Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

It's been several years since we have posted anything to this blog.  There were a couple of false starts and we can't guarantee this won't be another one of them. But we can say that Life throws a few curve-balls once in awhile that sometimes has you placing things on a shelf for awhile.  Like this blog.  We are hopeful we can pull this back down, dust it off, and put a little more out there as time permits. New England-i-est part An Update on the Mancave! First thing, we are no longer located in Western NY, but on the North Shore in the Greater Boston Area.  An unlikely series of events, involving joining a startup, successful acquisition of said startup a few years later (in startup speak ... the "exit"), serious soul searching about what sort of career one can do after working at a startup, various family things all lining up (nest definitively emptying, loss of one of our mothers), and a very blurry confusing time, now marveling that we now are livi...

We live in a world where distraction and interruptions are normal, politicians talk in 30 second sound bytes, and music is present nearly continuously.  People complain about shorter and shorter attention spans, and more and more interruptions.  We feel that the enjoyment of music is also a victim of this. Before we discuss how this could be the case, some background on the type of attention spans that have been documented: Transient attention span is about 8 seconds long, and is typically something that attracts/distracts - think ads & pop ups when browsing.  With broadcasts the rule of thumb for dead air on FM, half the remaining listeners would flip to another station every 7 seconds in a long decay  (AM, was about 30 seconds for the same thing).  People will listen to under 7 seconds of a song to see if they will like it before finding another one.  I wouldn't be surprised if a typical Social Media post gets about this level of scrutiny be...

Ever wonder how we existed before?  In the last century we have gained the ability to listen to music nearly 24 hours a day if we so chose.  First with radio, now with internet streaming.  And the catalog and services allow us to find whatever subgenre, however narrow, to base it upon (or indeed widely general, too).  Some folks initially referred it to "music discovery" style, but in reality it's a carefully curated musical stream and for most people it stops there (meaning they won't buy the music but continue to stream it either paid or unpaid).  It's been a revelation when we stream and can fill the day.  A lot of ink has been spilled on how cool this is, in essence.  And some people deride it as "sonic wallpaper."  I think it's an apt description of it, though I mean no offense by it.  We can now have musical entertainment when we do any kind of mundane activity.  No performances to attend, no records to flip, you don't even have...

He's Doomed. When you look at various forums, and talk to audiophiles, there is a common mythical beast, the so-called Giant Killer. The Giant Killer means many things to many people, but in essence, it is a variation of the "something for nothing" but its story is one of hope that there exists a combinations of improbable engineering successes, and marketing blunders that offers incredible performance for a pittance. Audio reviewers talk about Giant Killers in hushed tones, audio enthusiasts look for these deals (usually fruitlessly) in new and used gear to try to find that magic component that would be like a sprinkle of pixie dust to suddenly propel their system into a new category of performance. As you can guess, we're skeptical about these so-called Giant Killers (heneforth referred to as GK in this entry), and think the sweat, time and effort would be best spent making synergistic upgrades, careful experiments with cables and room treatments and ...

The audio family at home, might choose to spin a record (LP standard launched in 1948, stereo about a decade later), play a CD (1982), or playback a digital file (c1996) as they settle in for the evening.  For us, we tend towards solid state amplification (c1955), but there is nothing wrong with vacuum tubes (c1920).  We have a dynamic speaker (c1930) but we know that electrostatic (c1955), ribbons (c1960-1970) or horns (c1920) could be there, too. While you could go through the house and do a similar exercise and see that most things in a house aside form the structure itself, are from the 20th and 21st century. Most of the basic technology found in a house was developed before 1970, if not before World War II. But ... given how white hot the electronics sector has been since World War II (really since before World War I actually!), it is a little surprising that a domestic setup to listen to music is mostly unchanged over that time.  A stereo system in 1957 is m...

"Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well." - Mahatma Ghandi "Rare is the union of beauty and purity" - Juvenal "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted." - Mae West The ultimate in purity - it is 100% mechanical, and never goes through a single one of those degrading mechanical to electrical conversions .... Analog reproduction is a beautiful thing.  You put a small needle attached to a tiny transducer into a groove that's been scratched in a vinyl disk, and then the small signal comes off of it and gets equalized and amplified and then the resultant sound is converted into sound through some more loudspeaker transducers.  Any little thing can wreck the signal on the way, make it unconvincing in it's realism and dispell the illusion of the performance you are trying weave. So rightly so, people who care about that sort of thing can get fussy.  And many...

"The Throwaway Society?" Not if you are an Audiophile This whole stream of thought came after reading an insightful article by Alan Sircom of HiFi+ magazine. The Throwaway Society   is a section of the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.  Widely read, the whole book was by and large correct - the rate of change was so fast that everyone is in a continuous upgrade cycle, tossing out the old and obsolete, and living in a sort of culture shock since mentally people cannot adapt quickly enough to the change we ourselves instigate.  So much isn't designed to be repaired or last to keep the costs low, that not only can you afford to throw it away in a few years, you must throw it away.  And what you replace it with, is usually better and more capable by a significant margin. I know I feel it.  I am pretty sure everyone feels it.  But ... in audiophilia, with a few exceptions, has escaped largely immune from this churn. As people are throwing away ...

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing.  It is a way of looking at our past, and cherry picking the things we liked about it, and minimizing the bad things.  We do it all the time, and I truly think that it leads to a better life as long as we recognize it for the benign fantasy for what it is. What does that have to do with stereo?  From about the late 1940's until the 1980's every home had a stereo system capable of playing LP's and sometimes a form of tape.  It was a central element in entertainment for a family, competing first with Radio, and then with TV in the 1960's.  It was one of the first things a new household would buy, and when friends came over, it was a central point of them enjoying each other's company.  TV did take a big chunk out of the stereo's use, but it still was a major choice until the VCR hit the scenes in the late 1970's and early 1980's.  It truly was a "golden age" for the home stereo that many openly admit were sadde...

Music, more than gear, drives this hobby  I am finding this article to be difficult to write.  I have started several times, and erased it - gets too preachy, ponderous, pedantic, detailed.  And all I really want to say is that "if you want high end audio to be mainstream, you had better make sure you have mainstream pop music in suitable resolution" Don't believe me?  Try this little experiment: Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is under 30, and the music that us old farts would call "contemporary pop" A small sample of them would be: Fun. Lorde Bastille Pharrell One Direction  Pitbull Mumford and Sons Katy Perry Jason Derulo Ellie Goulding Eminem  Arcade Fire Florence and the Machine Ceelo Green Christina Aguleira Beyonce Zedd ... etc. In this thought experiment, your parents listen to music you don't really "like" or "get." That would be some Classic Rock, Jazz, some Blues, some C...

A friend of ours who is rather well connected in the audio field was talking to us about our adventures in selecting some new cables, and made a surprising comment in passing, a tangental comment to explaining to us why people made so much argument on the yes/no canard about cables making a difference:   "Well, you guys actually listen to your music a lot ... that's not as common as you'd think" Really? Wow ... I mean we spent an embarrassing amount of money on a stereo that gives us great joy and enjoyment of our music every single night - or at least most nights.  We actually rarely watch TV anymore since we can listen to our favorite bands with the illusion of a live performance! What's mind boggling is that in the audiophile spectrum, we are dead average for spending.  It is truly mind boggling for us to contemplate that there are lots of people with gear we could never possibly hope to afford, with sound reproduction even better in a larger, bet...

November 1975, the Date when Sony opened Pandora's Box! Why would I put a picture of the first Betamax player in an article about how Stereo is in the middle of it's golden age?  The conventional wisdom is that the VCR ushered in the doom ("Doom, I say!") of the home stereo, and we've watched a multiple decades death scene as people lose interest in stereo playback given the new options like home theater, mp3 players, and streaming services on headphones. The golden age of stereo system was from about 1950 until about 1980 where people chose to fill their evenings with glorious music and companies poured their efforts and money into 2 channel playback ... The conventional wisdom was right in its facts - but wrong in conclusion ... The Thing is, the Golden Age, wasn't ... Before the VCR, there were a few simple truths that is easy to forget if you are over 40, and unbelievable if you are under it:  The only commonly available source of prerecorded perfor...

Except, they really are not competitors. Interesting article in the link below.  Says that digital downloads dropped 6% in 2013.  They compare it to the continued rise of vinyl sales. While we're all very happy to see vinyl continuing to grow in popularity, since it really does bring a lot of good sound to the table, we are a little skeptical that MP3 and Vinyl are actual competitors since most of the folks use MP3 and LP's differently. I think it isn't surprising that MP3 continue to fade in the face of streaming services which offer the ultimate in convenience and cost reduction. What would be interesting is to track the progress (or retreat) of LP and high resolution downloads over time.  Since those tend to be more "event" than "sonic wallpaper."  But, honestly, if you are dedicated to music, you will be invested in multiple formats both high and low quality and fill your day with music when you can, and enjoy the silence when you can't...

The world of music irrevocably altered c.1880 I have often wondered how music got started in our culture.  I imagine, back in the mists of time, someone, somewhere took the various melodic calls and strung them together into a melody and then taught the various tribes-people the things she or he had done.  And at that point we had actual composed and arranged music.  It is hard to tell if language came first or music - so entwined both are in the way we are wired.  Without getting too romantically colored, it must have made the long nights more pleasant and the unity of the tribe stronger. In the subsequent milennia, music has been used for multiple purposes, and new genres and ways of music distribution have been central to our religions, entertainment, and government.  In fact, to extend the old joke about "death and taxes" I do believe music has always been and always will be with us. But fast forward to the era of recorded music, which began a little...

"Perfectionist Jazz" - Enjoyable but Not the best.  Sound quality 100% In my experience the journey though audiophilia really went in several stages. The first ones were yearning, and the initial plunge into a high quality stereo, followed by adjustment of components and other ancillary items to tease the most out of the stereo. But for music, there was a long dark period of musical enjoyment that I eventually busted out of.  That part was probably the most important thing I had to do ... Music bought only for sound quality is death to enjoyment ... Yes, sounds great.  "Meh" for enjoyment (Though fallen out of favor in audiophile circles these days) Early into audiophile exploration, I got a list of "demo quality music" - it was a 3 page small type single spaced list of CD's that the author used when setting up a demonstration of an audiophile stereo system.  I poured over the list, and had only heard of one or two out of the several hu...