Issue 199

“I wish this boat would stop rocking so much,” I groaned to myself as I opened my eyes and looked in the bathroom mirror. It was only then that I realized I was standing in my hotel room in Copenhagen.

This was my first trip to Denmark. I had been in the furniture business for a few years and my brother-in-law/boss suggested we drive from Glasgow to Copenhagen to visit the furniture fair in Bella Center in Copenhagen. At that time I was managing a shop that sold Danish Modern furniture and I was thrilled at the prospect of visiting some factories on the way there. Early one morning we drove south in my brother-in-law’s green Reliant Scimitar sports car to Harwich and took the overnight ferry to Esbjerg.

On arrival in Denmark the countryside looked pretty much the same as the England we had just left: flat and characterless. But as the road signs were in Danish and driving was on the right hand side of the road we felt very cool. On our eastward trip to Copenhagen we stopped at one or two furniture factories. I had never seen such spotlessly clean facilities. All the machinery was gleaming and unlike Scottish factories, there was no dust in the air. Now I understood why Danish furniture was so beautiful. It was a marriage of ethos and simple aesthetics. Add craftsmanship to this and you have something of wonder. I am still an aficionado.

We arrived in Copenhagen and attended the show. While wandering around, looking at various lines, we bumped into people we knew who suggested we join them for dinner. The evening was memorable for two reasons. The first was that, we ate at a restaurant called “7 Smaa Hjem”(7 Small Homes). This was one of the top restaurants in Copenhagen in the late Sixties and the food, to my unsophisticated Scottish palate, was like nothing I had ever had. (I have often wondered if I would still appreciate it now.) The second reason was that after dinner, we went to see a really raunchy porn movie that almost brought up the whole meal.

The next day we met one of the reps we were friendly with. He looked really terrible. Bedraggled did not began to describe this man who was always nattily dressed and coiffed. We asked him what had happened and he didn’t say a word. He took out his card, turned it over and wrote on the back, “Vikingbåde.” His croaking voice said, “Give this to the taxi driver and be there at seven.”

The taxi took us down to the port and under a sign saying "Vikingbåde" stood about a hundred people. We bought tickets and joined the crowd. At seven o’clock a whistle blew, the gate opened and everyone rushed towards a boat. We went with the flow, which led us downstairs to a large stateroom. Inside were long tables, piled high with food and bottles of aquavit. We sat down and noticed that even though there was enough food for an army, no one touched anything. The boat took off and after about 20 minutes, the whistle sounded and everyone dug into the food and started to drink.

Not being shy, we joined in. In talking to my neighbors the mystery was soon revealed. Duty on alcohol in Denmark was very high in those days. This ship sailed into international waters between Denmark and Sweden. When it reached that magic spot, the duty-free bar was opened and booze became really cheap. The large amount of food and low-priced alcohol encouraged everyone to party. This lasted for quite a few hours and, on docking, I accompanied my neighbors and new best friends to the Luna Park in Tivoli Gardens. Tivoli is a world-famous amusement park and garden in the heart of Copenhagen. I vaguely remember riding a roller coaster for many hours then going out for drinks afterward.

The following morning, still suffering from “sea-sickness” I left the hotel and returned to Tivoli Gardens. It was a quiet, sunny, Sunday morning. The park was almost deserted and while ambling along a chestnut tree lined path, I stumbled across a brass band practicing. In Scotland in those days, brass bands were very much a coal mining (i.e. blue collar) enterprise. I was a middle-class snob and didn’t think much of them at all so I thought of moving on but a park bench beckoned and I sat down to listen. As the music played and the melodies soared over my aching limbs everything changed. My headache disappeared; my flesh stopped crawling and my eyes opened wide. Perhaps it was the sun, or the serenity of the park, but I know it was the music that healed my hangover and turned me into a lifelong fan of brass band music.

 

Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/videomaxic.

With a tip of the hat to China Crisis for inspiring the title.

I think we can all agree that no audio system is perfect. Perhaps the biggest challenge in the art of reproduced sound is getting the recording microphones and speakers as right as possible, since they’re most susceptible to the fact that when you have a physical transducer, they’re subject to inertia and hence the inability to reproduce the audio waveform accurately. (Maybe that’s why I like the sound of ribbon mics and ribbon and planar magnetic drivers so much – they’re low-mass.) And of course, with loudspeakers you have to deal with things like internal resonances and baffle diffraction, and the endless quest to match the low, mid- and high-frequency drivers and optimize crossover designs.

So, there are still “tells” in an audio system that cue us into the fact that we’re not listening to the real thing, even though a good system can render a reproduction of the real thing that can be captivating. (“Good” also doesn’t have to equal “expensive.”)

And what is “reality” in reproduced music in the first place? The vast majority of recordings are multi-miked, compressed, EQ’d, effected, and created using monitor speakers that almost certainly aren’t the same as ours.

Is audio “perfection” impossible then? Maybe, maybe not – I have faith in the power of technology to get us there, or at least ever-closer. But the laws of physics are what they are (unless…don’t even get me started…), and the ear/brain is extraordinarily sensitive, so, what a challenge.

I wonder if perfection is even an ultimate goal. Perhaps we’ve grown accustomed to not only hearing audio colorations and distortions, but liking them, and even preferring them to a more “accurate” sound. I have some thoughts, most of them based on personal experiences.

 

 
"If it makes you happy, It can't be that bad..." Courtesy of Pixabay.com/5688709.

 

I think many people think of “coloration” as “inaccurate tonal balance.” I confess, I like the tonal balance to be a little on the warm side. Conversely, if a system is too bright, I don’t like it. Curiously, my upper midrange and high-frequency hearing loss hasn’t diminished this preference – I’m not finding myself liking brighter systems as I get older. The brain compensates.

I think sometimes upper midrange and high-frequency emphasis is mistaken for “detail” or “resolution.” Some audiophiles seem to like that, and that’s fine.

Let’s open the can of worms of whether tube electronics are more “accurate” than what some might call “sterile” or “cold” solid-state components – or if tubes add a pleasing harmonic distortion. I think we’ll be debating this forever, measurements and 12AX7s in hand. I like any kind of design topology if it’s done well – I don’t care if it’s a tube this or a Class D hybrid that – Yet I certainly enjoy the perhaps-stereotypical characterization of tubes adding “warmth” and “dimensionality” to the sound. I’ve mentioned before in these pages that I once owned a Gordon Gow commemorative edition Mcintosh MC275 power amplifier, and that thing made everything sound pretty. Was it “accurate?” No, and it didn’t offer the last word in resolution of low-level information, but man was it lovely to listen to. I wish I still had it, but it caught on fire during one particularly festive Fourth of July listening session.

Sometimes tubes can be microphonic. I have an Audible Illusions Modulus 3 preamp, and microphonic tubes will give a roughness to the upper midrange and highs. (A shame, because gold-pin 6DJ8/6922 Made in Germany and “Bugle Boy” Made in Holland Amperex tubes sound heavenly in the Modulus 3 until they go microphonic, which in that preamp is rather quickly.) Yet on an audio forum one participant said they actually preferred slightly microphonic tubes in some applications, for the “liveliness” they bring to the sound.

Loudspeakers are perhaps the most obvious example of different design approaches. Horn-based loudspeaker designs have a very different “feel” than cone-driver or panel designs. Is one better than the other? Sigh…I wish I had a speaker that combined the dynamic ease and “jump” factor of horns with the tight punch of dynamic drivers in a sealed enclosure, and the spaciousness of panel speakers. Many speaker designs attempt to combine these various elements, and it’s not surprising why their auteurs would take such a hybrid approach. Pick the imperfect loudspeaker you like the most (though dang, some of them are so good, especially in certain aspects, they’re downright spooky.

What about digital distortions? I’m going to put this out there: are there certain types that are more pleasing to the ear than others, or do they all suck to a greater or lesser degree? I don’t know. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve considered the question in all my years in audio. (I can see legions of digital engineers rolling their eyes right now. Frankie, where ya been?) I have a Cambridge Dac Magic 200 DAC. It cost a modest $249, and I know it doesn’t have the resolving power of a better DAC, yet like that old McIntosh MC275 it sounds smooth and warm and pretty, and not harsh and grating like some digital gear I’ve heard. Something is happening to the digital signal in that box to give the sound its friendly character, and I don’t know if it’s coloration imparted by the analog circuitry or what.

Conventional wisdom says that unwanted mechanical vibrations are bad. They’ll affect sonic purity and “smear” the sound, and should be dealt with. (I doubt anyone will argue that turntables should be isolated from vibration, especially those of us with springy floors.) But surprise surprise, like all things audiophile, there’s no 100 percent consensus on this. While received wisdom says you need to put speakers on spikes, others feel it will change the character of the bass adversely, or mess with the upper midrange and highs. The late, great Art Dudley (see my tribute in Issue 109) felt that isolation tweaks took away from the liveliness and character of the sound. And there seems to be no agreement as to whether to use cones or elastomer-type feet under audio components.

My take as always is to experiment and not be afraid to break the rules. I recently got an Audiolab 7000CDT CD transport (an excellent unit), and with everything I've tried so far, it sounds best on its own four feet, without resting on any aftermarket isolation products. Is its sound more accurate, or more colored? I don’t care.

I confess: I’ve used cables as tone controls. Still do. There, I said it.

I enjoy the sound of my system, but it doesn’t have a subwoofer. So, I’m not hearing everything there is to hear. Yet I don’t feel like my rig is lacking in bass, even though it is in fact. If it came down to it, I could live happily ever after with a pair of Rogers LS3/5A bookshelf speakers. And all those Quad owners can’t be wrong. Maybe we don’t miss what we don’t know we never had.

I sit a little too close to my speakers. And they’re not toed in.

Sometimes I like the sound of a stock power cord rather than an aftermarket one. It depends on the component and the cord. I know, I know, there are those who think AC cords don't have a "sound," but I'm not one of them. If that makes me imperfect, then I'll enjoy the irony.

As an aside, whatever happened to tone controls? With the advent of high-end audio, they largely disappeared from audiophile preamps, based on the idea that the less circuitry in the signal, the purer the sound. But tone controls can be useful, either to compensate for deficiencies in recordings or room acoustics, for the Fletcher-Munson effect (the louder the music, the more we hear the bass; the reason for Loudness controls on receivers and other gear), or because you may simply like a less-accurate tonal balance. Some Golden Age preamps had separate bass and treble controls for each channel. I know, equalization introduces phase shift, so everything's a tradeoff. And DSP room correction can work wonders. Perhaps tone controls aren't the anathema they're viewed as among today's audiophiles. (And DSP room correction can work wonders.)

If it’s a record I’ve heard many times, sometimes I like the clicks and pops. They bring back memories of specific times and places. When I visited the Haniwa booth at a show and they played “Goodnight Irene” from The Weavers Reunion at Carnegie Hall 1963, I closed my eyes and I was sitting with Harry Pearson in his listening room in 1985.

My main listening room has ugly 1980s or maybe even 1970s faux-wood paneling. Let’s just say I’ve never seen it recommended as a good material for a listening room. But I’m afraid to replace it for fear things will sound worse. (That, and I’m too lazy to spend the month it would take to clear all my stuff out of the room.)

I’d venture to say that every Copper reader has had to make tough decisions about their systems based on budget. As Frank Zappa once said, my dreams are limited by the size of my bank account. 99-point-six-nines of us have to make compromises based on available (or more likely, unavailable) funds. And we’re going to choose to live with, literally, the strengths – and the imperfections – we prefer.

And what is that indefinable something that makes an audio system sound like magic anyway? I’ve heard it in $100,000-plus speakers, and a Panasonic integrated amp I got in a garage sale for $3. For me, it has nothing to do with “accuracy,” though there’s certainly something magical about hearing Dave Davies’ guitar amp on “Waterloo Sunset” sounding like it’s right there, as I did on Michael Fremer’s system one time. Magic is that elusive quality that makes you forget you’re listening to reproduced sound, and the sound, though it can be even badly flawed, has that element of “rightness” about it. I throw my hands up in trying to really define it, but to paraphrase Dr. Watson, I know what is good when I hear it.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say, or could have said in far fewer words, is that instead of being frustrated that we can’t have audio system perfection, let’s embrace the imperfection. It can be pleasurable, even desirable, and loads of fun.

 

Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/Sebastien Marty.

Copper has an exchange program with selected magazines, where we share articles, including this one, between publications. This one's from PMA Magazine: the Power of Music and Audio.

 

 

Copyright 2023 PMA Media. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Header image: Edward W. Kellogg and Chester W. Rice with the moving coil loudspeaker in 1925. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/W.T. Meenam/public domain.

When the AR XA turntable came out in 1961, it was an instant classic – almost immune to external shocks and vibrations, low in rumble, and priced at a shockingly affordable $58.00 ($598 today), less cartridge but complete with arm, dustcover, and even a stylus force gauge. (The price was soon raised to a more sustainable $78, or $803 today.) It was a runaway success. AR sold hundreds of thousands of them. The Museum of Modern Art acquired one for its industrial design collection. And fifty years after its arrival, The Absolute Sound listed it first in its article, “The Ten Most Significant Turntables of All Time.”

Its key technologies were widely adopted by other companies, and are still in use. One of those key technologies was the AR’s mounting system. Instead of attaching the platter, motor, and tonearm to the turntable’s top plate, AR mounted its arm and platter to a subplatform, suspended below the top plate at three points by damped springs with a very low resonant frequency. This isolated the arm and record from footfall vibrations or acoustic feedback. In demonstrations, AR representatives would hit the top plate with a hammer (reportedly a padded one) without making the arm skip in the groove. To keep motor vibrations from reaching the record and stylus, the turntable used a belt drive, with the motor mounted to the top plate rather than the subplatform.

The other key technology was the use of a low-speed, low-power synchronous motor and a light platter instead of a heavy platter and large motor, (Early versions of the AR XA had a second motor, to ensure the main motor started in the right direction.) The lightweight motor generated less rumble than more massive ones, and its low speed lowered the rumble frequency to a subsonic 5 Hz. The lighter platter had less speed-stabilizing flywheel effect than the heavy platters then (and now) in common use, but the speed of synchronous motors is extremely accurate and stable to begin with. Reviewers at the time remarked on the AR XA’s low rumble and smooth, accurate speed, and other belt-drive turntables with subplatform suspensions, such as the Thorens TD-150 and Linn Sondek LP12 (No. 2 on the TAS “Significant Turntable” list), arrived soon after.

 

 

But neither the subplatform nor the light, slow motor originated with AR. The company – by its own admission – got these ideas from Stromberg-Carlson, an old-line supplier of telephone equipment that also sold audio equipment. Stromberg-Carlson was one of the few companies to make both phonograph consoles and audio components. They even had a product that bridged their console and component product lines, a wood console cabinet with slots to hold whatever mix of Stromberg-Carlson components you desired: a tuner, your choice of two amplifiers, and either a record changer or a single-play turntable. That table, the cheery red, variable-speed, “Perfectempo” PR-499, introduced both subplatform suspension and lightweight motors to a general audiophile audience. The PR-499 sold for $99.95 in 1958 ($1,073 today); its companion arm, with a unipivot suspension, was $24.95 ($268).

 

 

But subplatform suspension didn’t originate with Stromberg-Carlson, either. The first subplatform turntable was probably the H.H. Scott 710A of 1955. It used a more conventional motor, though, and shaft drive. The small-motor, lightweight-drive system didn’t originate with Stromberg-Carlson. It came, circa 1959 or 1960, from the fertile mind of Paul Weathers, better known for his FM phono cartridge. He rejected the heavy platters whose flywheel effect helped most turntables of the day maintain steady speed and smooth out the small speed variations audible as wow and flutter: heavy platters, and motors strong enough to turn them, had more rumble, and heavy-duty construction added cost. So Weathers’ turntable used an electric-clock motor for its extreme speed accuracy, low cost, and the fact that “eliminating the need for a large, inherently noisy motor gets rid of rumble at its source.” But that motor's low power could only handle a light load, so he used a platter stamped out of thin, non-resonant aluminum, riding on a single-needle bearing. That led to the ultimate in drive-system simplicity.

Many turntables, back then, used stiff rubber idler wheels to transmit power from the motor shaft to the rim of the platter. To drive a heavy platter, the idler had to be pressed hard against the motor and platter during play. But when the turntable was at rest, the idler had to be moved away from the motor and platter so the rubber wouldn't develop flat spots that would create periodic thumps and slight speed changes during record play. Weathers’ ultra-light platter could be driven by a soft rubber wheel that would not develop flat spots, so it didn’t require a mechanism to move it out of position when the platter was stopped.

 

 

That simplicity made the Weathers turntable ideal for kit construction. The kit version could be assembled with only pliers and a screwdriver, with no soldering required, and sold for only $49.95. That’s $523 in today’s money, but somehow $50 was easier to get back then than $400 is today – even as a college student on a scholarship, I managed to buy and build one. It was my first single-play turntable, and my first true high-fidelity component.

 

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Jacques.

This article was first published in Issue 105. The prices stated in today's money have been updated for 2023.

The best-fitting suit is a well-tailored one. You likely would never expect to try on a garment in a store and have it fit perfectly, if taken randomly from just any hangar displaying your size. You appreciate that the tailoring process adds value and yields a better fit and comfort. The other side of the coin is that you may be content with grabbing whatever garment is on offer, throwing it on and being satisfied with a one-size-fits-all experience. If you do, it’s reasonable that you would have to put up with the limitations of a tight-fitting seam or longer arms than you may prefer. The cool thing, though, is that tailors do exist who can measure us and perform a fantastic service.

Our listening rooms also benefit from tailoring, and yet, although this too may be obvious, how many of us have taken the measurements of our room’s frequency response and then made adaptive changes accordingly? (I’m sure some have, but not anywhere near a majority). In a previous article, “Standing Room Only” (Issue 139), we examined the reality that rooms have a “personality,” or sonic characteristics, especially in the bass frequencies, which are defined by their dimensions and their standing waves. These create room modes, areas in the room where frequencies are cancelled and reinforced. So, rather than getting frustrated with the limitations of our room, it can be good for us to look at the room’s personality as a foundation on which to build our subsequently tailored sound to our advantage.

All rooms have influence over the sound of our systems, so how can we achieve a “best-fit” scenario from our listening rooms? With careful measurements – with or without the aid of measurement software – and by investing some time in making adjustments, we can make vast improvements, and without hiring an installer or audio specialist.

Any room with four walls will be subject to three main sets of sound wave propagation (and reflection): front to back, left to right, and top to bottom. These are axial room modes, which involve standing waves that travel along two parallel surfaces. (There are also tangential room modes, which occur between two sets of parallel surfaces, and oblique modes, where all six room surfaces are involved, but these modes are weaker in their effect.)

To some extent, by moving the speakers further from the back wall by a few feet (or if you don’t have enough room, try a shorter distance), this can greatly diminish the effect of problematic standing waves which may be created along the front-to-back dimension. This can be particularly effective for managing the bass response in small rooms, especially from around 30 Hz to 150 Hz.

The smaller the room, the higher the frequency of its standing waves, and so, for the majority of us with small rooms, this means that we are subject to the effects of standing waves from around 150 Hz and below. Larger rooms may be affected from about 90 Hz and below. Eventually, once the room is sufficiently large enough, the low-end frequencies that are affected dwell within a range that is well below 20 Hz and of less concern because you can’t hear the effect of the standing waves. (In larger venues such as auditoriums and theaters, they occur at such low frequencies that we are never going to hear their impact.) Also, the bigger the room is, the closer the frequencies of the multiple standing waves that occur in the room, which will make less overall negative impact on the sound.

As we go up in frequency, it can become easier to hear differences in how the sound is being affected by the room. We can more readily identify where the areas of bass cancellation (nodes, or nulls) are in smaller rooms by listening for them, because their frequency range lies in a more discernible area of human hearing.

Room measurement software such as REW Room EQ Wizard (covered in “Subliminal or Sublime Bass?” in Issue 138) can be especially useful, but you can also use any number of online utilities to calculate where the nulls in your room will be located.

One way to overcome the sonic disadvantages of standing waves is to use multiple floorstanding loudspeakers, as discussed in a previous article, “Sub Missive,” (Issue 137). However, this is an impractical solution for most of us who use two stereo speakers. On the other hand, adding one or more subwoofers can be a practical solution for achieving extended bass response. Being able to specifically place one or more powered subwoofers where or near where the room’s null frequencies occur can be an effective way of overcoming the bass-robbing effects of the null. What we want to achieve is a result that sounds good to our ears, with a more-even bass response being enjoyed in multiple seats in our listening room.

 

 

(Subwoofers have an additional advantage – they lessen the low-frequency power demands placed on the main speakers. Many stereo speakers can even “bottom-out” – or reach the limit of their woofer excursion if driven hard – and at a higher frequency than their stated nominal value. By giving the responsibility of bass frequency reproduction to a dedicated sub and locating it very specifically in the room, this can radically start to transform the way your room behaves and is not to be underestimated.)

I’ve seen two schools of thought regarding whether to place a subwoofer right in the middle of a null, or at either side of it. Placing a sub in the middle of a null can result in achieving greater linearity – a smoother overall in-room low-frequency response – but at the expense of losing output (volume). On the other hand, placing the subwoofer on either side of the null effectively “breaks it up,” and also creates a more even bass response. Then, if you  place additional subs to break up the nodes of additional frequency null points in the room, it is possible to further improve linearity without necessarily losing as much bass volume.

It should be noted that placing a single subwoofer in a corner of the room is a common technique, because it’s a convenient locations for many people, and also because the sub will massively excite the room as a result of the boundary gain/reflections from the wall, which will maximize the subwoofer’s output. However, this may not give the smoothest in-room frequency response, so complimenting it with an additional sub for eradicating 50 Hz nulls can be effective in achieving greater low-frequency linearity.

All this is well and good, but how can you find where these nulls are in the first place, and then, what do you do about them?

It is possible to identify where nulls may be occurring without software, a microphone or room analysis programs. Take a test CD that can play a continuous 50 Hz tone, for example, or play or download a 50 Hz tone at this link. 50 Hz is a typical null frequency that many rooms are dogged by. Play the tone while moving your head from left to right at different distances back from the speaker, and you will notice the locations where the volume of that frequency drops. The places where this occurs are where the nulls occur.

Look at the butterfly wings as in our illustration below. The white line represents the waveform of the sound coming from our speakers. The butterfly’s body represents the null point where there is the least change in the audio signal. The butterfly’s wings represent the areas where there is the greatest change in audio signal happens. These are on opposite sides of the null and are represented one positive and one negative side of the audio waveform.

 

 

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

 

Placing the sub on either the positive or negative side of the null allows the sub to gain a better “grip” on that 50 Hz frequency and the null is all but vanquished. This method alters the amount of pressure on either side of the null, disrupting the standing wave reinforcement and preventing it from manifesting. It’s almost like creating more of an up and down pistonic action at that point, thereby reducing the audibly-noticeable fixed-point nodal effects. The room will have less “control” over that null point.

This is why using up to four (or more) subwoofers in multiple positions is so effective in eradicating other nulls which also occur but at different frequencies – and at different distances from the speakers within the room. If you listen to where these different frequency nulls are occurring, and place a second sub near these locations on either the positive or negative side of the nulls, you crush the null out. This greatly contributes to making more of the room respond with improved seat-to-seat listening position consistency.

Ideally, the key to best identifying the nulls is in using measurement software and a room mode calculator app, but if you don’t have access to or the ability to use these, you can still achieve great audible results by listening carefully to where the nulls occur with just your ears and placing a sub to the positive side of one frequency null, and, if you have multiple subs, by placing another along the negative side of another frequency’s null.

 

Header image courtesy of Pexels.com.

This article originally appeared in Issue 143.

“Madrigal” is one of those words that showed up in European music under vague circumstances, then stuck around long enough to change its meaning a few times. Most of us think of a madrigal as an a cappella vocal work in Italian or English from the late 16^th or early 17^th century. Here are a few recordings that show what else it can be.

Take, for example, the Madrigali et symfonie, Op. 2, by Biagio Marini (1594-1663), an accomplished Italian composer who worked in the musical capitals of Italy and was a colleague of the great Monteverdi. He’s hardly a household name, but in his own day the courtiers with money thought he was one of the best. To Marini, “madrigali et symfonie” would have basically meant “vocal and instrumental works.”

A 2017 recording of this 1618 collection, on the Tactus label, is by the Italian baroque ensemble Musicali Affetti and the vocal group RossoPorpora. By Marini’s time, the Renaissance was waning, thanks largely to Monteverdi’s innovative strides in making voices and instruments interact and letting textual meaning guide his writing for voice. Marini was clearly good at his job: he kept abreast of the latest trends and used them in his own compositions.

“Perché fuggi tra’ salci” has just one person singing, soprano Alicia Amo (showing off some deft baroque ornaments!), accompanied by harpsichord and viola da gamba. But why is this a madrigal? Because Marini says it is. By the early 17^th century, a madrigal was pretty much whatever you wanted it to be. A new genre, opera, had been around for almost 30 years, so both composers and audiences were getting used to dramatic solo singing with accompaniment.

Yet, thanks to the persistent success of madrigals in the previous few generations, the term still garnered respect; publishers in particular were determined to milk the madrigal cash cow until it was dry. “Madrigals” like this one (not to mention Monteverdi’s spectacularly theatrical Eighth Book of Madrigals: Songs of Love and War) show that the word was losing its specific meaning and being swallowed up by the concept of aria:

 

The Renaissance madrigal tradition did not evaporate in a day, however. Or even in a decade. In “Se nel sereno viso,” Marini employs techniques that had been common since Franco-Flemish composers working in Italy had invented what most of us think of as “madrigals”: Five-voice polyphony with rhythmically free phrasing, and (more recent, and thanks to Monteverdi) the generous application of dissonance to express the meaning of the text:

 

Some people believe the term “madrigale” is an Italian coinage combining “matrix” (womb) and “canto” (song) to refer to a simple song. Some believe it’s from “mater” (mother) and “lingua” (language), meaning a song in the mother tongue as opposed to Latin. Everyone agrees that the word showed up by the early 14^th century, which is why these late medieval pieces that originally used this label are now known as trecento madrigals. They’re quite different from the well-known Renaissance genre.

So, let’s plunge back in time – not just back in history for the type of music, but also back two decades for the recording — and have a listen to music from the Rossi Codex, one of the best surviving sources for 14^th-century secular songs. Ensemble Micrologus, an Italian group that has been digging up and revivifying little-known early music since 1984, made the Opus 111 album D’Amor cantando: ballate e madrigali veneti (Singing of love: Venetian ballads and madrigals) in 1995.

The compositional style is called Italian Ars nova, with its focus on a) secular vocal music in the vernacular language and b) putting the melody in the highest voice. The tunes called “madrigali” usually had two vocal lines with instrumental counterpoint. The stanzas would be followed by a contrasting chorus or “ritornello” (yes, the same word that became popular among Baroque composers three centuries later to describe a recurring refrain in instrumental music).

“Su la rivera” starts with two shawms, predecessors to the oboe. When the one singer comes in, he performs the upper written line, while the shawms read and improvise around the written lower counterpoint. In this period, using an instrument to stand in for a vocal line was far more common than writing pieces specifically for instruments to play.

 

On the other hand, Micrologus recorded “Lavàndose la mane” with no instruments, but two women singers. The vocalists’ perfect intonation focuses the open fifths and unisons, making the two voices seem more like one. Typical of the Italian Ars nova, the upper voice strikes the ear as the melody; that seems normal to us today, but back then the standard approach was to let a middle voice (called a “tenor” – from Latin “to hold” — because it held the melody) sing the main musical material, and then counterpoint would be built above and below it.

 

Much as I love hanging out in the Middle Ages, let’s pilot this time machine forward a few hundred years to find out how our own era defines the genre in question. Consider the recording Madrigals (Tzadik Records, 2016), which features works so labeled by American composer John Zorn (b. 1953). They’re scored for six female voices, unaccompanied, so you’d expect them to be Neo-Renaissance. In fact, they seem more like a deconstruction of the very concept of madrigal.

From Book I comes the “Epipsychideon.” The title translates to “About a little soul,” and perhaps refers to the famed Percy Shelley poem. In Renaissance madrigals, a revered poem would provide the text for a madrigal. Zorn has taken the title but not the text, leaving the piece itself almost wordless. And the most obvious historical allusion reaches way back to the time of the trecento madrigals in the 14^th century: The distinctive technique called hocket was named after the Latin word for “hiccup” because different voices toss single notes of a musical line back and forth to each other. Zorn exacerbates this acoustical strangeness by also having the line make big leaps in pitch as it gets passed around:

 

Zorn is certainly not the only modern composer to write new works in tribute to this old genre. Here are the King’s Singers performing one of the Nonsense Madrigals by György Ligeti (Sony Classical). These witty, bizarre bonbons, composed in the late 1980s through early ʼ90s, conjure up the spirit of the English madrigal of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries (Thomas Morley and Thomas Weelkes, for example).

 

It looks like the term “madrigal” is here to stay and will never stop inspiring composers to use it however they see fit.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/The Yorke Project/public domain.

This article first appeared in Issue 54.

 

 The disk mastering stage, discussed in detail in Part One (Issue 198) was the last stage permitting intentional changes to the sound of the final product, for aesthetic or technical reasons. While plating and pressing can and often do have a dramatic effect on the sound of a record, this is always unwelcome and unintentional.

Ideally, the recording would be an identical representation of the acoustic reality, the transfer to the master disk would be an identical transfer of the recording and the plating and pressing process would yield vinyl records containing grooves identical to those on the master disk, with nothing added and nothing removed. The reproducing system would then translate these grooves back into the original acoustic reality, right there in your living room. Reality, however, always interrupts us before we reach this ultimate nirvana.

Microphones, loudspeakers, cutter heads, cartridges, magnetic tape heads, electronics, and all other components of recording and reproducing systems are still far from perfect. They do, however, allow a subjective element, which may compensate to some extent for the inability of the technology to really capture and subsequently reproduce the exact original acoustic reality in a different space at a later time, through the selection of the most appropriate microphones, their placement, pairing with certain electronics, adjusting controls, and so on. Likewise, the selection of loudspeakers, their placement in the room, and choice of electronics, cables and other accessories, introduce a subjective element, which will best serve to create the illusion that even if this is not the original acoustic reality, it is getting impressively close to it.

In plating and pressing, however, we are dealing with industrial mass-manufacturing processes and manufacturing tolerances. It is no longer possible to adjust parameters of the sound in the sense of adding more bass or having any other form of creative control.

The ideal of vinyl records identical to the master disk can never be achieved due to the inevitable manufacturing errors. Each plating and pressing facility needs to be set up with a certain target for manufacturing tolerances and keep their process parameters under control to repeatably and reliably turn out products that fall within these tolerances.

Working to extremely tight tolerances means that the product is more consistent, accurate, and truer to the master disk. In such cases, the errors can be kept so small as to be practically below the threshold of perception, resulting in a product that is, both subjectively and even objectively (via measurements), extremely satisfactory.

However, tight tolerances require tight process parameter control, more elaborate equipment and facilities, a more skilled workforce, better raw materials, and inevitably, a higher rejection ratio. This last point is often not properly appreciated. Even the finest facilities will produce records that are out of spec. When they do, they will usually quickly realize and make the necessary adjustments to bring things back to normal. However, there will still be some out-of-spec records, and a choice to be made: “are these to be sold to the customer along with the good ones, hoping nobody will realize, or are they to be destroyed?” This question can be rephrased as follows: “who pays for these out-of-spec records, the customer directly, or the customer indirectly?”

In the end, the pressing plant is there to serve the demand for a certain product. It is the customer who needs the product and pays for whatever it takes to manufacture it to their standards. If their standards are high and to have 1,500 records of acceptable quality, a total of 1,000 records must be manufactured, 500 of which must be rejected for failing to meet these high standards, then the customer should be prepared to pay for 1,500 records, the high-quality raw materials, the more elaborate parameter control, and the skilled individuals who can make this happen. They will either pay this upfront, by choosing a better (and more expensive) pressing plant who will be honest about what is needed, or they can choose to pay less for a plant that will deliver inferior records, reject, then pay more to have more pressed, reject some more, pay some more, and so on. At this point in their learning curve, many record labels decide to just sell the inferior records and not care about it, if they believe their customer base will accept this.

Some people prefer to waste their money in small increments. Others invest it more wisely in larger chunks. The exact same applies to the consumer. If you really do want excellent records, you will have to be willing to pay for what it takes to make them. Neither the record label (or artist who self-releases), nor the pressing plant, mastering facility, or recording studio will absorb the increased cost of higher quality. If consumers are not willing to pay for higher quality, nobody will.

But let us leave the economics aside and see what happens after the master disks have been cut.

Master disks are soft, fragile, and contain microscopic grooves of nano-scale detail. We need a way to replicate this groove structure accurately on multiple vinyl records. The general concept is that we need to first make a durable “negative” of the master disk, containing ridges instead of grooves, and then use it to “stamp” this structure as grooves on plastic records. Unlike the rubber stamps we use with ink on paper, record grooves are 3-dimensional and the geometry is critical.

To further augment this piece with the latest trendy keywords, the “negative” is made using an additive manufacturing process frequently associated with nanotechnology: electroplating! (And has been done this way for over a century!)

But first, the master lacquer disks must be visually inspected for defects and then be thoroughly cleaned and chemically treated.

Then they are sprayed with silver nitrate to give them a thin conductive coating. This step is called “silvering.”

The silvered master disks are then immersed in a galvanic bath where they are plated with nickel. This is a very tricky process. The nickel negative is slowly “grown” through electrodeposition. The bath temperature and rate of deposition are critical parameters for accurate plating. Getting these wrong can ruin the master disk and/or the negative. Doing it too fast introduces stresses and defects. Doing it too slow increases the cost and lowers productivity.

 

When the negative has been grown, it needs to be carefully separated from the master disk. The master disk, at this point, has fulfilled its goal in life, and with surface damage from the separation of the nickel negative, can no longer be used. The negative could now be used directly to press records, but it would only be able to press around 1,000 to 1,500 records at best, before it gets worn out. No longer having the master disk available, this would be too risky and uneconomical. Instead, we usually call this negative a “father,” clean it, chemically treat it and dunk it in a galvanic bath to plate it. A nickel positive is grown on it, this time having grooves on it. This is separated from the “father” and we call it a “mother!” The mother can be inspected under a microscope and it can also be played on a turntable with certain precautions to prevent damage. Anyone who has ever heard a metal mother is left wishing we could just make 1,000 metal mothers instead of vinyl records! In fact, we can, but be prepared for a four-figure retail price. But, less friction between groove and stylus and no deformation distortions translate to improved transients, high-frequency response, and lower distortion. However, nickel is ferromagnetic, so we would be limited to using moving magnet and moving iron cartridges. I do have ideas about this, but they would be dismissed as rabidly uneconomical by any MBA with even the slightest desire to fit in with the mainstream…!

 

 

 

So, the mothers get cleaned, chemically treated and sometimes even de-horned, de-ticked, and polished, before being placed back into a galvanic bath to grow another negative, which we call a “son” or “stamper.” A mother can grow several “sons,” since she is tough and resistant to separation damage (as long as the person doing the separation actually knows how to do it). Happy family moments!

 

Stampers then need to be accurately centered. This is what defines the centering of a record. The centering is done by observing the runout on the locked groove under a measurement microscope and adjusting a turntable stage until it is deemed acceptably centered. At that point, a center hole is punched, but not a small one for a turntable spindle! The stamper is held on the molds of a press, through a larger center hole and around the perimeter.

 

The stamper is sanded on the back and label area and formed on a pre-former, giving it the necessary contour around the edge and center for the mounting hardware on the press.

 

Two stampers are fitted on a press, one for each side of the record. Raw PVC is formed into soft pucks, often called “biscuits”, through an extruder. A puck is sandwiched between two round paper labels (already printed and dried in an oven) and inserted into the press, between the two stampers. Steam heats up the molds and a hydraulic system presses the puck into a flat record with the grooves stamped on it. Then the steam is shut off and water runs through the molds to cool them and solidify the record.

PVC is a thermoplastic, so it softens with heat and hardens again when cooled. At the end of the cooling cycle, the press opens, the record is removed and is moved to the trimmer table, a turntable which clamps and rotates the record while the edge is trimmed. After the edge trimming, the records are stacked on cooling plates and left there to fully cool down and stabilize, sometimes for over 24 hours.

An SMT record pressing machine at United Record Pressing. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/David Clouston/public domain.

 

The timing of the steam and water cycle, the pressing force, the hydraulic system and steam pressure, the extruder settings and the puck temperature are all critical. Improper compression-molding parameters result in noisy records with high distortion, warps, and many other defects. In particularly bad cases, the result can even be damaged stampers and molds, or toxic fumes from overheated PVC. Rough edges can result from bad trimming, dents can appear on the record surface as a result of worn molds or stamper mishandling, while inadequate time on the cooling plates results in warped records.

The first few records are considered test pressings and are sent to those involved in the production of the record for evaluation and approval, before the proper manufacturing run commences. Usually, this evaluation is done on accurately-calibrated reproducing systems, by the producer, record label executives, mastering engineer (for a technical perspective), and occasionally also the artists themselves. This is the first opportunity these people have of actually listening to what has collectively been achieved in disk mastering, plating, and pressing. If any problems are found, they have to be traced back to their source and rectified. In case the fault occurred prior to the mothers, the entire process has to start all over again, with the cutting of new master disks. When planning a high-quality release, an adequate budget must be set aside to cover the event of unforeseen problems. It could be that masters will need to be cut more than once, if need be, to maintain the desired level of quality, along with additional plating runs and more test pressings.

Once the test pressings are approved, the manufacturing of the final product can start. It can range from a few hundred to a few thousand copies. For international hit albums selling millions of copies, stampers are sent out to pressing plants in many different countries. Then comes the real challenge: quality control of thousands of records, within a reasonable time frame and budget! We shall discuss this topic in the next episode.

 

Another view of the SMT record press. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/David McClister/public domain.

 

All images courtesy of Magnetic Fidelity except where indicated.

This article first appeared in Issue 93.

 

Copper has an exchange program with FIDELITY magazine (and others), where we share articles, including this one, between publications.

 

A point source is the theoretical ideal; why, then, do almost all loudspeakers sport two, three or even more drivers spread out over a three-quarter meter baffle? Karl-Heinz Fink, mastermind and developer behind the products of FinkTeam, Epos and many other brands, sheds light on the basic principles and problems of crossover design for us.

 

 

The human ear is an amazing organ: with the help of a single membrane, it is capable of capturing a frequency range from 20 to about 20,000 Hertz – that’s 10 octaves! Speaker drivers would break out in a sweat at the mere threat of such a challenge. That’s exactly why almost all developers spread the load across multiple drivers optimized for narrower bands. I write “almost all developers” because full-range [drivers] are a thing – and this approach has some merit, because as Karl-Heinz Fink explained to me at the very beginning of our conversation, “The best crossover is no crossover.” With this renunciation, however, you force some balancing acts upon yourself that are nigh impossible to master. If a driver is to cover the entire audible range, it can essentially neither be large enough nor small enough. Since diaphragms emit wavelengths smaller than their own diameter in a directional manner, small drivers are advantageous in the treble since they do not beam too much at high frequencies and thus enable a flat, even radiation pattern. However, as the frequency decreases, more air must be shoved around with each stroke, and diaphragm area is indispensable to do this.

In addition, a full-range driver cannot simply be left running unfiltered. The reason for this is the so-called “baffle step”: while wavelengths shorter than the width of the baffle are radiated forward by the speaker, longer waves (i.e. lower frequencies) “wrap” around the cabinet. In the low frequencies, therefore, twice as much air volume must be supplied with sound pressure than at the top. If a linear signal is fed to the loudspeaker over the entire bandwidth, the sound pressure is halved in this range, which corresponds to a drop in SPL of 6 decibels. The resulting “step” in the frequency response has to be smoothed out if a well-balanced loudspeaker is to emerge in the end. And speaking of cabinets: They, too, act as filters, just acoustically and not electrically. This becomes obvious at the speaker’s lower cutoff frequency: In combination with the driver, the cabinet forms a high-pass filter that causes the bass level in a closed system to drop below the cutoff frequency at 12 decibels per octave. In bass reflex speakers, the frequency is lower, but the drop below it is steeper at 24 decibels per octave. Midrange and tweeter drivers also exhibit such filtering functions in their respective enclosures. “When choosing a topology, it’s important to keep in mind that the acoustic and electrical effects added together determine the final result,” Fink explains.

 

 

Frequency What?

So in the end, there’s little getting around the necessary evil of a crossover – so how is it constructed? The essential components are high, low and bandpass filters, each implemented with a combination of capacitors and coils. In most crossovers, resistors are also built in, for example to adjust the level of the individual drivers to each other. A high-pass filter, i.e. a filter that allows only high frequencies to pass, consists in the simplest case of a capacitor that sits in series between the amplifier output and the tweeter. Its capacitance can be used to set the frequency below which the filter effect kicks in – the higher the capacitance, the lower the crossover frequency. The result is a “first order” filter. Such a filter lowers the signal level by 6 decibels per octave, i.e. with each halving of the frequency, the signal amplitude is halved. If you add an inductor to ground after the capacitor, you get a second-order high-pass filter that operates with twice the slope steepness: The amplitude decreases to a quarter with each octave, i.e. by 12 dB. By adding a second capacitor behind the coil, we get a third-order filter that separates at 18 dB/oct, and so on.

If we replace all the capacitors with coils in this setup, and vice versa, the high-pass filters become low-pass filters that operate according to the same laws: a single coil filters out high frequencies with a slope of 6 dB/oct. The decisive characteristic value in this context is called inductance, where larger values likewise lead to lower crossover frequencies. Analogous to the high-pass filter, an inductor and a capacitor result in a second-order low-pass filter (12 dB/octave), another inductor in a third-order filter, and so on.

Finally, the combination of the two aforementioned filters forms what we call a bandpass: a network that uses a low-set high-pass in conjunction with a high-set low-pass and allows the frequency band in between to pass, which then supplies signal to the midrange driver of a three-way loudspeaker, for example.

The above is what the transfer functions of the filters might look like in a typical three-way loudspeaker (with blue representing the bass, green the midrange, and yellow the treble). While the bandpass allocates a frequency band cut off at the top and bottom to the midrange, the woofer and tweeter are each bandwidth-limited on only one side by a lowpass and highpass, respectively. According to the electrical filter function, this hypothetical speaker would reproduce arbitrarily low frequencies, but the bass driver interacts with the cabinet to form an acoustic high-pass filter that imposes a lower cutoff frequency – about 30 - 40 Hz for a typical floorstanding speaker. The dotted line at the low pass filter represents a filter of the same cutoff frequency but of a lower order (e.g. 2nd instead of 3rd order; figure not to scale).

Another important parameter of the filter function is the damping – the so-called quality factor or Q-value, which describes how smoothly or abruptly the transfer function approaches its slope in the range of the crossover frequency. At low Q values, the transition occurs gradually over a wide frequency range; at higher Q values, it occurs correspondingly faster.

Thus, a crossover for a two-way loudspeaker consists of a high-pass filter in front of the tweeter and a low-pass filter in front of the mid-bass driver. Each of the two drivers takes care of the frequency range it handles best, and thus everything should be fine. Unfortunately, however, this is not the case: in fact, the filtering delays the signal by 90 degrees per filter order – so it’s not just a matter of achieving a smooth frequency response, but also of getting the phase behavior well enough under control to produce a predictable, even and time-correct dispersion pattern. In choosing the type of filter, one has “the choice between cholera and plague,” as Fink describes.

Smooth Frequency Response…

The two most common filter types are Butterworth and Linkwitz-Riley filters, which differ not only in filter order but also in their quality factor: Linkwitz-Riley filters are even-order filters with a Q value of 0.5, which means that at the crossover frequency, both ways – mid/bass and treble – are attenuated by 6 dB each compared to the input level. Second-order Linkwitz-Riley filters produce a phase offset of 180 degrees, which would cause the frequency branches to cancel each other out. The solution is quite simple: simply reverse the polarity of one of the two drivers, causing the phase to rotate another 180 degrees and thus arrive back at zero – albeit delayed by one wavelength. With a fourth-order filter, this problem solves itself by a 360-degree phase rotation. The time delay is not a significant problem as long as the crossover frequency is reasonably high – at 2.5 kilohertz we’re talking 0.4 milliseconds.

Since the -6 dB at the crossover frequency correspond to half the original signal amplitude, our elementary school math skills tell us that the two branches add up exactly to the correct level – but that’s only true on-axis. If the listener moves his head up or down, the phase of the frequency branches shifts in relation to each other. They now no longer add up completely or, in extreme cases, even cancel each other out, causing the level to drop off-axis in the transition range. “Especially at low crossover frequencies – for example, with three-way loudspeakers – this can lead to a rather thin-sounding low end, since less power is radiated into the room overall as a result of the filtering,” Fink elaborates. This can be mitigated with higher filter orders. The steeper filter slopes limit the problem to a narrower frequency band, but this in turn means accepting a greater overall time offset, which can be considerable at low crossover frequencies.

…Or Uniform Dispersion?

Or you decide for a Butterworth filter. This is characterized by an odd order and a Q-value of 0.707. This higher Q-value (one speaks of lower damping) means that the level at the crossover frequency is only 3 dB below the input signal – so in itself one would expect a hump of 3 dB when adding the two branches. However, due to the phase offset by 90 degrees (first-order), the levels do not add up completely and a largely smooth frequency response in the crossover region is the result. Since the phase turns towards 0 or 180 degrees as you move your head vertically (depending on whether you move up or down), you end up with a mixture of peaks and troughs that add up to more or less the right amount of radiated power. However, you can probably already see where the problem lies: Off the listening axis, Butterworth filters sometimes behave quite unpredictably and unrefined because of their “skewed” phase behavior, which makes it difficult to achieve an overall balanced frequency response.

“No matter how you do it, you do it wrong,” the cynic may now lament – and indeed, every loudspeaker is ultimately a box of compromises. Perfection doesn’t exist anywhere, however, and when you take a seat in your chair tonight, fire up the system, and press play, you’ll have another opportunity to marvel at how well compromises can work when the developers behind them know what they’re doing.

Special thanks to Karl-Heinz Fink.

 

This cartoon originally appeared in Issue 128.

Before the Runaways, before the Go-Go’s, before the Bangles – there was Fanny. David Bowie was quoted in a 1999 Rolling Stone interview about Fanny: “They’re as important as anyone who’s ever been, ever.” Fanny was led by the sisters June and Jean Millington, on guitar and bass, respectively. They defied gender stereotypes with sophisticated musical virtuosity, great songwriting, passionate singing, and a ferocious, kick ass, no-holds-barred attitude on stage.

Part One of Copper's interview with June Millington appeared in Issue 198 and continues here.

This cartoon first appeared in Issue 121.

By now it has been established that my renewed interest in reel-to-reel is unnaturally narrow, in that I am not a recordist in any manner. I may be the only audio scribe who didn’t scratch his head when Thorens announced, at the last Munich High End Show, that its version of the Ballfinger tape deck would be playback-only. The only time I ever hit the Record button is when I am erasing old homemade tapes for recycling.

No wild claims for effect, no melodrama: I genuinely do not tape live music or off-air broadcasts, nor do I transfer LPs or CDs to tape, as I am not (yet) part of the niche group which finds it improves the sound. I am only interested in playback of commercial tapes, and that excludes the fare from the current practitioners, a.k.a. The Open Reel Revivalists.

Again, I do not wish to criticize any of the labels presently and bravely issuing pre-recorded open-reel tapes in the 2020s, nearly all of which are 1/2-track/15 ips releases, with prices up to around $1,000, but averaging $300 – $500. Partly it’s because I simply cannot afford them, but mainly it’s about repertoire. I just don’t have any desire to buy tapes of artists I’ve never heard of, performing music which I don’t care about, while the reissues of known works are simply out of my price range. And this is despite having heard examples of the Revivalists’ output, and been dazzled by their sonic worth.

Thus, you might have already surmised that I have restricted my playback to tapes produced during The Original Open Reel Era, roughly the period of 1952/3 to circa-1985 (give or take a year or two on either end), with the likelihood that some of the earliest binaural tapes may have appeared as far back as 1948. This is not as limiting as you might think, because – as best as I can estimate – in excess of 10,000 titles were released by labels ranging from the legendary pioneering audiophile labels such as the Livingston Tape Libraries, Everest, Command, Audio Fidelity, and so on, to nearly all of the majors. That figure of 10,000 comes from me manually counting the titles in my collection of 40 or 50 catalogues, as found in the used tapes I’ve acquired.

 

 
Part of KK's rock collection.

 

Because RCA, Columbia, Capitol, London (the US wing of Decca), Mercury, and nearly all of the other mainstream labels supported open-reel tape for, at least, their major artists, and because the smaller independent labels, too, had access to well-known performers, the repertoire is huge, but severely skewed in terms of genre. It is blindingly obvious that – like the earliest LPs – the labels were targeting “grown-ups” for lack of a better term, because tape decks, and the tapes themselves, were costly.

Noting manufacturers’ prices printed on the boxes (as opposed to retailers’ price stickers), $7.95 – $12.95 was charged, depending on whether the tape was 1/2- or 1/4-track, a single album or a double-play, and occasionally thanks to some other factors, such as album length. (There were also budget labels and special sampler tapes from the likes of RadioShack for as low as $3.95.) Most of the vintage open-reel tapes seem to have playing times of 13 to 17 minutes per side, but many classical titles and some compilations ran to 30 minutes per side, while boasting this on the cover. Whatever the reasons, the prices equate to $60 – $110 in today’s values. In other words, feeding a tape deck back then was costlier than buying LPs. Plus ça change, eh?

Back to the genres. During the pre-Beatles era, the then-new teenager demographic got its musical fix with singles, not albums. Although major artists such as Elvis Presley (especially his soundtrack albums), Duane Eddy, Johnny Tillotson, Connie Francis, and Roy Orbison were given the reel-to-reel treatment, they were the exceptions.

One suspects that younger listeners would not become a market force until the mid-to-late 1960s, arguably the result of the perfect storm of college radio, the ascent of the rock LP, the arrival of affordable Japanese separates, and the emergence of outlets like Tech Hi-Fi, which catered to music lovers other than well-heeled professionals and seasoned audiophiles. It is therefore no surprise that the most poorly-served genres for pre-recorded tapes were soul, rock, R&B, and blues. By the time these genres did merit open-reel tape releases, the cassette had arrived and its convenience trumped that of open-reel, further limiting its commercial or practical appeal. And while many hundreds, if not thousands of rock titles ultimately were released on open-reel tape, the survival rate is low, while demand today outstrips that of all other genres. But we’ll get to that next time.

Surprisingly, there were more (US) folk and country and western titles available than one might have imagined. The former genre was hot in the early 1960s, with the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary, the Kingston Trio, the New Christy Minstrels, and others benefitting from the “hootenanny” craze, crossing over into the pop charts and enjoying TV coverage. Country music was more radio-supported than album-oriented, but huge crossover stars, including Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Chet Atkins appeared on open-reel tape.

At this point, to provide some basis for these observations, please note that my research is based on analyzing the aforementioned catalogues, and on cataloguing more than 2,200 tapes I have acquired in the past three years. While that is hardly a large enough sampling to make broad generalizations, neither is it so tiny as to be risible or insignificant. Moreover, I have forced myself to develop an open mind, beyond rock, pop, soul, blues, and the like, and, out of necessity, have not limited myself by genre.

I have now spent many hundreds of hours in my dotage listening to music which never before issued forth from my sound systems. If you told me five years ago that I would be listening (as I write this) to Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic’s album, Russian Sailor’s Dance (Columbia MQ801) with selections by Glière, Grieg, Copland, et al, I would have asked you to share your hallucinogens with the rest of the class. I have sat enthralled by Mantovani, marveled at Percy Faith, swooned to Jerry Vale and even sat through Half a Sixpence.

 

19 tapes per box, and KK has 80 of them.

Next month, I’ll get to the rock tapes and why they’re so rare, but for the moment, here are my musings. Out of 2,200-plus tapes, there are around 150-200 duplicates, so my study is based on 2,000 tapes purchased at random. Aside from a dozen purchased at the UK’s AudioJumble and a box of 40 or so from a record store, all are from eBay vendors – around 50 different suppliers. And I have watched prices treble since I started collecting, so I am not imagining a revival in interest in reel-to-reel, and I claim no credit for it.

It swiftly emerges from the sheer presence of so many multiple copies that the best-selling tapes back in the day appear to be the soundtracks or Broadway scores to The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Carousel, Camelot, The King and I, and South Pacific; popular music from Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Englebert Humperdinck, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Tom Jones, Johnny Mathis, and Barbra Streisand; easy listening from Percy Faith, Ray Conniff, and Mantovani; and classical recordings from the aforementioned Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Andre Kostelanetz, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops and others of that caliber.

Jazz is represented by the Dukes of Dixieland, Dave Brubeck, Al Hirt, and a few others, but it might be that – like the best rock titles – they haven’t been fed to eBay because the lucky owners hang on to them, e.g., Miles Davis tapes fetch a fortune. The most common tapes from the pop, soul and rock era are the Supremes, the Carpenters, Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, and Neil Diamond.

If open-reel tape is beginning to seduce you – all it takes is one good demo at a hi-fi show from the likes of Jeff Joseph – be warned. The cutoff date for open-reel means no Rage Against the Machine, no Prince, no Ed Sheeran, no Beyoncé, no Foo Fighters. It is a format locked in the past, like 78s. But if you do venture forth, you might find, as I did, that Julie London and Tony Bennett and Billy Vaughn are more than enough in the wee small hours.

 

Header image: Ken Kessler’s pension fund.

This article first appeared in Issue 151.

The Middle Ages lasted from the fall of Rome (c. 500) to the start of the Renaissance (c. 1400 – 1500). It’s a span also referred to as the medieval period or Dark Ages – an age that brings to mind images of knights in shiny armor, castles, and damsels in distress. [1] The Dark Ages were known for widespread poverty, famine, plague, superstition, and social oppression, but are now looked back on as an active time that also included economic expansion, urban growth, the emergence of national identities, the Crusades, Gothic art and architecture, and the birth of the university.

There were positive developments in music, too, from monophonic chants to the beginnings of  polyphony. The first music we have any documentation for comes from this period and some modern composers have looked back to the Middle Ages and Renaissance as sources for their own compositions. Here’s a sampling of medieval music from several countries as well as two modern approaches to these early compositions.

Hymns of Kassiani/“Hymn of Kassiani”/Cappella Romana (Cappella Records/Naxos SACD) Kassiani (aka Kassia c. 810 – c. 867) was a 9^th century nun, poet, and hymnist generally thought of as the first woman composer. She was certainly not a helpless damsel in distress. Born into a wealthy family associated with the imperial court in the Byzantine Empire of Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) she became famous partly because of her popular composition known as “The Hymn of Kassiana” and partly because of her supposed encounter with the emperor Theophilus:

“The emperor is said to have met Kassia as a potential bride. He said to the young Kassia: ‘Through a woman came forth the baser things’ (referring to the Biblical story of Eve eating the forbidden fruit). To which she replied, almost certainly with a steely glint in her eye: ‘And through a woman came forth the better things,’ referring to Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary…

She did not marry him. Instead she became a nun and wrote some of the most haunting music of all time.” [2]

The Cappella Romana, a leading ensemble in the field of medieval Byzantine chant, performs Kassia’s hymn in a traditional manner. The music is usually sung by an accompanied soloist but also performed by choirs singing in unison supported by a Byzantine vocal bass drone. Kassia’s melodies closely follow the rhythms of the text, and motifs are often used to mirror the words. The hymn is attractive and melodic but also has occasional resolutions and chromatic changes that wouldn’t be out of place in some modern choral music.

There are several examples of the composer’s music on the disc that haven’t been recorded before, all impeccably sung. The sound is excellent in the standard CD format and even better for those who can take advantage of the SACD layer. The production quality is outstanding, including texts that are provided in Greek and English. A very appealing and welcome new release…the first in a planned series to record all of Kassia’s surviving works.

 

Hildegard von Bingen: Symphoniae/“O quam mirabilis”/Sequentia (BMG CD)

Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179) was another woman who would never be considered a damsel in distress. A well-known German saint, she is now recognized as a New Age guru, an early feminist, composer, writer, and visionary celebrated not only for her music but for her experimental contributions to holistic medicine and nutrition. (Her name has also inspired the creation of contemporary products like Hildegard bread and Hildegard’s naturopathic moisturizers and face creams.)

In the 1150s Hildegard gathered her songs into a lyrical cycle called the Symphony of the harmony of heavenly revelations. “O quam mirabilis,” from that cycle, is her depiction of life’s central miracle: When God looked at the beauty of man (referring to both males and females), he knew he could not create anything greater. Hildegard’s music is important because her melodies were freer, more wide-ranging and elaborate than those used by her contemporaries and she gave plainsong greater expression through the use of long, spiraling melismas [3] and soaring melodies. [4]

Maybe not be the best choice for Karaoke night, but ideal music for relaxing while eating Hildegard bread.

 

Love’s Illusion: Music from the Montpellier Codex 13th-Century/“Amours, dont je sui”/The Anonymous 4 (Harmonia Mundi CD) For 30 years the critically acclaimed female quartet Anonymous 4 (established in 1986) specialized in singing early music. Every album these four women recorded treated listeners to little-known medieval repertoire, with superb performances and musicianship presented in superior sound by Harmonia Mundi.

Love’s Illusion focuses on courtly love texts from the Montpellier Codex, the richest single source of 13^th century French polyphony. The Codex spans the entire century and contains polyphonic works in all the major forms of its era, especially motets. [5] From the extensive literature of fin amours [6] “there emerge two inviolable precepts: first, true love may exist only outside of marriage and, second, a man must subject himself totally to the will of his beloved, whether her requests seem rational or not. A woman’s physical perfection…was an outward symbol of her inner goodness, for which a man yearned and suffered, to the point of death…[However] the romantic love expressed in the literature of fin amours was probably little more than a clever illusion; the [misogynistic] reality of day-to-day life remained unchanged.” [7]

“Amours, dont je sui” is a double motet where each of the two upper voices has its own text. The following translation is from from the start of “Amours…” and reflects the ideal of courtly love:

“Love, who holds me captive,
makes me sing.
I must be gay
and conduct myself joyfully,
for the one whom I most love and desire
deigns to call me sweetheart.
I want to serve and honor her
with a true heart, without deception,
all my life long.

 

On Yoolis Night: Medieval Carols & Motets/“Ther is no rose of swych vertu”/The Anonymous 4 (Harmonia Mundi CD) The Anonymous 4 return in a program of carols, plainchant, songs, and motets for Christmas using English sources from the 13^th through the 15^th centuries. These works refer to all aspects of the Christmas story and its many related legends, and “express a range of responses to these marvels: mirth and joy, wonder and praise, and even theological exegesis. But the thread that ties this music together is a striving toward something out of the ordinary, a special sound or gesture, reserved for this most wonderful time.” [8]

Most of the carols on this disc date from the early 15^th century and were written for two or three voices. They follow a basic pattern of refrain alternating with a number of verses but are still varied and expressive. The two-voice sections sometimes incorporate fauxbourdon – an improvisatory technique where a third voice is added between the two written outer voices to create a richer harmony.

 

Officium/“Parce mihi Domine”/The Hilliard Ensemble, vocals with Jan Garbarek, saxopohone (ECM CD) The combination of medieval/Renaissance vocal music and saxophone seems like an odd concept but is surprisingly successful. Garbarek’s instrument provides musical commentary as it weaves through the voices and breaks through any predispositions caused by time and style. Words like spacious, ancient, primeval, and spiritual come to mind and this distinctive style can be haunting.

John Potter of the all-male Hilliard Ensemble makes a connection between modern jazz improvisation and the earliest music. He explains that ancient songs had lives of their own and each monastery had its own living tradition: “There was no central authority to call upon, just the experience and skills of the singers; every performance was the first one.” As for adding a saxophone to early music, “What is this music? We don’t have a name for it…When jazz began, at the beginning of this century, it had no name; nor did polyphony when it began around a thousand years earlier. These two nameless historical moments were points of departure for two of the most fundamental ideas in Western music: improvisation and composition. The origins of the performances on this record, which are neither wholly composed nor completely improvised, are to be found in those same forces that awoke a thousand years apart from each other.”

Although the YouTube selection is from a concert, performances by the same artists can be found on ECM’s Officium. The CD has three different versions of Spanish composer Christóbal de Morales’ early 16^th century “Parce mihi Domine”: the original version for acapella vocal ensemble and two performances for ensemble with saxophone.

 

Carmina Burana Vol. 1/“Tempus est iocundum”/New London Consort (L’Oiseau-Lyre/Decca CD) This isn’t the famous Carl Orff piece but the early text and music Orff based his composition on. The original manuscript, compiled in Bavaria during the first half of the 13^th century, contains the most important and comprehensive collection of medieval Latin lyric poetry we know of. There are over 200 pieces organized by subjects like moralizing and satirical songs, love songs, and eating, drinking, and gambling songs. The codex draws upon several preexisting sources, resulting in a collection with moral and didactic annotations similar in form to various moralizing encyclopedias of the Middle Ages. Scholarly and artistic poems written by successful clerics are found side by side with lusty verses generally attributed to poorer clerks and itinerant scholars who wandered from one patron and university to another.

The Carmina Burana is an uninhibited celebration of life’s pleasures including sensuality and the physical excitement of love. You might want to listen to the original version of “Tempus est iocundum” first, then compare it to Orff’s interpretation.

“Tempus est iocundum” from Carmina Burana (original)

 

“Tempus est iocundum” followed by “Dulcissima” (Orff) – stay tuned for a slightly blurred but outstanding and clear-sounding 1989 videotaped performance of Orff’s complete work (Seiji Ozawa conducting the Berlin Philharmonic with soloists Kathleen Battle and Thomas Allen).

 

[1] There were many tales of knights saving damsels in distress, but there is little if any evidence of anything like that having actually occurred.

[2] Lizzie Davis, “Listen to the music of the first female composer: Kassia a ninth-century Byzantine abbess,” Classic FM (March 8, 2018).

[3] A group of notes sung to one syllable of text.

[4] For more about Hildegard see Anne E. Johnson’s “Hildegard of Bingen” (Issue 98) and my own article about “Women Composers of Early Music” (Issue 114).

[5] Polyphonic choral compositions on a sacred text usually without instrumental accompaniment.

[6] The 13^th century gentle spirit of fin amours in northern France is found in thousands of trouvere love lyrics. The idiomatic expressions of fin amours poets and the musical style of the trouveres (northern French lyric poets/musicians influenced by the original southern troubadours) had a major influence on the most important polyphonic genre of the 13^th century: the motet.

[7] Susan Hellauer, Anonymous 4 performer

[8] Susan Hellauer

Header image: Officium album cover by Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble.

When you think of classic recordings by Duke Ellington’s big band, an important part of that sound in your head is Johnny Hodges on lead alto sax. Hodges joined Ellington in 1928, at the age of 21, already a jazz pro with a C.V. that included gigs with Sidney Bechet, Chick Webb, and others. Except for a few years in the early ʼ50s, Hodges stayed with the Ellington band until his death in 1970.

Born in 1907, Hodges grew up in Boston. That’s where he first heard Bechet play when he was 14. By then he was already mastering drums, piano, and soprano sax. He sometimes played soprano with Ellington in the early days, but by the mid-ʼ40s decided just to concentrate on alto. His sax playing has a distinctive character, full of vibrato and unabashedly lush, yet with the capacity to hop with high energy when needed.

All the time he was with the Duke, Hodges also played with other greats and produced dozens of solo and side projects. And that’s what we’ll cover here, or at least a small percentage of them. So, please enjoy these eight great tracks featuring Johnny Hodges.

1. Track: "What I'm Gotchere?"
Album:  In a Tender Mood
Label: Norgran/Columbia
Date: 1952

“Johnny Hodges and His Orchestra,” the LP’s front cover says. That’s how you know it was recorded between 1951 and 1955, the years Hodges had left the Ellington band to lead his own group. Columbia bought the rights from the original label, Norgran, and rereleased the record in 1956.

Among many interesting things about the tune “What I’m Gotchere?” is the fact that it was written by Hodges’ wife, Edith Cue. She composed a handful of blues-based tunes for her husband’s own projects as well as for Ellington (“Duke’s Jam,” for example). This is a great demonstration of Hodges’ lyric style, speaking with his instrument. The sweet trumpet sound is by Emmett Barry, and it’s worth sticking around for Lawrence Brown’s trombone work.

 

2. Track: "Madame Butterfly"
Album: Used to Be Duke
Label: Norgran/Columbia
Year: 1954

An endlessly astonishing aspect of Hodges’ output is the world-class quality of the people he worked with. On this track, we have no less than John Coltrane sitting in on tenor sax. The complex tune “Madam Butterfly” was co-written by Hodges and clarinetist/saxophonist Jimmy Hamilton.

The use of dynamics and syncopated accents is especially effective in this swinging track. At around 2:30, the two saxes, trumpet (Short Baker), and trombone (Brown) twist the melody around like a quadruple helix. Louie Bellson on drums holds things together with offhanded perfection.

 

The main phrases featuring Hodges and the lower saxes of Paul Gonsalves and Harry Carney, are exquisitely shaped, and they project like sculptural curly-cues against the blatting big-band horn sound that answers. All in all, this humorous number is a cross-stitch sampler of jazz instrument timbres.

 

 

Another great team-up in the Hodges archives is this one with post-bop/cool-jazz master Gerry Mulligan, who specialized in baritone sax. He was also a great composer and wrote half the tunes on the album. “18 Carrots for Rabbit” is one of his (the surreal title might have clued you in).

Although Mulligan’s playing is often described as “airy,” he solidifies his sound under the influence of Hodges’ driving style. The alto solo by Hodges starting at 0:35 establishes a high-energy voice that pulls long lines through the jagged tune. Mel Lewis’ brushwork on the snare is especially nice.

 

6. Track: “And Then Some”
Album: Blue Hodge
Label: Verve
Year: 1961

There’s a different flavor of driving energy on this track from Blue Hodge, an older, tighter, more Ellington-rooted style. What they used to call “jumpin’.” The record was the first of several that featured organist Wild Bill Davis.

In Hodges’ composition “And Then Some,” his sax acts as a grounding device below the flute of Les Spann (better known as a guitarist) and Davis’ vibrating organ chords. “And Then Some” opens side A, so you’ll find it easily on this full-album video:

 

 

Encountered in France: a strange attractor and a sign of a free electron.