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"The Ideal Conditions for Sound Art and Office Productivity Aren’t So Far Apart"

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"The Ideal Conditions for Sound Art and Office Productivity Aren’t So Far Apart"

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In case you haven't been tracking the progress of group exhibitions of sound art, a short history would be: they are generally a disaster, with many works either impossible to hear adequately in the situation or impossible not to hear while you are trying to listen to something else. "It is in sound's nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and to go places where it's not supposed to go," as the sound artist Christian Marclay said, in an interview, in 2005. Meanwhile, the institutions that are devoted to art exhibition-galleries, museums-are all about placing art works where they intend them to stay. "I think it's great that there is this interest in sound and music," Marclay said. "But the over-all art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented."

In the nearly fifteen years since Marclay gave that interview, little has changed in regard to the exhibition of sound. But then, little has changed in the fundamental architecture of the institutional spaces for art. The modernist "white cube"-a term coined by the artist Brian O'Doherty in an article for Artforum, in 1976-remains, for all its postmodern twists and digital-era turns, the predominant archetype for galleries and museums. "Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics" is how O'Doherty characterized the phenomenon, and not with admiration. He continued:

The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light . . . The discreet desk may be the only piece of furniture. In this context a standing ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, just as the firehose in a modern museum looks not like a firehose but an esthetic conundrum. Modernism's transposition of perception from life to formal values is complete

O'Doherty could have been describing a modernist office as well as a gallery. The isolation of the white cube-from the outside world, from other people, even (as O'Doherty went on to argue) from our own bodies-is the same isolation found in most twentieth-century office design. The architecture of modernist office buildings and art institutions has been entangled from the get-go via the Bauhaus, and Alfred Barr's adoption of Mies van der Rohe's ideas for a museum of modern art. The Seagram Building and the original MOMA were two sides of the same coin, there on West Fifty-third Street. The white cube is also the white cubicle.

The historian of technology, Emily Thompson, in her book " The Soundscape of Modernity," makes this connection explicit in terms of sound. The first modernist skyscraper in the U.S., the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building (completed in 1932, the same year that an Alfred Barr exhibition launched the term "International Style"), was also the first to successfully control sound inside its spaces. Using the latest technologies of acoustical ceiling tile, sealed exterior windows with internal H.V.A.C., and office partitions built from Insulite so that "neither typewriter clatter nor telephone jingling can penetrate," the P.S.F.S. building created a newly "silent" workspace. "Quiet reigns!" shouts a contemporary advertisement for the building. "Efficiency is enhanced. Concentration is possible. The silence you have wished for is available."

Co-working spaces-the voguish real-estate container for desk workers in the gig economy-are intended to disrupt precisely this sort of design. If you contrast them with older office models, some of the most striking differences relate to sound. Gone are the sound-absorbing dropped ceilings and acoustical tile, cubicle dividers, wall-to-wall carpets, and upholstered chairs. In their place are reflective high ceilings with exposed H.V.A.C., hardwood surfaces, mesh chairs, and lots and lots of glass. The goal is a buzz, similar to the free-flowing coffee and beer that many provide to their clients. A common citation in the literature that promotes co-working is a 2012 study from the Journal of Consumer Research that concludes the right amount of ambient noise-seventy decibels, roughly the level of a household appliance like a vacuum cleaner, or about the volume you might typically use for a radio or TV-"enhances performance on creative tasks." Apparently, too much (eighty-five decibels) or too little (fifty decibels) both suppress that behavior.

Sound is also a crucial way that co-working companies articulate the different uses of the space that they manage. A Boston-based chain, WorkBar, explicitly maps out areas for users according to four different sound "neighborhoods." The "café" has (piped-in) music, and allows the use of phones. "Commons" has no music, and no phones, but encourages chatting. The "study" has no music, no phones, and no chatting-plus a white-noise machine. And the "switchboard" has "phones, phones, phones"-this is where sales and telemarketing people do their thing, with the sound of others doing the same lending their energy (think "Sorry to Bother You"). Meanwhile, sound-isolation booths-for private calls-dot all co-working spaces, just as they do recording studios, where they are similarly used to isolate vocals.

WeWork, the dominant player in co-working-they manage forty-five million square feet of it and are growing exponentially-doesn't maintain such an elaborate articulation as WorkBar of their "hot desk" spaces, but they do micromanage sound to the point that identical music is playing in every single one of their U.S. locations. Until recently, you could even tune in, should you want, through the " Work Radio " station on the iHeartRadio app and web site. "Music has always been a huge part of the WeWork experience," said the press release announcing that partnership. "The music we play in our locations helps to set the rhythm and energy of the space and fuels the productivity of our global community all over the world."

Community is the key buzzword, because it is what co-working spaces are selling above all-ultimately, that's what sets them apart from plain old subleased space, or a home office. The WeWork mission statement proclaims, "Community is our catalyst." The place where you park your laptop isn't just rented desk space. Rather, it's "A place you join as an individual, 'me', but where you become part of a greater 'we'." An open keg and a coffee machine are a small price to pay to signify "community." But liquids alone don't make the magic-ask any band. The fairy dust in co-working spaces, just as it is in night clubs and recording studios, is sound. It's sound that makes you feel you're not alone at your desk. "Sound wants to mix," as Emily Thompson has said. It forms a community on its own, often despite our intention.

Which brings me to a group show of sound art that I experienced in a Boston branch of the co-working company The Yard. Like many of its competitors, The Yard hosts social activities for clients-to emphasize the "we"-that run the gamut from networking to yoga to cultural events. Still, few, if any, artists or curators I know have much of an experience with co-working spaces. And so it was a largely bewildered group of experimental-sound aficionados that entered this particular space last December. "What is this place?" I heard more than one cluster of attendees mutter, as they wandered its meandering hallways and passed through its various gathering areas. Work-positive slogans adorned walls and columns. The uncluttered lines of designer furniture and light fixtures clashed with the detritus of information-age desk jobs: take-out containers, clumps of cables, whiteboards littered with V.C. jargon. "It's distilled alienation," said one particularly dry wit. "Like communism without any of the cool bits."

Any disdain in the crowd turned to happy surprise once it started to interact with sound in this space. The Yard had opened not only its communal spaces for the event but invited artists to install sound works in any of its unoccupied offices. Wandering those hallways became a fascinating aural exploration as sounds from various glassed-in offices emerged, enticing us into their semi-private domains. Each office-built for aural privacy, but not visual-was sufficiently insulated from the others for the individual sound works to register fully. But none were completely isolated. The glass walls of co-working spaces are deliberately kept clear to insure social interaction between users, and their sound insulation is sufficient for privacy but not so thorough as to kill the feeling of activity in its shared environments. As a result, the audience never disappeared into these rooms; we were still a crowd, even as we splintered into smaller groups attending to individual works. What's more, enough sound from each work leaked into the hallways to lead listeners toward them; and to mix intriguingly with the leaked sounds from other installations, making this truly a group show.

Meanwhile, the more public gathering spaces sprinkled throughout the space-coffee bar, lounges, greeting area-were dense with the chatter of an art opening, none of which spilled into the glass offices to interfere with the sound installations. There was even a series of live performances in the main entrance hall-some of them quite noisy-that didn't disturb the installations within. The co-working space was, in short, the best architecture for a group sound art exhibition that I had ever experienced. Perhaps sounds are simply better co-workers than cubicle dwellers. Or could it be that the gig-economy office structure-one art professionals might be quick to disdain, and not without good reason-has stumbled on a new way to let sounds do their thing in space?

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The Ideal Conditions for Sound Art and Office Productivity Aren't So Far Apart

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In case you haven't been tracking the progress of group exhibitions of sound art, a short history would be: they are generally a disaster, with many works either impossible to hear adequately in the situation or impossible not to hear while you are trying to listen to something else.

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"The Freeman Etudes are known to be among the most difficult pieces Cage ever wrote, and of them he said that the challenge was in response to a more global issue:

These [the Etudes] are intentionally as difficult as I can make them, because I think we’re now surrounded by very serious
problems in the society, and we tend to think that the situation is hopeless and that it’s just impossible to do something that
will make everything turn out properly. So I think that this music, which is almost impossible, gives an instance of the
practicality of the impossible.
(Fletcher and Moore 1983: 19)"

Excerpt from an essay by Mieko Kanno: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/1458953.pdf
Reprint from “metaCage – Essays on and around Freeman Etudes, Fontana Mix, Aria” – ISBN 978 94 9038 901 7 – © 2009, Orpheus Instituut

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Density 21.5, on a score by Edgar Varese, changed the career of Carolyn Carlson (born in 1943). In 1973, on tour in Hamburg with Alwin Nikolais' company, she was noticed by Rolf Liebermann, then director of the Hamburg Opera. He offered her to create a work for a "Tribute to Varese" evening, at the place at the Paris Opera.

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[00:00 - 03:40]
Abel Decaux
'Minuit Passe' [3:40]
Meral Güneyman, Piano
Finnadar ‎– SR 9031

[03:40 - 05:27]
Alban Berg
'Sehr Langsam' [1:52]
from Vier Stücke Für Klarinette Und Klavier Op. 5
Ensemble Intercontemporain
Deutsche Grammophon ‎– 2531 007

[05:27 - 08:48]
Ruth Crawford Seeger
'Andante' [3:30]
from String Quartet, 1931
The Composers Quartet
Nonesuch H-71280

[08:48 - 13:17]
Arnold Schoenberg
'Variatonen' [4:30]
from Serenade op.24 for Seven Instruments and Bass Voice
The Light Fantastic Players
Nonesuch H-71331

[13:17 - 16:48]
Abel Decaux
'La Ruelle' [3:37]
Meral Güneyman, Piano
Finnadar ‎– SR 9031

[16:48 - 20:58]
Edgar Varèse
Density 21,5 [4:13]
Columbia Masterworks Portrait ‎– MP 38773

[20:58 - 25:46]
Luciano Berio
'Secton II' [4:47]
from Sinfonia
New York Philharmonic, The Swingle Singers
CBS MP 38779

[25:46 - 28:26]
György Ligeti
'Cordes Vides' [2:45]
from Études Pour Piano
Volker Banfield, Piano
Wergo WER 60134

[28:26 - 38:57]
Toru Takemitsu
Waves [10:49]
Tashi
RCA Red Seal ‎– ARL1-3483

[38:57 - 47:46]
György Ligeti
Étude Nr. 1 ("Harmonies") [9:00]
Mauricio Kagel, Organ
Deutsche Grammophon ‎– 137 003

[47:46 - 53:04]
John Cage
Freeman Etudes, No. VII [4:53]
János Négyesy, Violin
Lovely Music ‎– VR 2051-2

[53:04 - 57:46]
Abel Decaux
'La Cimetiere' [4:41]
Meral Güneyman, Piano
Finnadar ‎– SR 9031

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Minuit Passe - The Dollhouse by 12-Tone Disco

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This mix was put together as part of a project for 'The Dollhouse', an experimental contemporary art space based in North Holland that is housed in a 1:12 scale open-plan dollhouse designed and manufactured in 1974 by the Dutch toy firm G. Okkerse. More information: http://www.markorange.com/projects/minuit-passe/ 

Tracklist:

[00:00 - 03:40]
Abel Decaux
'Minuit Passe' [3:40]
Meral Güneyman, Piano	
Finnadar ‎– SR 9031

[03:40 - 05:27]
Alban Berg
'Sehr Langsam' [1:52]
from Vier Stücke Für Klarinette Und Klavier Op. 5
Ensemble Intercontemporain
Deutsche Grammophon ‎– 2531 007

[05:27 - 08:48]
Ruth Crawford Seeger	
'Andante' [3:30]
from String Quartet, 1931
The Composers Quartet
Nonesuch H-71280

[08:48 - 13:17]
Arnold Schoenberg 
'Variatonen' [4:30]
from Serenade op.24 for Seven Instruments and Bass Voice
The Light Fantastic Players
Nonesuch H-71331

[13:17 - 16:48]
Abel Decaux	
'La Ruelle' [3:37]
Meral Güneyman, Piano	
Finnadar ‎– SR 9031

[16:48 - 20:58]
Edgar Varèse
Density 21,5 [4:13]
Columbia Masterworks Portrait ‎– MP 38773

[20:58 - 25:46]
Luciano Berio
'Secton II'	[4:47]
from Sinfonia
New York Philharmonic, The Swingle Singers
CBS MP 38779

[25:46 - 28:26]
György Ligeti
'Cordes Vides' [2:45]
from Études Pour Piano
Volker Banfield, Piano
Wergo WER 60134

[28:26 - 38:57]
Toru Takemitsu 
Waves [10:49]
Tashi 
RCA Red Seal ‎– ARL1-3483

[38:57 - 47:46]
György Ligeti	
Étude Nr. 1 ("Harmonies") [9:00] 
Mauricio Kagel, Organ
Deutsche Grammophon ‎– 137 003

[47:46 - 53:04]
John Cage
Freeman Etudes, No. VII [4:53]
János Négyesy, Violin
Lovely Music ‎– VR 2051-2

[53:04 - 57:46]
Abel Decaux	
'La Cimetiere' [4:41]
Meral Güneyman, Piano	
Finnadar ‎– SR 9031

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Following news of Mark Hollis' death yesterday, I wondered if, perhaps, Talk Talk feature in Mr– 's vinyl collection...

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If you have to ask "Why?" You really need a Fi...

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If you have to ask "Why?" You really need a Fi...

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fi x 2a3/45 integrated amplifier - audiophile reviews

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Fi X 2A3/45 Integrated Amplifier by Ian White

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Fi X 2A3/45 Integrated Amplifier - Enjoy the Music.com Review Magazine

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As Chester Rice, co-inventor of the moving-coil loudspeaker, once ruefully observed: "The ancients have stolen our inventions." So often, what is painted as new and innovative turns out to be something someone thought of long before. We have a habit of forgetting, and that applies not only to inventions, but to knowledge of other kinds as well.

If you've been reading audio magazines for the past 30 years or more, you may recall that in the late 1970s there was a short-lived furor, first in the US and then in the UK, about forgotten lessons of tonearm/cartridge alignment. It turned out that seminal work on the subject by H.G. Baerwald, published in 1941(footnote 1) and refreshed by J.K. Stevenson in 1966 (footnote 2), had been disregarded by many pickup-arm designers, presumably because they'd never been acquainted with it. (It has since come to light, principally through the work of Graeme Dennes (footnote 3), that Erik Löfgren first published the optimum alignment equations more generally credited to Baerwald over three years earlier, in 1938. Perhaps because Löfgren's paper was in German and Baerwald's in English, the latter's became the recognized reference. Löfgren's paper has since been translated by Klaus Rampelmann (footnote 4)).

At the time this all blew up, LP was thriving, of course. Some would argue that it is beginning to do so again, but either way, we're talking 30 years ago. In the interim, the same process of forgetfulness and obfuscation has inevitably occurred, so that today, once again, despite the recent efforts of Michael Fremer and some fine Web resources (footnote 5), many audiophiles—and perhaps even some new-generation turntable designers—will be unclear about what's involved in optimally aligning a pickup cartridge. Fewer still will know about the history and theory of the subject, and the important ramifications that theory has for the design of pickup arms and their use. If you're interested in the more complete picture, then this introductory article will give you a good grounding, and point you in the direction of further reading.

To do the history part right, we have to go back before Löfgren and Baerwald, and turn our gaze to England in 1924, the second year of publication of The Gramophone, cofounded and edited by novelist (later Sir) Compton Mackenzie. The magazine's technical editor was the remarkable Percy Wilson, a larger-than-life character whose mathematical background was used to good effect at the time, not only in modifying the flare of the exponential horn on the more realistic assumption of spherical rather than planar wavefronts, but also by being applied to what, in an article published in the September and October 1924 issues (footnote 6), he termed "needle track alignment."

What was then already understood was that (using modern terminology) because tonearms or pickup arms were pivoted, but cutter heads ran on a linear drive mechanism, angular errors were inherent in record replay—and exactly the same remains true today (footnote 7). The cutting stylus traverses a radius of the disc, so that the lateral groove modulation is nominally at right angles to a tangent to the groove at all times—whereas the replay stylus traverses an arc, so that the modulation is generally read with some angular disparity, which generates distortion (footnote 8). Today we know that angular disparity as lateral tracking error (LTE), and the resulting nonlinearity as lateral tracking error distortion (LTED).

Wilson calculated what alignment of the replay components would minimize LTE across the disc, basing his figuring on the assumption—wrong, as we will see—that this would also minimize the resulting distortion. To achieve this, he found, the radius of the stylus (needle) arc had to be greater than the distance from the arm pivot to the center of the disc, by a distance that today we term the overhang; and the pickup cartridge had to be twisted relative to a line joining stylus to arm pivot by an angle termed the offset. This overhang-plus-offset geometry, Wilson's great contribution to arm/cartridge alignment, is still used today, even though his equations for calculating the two parameters have been superseded.

If we assume an arm effective length (that is, the horizontal distance from stylus to arm pivot axis) of 230mm, which is about the 9" of many modern pickup arms, and maximum and minimum modulated groove radii of 146.3 and 56mm (more on this later), then Wilson's alignment gives the result shown in fig.1. Actually, this is two graphs superimposed: the red trace, which is partly overlaid by the blue trace, shows LTE vs groove radius, and the blue trace the absolute value of LTE vs groove radius, which results in a W shape that will become more familiar as we continue. There are two important features to note about this graph. First, the alignment minimizes the maximum LTE by setting it equal at three points across the disc: the innermost modulated groove radius, the outermost modulated groove radius, and a point in between represented by the peak of the curve. (The sign of the LTE is irrelevant; a positive angle gives rise to the same distortion as an equivalent negative angle.) Second, the LTE is zero at two points across the disc termed the zero tracking error radii, here 64.3 and 127.4mm.

Footnote 1: H.G. Baerwald, "Analytic Treatment of Tracking Error and Notes on Optimal Pick-Up Design," Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, December 1941.

Footnote 2: J.K. Stevenson, "Pickup Arm Design," Wireless World, May and June 1966.

Footnote 3: Graeme Dennes, "An Analysis of Six Major Articles on Tonearm Alignment Optimisation," 1983, updated 2009, downloadable here.

Footnote 4: Erik Löfgren, "On the Non-Linear Distortion in the Reproduction of Phonograph Records Caused by Angular Deviation of the Pickup Needle," originally published in German in Akustische Zeitschrift, November 1938, Vol.3, pp.350–362; downloadable in English translation here.

Footnote 5: Such as www.vinylengine.com and www.audioasylum.com/audio/vinyl.

Footnote 6: Percy Wilson, "Needle Track Alignment," The Gramophone, September (pp.129–131) and October (pp.167–169) 1924. Available from Gramophone's online archive, these articles can be downloaded, a bit laboriously, as PDFs. Only the September article contains alignment equations.

Footnote 7: I ignore here radial-tracking (aka linear-tracking or parallel-tracking or tangential-tracking) arms since they remain rarities, and those pivoted arms with headshell-rotation mechanisms—such as that on the Garrard Zero 100 of yesteryear because they are rarer still.

Footnote 8: I was once upbraided by a reader for forgetting, along with everyone else who had ever written about arm/cartridge alignment, that the record groove is a spiral, and therefore its tangent is never truly at a right angle to a radial line drawn from the center of the disc through the stylus. While true, this is irrelevant to the alignment issue, since the aim is not to align the cartridge front-back axis as closely as possible to a true tangent to the groove, but to align it as closely as possible to the front-back axis of the cutting head, which is aligned (nominally, at least) at a right angle to the disc radius. Even if it were relevant, the angular error is tiny. If we assume a groove pitch of 0.135mm, then even at the inner modulated groove radius of an LP, the angular difference between a tangent to the groove spiral and a tangent to a circle of the same radius is just 0.022°. For comparison, the LTE of an optimally aligned 9" arm at this radius is 0.85°; ie, almost 40 times greater.

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As Chester Rice, co-inventor of the moving-coil loudspeaker, once ruefully observed: "The ancients have stolen our inventions." So often, what is painted as new and innovative turns out to be something someone thought of long before. We have a habit of forgetting, and that applies not only to inventions, but to knowledge of other kinds as well.

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Speaker modification for low frequency extension

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Speaker modification for low frequency extension

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Back in the 1950s and 1960s, America was producing some of the world's best-sounding hi-fi gear by famous brands like Marantz, McIntosh, Fisher, Eico, Scott, Acoustic Resarch, and Altec-Lansing. Then in the 1970s, with the advent of transistors, many of the great tube amps, preamps, and speakers disappeared as they were replaced by mid-fi Japanese brands. Fortunately, since the 1990s, America's hi-fi cottage industry has been re-emerging. McIntosh, an iconic American brand founded in 1949, continues to be made in USA at their longtime facility in Binghamton, New York.

My longtime KCRW production assistant, Bob Werne, recently sent me a photo of Frank Sinatra standing in his living room alongside his hi-fi system. With a little help from my friends, Joey Cevetello and Yves Beauvais (who restores classic gear to showroom quality), we were able to identify most of Sinatra's components:

Amplification: Console furniture with built-in components was quite common back in the day, so we can't say what brand they are. I'm told that the three amplifier units down below might be Scott amps.

Preamplifier: McIntosh C-22 (pictured on top)

AM/FM Tuner: Fisher R-200 tube tuner

Loudspeakers: Either Altec-Lansing or JBL (James B. Lansing), but they look like they could also be other hi-fi classic models of the day by Klipsch, Jensen, or Tannoy.

Turntable: Garrard or Reko-Cut in one photo; the other photo has the turntable inside the cabinet under the Fisher tuner.

Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck: Correction: Not a 350 series Ampex 3-track tube tape machine; rather, it is a Presto 825 3 box/3 channel deck. Thank you Bob Donnelly for that 411. Also thanks to George Little for telling us The three units below the tuner and preamp the power supplies for the Presto tape unit amps.

There are some other professional-looking components Sinatra had that we weren't able to identify, but that I'm curious about, so if anyone out there knows, please comment below or on my .

Am I a hi-fi geek? Yes, probably. You can read my previous audiophile posts and decide for yourself. But I've kicked the audiophilia nervosa habit and even skipped this year's T.H.E. (The Home Entertainment) Show in Newport. I have finally reached my own high-end, so it's time to stop this madness.

PS. I like the Buddhas atop Sinatra's cabinetry. Although, he sure didn't seem like an adherent, especially back when he was hanging out with the Rat Pack.

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Back in the 1950s and 1960s, America was producing some of the world's best-sounding hi-fi gear by famous brands like Marantz, McIntosh, Fisher, Eico, Scott, Acoustic Resarch, and Altec-Lansing. Then in the 1970s, with the advent of transistors, many of the great tube amps, preamps, and speakers disappeared as they were replaced by mid-fi Japanese brands.

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Steve Jobs was a closet audiophile. Yes, the man responsible for the iPod and the global domination of low-res MP3 files had a serious Hi-Fi fetish. As musician and audio quality champion Neil Young said in 2012, " Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl."

This wasn't a just wealthy man indulging in some hipster fantasy. Jobs's analog roots ran deep, stretching back to at least to 1982. That's when photographer Diana Walker snapped this candid portrait of him in his Woodside, California home. Other than the Tiffany lamp, the room's only furnishings are a clutch of stereo components and a small stack of vinyl LPs. The shiny boxes loom large in the background like sacred totems, which is precisely what they were to Jobs. They embodied everything he held dear in high-end industrial design: clean lines, quality materials and workmanship, outstanding performance-price be damned. Although he would eventually upgrade to far more exotic equipment, like six-figure Wilson Audio speakers, this old school rig is still considered serious audio porn today. It should have been shipped off to the Smithsonian, preserved behind glass. But, like so many of the toys that famous men collect, it simply disappeared. Fortunately, the photograph and the forensic evidence it contains, remain.

For the curious, if you were to put together this same stereo rig today by picking up the components on the used market, it would cost about $8,200 - not including the records.

More Great WIRED Stories

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We Pieced Together Steve Jobs' Long-Lost Stereo System

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Steve Jobs, the man responsible for the iPod and the global domination of low-res MP3 files, had a serious Hi-Fi fetish. All the proof you need is in Diana Walker's iconic 1982 photo of Jobs in his Woodside, California home.

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Japanese Audiophiles Are Going to Extremes

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Japanese Audiophiles Are Going to Extremes

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8/14/2016 11:30AM

Japanese audiophiles are spending thousands of dollars on high-end stereo systems. Some are even installing private utility poles for a personal source of electricity, all in a quest for aural perfection. Photo: Juro Osawa/The Wall Street Journal

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Japanese Audiophiles Are Going to Extremes

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8/14/2016 11:30AM Japanese audiophiles are spending thousands of dollars on high-end stereo systems. Some are even installing private utility poles for a personal source of electricity, all in a quest for aural perfection. Photo: Juro Osawa/The Wall Street Journal

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Audiophiles: Are They Hearing Something We're Not?

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Audiophiles: Are They Hearing Something We're Not?

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It's a wet Sunday afternoon and I've discovered an alternate universe in a hotel outside Melton Mowbray. At least I've got a guidebook, although the leaflet headlined "2015 HiFi Wigwam Show" might as well be in Biblical Aramaic for all the sense it makes. "Home-built passive pre-amp feeding very unusual VRR monoblock power amps and rounded off with Tannoy Cheviots." "Software-based room correction and linear phase crossovers feeding six Hypex amps powering DIY sealed box three-way speakers." "Tri-amped with classic Pye HF25, PF91 and HF 5/8, stacked Quad ESL57s with lonophone plasma supertweeters."

But if the guidebook seems odd, it's nothing compared to what's actually happening in the hotel. The HiFi Wigwam Show - one of the premier annual gatherings for Britain's audiophiles - has taken over the whole building. Every guest room contains a man - it's always a man - with a hi-fi system he's brought from home. People go from room to room, listening. Pinned to the walls of the corridors, you occasionally see a small ad written in the same impenetrable language as the guidebook. "Wanted: Nordost Valhalla speaker cables spades both ends," reads one. "Please call."

You may think of yourself as someone with an interest in hi-fi, who believes that the music you love deserves to be heard in decent sound quality. Perhaps you spent a few hundred quid on an amp and speakers, or a Sonos system. Perhaps you upgraded the earbuds that came with your phone for a pair of Beats headphones. Or perhaps you've junked your CDs and turned your nose up at digital downloads in favour of a return to vinyl, confident that it sounds "so much warmer".

But you're not an audiophile. By the standards of the exhibitors at HiFi Wigwam, you're a part-timer, a dilettante, you're one step away from the dog on the HMV logo, your idiot brain transfixed by the muffled sound coming from a wax cylinder. There's a guy in one room who's eschewed hi-fi equipment altogether in favour of playing music off the huge reel-to-reel tape machines you get in recording studios. There are people here who build their own speakers and CD players. There are "modders", men whose immediate impulse upon buying a £3,000 amplifier is to rip off the back and set about it with a soldering iron, confident they can make it better.

***

In a room off the hotel lobby, I find Steve, a building contractor from Essex, who has devoted his spare time to assembling the most deranged-looking hi-fi system I've ever seen.

The speakers have something resembling the horn from an old gramophone on top of them: they're called Acapella High Violons and you have to play music through them continually for 14 days to "break them in". They sell for £40,000 a pair. (This makes them Acapella's entry-level model: its top-of-the-range speaker costs around £350,000, looks like someone nailed two tubas to a mid-Eighties Habitat shelving unit and can only be used in rooms over 131sq ft.)

His turntable has two platters, one on top of the other. The bottom one spins round in the opposite direction to the one on top: apparently it's designed on the same engineering principle as the counter-rotating blade of a helicopter. There are only two in the UK, possibly because its recommended retail price is £30,000. It's sitting on top of something that looks remarkably like a Black & Decker Workmate bench. It turns out that this is because it is a Black & Decker Workmate bench.

Someone hands Steve an album and he puts it on, and it becomes apparent that, however crazy his system looks, that's nothing compared to how it sounds.

The old line about great hi-fi making it feel like the band's in the room with you isn't quite right. It doesn't sound like live music: it sounds better. Clearer, more pure. The weirdest thing is that the music doesn't appear to be coming out of the speakers: it seems to be happening in a space just in front of you. It feels like it's in 3D: you could walk around it, you could reach out and touch it. It's astonishing.

And that's the thing about audiophiles. You can, if you're so inclined, mock their nerdiness; if that's your wont, then there are plenty of people here from geek central casting, including a man wearing a T-shirt that reads: "THERE'S A NAME FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT BEARDS: WOMEN".

You can look askance at the kind of things that get them riled up - if you want to start a massive row among high-end hi-fi buffs, if you want to turn the HiFi Wigwam Show's atmosphere of beery bonhomie into one of murderous fury, get them on the subject of whether the cables used to connect hi-fi components make a difference to the sound. You can wonder aloud whether some of them aren't more interested in sound waves and lonophone plasma supertweeters and shiny boxes from Japan and Germany than they are in music.

And you can stand there with your mouth hanging open and your finger twirling by your temple when you find out how much they'll pay for a CD player or a pair of speakers - however much they tell you that good sound is not about how much you spend, but how carefully you match your components, you never seem to meet an audiophile who hasn't lavished thousands of pounds on their obsession.

But if you've got functioning ears and a love of music, you can't help but boggle at the sound their equipment can make.

I listen to this bizarrely tangible music and I look at Steve. And I can't decide whether he's a kind of epicurean genius, dedicated to something really noble - presenting great art in the best possible way - or a total fruitcake.

Whichever it is, the music business would currently like us all to be at least a bit more like him. Sound quality is a hot topic. Record companies are hoping to shill us high-definition, better-than-CD-quality downloads. Neil Young is trying to flog us his high-resolution Pono digital player. That weird conglomeration of pop stars who got onstage in New York in March and started carrying on as if they'd discovered a way to cure all known diseases were trying to interest the public in Tidal, a music-streaming service that offers better sound quality than Spotify, for a £20-a-month subscription fee.

Of course they are - there's theoretically a lot of money in it. If record companies can convince people they need high-definition downloads, then it might be the CD all over again. It means music fans re-buying their entire record collections at a premium price. If you find it odd that pop stars are suddenly so interested in sound quality - after all, you never heard The Beatles complaining that listening to their music on a transistor radio or a crappy old Dansette was somehow disrespecting their artistry - well, that's where the money is these days. There's less cash in music itself than in the means by which music is distributed and played.

The best of luck to them. They're going to need it.

For the past 40 years, every major technological advance in hi-fi that's caught on has been about convenience rather than sound, such as the Walkman, the MP3, the iPod and streaming. Even the CD was marketed more on its size and alleged indestructibility. The ones that tried to tempt the public with sound alone were the ones that withered and died and now languish forgotten: Quadraphonic, Super Audio CD, DVD-A, Blu-Ray Audio. The general public, it seems, couldn't give a flying one about sound.

All of which makes audiophiles something of a band apart. Their world feels deeply arcane, even by the standards of what you might call luxe pursuits. There are TV programmes devoted to drooling over supercars. There's always space in the Sunday supplements for articles about fine wine. Turn the pages of a men's magazine such as this one and you'll find stuff about suits and shoes and watches no normal person would dream of buying. It's aspirational.

But the mainstream media takes no interest in audiophiles. Everyone knows the Bugatti Veyron, but no one outside of the audiophile community has heard of the serious high-end hi-fi manufacturers: Audio Note, Puresound, Advantage, Nagra.

That may be because most of those other pursuits are about outward show: if you drive a Bugatti Veyron or wear a Rolex Oyster, you're making a very public statement about yourself. But a high-end hi-fi isn't a public statement. It's squirrelled away somewhere in your house, not on open display, unless you dismantle it and haul it up to something like the HiFi Wigwam Show, and even then only other audiophiles - and the odd nosey hack from Esquire - will see it.

The convivial atmosphere at the HiFi Wigwam Show notwithstanding, being an audiophile seems an oddly solitary pursuit.

There are those happy to invite their non-audiophile mates around for a listening session, but they seem to be outnumbered by those who keep their interest to themselves and the other members of their tribe. Steve tells me he thinks it attracts "people who are a little bit introspective, a little bit shy, if you want to generalise". Others talk about it as being like a religion: you wouldn't go around trying to foist it on your non-believing friends.

***

"It's sort of a secret," says Jason, a 46-year-old teacher with a West Country accent, a rather serious manner and a "six- figure" system. He claims to "eat, think and breathe hi-fi", but even so, he says, "I never tell anyone at work. They wouldn't understand." He says that very emphatically, and he may have a point.

Worried that something he calls "dirty" electricity will affect the sound his system produces, Jason has had his home rewired - his hi-fi is on a separate mains ring to the rest of the house, running off the "purest electricity possible". "It's quite a lonely road in some ways," he says. "Because when you're listening, you're in your room, it's just about you and the music."

It's an obsession they even shield from those closest to them. I keep hearing about audiophile wives who share their husband's passion - everyone I speak to seems to know another audiophile whose wife enjoys nothing more than discussing the finer points of software room correction - but I never actually meet one. I start to wonder if it's a kind of urban myth. In fact, keeping your partner in the dark about your hobby seems as much of an audiophile skill as being able to spot the sonic difference between two different brands of speaker cable.

"It's the audiophile's biggest fear, isn't it?" grins James, the immensely affable founder of HiFi Wigwam, an online forum that begat the show. "They die and then their wives sell their hi-fi equipment for what they told them it cost." Even Trevor, a retired engineer, who's gone to the extreme of building his own listening room - a windowless, soundproofed, acoustically treated, freestanding structure within a barn next to his East Anglia home, complete with a handmade 300lb door filled with building sand - suggests his wife, who presumably got an inkling something was up when the builders arrived, isn't entirely au fait with what goes on inside it.

"It's something my wife doesn't know anything about," he says, when I pay him a visit. "She would absolutely pass out if she had any idea how much money I've spent." He used an inheritance from an aunt, he says; he didn't dip into the household budget. His hi-fi equipment is insured for £75,000. As if to prove its worth it, he shuts his handmade door, dims the lights and puts on a CD by Oscar Peterson. It's the whole astonishing 3D, tangible-music experience again. I say so and Trevor nods happily. That means he's created a good soundstage, he says.

Like every audiophile I speak to, Trevor seems a really nice guy. Normal. Dotes on his granddaughter, talks fascinatingly about stuff that isn't hi-fi: the cultural differences between Britain and the US, where he was born; his time in the forces - he served in Vietnam towards the end of the war. You'd like him. Maybe I got lucky: apparently, there's some real headcases out there, people who, as Trevor puts it, "you wouldn't want to bring home to meet your mother".

But it all begs the question: what sets an otherwise normal man off on a path that leads them to commission a handmade 300lb door filled with sand or rewire their house, in pursuit of sound quality?

Some audiophiles talk about a Damascene moment: a post-pub visit to a friend's house where they heard music they loved played on really good equipment and never really recovered. Laurie, a 65-year-old "semi-retired" writer from Suffolk, tells me that as a kid, his family were poor: they couldn't afford a record player, so he had to make do with a wind-up gramophone and a selection of Gracie Fields 78s someone had bequeathed them. He doesn't explicitly make the connection between this and what he calls a "slightly ridiculous" obsession with high-end hi-fi in later life, but you do the amateur psychology.

***

But most of them don't have a story like that.

When you ask what got them into high-end hi-fi and all its trappings, they talk vaguely about loving music when they were a child or being fascinated by the family record player. Well, yeah, I think, but so was I, so were loads of people I know, and they've managed to get by without rewiring the house or buying bits of plastic that ensure their speaker cables don't touch the floor in the belief that it affects the sound. Perhaps there's something else, something deeper.

James from HiFi Wigwam is not a man much given to mysticism - he's funny and self-deprecating and tells me that the best upgrade you can buy for your equipment is "a couple of bottles of wine" - but he has a theory that audiophiles might be wired differently to everyone else. "You know how you get super-tasters for wine and people who have particularly good palates for tasting food? I wonder if our hearing might be like that, and that's why we get drawn into it."

Maybe he's right. Maybe audiophiles have some kind of weird heightened superpower hearing. And maybe it's sometimes a burden. Trevor tells me he finds it hard to listen to music that's badly recorded, no matter how great the actual music is. "Amy Winehouse, amazing voice, but Back to Black ... that's a terrible-sounding album." He recently went to a gig by fabled jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. "Ruined," he says. "Ruined by the sound reinforcement in the hall."

James tells me he sometimes feels he's not listening to music, but to his hi-fi system: he's a fan of Kraftwerk and Joy Division, but finds he's been buying "plinky-plonky jazz" because it shows off his equipment. "I would never," he says heavily, "have bought a Diana Krall album unless I was into hi-fi. But play a Diana Krall album on my system..." He blows out his cheeks. "Bloody hell."

People listening to music they don't like, people who find themselves unable to listen to music they like. As I said, it's an alternate universe. It has its own language and its own tribes, not least the box-swappers: audiophiles whose quest for elusive perfect sound quality leads them to constantly upgrade or alter their hi-fi, buying and selling equipment with a dizzying frequency.

It has its own controversies, a lot of which seem to stem from the fact that sound quality is a completely subjective thing: there's no way of meaningfully measuring it, so if you think something improves your system, then, well, it does.

Hence the ideas and products peddled by Peter Belt, a former electronics engineer who variously advocates freezing CDs before you play them, colouring in the edge of your albums and the fuses in your plugs with a violet marker, ensuring that all the leads on your hi-fi system are white - that's not a euphemism for something technical, he means coloured white - and the use of a series of mysterious creams. You rub these into your hi-fi components and - get this - the magnetic strips on your credit and debit cards to improve "energy patterns" and achieve better sound quality. A lot of the audiophiles I speak to understandably think Belt is a raving nutter, or, worse, a snake oil salesman, but even so, his adherents aren't hard to find. "I've got some of his products," says Jason. "Do they work? I wouldn't be paying money for them if I didn't think they did.

And it has its own curious celebrities. There's Roman "The Cat" Bessnow, a Russian-born, US-based blogger acclaimed in some quarters as "the world's most obsessed audiophile", whose bafflingly designed website mixes quotes from Thomas Mann with hugely opinionated screeds written in Seventies comedy-show pidgin English: "I have an excremental tone arm".

There's the group of hugely wealthy Greek businessmen who call themselves the Audiophile Club of Athens, the subject of a much-discussed YouTube documentary, with whom Laurie has had dealings. He once designed a small piece of hi-fi equipment of his own: the Audiophile Club of Athens ordered several from him, then wrote him a letter of congratulations, which also noted they'd discovered that its sound quality was improved if you hung it from the ceiling on a piece of cotton thread.

And there is Peter Qvortrup, a Danish former hi-fi retailer turned maverick hi-fi manufacturer who runs his company, Audio Note, from a shop in Hove that appears from the outside to have closed down years ago - the window display is a cobwebbed mess of empty wine and tequila bottles.

The equipment Audio Note makes is both hugely well-respected and eye-wateringly expensive: don't even think about the top-of-their range unless you're an oligarch or a Far Eastern multimillionaire. It takes about five minutes in his company to see why Qvortup's reputation precedes him in the audiophile world. He quotes Kierkegaard and Einstein, seems to think that more or less every other hi-fi manufacturer in the world is doing everything wrong, tells me he believes that the best speakers were made in the Thirties and announces that he spends £7,500 a year on champagne. He is richly, riotously entertaining company, but he is deadly serious about hi-fi. None of this I-don't-want-to-foist-my-religion-on-unbelievers stuff from him. He's positively evangelical.

"If your article is to have any journalistic validity at all," he says, thumping the table for emphasis, "it's important to impress upon people that if you run around listening to music on one of these" - he stabs at my iPhone - "with headphones the size of a pea, the price for that is very considerable in terms of your musical enjoyment and understanding. And then, if you think about music developing over the next 100 years in order to satisfy the requirements of things like this" - another disgusted look at the iPhone - "then we're going to end up with music that's absolutely inane and useless."

On the one hand: well he would say that, wouldn't he? It's his business to sell hugely expensive hi-fi. But on the other, there's the uneasy feeling he might have a point. Take dubstep. Not the good stuff: the awful, noisy, bleached-white, funk-free variant that sounds like a giant robotic moron stamping on the face of humanity, the one that's popular with hideous, gurning American frat boys. One of the reasons posited for its success was that most people hear music via their computers these days and it sounded good coming out of tinny laptop speakers: there were no subtleties in the music to lose.

***

Sometimes, says James from HiFi Wigwam, being an audiophile feels less like a hobby than having a weird illness, like obsessive-compulsive disorder or something: you know what you're doing is a bit daft, but you can't stop yourself.

The audiophiles I speak to keep insisting that they've got their hi-fis to sound just how they want them, they won't be buying any more equipment, they're as close to perfection as they're going to get. They say that and then they say the word "but" - there's always another box, another tweak, something else that might get them a little closer. Laurie tells me he's planning to downscale his system, but, with the best will in the world, his plan doesn't seem to be going terribly well. "I've got this caveat: what if we move house? I might need another amplifier. Or I might need a spare. I've got two spare amps, you know, just in case."

James says that his hi-fi obsession recently led to a kind of existential crisis. He was at a show in Munich and he heard a pair of Magico speakers that cost $600,000.

"They played a Dead Can Dance track on them, and..." His voice trails off and he sticks his hand out. "Look, the hairs on the back of my arms are standing up just thinking about it. The room was just full of this sound. It was immaculate. Immaculate. I walked out and said, 'Well, that's it. That's the sound I want.' And I'll never be able to afford them. So I've just blown my hobby forever."

But that was a year ago, and a huge pair of speakers still dominates the living room of his terraced house.

He asks me if I want to hear something on his system. I choose "To Here Knows When", the 1991 single by My Bloody Valentine that Brian Eno described as "the vaguest music ever made". When it was released, people kept taking it back to the shops, convinced that there was something wrong with the record they'd bought: surely it wasn't meant to sound like that, with its beautiful sleepy-eyed melody almost drowned out by layers of churning, woozy noise. I've listened to it obsessively for 25 years, trying to get to the bottom of what the band thought they were doing. In Steve's front room, I feel like I'm sitting in the middle of the song, the guitars arcing around me. It's overwhelming. And once again, all the downsides of audiophile addiction - the ridiculous financial excesses, the mystical woo, the obsessive behaviour - seem to evaporate.

Who wouldn't want music to sound this enveloping, this enrapturing? Would I spend £40,000 on a set of speakers? Would I rewire my house? Would I build a freestanding structure in a nearby barn? Of course I wouldn't. But there's a part of me that knows precisely why they do and thinks the rest of us don't know what we're missing.

***
MORE LONG READS:
How 6 Music Defined The Music We Listen To Today
Alone: How It Feels To Spend A Week In Total Isolation
Will Self's Music Festival Hell
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Audiophiles: Are They Hearing Something We're Not?

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It's a wet Sunday afternoon and I've discovered an alternate universe in a hotel outside Melton Mowbray. At least I've got a guidebook, although the leaflet headlined "2015 HiFi Wigwam Show" might as well be in Biblical Aramaic for all the sense it makes.

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the death of the home stereo system - cnn

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The death of the home stereo system - CNN

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For years, when you moved, the first thing set up was the stereo system. Now audio is all about computers.

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A resource for past, present and future artists occupying The Dollhouse as well as the online visiting public. To access the bookcase, simply click the image below:

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Klipsch Cornwalls 1:12

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full disclosure

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Inspiration boards

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out of the oven

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finishing touches...