Audiophilephobia versus Audiophilephilia (slight return)

Henry Rollins confesses "I Am An Audiophile". A piece in Stereophile magazine from 2011

"I have five systems in my home. The one I spend the most time in front of is perhaps amateur hour to hi-fi heavyweights like yourselves, but I like it very much: Wilson Audio Sophia 3s, McIntosh amps and preamp, Rega Planar 3 turntable, and Rega Valve Isis CD player. At the end of 2012 that system will be moving to a different room, and Brian from Brooks Berdan Ltd., in Monrovia, California, will come in with his sturdy crew and we will start all over again."

Rega Planar 3 - we have (well, had, in my case *) the same turntable!

"Sturdy crew"!

And here's Rollins's listening room in his new place in Nashville.

 Are those grey monoliths the speakers?  I wonder if he used the same "sturdy crew" expensively brought in or whether he found someone as good in Tennessee... 

At a blog I learn that Rollins's "main system includes Wilson Alexandria XLF speakers that go for six figures"

And here's me chatting with Rollins about vinyl.  I kinda had to make out I was more of an active vinyl user than I am nowadays. I have a shit ton of vinyl. I have a Technics turntable and a decent set up. It's like three feet away. But the convenience of the internet, YouTube, streaming, wins out 96 percent of the time. That or the gargantuan number of downloaded files stored inside the computer. 

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In Sheeps Clothing Hi-Fi is unusual for a webzine insofar as it's both a hipster music site and - as the site name indicates  - has a lot of articles about audiophile concerns, like this one about  "Vintage European Turntables That Matter" and another about a 1975 issue of High Fidelity magazine's article about creating a Listening Room, and this one about the "lost language of hi-fi obsessives" (terms like tizz and boom  - crisp treble, punchy bass, I'm guessing) and a primer on finding a good vintage cassette deck. And indeed they have an item about the BBC 1959 program in the previous post.

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Among my music-fiend friends  I can only think of a couple who have any interest in hi-fi.  Still, as obsessions go, I find this one more sympatico than say people who get into sports cars. It's in service of music, the most elevating of the arts. Soul food.  Why not present it to the ears on the most optimal of plates? 

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Then there's the whole phenom of the listening bar. I have been to just one, here in LA, for the premiere of a friend's album. I have to say, the sound there was not amaaaaaaaazing -  I didn't feel like it was mind-blowingly superior to other listening situations. But then I was a bit distracted by conversation and also there were the mid-term election results coming in so I kept pretending to go to the bog and nipped out on the street to check on my phone how it was going. 

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An earlier post on the mysteries of vinyl - how does all THAT get extracted from a narrow bumpy furrow by the scraping of a vitreous shard?!? - and on an encounter with nutty audiophile David Mancuso and his magnificent stereo

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* The Rega Planar I used to have.  When we moved back to NYC in the fall of '94, after nearly a year in the UK, I put nearly everything in a storage unit in Swiss Cottage. After a few years it seemed stupid to have this good hi-fi just wasting away there, so I lent it to a dear friend, a music lover whose hi-fi was on the blink. Burhan loved it - the whole ritual of changing the speed by lifting the platter. 

Then about eight years years later he died tragically young. 

It seemed unseemly to approach my friend's flat mate under the circumstances, about retrieving my turntable and amp...  So I kept putting it off and eventually shelved the thought for good. I hope somebody out there is getting good use of  that Rega. Fiddling with the fiddly belt, trying to stop the glass platter sliding out of their grip, and cursing under their breath... 

I still have the speakers and the tape deck, though. He didn't need them and eventually, after a couple of decades, I moved all the storage unit's contents - a huge number of records, a lot of books, much misc. - to LA.  The records, almost all unplayed, sit in a room upstairs; the UK hi-fi components languish in the cellar. Can you even use them in the USA?

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It is ultimately a bit of a world of madness, audiophilia - "stylus rake"!

Oh yeah and there's that whole thing about your power supply - fluctuations in what comes out of the wall supposedly causing noise in your system, which can be expensively rectified with devices that regulate and regularize the current. A whole other subworld of doctrinal dispute opened up....

Audiophilephobia versus Audiophilephilia

Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum, originally broadcast on BBC Television, 12 April, 1959, as part of the program Monitor.

Directed by John Schlesinger. Narrated by Robert Robinson.

Jump ahead to 12.43 for an amusing scene of an audiophile soirée.

"Do they like music - or are they in love with equipment?" asks presenter Robert Robinson

(Alan Parsons's version of the same idea - "“Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to music. They use music to listen to their equipment”)

Well, well, well - I had no idea that audiophilia started so early....

I shouldn't imagine it was even a possibility during the era of shellac '78s, given the clunkiness of the technology. But I could be wrong there - maybe there were pre-WW2 hi-fi buffs

I do find the world of audiophile fiends distantly fascinating 

I remember being at a wedding and the guy next to me at the table was an obsessive 'phile, he had a whole system set up in a converted barn. The cost of the system was equivalent to a BMW or a Mercedes. 

But this chap was only at the shallow end of the A-phile spectrum. 

Here's the story of a guy who ruined his life in the expensive, family-alienating quest for Perfect Sound. 

There are some music blogs I check out - here's one, here's another, and there's a third who wouldn't want any attention drawn to his activities - that specialize in sharing optimized recordings, sourced in vinyl, but circulated as data-dense files - 96 kHz / 24 bit - usually in FLAC.  They list all the stages of the process  ("the ripping lineage"*) and itemize the high-end, expensive technology involved, from needle to cartridge to turntable to cables.... and all the other bits and bobs, like pre-amps and digital-to-analogue converters and what have you.

And then sometimes they also go deep into the vinyl source itself.  About whether it's an original pressing (cut in particular territories that are said to be better quality than others). About the whole mono versus stereo dilemma. And then if it's not an original pressing but one of these high-end, deluxe reissues, they get into the nitty gritty of the various 'name' figures of high reputation who did the mastering and cutting from the original master tapes (which is a whole other level of obsession - the superiority of various masters). In some cases, the reissued LP is mastered at half-speed to extract more data and  then deluxely spread across four sides of deep-grooved vinyl. And then you get into the whole thing of 180 gram vinyl.  Much talk about noise floors being reduced, and the correcting of master tape blemishes...  pops and skips cleaned-up if it's vintage original pressing. Oh and there's also the dilemma of discrepancies between different original pressings - in some territories, there'll be songs with a few extra seconds, or a different, slightly muffled mix. 

And blimey, I nearly forgot - there's that whole extra dimension to do with cleaning the vinyl. Expensive mechanical devices and brushes...  fluids and clothes. A lot of  doctrinal dispute on this question of how best to dislodge the sedimented gunk out of your grooves. 

Now I must admit I don't fully understand the rationale of taking this beautifully transferred pristine and optimized analogue source and then digitizing it and circulating it as FLAC, which even at the high level of 96 kHz / 24 bit is still compressing it down a bit. It seems a bit counter-intuitive - so despite being the analogue believer, you are turning back it in digital?

But I take it on faith that for all that, it's still superior - or interestingly different - to what I would hear at Tidal even at MAX quality, or what I'd get from playing a CD or a WAV through my computer.

Of course, with these shared audiophile offerings, I am playing it back on a less-than-ideal system, of the sort that would make these audiophile bloggers blanch and scowl, I should imagine. I can't be arsed to burn it to a blank compact disc and put it through my proper hi-fi - that would seem like one stage of transfer too many - so I play it on the computer, through pretty modest speakers, albeit boosted with a big black block of a woofer unit that sits balefully near my feet, like the monolith in 2001, A Space Odyssey.

These audiophile vinyl-sourced offerings do often sound great. And they sound different to what you can hear on streamers or the particular CD version of an album you might have.  Certain details are brought out more clearly. (That's not always great - there can be a tendency to wispy separation. What was it Mike Skinner used to say? "Subtle" - a synonym in his private lexicon for "boring"!).  

That's what I find interesting about audiophilia - not so much the fact that there is no end to how much more detail that can be extracted from a recording if you are prepared and financially able to keep upgrading, but more the idea there is no definitive 'version' of a recording, in terms of the differentials of the extraction process. The variabilities of format, the playback set up, the room it's played in.... this means that everyone is hearing something slightly different. 

The Prof Stoned dude goes a step further and remixes 1960s records he feels could benefit from it. Indeed he has gotten into using demixing technology,  that (AI?) process that enables you to separate sound-strands originally smushed together in a bounced-down 2-track or 4-track mono mix.

Over the years I've noticed that most music critics I've known tend to have fairly low-level hi-fi equipment. Presumably the priority was buying records, as many as possible, leaving little money left over for the mechanism of playback. Two rival definitions of richness there.  

Conversely, the people I've known who were obsessed with hi-fidelity often had really small record collections - and distinctly square taste.  I remember my Streatham landlady Beverley - a rare example of a female audiophile - telling me contemptuously "I don't even call what you listen to music"  Not because of the music itself but because of the sad little music center I then had. This is around 1986-87 when I was starting out as music journalist. She actually guided me through the process of buying my first proper stereo - Rega Planar turntable *, Cambridge Audio amp I think it was, good speakers, decent tape deck.... Beverley even got her brother to drill holes in the wall so my speakers could be properly mounted!  The kind of thing that a landlady would generally not encourage a tenant  to do. A testament to her vicarious commitment to Good Sound! 

But she only had a few records as far as I could see, and seldom played them. She wasn't having to grapple very often with the annoying glass platter of the Rega, where you have to pick it up and move a little rubber band underneath to switch speeds between 33 rpm and 45rpm. (This became the bane of my life when I had to do the singles overnight).

I don't agree with Bev, by the way:  the soul and essence of music is not depleted by the medium of its playback. If it's in there, it'll cut through on the fuzziest of transistor radios, the crappiest of kiddy record players and boomboxes, through a came-with-the-vehicle in-car stereo competing with the noise of the traffic.... a speed-dubbed cassette....   even the lowest-grade MP3.  

Still I do wonder, if I was wealthy, would I be tempted to go down this path? 

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Examples of rippling lineages:

Equipment:

Hardware:

- Technics 1210mk2

- Jelco SA-750D Tonearm

- Audio Technica AT33PTG

- Pro-Ject Tube Box SE-II

(Genalex Gold Lion tubes)

- RME ADI-2 A/D Interface

- Universal Audio UAD-2 Satellite Quad-Core (incl. various extra plugins I purchased over the years)

- Neumann KH150 & iLoud Micro monitors

Software:

- Spectralayers Pro

- DeMix Pro

- Cubase

- Izotope RX10

- Adobe Audition

- Click Repair

Most Important:

- My Ears

and

Equipment

Hardware:

- VMN40ML stylus on AT150MLx dual MM cartridge

- AT-LP1240-USB Turntable (internal preamp removed)

- Pro-Ject Phono Box S2 Ultra (dedicated Zero-Zone PS)

- Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 MkII

Software:

- Adobe Audition CC 2024

- iZotope RX 11 Advanced

- Audacity 3.x.x

- foobar2000 2.x.x

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New Wave / Old Wave juxtaposition (2 of ??) (Penetration versus Penetration)

 Resuming an early, barely-started series

from 1976 the year of punk

Pauline Murray's dancing here in this Electric Circus clip, is a kind of bodily rhetoric - "these be new times"

You have to feel sorry for performers in those days, the amount of liquids flying at the stage

Pauline has a good piercing strident / stringent voice (a contender inclusion in the category That Voice) but overall Penetration seem Pedestrian 

She was better served with the Invisible Girls 

That album cover could not be more New Wave - the grid

"Invisible Girls" almost calls forth the concept of this song by AC Marias, which seems to be in the same approx lineage

Angela Conway achieves her own unexpected collision of New Wave and Old Wave with a cover of a Canned Heat song

Penetration presumably got the band name from the Iggy and the Stooges song. 

Or perhaps they were just trying to come up with a slightly more clinical take on the Sex Pistols idea.

Well lookee here - a decidedly Old Wave zine from Manchester called Penetration

Surely Suicide does not refer to the band Suicide? 

"Cozmic Vibes"

I'm guessing this issue #14 is circa 1977 when Mahogany Rush played the Free Trade Hall in Manchester

However an earlier issue, #10, is already protopunky - indicating where the title likely originates too

The zine seems to have oscillated between Old and New, or comprehended both simultaneously for a while

Perhaps the Hawkwind / Motorhead nexus was the bridge

Magazine's creator Paul Welsh writes on  the Amazon page for the compendium of Penetration zine:

I began writing in the early 70's and produced my own 'arts' magazine entitled 'Purple Smoke'.

When that folded I created a rock magazine entitled 'Penetration' featuring many bands of the day, Motorhead, Hawkwind, AC/DC, Sex Pistols to name just a few.

I was the only person taking photos of the legendary Sex Pistols gig at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall which have since sold worldwide featuring in Books, magazines, TV and Movie documentaries.

... All that and more has been documented in my book 'May Contain Flashing Images-Manchester, Music and Me!' 

I wonder if Penetration the zine ever covered Penetration the band.....

I wish to speak to the MGMT

 I suppose it's a pointer to the average age of people commenting at this blog that in the Inspirals-inpired thread about artists who take the name in vain of their heroes or heroes's work (as the Carpets did, ach, with "Bitches Brew" - the effrontery! the gall!), that nobody mentioned MGMT, who on a single album, 2010's Congratulations, have a song titled "Brian Eno" and another titled "Song for Dan Treacy". 

Eno and Television Personalities are are quite good pointers to their aesthetic, if you also factored in Todd Rundgren, Ariel Pink, Flaming Lips...

So they are Anglophiles but also Anglophile-philes, if you get me.

And maybe some Hot Chip is in there. 

Here's the Eno tribute. 

So tired, soul searching

I followed the sounds to a cathedral

Imagine my surprise to find that

They were produced by Brian Eno

Past the gates, quite stark

The roses trimmed and the windows dark

I see the walls through a limestone crack

Not red, not blue, not yellow but black

And all the spaces left for you

If the sky was synthesized you'd probably know

He taught me many things

The wisdom of oblique stratagems

The prophet of a sapphire soul

Presented through creative freedoms

And everything I say is true

'Cause if I was telling lies it'd probably show

I can tell that he's kind of smiling

But what does he know?

We're always one step behind him

He's Brian Eno, Brian Eno

When I was stuck he'd make me memorize elaborate curses

Tinctures and formulas to ditch the chorus and flip the verses

My whole foundation came unglued

When I tried to humanize by ambient light

Dipping swords in metaphors, yeah

But what does he know?

We're always one step behind him

He's Brian Eno, Brian Eno

He promised pretty worlds

And all the silence I could dream of

Brian Peter, George St. John

Le Baptiste De La Salle Eno

Well, all alone by the oldest stone

Where the shade trees grow

The creature by the water

Feature with a ghostly glow

Yeah, he's making sure that time's preserved well

We reap what we sow

We're always one step behind him

He's Brian Eno

Yeah, I can tell that he's doing well, yeah

But what does he know?

I'm always one step behind him

He's Brian Eno

Yeah, dipping swords in metaphors, yeah

But what does he know?

I'd like to see him plant a forest 'cause I don't know

Brian Eno

I can tell that he's kind of smiling

But what does he know?

I will always be a step behind him

He's Brian Eno

Yeah, he's making sure that time's preserved well

We reap what we sow

I'm always one step behind him

'Cause I don't know Brian Eno

And here's the Dan Treacy one

He spends his time or maybe half of his time

Or part of the time wandering

'Round the creeks and cobble stones

Of Hackney lanes

With a tear in his eye

As the children walk by, he's thinking of a song

Then stops to paint a picture of a frown

Walking around

Dan Treacy's smile, leaves you trying

To decide who's the victim, what's the crime?

No rest for the mind

That's seen it all before

And I don't know where he lives

But he's a myth of a man

And Texas Bob the cameraman

Is off to fix his seat before the show

Yeah, but where did he go?

To know when your time's up

You flip the glass and watch the hours quickening

Oh, oh, oh

In the back of the station

Fluorescent lights about to quit their flickering

Well, he speaks his mind

He says, "What is crime?"

Dan Treacy's eyes

Stop in the middle of the park

When the underground is dark

He's a poet, he's a lark

He starts thinking about a place that no one knows

And when the creeks run dry, he stays frozen in time

Strange lights in the sky start blinking

I can see the car outside but he's listening

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

He's listening

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

He's listening

Ah, ah, ah, ah

And he's making up his mind

He made his mind up

To get things done and overcome

He made his mind up

Yeah, he's gonna let it go

He made his mind up

In the park and at the station

He made his mind up

Yeah, he's gonna get it done

He made his mind up

Yeah, he's gonna get it done

He made his mind up

Yeah, he's gonna let it go

No matter the time, oh no

When the creeps run by, oh, no

He's making his mind up, oh, oh, oh

Yeah, he's gonna get it done, oh, oh

Yeah, when the creeks run dry, oh, oh

Said yeah, he's gonna listen to his soul

Said yeah, when the creeps walk by

"Come here, boy, look me in the eye"

Bow to the heart, back to the beat of Dan Treacy

I suppose it is the next logical extension of the TVP's own efforts like "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives"

But it also reminds me of the Mighty Boosh... 

But yes I'm guessing nobody here listens to MGMT.... I only noticed these songs because a student did a presentation on the group and it reminded me how much I liked the radio hits and had always meant to check out the albums properly.

Nick S in comments points to the original EP version of "Time To Pretend" - more DIY fuzzy

Looking at the presentation, which includes these videos I'd never seen for the hits off the debut, the sort of DIY  retro phantasmagoria look of the promos and the sound and the Maus-y / mousy Angloid vocals did remind me of Ariel Pink. None of the students could see the connection but then I found that another favorite tune, "When You Die" was actually a (pre-disgrace) collab with AP, which would explain the dark lyrics maybe. It's another cool video involving trippy animation and Alex Karpovsky, the actor who plays Ray in Girls. 

I'm not that nice

I'm mean and I'm evil

Don't call me nice

I'm gonna eat your heart out

I've got some work to do

Baby, I'm ready

I'm ready, ready, ready to blow my lid off

Yeah

Go fuck yourself

You heard me right

Don't call me nice again

Don't you have somewhere to be at seven thirty?

Baby, I'm ready

I'm ready, ready, ready to blow my brains out

You die

And words don't do anything

It's permanently night

And I won't feel anything

We'll all be laughing with you when you die

sourced in this image from "The Heart of Man; Either a Temple of God, or a Habitation of Satan; Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, an 1851 book by German religious figure Johannes Evangelista Gossner."

MGMT  are one of those groups I could never pick out from a police lineup. Like Phoenix or Foster the People (whose "Pumped Up Kicks" very much struck me as a cleaned-up radio-ready rip on Ariel P - bouncy catchy retro-y tune, twisted lyrics about a school shooter). Or the Swedish chaps who do "Young Folks" - Peter Bjorn and John. 

These are acts I know only from the rotation they get on modern rock stations in Los Angeles. Which was a lot in the first years we arrived here and were driving around, using the radio, whereas nowadays it tends to be Spotify or Tidal in the car.  But you still do hear "Young Folks" or "Lisztomania" on the radio now and then. 

Tempting to shove MGMT into the category of Clever Dick Pop just for the production obsession and the retro synth penchant, but I think there is some real feeling in there hiding behind the layered-ness. 

They do seem unAmerican  - I sort of imagined them being much more popular in France. In fact, Switzerland seems to have a thing for them judging by their chart placings - it was the only place "When You Die" was a proper hit. 

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An earlier post on "bands from nowhere" aka faceless rockno bollocks

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update

Here's clever sod Momus with a newish song called "Life With Eno" off an album called Quietism

Off the map

Insofar as there is one

A film soundtrack by Eno

Plays in my ears

Events in Thick Fog

Is what it’s called

No singing 

Just a pleasant sense of being lost

As the fog of the real world

Starts to swirl

And Eno, I imagine him

As friendly

Like a guide for the blind

Showing the dead

The catacombs beneath the Panama Canal

At the airport

There’s a Chinese supermarket

And a briefcase synthesiser

Eno now unfolds

To play us sounds he’s made

From birds

I believe

He just wants his music

To sound like animals and birds

Fair enough

Every day is a good day

When nothing’s planned

I sink into my bath

In our hotel

And drown in these events

In thick fog

New Wavey as Anything

Glimpsed this (which used to get quite a bit of evening-radio airplay in the UK - kind of thing Radio One deejays liked) in the below, which is quite entertaining (the New Wave / punk / postpunk section of a long series on the story of Aussie rock)

Talking of Aussie things that are New Wavey as Anything

Surely there is none more Noo  - unless it's some videos of The Plastics - than various scenes in this film (but also the entirety of the film) 

Something I wrote on Starstruck for a piece on the worst and the best punk movies

STARSTRUCK (1982 – directed Gillian Armstrong)

A riot of primary colors and man-made fabrics, Starstruck might be the most New Wave looking movie ever. Focal figure Jackie Mullens, an aspiring singer in early Eighties Australia, has bright orange hair and carotene lipstick; her 14-year old cousin/manager Angus sports a skinny tie and a purple rinse.  The pair live with Jackie’s pub-owner mum, a mash-up of Margaret Thatcher and Edna Everage sluiced through the color-palette of a Split Enz record cover. The barroom and the domestic spaces adjoining seem plucked from the video for Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”  and the dance formation scenes in the Lizard Lounge nightclub are as jaggedly robotic as SNL’s sketch Sprockets. Jackie has no voice to speak off,  but sheer chutzpah makes her ascent to stardom seem irresistible. When the presenter of a TV show beguiles her into showbizzing up her act to win a talent show, her spunky spirit crumples – but only for a moment. She and her band smuggle themselves onto the soundstage and wow the audience with their true sound and style, which triggers the audience to synch up to Jackie’s herky-jerky dance like the teenyboppers in Devo’s “Girl U Want” video. Victory and a 25 thousand dollar check are hers. Spirited young women is a Gillian Armstrong specialty: see also My Brilliant Career, Little Women, and her documentary series that began with some teenage girls in Adelaide and followed them at intervals through their lives. Starstruck is a trifle in comparison but – atrocious tunes aside – is a charmer from start to finish. 

Well when it comes to Aussie New Wave there's this of course  -

The damped-strings rhythm-gtr chug, the sub-Sting vocal, the kooky video, the fact that underneath the style strictures they can clearly really play - it's all archetypally Noo

Talking 

the other Bitches Brew

 Well this is some nerve of the Carpets if you ask me

Completely missed this at the time - didn't even see the advert

The Egyptian artwork even seems to nod slightly to the artwork of the Miles album

I mean, not quite, but the Mati Klarwein artwork is a bit Nubian, ancient-to-the-future, mythscience vibed. 

Plus Miles did an album titled Nefertiti and "Pharoah's Dance" is the opening track of Bitches Brew.

So what other examples are there of bands heisting iconic titles and dragging them through the mire of their own mediocrity? 

I suppose there's "Wonderwall" but the original is not all that in the first place...