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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vinyl mysticism

At Washington Post, an interesting video-illustrated feature on how vinyl records are made today 

Interesting, even though I have almost no interest - and zero participation - in the Vinyl Revival

Can't remember when I last bought a new LP ....  and buying a second-hand, from back-in-the-long-ago elpee has become a vanishingly infrequent occurrence too.  

I've almost fully shifted over to streaming... the logic of ultra-convenience has vanquished me...  the sound is good enough for most situations....  It's so much easier than having to sift through my collection, which is not as well-organised as it should be.

And so all those LPs I hunted down over the decades, the CDs I got sent or bought... they mostly just sit there. 

Still, even though it's all in the past for me now, the vinyl record remains one of the things that makes me feel a little bit mystical... even after having the production process demystified in that WashPost article.... because even after seeing all the stages of the manufacturing, I still don't have a rational understanding of how vinyl records work.... and consequently continue to find it more than a little magical. 

This applies to any record in any genre really, but for some reason particularly stands out if I play an LP of avant-garde electronic music, something I bought back in my second-hand record shop haunting days... or in recent years, that I've borrowed from the amazing record library at the place I work, so I'd be playing it in on my turntable in order to burn it onto a CD-R.  

These avant-electronic / musique concrete recordings are radically spatialized, teeming with minute textural details, sounds darting around the stereofield....  

Their almost glossy sound jumps out of the speakers.  

And I'm always like: "how do they get that into these narrow grooves... engrave all that information and space into these tiny furrows gouged into slabs of petrochemical matter?"

"How can all of that sound-and-space get extracted on demand via what - on the face of it -  would appear to be a crude electro-mechanical process: the friction of a stylus - this pointy shard of mineral - dragged through that incredibly constricted furrow?"

It still seems magic to me....  it defies comprehension...  it's a real "can't believe your ears" situation.

A mundane miracle.

And then to realise further that my decent but quite old hi-fi is extracting a tiny portion of what a record is capable of releasing, if it were to be put through some really advanced, superior, high-end equipment. 

When I did a piece on the revival of interest in '70s underground disco that was going on in the 2000s with Body & Soul and so forth, I interviewed David Mancuso. After  a plate full of pasta at a local restaurant, he took me round to a friend's apartment in the East Village, where this old Loft believer had allowed Mancuso to stash his ultra-expensive stereo. 

He had to assemble parts of it and also let it warm up before playing a record. 

The stylus alone cost something like $5,000, a multiple of my entire hi-fi's cost.  The cartridge even more.

Memory is hazy, but I believe the turntable's platter was suspended in some kind of special cocooned space, held in place by springs maybe, so as to protect the playback from the effect of external vibrations.  

The speakers were large, chest-height things. 

I thought how generous and loyal and self-sacrificing it was of Mancuso's friend to allow such a large part of their apartment - which wasn't huge - be so dominated by this musical machinery. 

Finally, he was ready to play some records - one was Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, a favorite of mine, rather than a disco record. And it truly was incredible, the shimmering, fluttering depth and detail in the playback, the sheer sonic presence. 

I started to see how you could go down that path (which can become a tragic obsession as with this story of an audiophile fiend, who more or less ruined his life in pursuit of perfect sound) 

The other tune Mancuso played was, if memory serves, this Loft classic by Holy Ghost Inc., who I know for their fabulous hardcore-era tracks, but this is a wafty ambient house era track:

Anecdotally, over the years I've noticed that most music critics I've know have had a fairly crappy hi-fi - sometimes I'd be surprised by the poor quality of tapes they'd do for me. Probably it was the case that all their money was going on records, rather than the mechanism for releasing their musical content - they were greedy for new sounds. 

Conversely, the people I've known who were obsessed with hi-fidelity often had really small record collections - and distinctly square, conservative taste. 

There's been some examples recently of lifelong vinyl fiends shedding their lifetime's accumulations, or preparing to do- perhaps sensing that time is running out, "you can't take it with you"

Maybe it's time for me too, to divest - or at least, to undertake a radical thinning down. 

Practically speaking, I'm not getting use out of this stuff. Someone in Japan or Argentina would get more buzz of owning such-and-such a techno 12-inch or postpunk obscurity.  Maybe it's time to strike while the iron is hot. While the demand is out there still.

But the idea of the effort involved - the expenditure of time and energy - makes me all weak at the knees and I put it off again. 

Perhaps I will end up interred in a gigantic burial mound...  shelves lining the vaulted interior, crammed with LPs and box sets.... my mummified body draped across a huge pile of unsleeved vinyl - like Smaug lying on his treasure in The Hobbit... 

More demystification of the process

snippet on the vagaries of vinyl science, from Kevin Shields, interviewed by Taylor Parkes for tQ

"So when you're making a record, it's a hard thing... different cuts of the record sound different, the kind of vinyl has an effect.

"I mean, what the needle looks like is a snowplough, because there's always dust in the air and the grooves have all got shit in them, and the needle just throws all that out the way, ploughing through it. 

"So depending on the vinyl and how heavy it is and how dirty it is, the needle can be dancing and jumping as it goes... so you get all those variations in the sound. "