air and make sound) start misbehaving (dispersion goes down and distortion goes up). When the physical length of the note (wavelength) begins to approach the physical diameter of the piston, dispersion diminishes and beaming occurs.

As the Wavelength Gets Smaller, Dispersion Gets Smaller

At frequencies well below the diameter of the piston, the wavelengths are quite large but the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength. As the wavelength approaches about 5/8 the diameter of the piston, beaming begins. So in the example of our 2" diameter piston, this is a frequency that is (2*8)/5 inches long or a frequency whose wavelength is 3.2 inches long. This translates to a frequency of 4,230Hz.

So a 2" diameter piston can produce frequencies up to 4,230Hz and deliver wide dispersion (not beam). As the frequency rises, the wavelength gets shorter so when the wavelength of the sound equals the physical diameter of the piston, severe beaming occurs. This means that a wavelength of 2" or 6,768Hz, beaming is pretty severe. Sounds may still be reproduced at a quality, uniform level, but the wide dispersion of sound at lower frequencies is all but gone, hence the sweet spot.

The crossover frequency chosen by the manufacturer determines how well the sound from the speaker will or will not disperse and how small of a sweet spot there will be.

There are some tricks that can improve the dispersion pattern, the most widely used is the dome-shaped piston (aka dome tweeter or dome midrange). Ring tweeters attempt to overcome this same issue by adding phase plugs that normalize the phase distortions produced from big pistons trying to produce high frequencies.

So what does this sound like? Good dispersing speakers sound very good at places other than the sweet spot and poor dispersing speakers only sound their best at the sweet spot. This phenomenon has nothing to do with how accurate a speaker is, just how good it sounds in other places.

So if you want to widen your sweet spot, you must find speakers that disperse well and sound accurate enough to your personal tastes.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Deep Bass: Volume 1

My wife and I have a push-pull, love-hate sort of relationship when it comes to bass response. She loves bass; the more the better, flabby or thin, as long as it's loud and dominant. I on the other hand have a more selective slant on this topic and prefer little (read no) bass over flabby bass. Allow me to explain.

Several manufacturers over the years have found ways to get deep bass from small speakers. While this is doable, what results is long cone excursions for any kind of sound pressure level. This means that to go loud, these small drivers must be pushed to their limits and you can see the little buggers flapping in the breeze trying to reproduce very low notes. To me, this is not music; this is noise and categorized much like the tinniness and lack of dynamic range I hear in 16/44 CDs.

Acoustic suspension speakers, prevalent in almost every commercially available design, use a cone edge that also permits long cone excursions. This half-round foam or rubber roll lowers the distortion of the cone but the characteristic sound of such speakers is boomy. It is only once you hear what other designs can do is when you understand how much distortion you are listening to.

The sound of bass reflex speakers leaves me mixed in that the colorations are lower but the flabbiness and tuning seem to be more prone to temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity sensitive. Ports and enclosures reveal the tuning issues after prolonged (weeks worth) listening.

Infinite baffle designs seem more accurate than the above but the compromise is the last octave (very deep bass under 40Hz). Properly controlling the rear wave from a dynamic driver gets one closer to accurate sound at the expense of huge cabinets (read refrigerator sized).

My first real love with low bass was when I heard the Klipsch corner horn (K-horn) for the very first time. Besides transforming whispers into roars (1 Watt sensitivities typically exceeding 100dB), horn loaded speakers do not demand long cone excursions thereby keeping the amount of movement each driver has to an absolute minimum.

But there is always a tradeoff when it comes to clear, undistorted bass and the K-horns have their own: PHASE. The time it takes for the sound to emerge through the labyrinth and arrive at your ear is tens of milliseconds behind the time it takes for either the midrange or tweeter sound to arrive at your ear. What you hear is a musical disconnect much like the chronic audio/video sync problem plaguing HD TV today. A classic example of this problem is to listen to a tap dancer: you hear the metal cleats and a moment later you hear the thud of the leather shoe. Listening further you come to the realization that everything is just a bit "off" and again you find yourself in search for that ultimate low distortion and phase coherent bass.

Fortunately, bass is the part of the audio spectrum to which human ears (especially male gender ears) are the most tolerant to such distortions. So where does one turn when all other speakers have compromises that make their sound muddy or weird? Enter the planar speaker.

Back in the 1980s, I ran across an ad in the back of Audio magazine that summarily read, "Full-range planar speaker." Intrigued by its possibility, I always held hope to hear such a speaker knowing that other planar transducers such as EMIT and EMIM tweeter and midrange drivers did very well. Even the Magnaplanar panel speakers showed promise for this technology but none could attest true full-range bass. All other models needed some sort of woofer to get into the basement (notes under 100Hz).

One day a friend bought a pair and set them up in his Boulder, CO, listening room. With his Moscode amps warmed up and tubes aglow, we spun some jazz and for the first time I heard what real bass could sound like. Now these Apogees also were not perfect, but they were definitely a step in the right direction. They required massive power to drive and careful attention to placement and room treatment. There was a small sweet spot from which to fully appreciate their potential, but the sound that reverberated through the room was unique in itself. But the sound...that unmistakable sound was for the first time there. I lusted after a pair but their price was beyond my reach.

I still think fondly back to that day when I first heard what good bass sounds like. Despite their drawbacks and quirks, properly designed planar speakers sound to me more accurate than others. I think of all of the audiophiles who probably share my view but cannot put up with their inherent compromises. Oh well, I'll just have to be satisfied with what my Bozaks do right and dream of the day that a pair of full-range planars appear in my own listening room.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Monday, May 14, 2012

Schermerhorn Symphony Center

While on our whirlwind 3,100 trip, we stopped in Nashville. Along with its impressive recording industry, Nashville is known as home for the best of country western, bluegrass, and gospel music. Everywhere you turn, you cannot help but see young musicians vying for attention with that special sound and voice hoping to barnstorm their way to the top or at least catch the attention of some curious record producer.

Wandering through the streets of downtown, we passed the new construction sight of the Country Music Hall of Fame and found that their hockey team, the Nashville Predators, were in the playoffs at the nearby Bridgestone Arena. McGavock Street was swarming on that early Friday morning with anxious fans, media crews, and supply trucks shuffling back and forth around the adjacent Nashville Music Garden, just east of the arena. This garden is filled with roses of every color and scent you could imagine and located at the center of the thriving SoBo neighborhood.

On the north end of the garden was the impressive new Hilton Hotel providing convenient and luxury accommodations for business people, hockey fans, and tourists alike. To the east of this garden was our destination: the brand new Schermerhorn Symphony Center, home of the well respected Nashville Symphony Orchestra. This building, nestled among all of the other new construction, was our final destination.

Only recently completed, free hour-long tours are available at 1:00PM most Wednesdays and Saturdays allowing you to explore this striking new concert hall (see http://www.nashvillesymphony.org/about/tour). The brain child of its recently departed musical genius, Maestro Kenneth Schermerhorn, this monstrous building employs Greek architecture with massive columns flanking its entry above which appears an ornately carved facing.

The center formally opened on September 9, 2006, with a gala concert conducted by Leonard Slatkin and broadcast by PBS affiliates throughout the state. But from the devastating May 4, 2010 flood that damaged the organ and the instruments housed in its basement, the center just reopened prior to our arrival. Aside from rivaling some of the best concert halls in the world, classical music seems to be an unlikely musical,style juxtaposed in a town focused primarily on other venues. But this apparent contradiction does not stop there: did you know that the Nashville Symphony is also one of the most listened to symphony orchestras in the world?

Selling more recordings than any other orchestra in the world, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra if nothing else is lucrative. Performances are available at http://www.nashvillesymphony.org/about/our_recordings and older recordings through eBay and local used record stores. We wandered through the entry and into the concert hall stunned by its attention to detail. Dozens of microphones were suspended from the ceiling at strategic points providing the best positions without the visual distraction of floor stands. The seats were plush and comfortable and we were fortunate to hear a xylophonist rehearsing for an upcoming performance.

I sat there imagining what it would be like to hear the entire orchestra and feel the magic that transforms those walls into a work of art. One day I will return and hear with my own ears what my mind could only imagine. With luck, that will be sooner than later.

Support the music in your home towns and encourage the musicians that struggle to bring beauty into our world. Attend every performance you can and listen intently to it as if it were your last. It is with this attitude that true music appreciation can be found.

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include:

Friday, May 11, 2012

Evolution of the High End Part 5

When transistors entered the audio industry, it gave tubes a run for their money. A battle between the two designers ensued and the high-end audio market was all the better for it. For example, Mark Levinson introduced many fine designs throughout the years that people like Audio Research then trounced with their own amazing and out-of-the-box thinking designs. So competition has driven sound quality forward much like Formula One race cars eventually bring improvements to the automobiles we mere mortals drive.

In 1983, Sony and North American Philips created quite a stir when they introduced the "fingernails on the chalkboard" sounding CD player. Touted by the same reviewers who listened to music with their eyes as being "perfect sound, forever" (boy did they miss the boat on that one), CDs did - if nothing else - add another race car to the race. What digital music offers is convenience, and from the VHS-Beta wars of early video tape recorders, the lesson learned is that convenience and length of recording time is what the mass market wants.

So with a CD, you can listen to "music" (I just cannot bring myself to saying that CDs sound like music, at least not yet), for over an hour without having to get up and flip over the record. Plus, you can take it with you and fit it into your car. These were the great selling points that non-high-enders gobbled up. Those of us who were listening to the music knew that they had a long way to go before this media even began to approach sounding like any instrument (with the possible exception of a...no I was wrong, forget that).

What digital recordings did bring to the forefront was another challenge and one that we are still trying to get "right" even after almost 30 years of trying to figure out how to coax real music from the established digital format (16-44). So the challenge now is to make digital sound as real as analog vinyl, just as the challenge was for transistors to sound as good as tubes. Each time there is an advance in the digital realm, another one is made in the analog realm. Another leapfrog contest is going on that once again is driving the high-end forward.

This is a good thing. One day, digital may come out on top. One day, transistors may come out on top. One day, I'll listen to a system and say to myself, "Now that sounds real!" as opposed to "Now that sounds better." Audio nirvana - what all high-end proponents dream of - still has a way to go. Just like Formula One race cars that are now using ethanol to power their smaller engines, change is in the wind, and it is a change for the good.

So where does this take us? I foresee 32-bit/192KHz as the next digital audio standard. I foresee new types of audio drivers developed that deviate from the same linear motors we've been listening to since the invention of the electron tube. I foresee recording engineers changing their styles to capture more than they do today and preserving the emotion of a performance rather than just the notes. I foresee even different ways to create sound and take the high-end one step closer to the "being there" experience.

What I hope one day happens is for me to be able to buy a seat at the Met and be there from the comfort of my home; to enjoy the performance without having to smell someone's perfume that makes my asthmatic wife have a reaction to it; to experience the imperfections of a live performance and love every single one of them. That's what I hope happens in the high-end future. How about you?

Yours for higher fidelity,

Philip Rastocny

My other titles include: