Here are some of the most beautiful recorded musical sounds that I have heard in the past few weeks: the matched horns and clarinet, very soft, in Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” recorded in 1950; Buddy Holly, in his just-hatched-this-morning voice, singing “Everyday,” recorded in 1957; the London Symphony Orchestra in full cry under André Previn, playing Shostakovich’s tragic wartime Symphony No. 8, recorded in 1973; and Willie Watson’s rich-sounding guitar, accompanying him singing “Samson and Delilah,” recorded last year. The source of all these sounds was a vinyl long-playing record.
I tried to quit. I tried to give up audiophilia. You might even say I stopped my ears. That is, I listened to my O.K. high-end audio rig when I could find a few hours, ignoring its inadequacies. But, most of the time, I listened to CDs ripped into iTunes and then played on an iPod with a decent set of headphones. Hundreds of hours of music were inscribed there: Wagner’s “Parsifal” and John Coltrane’s “Blue Train” and the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”—soul music, indeed! The glories of Western music, if you want to be grand about it, were at my fingertips, and I was mostly content. For years, I relinquished the enthralling, debilitating, purse-emptying habit of high-end audio, that feverish discontent, that adolescent ecstatic longing for more—a better record player, speakers with more bottom weight, a CD player that completely filtered out such digital artifacts as ringing tones, brittleness, and hardness.
Most people listen to music in the way that’s convenient for them; they ignore the high-end stuff, if they’ve even heard of it, as an expensive fetish. But audiophiles are restless; they always have some sort of dream system in their heads. They are ready, if they can afford it, to swap, trade, buy. It’s not enough, for some listeners, to have a good turntable, CD player, streaming box, pre-amplifier, amplifier, phono stage, speakers, and top-shelf wires connecting them all together. No, they also need a power conditioner—to purify the A.C. current. Does it matter, each separate thing? The cables, too? Is it all nonsense? The debates rage on, for those who are interested. At the moment, the hottest thing in audio is “high-resolution streaming”—the hope, half-realized, of getting extraordinary sound through the Internet.
We audiophiles want timbal accuracy. We want the complex strands of an orchestral piece disentangled, voice recordings that reveal chest tones and a clear top, pianos that sound neither tinkly nor dull, with the decay of each note sustained (not cut off, as it is in most digital recordings). We want all that, yet the sound of live music is ineffable. The goal can never be reached. The quest itself is the point. (...)
I tried to quit. I tried to give up audiophilia. You might even say I stopped my ears. That is, I listened to my O.K. high-end audio rig when I could find a few hours, ignoring its inadequacies. But, most of the time, I listened to CDs ripped into iTunes and then played on an iPod with a decent set of headphones. Hundreds of hours of music were inscribed there: Wagner’s “Parsifal” and John Coltrane’s “Blue Train” and the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”—soul music, indeed! The glories of Western music, if you want to be grand about it, were at my fingertips, and I was mostly content. For years, I relinquished the enthralling, debilitating, purse-emptying habit of high-end audio, that feverish discontent, that adolescent ecstatic longing for more—a better record player, speakers with more bottom weight, a CD player that completely filtered out such digital artifacts as ringing tones, brittleness, and hardness.Most people listen to music in the way that’s convenient for them; they ignore the high-end stuff, if they’ve even heard of it, as an expensive fetish. But audiophiles are restless; they always have some sort of dream system in their heads. They are ready, if they can afford it, to swap, trade, buy. It’s not enough, for some listeners, to have a good turntable, CD player, streaming box, pre-amplifier, amplifier, phono stage, speakers, and top-shelf wires connecting them all together. No, they also need a power conditioner—to purify the A.C. current. Does it matter, each separate thing? The cables, too? Is it all nonsense? The debates rage on, for those who are interested. At the moment, the hottest thing in audio is “high-resolution streaming”—the hope, half-realized, of getting extraordinary sound through the Internet.
We audiophiles want timbal accuracy. We want the complex strands of an orchestral piece disentangled, voice recordings that reveal chest tones and a clear top, pianos that sound neither tinkly nor dull, with the decay of each note sustained (not cut off, as it is in most digital recordings). We want all that, yet the sound of live music is ineffable. The goal can never be reached. The quest itself is the point. (...)
Yet there’s a serious problem with most of the streaming services: the sound is no more than adequate (exceptions to follow). And therein lies a tale—a tale, from the high-end audiophile’s point of view, of commercial opportunism,betrayal, and, well, audiophile-led redemption. A little potted audio history is now in order.
The first betrayal: in the sixties, Japanese solid-state equipment (Sony, Panasonic, Yamaha, etc.) emerged as a low-cost mass-market phenomenon, driving American quality audio, which had made analog, vacuum-tube equipment, deep underground. The big American names (like Marantz and McIntosh) stayed quietly in business while a variety of engineers and entrepreneurs who loved music started small companies in garages and toolsheds. It was (and is) a story of romantic capitalism—entrepreneurship at its most creative. Skip forward twenty years, to the second betrayal: in 1982, digital sound and the compact disk were proclaimed by publicists and a gullible press as “perfect sound forever.” But any music lover could have told you that early digital was often dreadful—hard, congealed, harsh, even razory, the strings sounding like plastic, the trumpets like sharp instruments going under your scalp. The early transfer of “Rubber Soul,” just to take one example, was unlistenable.
The small but flourishing high-end industry responded to digital in three different ways: it produced blistering critiques of digital sound in the musically and technically literate audiophile magazines The Absolute Sound and Stereophile; it developed CD players that worked to filter out some of the digital artifacts; and it produced dozens of turntables, in every price range, which kept good sound and the long-playing record alive. Years ago, many refused to believe in the LP, but, really, anyone with a decent setup could have proved this to you: a well-recorded LP was warmer, more natural, more musical than a compact disk.
The recording industry woke up, as well: Sony and Phillips, which had developed the compact disc together, released, in 1999, a technology called D.S.D. (Direct Stream Digital) and embedded the results in Super Audio CDs—S.A.C.D. disks. Remember them? Some six thousand titles were produced, and the sound was definitely better than that of a standard CD. But the Super Audio CD was swamped by another marketing phenomenon—the creation of the iPod and similar devices, in 2001, which made vast libraries of music portable. So much for S.A.C.D.s—your music library was now in your hand! For me, the iPod was, for long periods, the default way of listening to music. God knows I have sinned. I knew that I wasn’t hearing anything like the best.
Which brings us to betrayal No. 3: music was streamed to iPods and laptops by squeezing data so that it would fit through the Internet pipes—the sound, in the jargon, was “lossy.” And that’s the sound—MP3 sound—that a generation of young people grew up with. The essentials of any kind of music came through, but nuance, the subtleties of shading and color, got slighted or lost. High-end types, both manufacturers and retailers, still lament this development with rage and tears. Availability was everything for the iPod generation. Well, yes, of course, says the high end, availability is a great boon. But most of the kids didn’t know that they were missing anything in the music.
Except for the few who did. A growing corpus of young music lovers have, in recent years, become attached to vinyl—demanding vinyl from their favorite groups as they issue new albums, flocking to new vinyl stores. For some, it may be about the sound. Or maybe it’s about backing away from corporate culture and salesmanship. Vinyl offers the joys of possessorship: if you go to a store, talk to other music lovers, and buy a record, you are committing to your taste, to your favorite group, to your friends. In New York, the independent-music scene, and the kinds of loyalties it creates, are central to vinyl. In any case, the young people buying vinyl have joined up with two sets of people who never really gave up on it: the scratchmaster d.j.s deploying vinyl on twin turntables, making music with their hands, and the audiophiles hoarding their LPs from decades ago. The audiophile reissue market has come blazingly to life:
The first betrayal: in the sixties, Japanese solid-state equipment (Sony, Panasonic, Yamaha, etc.) emerged as a low-cost mass-market phenomenon, driving American quality audio, which had made analog, vacuum-tube equipment, deep underground. The big American names (like Marantz and McIntosh) stayed quietly in business while a variety of engineers and entrepreneurs who loved music started small companies in garages and toolsheds. It was (and is) a story of romantic capitalism—entrepreneurship at its most creative. Skip forward twenty years, to the second betrayal: in 1982, digital sound and the compact disk were proclaimed by publicists and a gullible press as “perfect sound forever.” But any music lover could have told you that early digital was often dreadful—hard, congealed, harsh, even razory, the strings sounding like plastic, the trumpets like sharp instruments going under your scalp. The early transfer of “Rubber Soul,” just to take one example, was unlistenable.
The small but flourishing high-end industry responded to digital in three different ways: it produced blistering critiques of digital sound in the musically and technically literate audiophile magazines The Absolute Sound and Stereophile; it developed CD players that worked to filter out some of the digital artifacts; and it produced dozens of turntables, in every price range, which kept good sound and the long-playing record alive. Years ago, many refused to believe in the LP, but, really, anyone with a decent setup could have proved this to you: a well-recorded LP was warmer, more natural, more musical than a compact disk.
The recording industry woke up, as well: Sony and Phillips, which had developed the compact disc together, released, in 1999, a technology called D.S.D. (Direct Stream Digital) and embedded the results in Super Audio CDs—S.A.C.D. disks. Remember them? Some six thousand titles were produced, and the sound was definitely better than that of a standard CD. But the Super Audio CD was swamped by another marketing phenomenon—the creation of the iPod and similar devices, in 2001, which made vast libraries of music portable. So much for S.A.C.D.s—your music library was now in your hand! For me, the iPod was, for long periods, the default way of listening to music. God knows I have sinned. I knew that I wasn’t hearing anything like the best.
Which brings us to betrayal No. 3: music was streamed to iPods and laptops by squeezing data so that it would fit through the Internet pipes—the sound, in the jargon, was “lossy.” And that’s the sound—MP3 sound—that a generation of young people grew up with. The essentials of any kind of music came through, but nuance, the subtleties of shading and color, got slighted or lost. High-end types, both manufacturers and retailers, still lament this development with rage and tears. Availability was everything for the iPod generation. Well, yes, of course, says the high end, availability is a great boon. But most of the kids didn’t know that they were missing anything in the music.
Except for the few who did. A growing corpus of young music lovers have, in recent years, become attached to vinyl—demanding vinyl from their favorite groups as they issue new albums, flocking to new vinyl stores. For some, it may be about the sound. Or maybe it’s about backing away from corporate culture and salesmanship. Vinyl offers the joys of possessorship: if you go to a store, talk to other music lovers, and buy a record, you are committing to your taste, to your favorite group, to your friends. In New York, the independent-music scene, and the kinds of loyalties it creates, are central to vinyl. In any case, the young people buying vinyl have joined up with two sets of people who never really gave up on it: the scratchmaster d.j.s deploying vinyl on twin turntables, making music with their hands, and the audiophiles hoarding their LPs from decades ago. The audiophile reissue market has come blazingly to life:
by David Denby, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Janne Iivonen
