Issue 43

American Dream is arguably James Murphy’s best album yet. It had to be: complete, expansive and from the heart.

After touring for This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem had the blow-out show to end all blow-outs in 2011 by selling out the grand Madison Square Garden (in 15 seconds!). They released 2 stellar alums prior to This Is Happening (LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver), each building on an already fanatic fan base. Each album is extremely re-playable and each soundied better than the last. When word that the band was splitting and there would be one final show, the who’s who of Manhattan and fans from around the world, piled into The Garden to shake the roof apart and say goodbye to a group that was just hitting their best. Smog machines, strobe lights, a fantastically large mirror ball and a charismatic ring-leader standing in the middle of it all: wearing a black suit, white button up shirt and a skinny black tie: sums up the New York City “cool” for the 2010’s. Not the obscure hipsters crammed into the smelly dungeons of Williamsburg Brooklyn to see a band you (certainly) haven’t heard of yet. No. LCD Soundsystem crafted a vibe and sound to lure those glass-eyed young professionals and the die-hard 40 somethings into a dance factory frenzy.

The previous release This is Happening (2010) was a smash hit on several levels.  James Murphy was able to craft a post-punk / art-rock album reminiscent of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, or something from the vast Brian Eno vault. LCD Soundsystem gained more notoriety from press and musical icons (From Lou Reed to Gorillaz), sold out all their venues (stadiums) and became an icon for the young affluent who just couldn’t relate to the lo-fi rock scene. This Is Happening gained universal acclaim, sold 31,000 albums within the first week of hitting the shelves, and was included on almost every Top 10 list of 2010. TIH is engineered in such a way that, to this day, I have to turn the volume up with each listen. I still haven’t reached a point of it playing too loud. This album can blast, never reaching a level of unintended distortion.

What a great time to end a band right?!

I can only imagine the motivation and reason for pulling the plug on a band that is just destroying every show they play, and who had sold millions of records within their 10 years of  existence. But James and Co. did just that and said “goodbye and thanks” by throwing a goodbye party to end all goodbyes. It was a massive champagne-soaked celebrity nightclub dance party with heavy upbeat rhythms, warm gooey bass, and lighting fit for a fashion show.

Jump forward 6 years, and a cautiously-optimistic buzz started floating around the web mid-2016. The quiet buzz was that LCD Soundsystem was recording again. Amidst their new tour, they canceled the Asian leg. In August 2016, LCD Soundsystem, officially turned the volume up on the chatter. It was official, they had started working on their upcoming album American Dream. Almost exactly one year later (September 2017), they release American Dream and James Murphy promised fans and press to never make a show of LCD’s retirement ever again.

No, really.

While some would view this album as a fresh beginning, the content steers the story to endings. Endings of relationships. Endings of love, of heroes, of icons, of the American dream itself. The songs carry some tick-tick tempos which keep my head rocking from side to side, and percussion, synths and guitars can be found on almost every song. But, the album doesn’t play on a surface level. It’s a deep release in terms of content, and yet is able to keep the pace of a fun night out.

The final track “black screen” starts with bass, snares and that famous 505, repeating and slightly escalating to a point where James Murphy’s voice breaks the tension and directs the song to what many consider a belated message for the late/great/mentor David Bowie.  David Bowie befriended and collaborated with James in the years past. Some rumors even mention that David Bowie requested the band to re-unite. Can’t say “No” to David Bowie. Murphy was reportedly asked to co-produce the final Bowie album Blackstar, but choose not to.

After many listens to black screen some reasons were uncovered. “I had fear in the room,” Murphy whispers, “so I stopped turning up.” It’s hard for anyone to see a role model hurting and weak. There is a  part of me that understands this decision: these aren’t superficial albums. American Dream deals with a lot of the melancholia of growing older and reflecting on all of yesterday’s parties. I can relate.

Lyrically, the songs of American Dream are sorrowful, vulnerable, and regretful. The songs are presented by a guy in a fitted black suit and white shirt, not wearing shoes. And at first pass they sound like great dance music. Modern day disco, super catchy and clean.  But lyrically, the content is as heavy as a bag of bricks.

By the time American Dream finishes, I am left wanting more, thoroughly entertained, but sad for no particular reason.  A fitting soundtrack for 2017.

LCD Soundsystem

Album: American Dream

Release: Columbia Records, September, 2017

The name of this Lebanese band, Mashrou’ Leila, means “The Night Project.” Their sound is a blend of Arab pop and western electronica. But what really matters is what they are singing. It’s not what you might expect, and it gets them into trouble.

Using the band’s easy-going pop sound as a shield (or maybe sugar in the medicine is the better analogy), lead singer and songwriter Hamed Sinno sneaks serious socio-political commentary into his songs, with a distinctly left-leaning bent. He is openly gay and not afraid to sing frankly about his lifestyle, not to mention questioning gender identity, gun violence, the controlling power of religion, ecological ethics, and other hot-button issues.

These songs would make certain Americans fume, so it’s not surprising they’ve recently caused officials in Jordan to cancel their concerts. And their fans take on a risk, too. On September 26, seven audience-members at a gig in Egypt were arrested for waving a rainbow flag.

Before delving into their lyric content, it’s worth enjoying the band’s sound first. Let’s establish Sinno as a gifted singer on the pop edge of the classic Middle Eastern style. I don’t have the translation for the lyrics of “Habibi” (The title means “My Love,” referring to a male), but that’s all right. Enjoy the voice, the interplay with Haig Papazian’s violin solos, and the solid support from Firas Abou Fakher on keyboards and guitar, Ibrahim Badr on bass, and Carl Gerges. You don’t need Google Translate to hear the longing and sexuality in this performance.

These five men formed Mashrou’ Leila in 2008, when they met at the American University in Beirut. They have released three albums (2009 Mashrou’ Leila, 2013 Raasük, and 2015 Ibn El Leil, and the 2011 EP El Hal Romancy). Because I don’t speak Arabic, I will focus on songs with translated videos available. The band does release traditional music videos, but they also want the English-speaking world to discover them. Instead of putting captions over the mini-movies, they put out special “lyric videos” with no visuals except a slowly spinning winged devil statue and English captions. I admire how that demands a focus on the words.

If you read the captions, you’re rewarded with their courage. “Kalaam” (“S/He”) deals with gender identity. It’s impossible for an American to understand how brave it must be for them even to broach such a topic. The style is inspired by old-fashioned R&B love songs, with a digital snare backbeat. If you’re not really listening and analyzing, this is just an innocent slow dance:

Name your favorite controversial issue, and Mashrou’ Leila probably has a song about it. Take violence, for example. Although many people think of the Arab world as a violent place, in general,  mentally distressed individuals don’t wander into business or schools and randomly shoot everyone in sight. So, when it does happen, it’s particularly shocking. “Magwahir” (“Commandos”) was written after a rare nightclub shooting in Beirut. Sinno expresses the sudden and complete change the experience causes in those who survive: “All the boys become men / Soldiers in the capital of the night / Shoop, shoop, shot you down … We were just all together, painting the town / Where’d you disappear?”

The musicians chose a strident tempo, not slow mourning, as if they wanted a song about this club tragedy that could be danced to at another club as a reminder on another, happier night:

If “Magwahir” deals with Beirut’s anger at that tragedy, then “Tayf” (“Ghost”) deals with its sorrow. The violin hook seems to call into the netherworld. I wish the percussion were less static to give this piece more shape. As usual, the lyrics contain powerful imagery of urban heartbreak: “I danced the debkeh until I was high on the marrow of the electric pole and I poured neon tears on swollen pupils.”

Clearly, these men do not shy away from the controversial. As part of a promotion for Greenpeace, they released this video called “Falyakon” (“The Sun Unites Us”). So now they’re taking on climate change. “The past is not a future decreed. The path will either protect or destroy us.” The spiccato bowing on the violin portends a hollow doom.

Not all their work is political, but that doesn’t make it any less controversial. In “Comrades,” Sinno sings about a one-night stand at a club and the enervating monotony of too many unemotional attachments. This would be daring stuff for a western artist, the kind of lyric you might get from Rufus Wainwright or Brendan MacLean.

Not surprisingly, the grip of religion on society has come up in lyrics. (It’s worth noting that the bandmembers represent a variety of religious backgrounds.) Sinno chose to handle this delicate topic with satire. “Djin” is about the worship of booze above all other gods. According to rumor, at least, this was the song that caused one of their concerts to be canceled in Jordan, a Muslim-ruled country where drinking is strictly controlled. Fans of all faiths expect that kind of defiance from the band, and hold up Sinno and his colleagues as heroes, representing the fight for greater freedom.

Mashrou’ Leila has toured America several times; in fact, they’re currently in the States. All in all, it’s probably the ideal time to be a band that flies in the face of everyone’s expectations of Arabic culture, even the expectations of Arabs themselves. The world has a lot to learn.

I’ve previously mourned the death of tone in modern audio gear, and written about wood in audio gear. As far as I’m concerned, we’re talking about two sides of the same coin.

There was a time when every radio and preamp had some type of tone control that could be used to compensate for deficiencies in recordings, or to a certain extent, the room. -Or, even, adjust the sound to match personal taste, or just to crank up the bass when the thunder-sheets are going in the Ring cycle, or for Jack Bruce’s intro to “Badge”. When you look at the much-loved Audio Research SP-3 shown above, what do you see?

Tone controls. Not just the usual treble and bass, but a contour control which altered the slope of the bass and treble controls. They were useful. Not every recording is perfect—in fact,very few are— and those tone controls were particularly useful in the ear-bleeding days of early CDs and certain moving-coil cartridges.

So: where did they go?

As is often the case in the history of high-end audio, credit and/or blame can be ascribed to Harry Pearson. Amidst the numerous pieces he wrote about the SP-3 and its multitude of alphanumeric variants, HP commented that the sound was notably better with the tone controls switched out of the circuit (one of the five push-buttons at the bottom of the faceplate switched out the tone controls). And so it was, largely due to a decrease in noise. If memory serves (and increasingly these days, it does not) one of the changes wrought by the Paoli mod of the SP-3a-1-et al was to eliminate the tone control circuit entirely. Snip-snip.

From that point, the deficiencies of one circuit in one particular preamp were transformed into a philosophical movement of sorts, one whose rallying cry was “a straight wire with gain!!”

The first product from Mark Levinson Audio Systems that I was aware of was the decidedly pro-looking LNP-2 (Low-Noise Preamplifier), designed by pro-side engineer Dick Burwen, complete with not two but three tone controls. (Side note: the LNP-2’s $1750 price tag in 1973 was almost three times the price of the SP-3, and equates to more than $10,000 today.)

But the Levinson product  that broke through in the audiophile world, again courtesy of HP, was the minimalist JC-2 preamp designed by John Curl. See the difference? No tone controls, and the pitch is even based upon that straight line thing. Note that there was no way to alter frequency response, but gain could be adjusted independently for each channel, in 1 dB steps, no less. While channel-matching in volume pots is sometimes inexact, dual volume controls are a pain to live with.–Yes, I digress. Sorry.

By the time Audio Research came out with the SP-6 (the real heir to the SP-3, not the contentious SP-4 and SP-5), tone controls were nowhere to be found. Sniff.

And yet, and yet: as Mark Levinson moved on to found Cello, he apparently saw the need for an ultra-sophisticated tone control (or more likely, sensed the market for one). The Cello Audio Palette was more complex and versatile than anything seen since the ancient Altec Acousta-Voicette, the granddaddy of all graphic equalizers. The Audio Palette replaced the grotty sliders of the Altec with  precision rotary controls. Despite the 12 knobs on the unit, only the bottom six altered frequency response—the top six were rather extensive preamp controls.

Like the LNP-2, the Audio Palette was the work of Dick Burwen. In terms of raw geekiness and gadget-lust, the Palette is pretty much the ultimate. I’ve never seen anyone able to walk past one without clicking at least one of the stepped rotary controls.

So: here we are, in an era in which frequency response can be contoured in zillionths of a dB in the digital mode (horrors!). Does anyone do that? Aside from digital crossovers and room-correction devices like those from DEQX, mostly no. One exception: yep, Dick Burwen is still around, and offers Audio Splendor, software-based tone controls and ambience generation. Despite my Luddite resistance to complex mucking about with frequency response—especially through a computer—knowing Dick, I’d bet that it works, and works well.

One problem…there aren’t any knobs!

The full expression is of course, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. If your French is as bad as mine, that may be meaningless—but it translates literally (more or less) as “the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing”. More flowingly, perhaps, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

Or, in the succinct Southern English with which I grew up: “same ol’, same ol'”.

What prompted this? I’ve been talking to some folks in the money biz—and there will likely be a number of stories about those conversations, some day— and I was struck by their universal condemnation of print media. Magazines, newspapers, whatever: all tarred with the same brush. Stay away at all costs, pouring money down the drain, yadda yadda, IT”S DEAD.

Being a natural-born contrarian, I am distrustful of common wisdom; all too often, in my eyes, common wisdom  merely turns out to be shared stupidity. So when someone utters a simplistic truism, I immediately look for loopholes and counter-examples. Maybe that has to do with my time as an IRS tax-examiner, as well.

I digress.

Remember the whole “LPs are dead” pronouncement? While it will never be what it is in, say, 1967, vinyl as an industry is the strongest it’s been in thirty -some years, with existing pressing plants operating at max capacity and new pressing plants popping up all over the place. Did that turn-around just happen? Or is it the result of dilligent (some might say relentless) efforts on the part of people like Michael Fremer, Chad Kassem, and many others?

Maybe a little of both, but I’d lay my money on the latter. So—a decade or so ago, investing in LP production would’ve seemed insane, like putting money into Enron after it vaporized. But now? Guys like Mikey and Chad look prescient, positively VISIONARY (to use yet another overused  buzzword I hate).

I can’t help but think of print media as the analog form of reading media. I don’t see newspapers ever being what they once were, at least for breaking news snippets—that chunk of the market is locked up by digital media. But for in-depth reportage, or lightweight subway/beach reading? Paperbacks, hard covers, magazines definitely have a place. For many folks—like me—a preferred place.

A number of media empires are anchored by print properties, augmented by websites and other digital outposts like You Tube channels. Think of Robb Report, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes: with each one there’s a magazine or newspaper at the core, nicely supplemented by online content. Is the tail wagging the dog? Maybe—but the combination of print and pixels is stronger than either would be alone.

So why the lack of love from venture capital and private equity folks? Is it because there’s no way of shorting their investments, of betting against an idea?

Whatever the reason, I think those folks are being short-sighted. Like an LP itself, spinning on the platter…what goes around, comes around. Mark my words: print ain’t dead. Not by a long shot. I’ll betcha that some savvy print investments will have their shareholders laughing all the way to the bank.

Check back with me in ten years—okay?

As mentioned back in Copper #40, changes were afoot at Classe’, part of the B&W Group. It has since become clear that Classe’ will be shut down, effective this weekend.

While this may qualify as Big Freaking News in the world of high-end audio, it’s drawn virtually no attention in mainstream consumer electronics reportage. For those of us who attempt to stay abreast of the changes in our insular little world, this is both frustrating—and business as usual.

The only source actively pursuing information on this development is the industry website Strata-gee.com. Ted at Strata-gee relentlessly ferrets out the truth—which in this case appears to be that …” on Friday, October 6th, the Montreal headquarters of Classé will close their doors for the last time and all remaining employees will be let go.”

Throughout all the upheaval of the last few months, parent company B&W has maintained the attitude of “ain’t nothin’ to see here”, and has decried what they refer to as “rumors” regarding the closing of Classe’.  For longtime industry folks, B&W has largely ceased to exist as it was, as headquarters of the company has moved from Boston to the SF Bay area, longtime company President Doug Henderson was let go, a mass exodus of B&W execs has occurred, and veteran PR representative Lucette Nicoll—immortalized by Art Dudley as “the eternally-beloved Lucette Nicoll”—has parted ways with the company after 27 years.

So: that’s it. Sorry, Classe’. Good luck, B&W.

Gérard Chrétien,   the longtime CEO of Focal, passed away on October 1st. Few details were available at this point; the Focal website announced:

Gérard Chrétien nous a quittés.

Focal rend hommage à cette figure emblématique du monde de la haute-fidélité.
Amoureux de musique et de son, cet homme passionné et passionnant a marqué l’histoire de Focal depuis 1990.

Aux côtés de Jacques Mahul et des équipes Focal, il a contribué à de nombreuses innovations et au rayonnement de la marque en France et à l’international.

(Mangled by Google Translate:  “Gérard Chrétien has left us.

“Focal pays tribute to this emblematic figure of the world of high fidelity.
Lover of music and sound, this passionate and exciting man has marked the history of Focal since 1990.

“Alongside Jacques Mahul and the Focal teams, he has contributed to numerous innovations and to the brand’s reputation in France and abroad”.)

I’d never heard the phrase “the agony of the leaves” until I landed a project for a specialty tea manufacturer (there’s the clue, in case you haven’t heard it either). As a freelance writer, I’m used to being led on mysterious journeys with each client. A company brochure covering the intricacies of shrimp farming in Kerala. Short training video scripts on bedside-manner for nurses. Frou-frou branding copy that was etched in glass at the entrance of a fancy restaurant that never paid me or the designer, and then swiftly went bankrupt. Just desserts?

It turns out that business-to-business specialty tea looks a lot like high-end audio. Both are specialized luxury markets with their own jargon, trade shows, and range of associated brands you’ve never heard of. Both are focused on purity and quality, and have an appeal that’s at once robust and rarified. Both are ubiquitous in common form, but much of the market hasn’t woken up to the pleasures of the truly good stuff.

Just like wine, good tea has terroir, and the client spoke with great passion about how a cup of tea is a journey to the plantation. “You can taste the soil, the seasons, the slopes, the drying process.” He took me to the tasting room at the factory, where professional tasters showed me how they brewed tea in cups of a standard whiteness so they could inspect infusion color, a vital part of the consistency of a product. They were formulating a turmeric blend, and demonstrated how to slurp the tea off a spoon to taste all the notes, though “slurp” doesn’t quite describe how little tea is ingested relative to air. “Huff” might be a better verb.

I was reminded of a similar room, focussed on a different one of the five senses, and one I’ve only heard about. It’s listening room at a storied audio brand, one I hope to visit some day. The irascible chief listener, yes I’ve decided that that’s actually his title… the irascible chief listener is someone we’ll call Steve.

As is common at many high-end audio factories, Steve listens to every single unit that leaves the premises. Someone from the company described it as one of the worst jobs in the world, especially since he has to use the same music track for months or years on end for consistency.

One day, the company decided to change brands of solder. Steve listened to a production unit made using the new material, and deemed the sound so bad that he would resign if they were to adopt the stuff. Experienced staff screwed up their eyes and ears, and when they concentrated, could tell that yes, this new unit didn’t sound quite as good. It was barely noticeable to most people, but for Steve, it was almost painful.

Hearing me tell this story and knowing how much I fetishized high-end audio, the owner of the tea company worried that I wouldn’t be interested in the intricacies of his market. But intricacies are fascinating in themselves. I’ve learned a lot, not just about tea, but shadow markets, such as contract manufacturing, that we’d never encounter as regular consumers. It’s like a playgoer being allowed to peep backstage before the show begins. My treasured find from the specialty tea industry, though, is the phrase I mentioned: “the agony of the leaves”. It is used to describe the unfurling, dancing action of tea leaves when hot water is poured over them. It’s the phenomenon that’s exploited for “blooming teas”, those hand-tied balls that blossom as they steep.

The agony of the leaves. My delight with it is not just its uncomfortable vividness, but that an effect I’ve barely even noticed is an event with a name in the tea industry; a thought as mind-blowing as knowing that solder has a sound.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall…

Here’s a quick challenge for you.  When you look at something in a mirror, why is the image always reversed left-to-right, and never top-to-bottom?  Think about that for a minute.  Always left-to-right.  But never top-to-bottom.

Now lie down on the floor in front of the mirror, with the mirror at your side.  Now the image is reversed top-to-bottom, but not left-to right.

Go read some of the other columns now, and come back to this when you think you have a watertight explanation.  And then read the answer below ….

… Who is The Fairest of Them All?

Suppose you and your identical twin stand face to face.  If I ask both of you to point left, each will point to a different side.  If I asked you both to point forwards, you would point at each other, again in opposite directions.  On the other hand, if I had asked both of you to point West, or North, you would both point in the same direction.  By stipulating Left/Right and Forward/Backward, I am stipulating a frame of reference which is different for both you and your twin.  Does this help?  No, not really.  But I will come back to it.

Consider, as someone once said to Bill Clinton, the optics of the problem.  What we see in the mirror is what we call a Virtual Image.  This means that the light rays that reach our eyes appear to have come from a particular place – behind the mirror – whereas in fact they did not.  They reflected off the mirror.  Our eyes can only detect the fact that light has impinged upon them.  They cannot tell the direction from which the light came, and they certainly cannot discern the path it took along the way, like we can with a tennis ball for example.  We can only infer these things.  So when we look into a mirror, we see not light rays bouncing off its surface, but an entirely false Virtual image of ourselves standing behind it.  Which is very convenient when it comes to combing your hair.

In fact what you see in the mirror is an entire Virtual World – a reflection of you and everything else around you.  It is this Virtual World which has the apparent property of being inverted horizontally and not vertically.  To understand the image of the Virtual World, we need a good old-fashioned photographic slide, the kind you can put in a projector, or hold up to the light and squint at.  Those of you old enough to have loaded a stack of slides into a projector will know that getting them the right way up is easy – but getting them the right way round is a pain in the [somewhere inconvenient].  If you get it wrong, the slide will come out as a mirror image.  The Virtual World in the mirror is just like that old photographic slide.  The real image is oriented a certain way, but the virtual image is oriented differently.  In order to see the virtual image, we simply flip the picture slide over and look at it from the other side.

If instead of flipping it horizontally we flip the photographic slide vertically, what we will have is a top-to-bottom mirror-image of the original.  Left is on the left, and right is on the right, but top and bottom are inverted.  Now, by the simple expedient of rotating the image 180 degrees clockwise – not flipping it – thus bringing the bottom of the image to the top, we find that the resultant image is now the original left-to-right mirror-image.  You really need to try this for yourself sometime.  And that is the key observation here … viewed from the wrong side the same image can be a top-to-bottom OR a left-to-right mirror image of the original, depending only on how you look at it.  But not both.  And not neither.  We call this an image with “inverted parity”.

Looking at the Virtual World in the mirror is the exact same thing.  The Virtual You in the mirror lives in its virtual world, but, like the picture slide, we are in effect seeing it from behind, or in inverted parity, and therefore flipped side-to-side.  Or top-to-bottom, if we just lie down.

Apart from being able to comb your hair, this has consequences that you may not have thought of.  How many of you know someone – perhaps a wife – who complains about how she never looks good in pictures?  I know mine does.  As a result, their appearances in the family album are inevitably few and far between.  Most people have an asymmetric face.  The left half differs from the right half.  Occasionally the differences are subtle, but more often they are quite marked.  As an individual, for the most part, the image you recognize as being that of your face, is the one you see looking back at you from the mirror.  It is, of course, a “mirror image” of your real face.  Since your facial features are asymmetric, it is a different image from how everyone else in the world sees your face.  Everyone else only sees your face as it really is.  You only see the mirror image.  So when you see a photograph of yourself, suddenly your see it as everyone else sees it, but this is not how you are used to seeing yourself.  It is a mirror-image of what you have become accustomed to believing you look like.  And, quite often, it looks plain wrong.  As I write this, I suddenly recall a vivid memory of being a small child, and wondering why my mother always looked slightly odd whenever I saw her in the mirror!

I need to put this post to bed with a further observation.  The “mirror-image” nature of the image in the mirror is the consequence of light being reflected off the surface of the mirror.  Mathematically, the reflection off the mirror’s surface flips the parity of the virtual image.  This parity has two states, normal and inverted.  By reflecting it off the mirror’s surface, the parity of the virtual image flips to the inverted state.  Suppose we then reflect the light off a second surface.  This should flip the parity of the image back to normal again.  How might that work?

Here’s how we can test this.  We take two mirrors and join them together at exactly 90 degrees.  Hopefully, where the two mirrors meet will be as smooth a join as possible.  We now stand in front of the pair of mirrors, and gaze directly into the Vee of the join.  Light reflecting off the mirror will actually have two reflections, once off each surface of the compound mirror.  What will we see?

Once again, we will see ourselves in the mirror.  Except this time the image is not a “mirror-image”.  If I stick my arm out and point left, the fellow in the mirror sticks his opposite arm out and points right.  Indeed, he points to HIS left.  If I hold up a newspaper, the fellow in the mirror also holds up a newspaper and all the newsprint on it is normally aligned … and perfectly readable.  This is just like where we started off, with me and my identical twin standing face-to-face.  The only annoying thing is that there is a line that insists on interrupting the image and it insists on going right between the eyes of the fellow in the mirror.  What you see in this mirror is your face exactly as it looks to other people (OK, with an annoying line down the middle).  Or how it looks in photographs.  This is an example of a non-inverting mirror.  You will often encounter this effect in the elevators of high-end olde-worlde European hotels.

So why are non-inverting mirrors not at all popular?  Well, for a start, you might want to try combing your hair in one …

A wise man once said “the most difficult thing that there is to do in the world, is to separate a man from his suffering”.

Had I heard that earlier in life I might have chosen another profession.  It is a point of utter fascination that if one looks backwards at one’s life it often looks remarkably well orchestrated.  It’s only when one looks forward that things look a little dicey.  Such is the nature of analog design, especially when it comes to miniaturization.

When you trace the developments in analog from the beginning of time, it would seem that very few detours were encountered.  That, in and of itself suggests a preconceived pathway, a portal, that once appearing, mandated a mission.  Mankind’s best efforts have often been realized by mimicking nature itself, which appears to exist in the continuous flow of time’s passage. As it turns out, I have been the willing victim of such hypnosis, spending most of my life engaged with invention and designs that can only be realized through intuition, a steady hand, and inspected with the aid of high power optics.

The development of critically-accurate miniaturized devices intended to interface the tangible world with intangible technology, along with seemingly wasted amounts of wattage and inefficient motors designed to move air somewhat accurately, at first seems a fool’s game. It is in fact, an emotional, unstoppable pursuit in the effort to capture and reproduce the healing effect of music. It is a worship of a subset of creation itself, a pathway one creates to be reminded that there is a place above the chaos that is attainable.

Of the two ways to get there, I chose the analog path, and stuck with it, for reasons I find remarkably easy to explain.  Analog is the most beautiful woman one could ever imagine; no matter how flawed, at the end of the day she is still beautiful.  She is constant energy, she traces the musical notes with a pointed finger perfectly formed.  She is elusive, extremely difficult, remarkably evocative, and so overwhelmingly devastating when she gets it right.

While the ones and zeros attempt to capture an evasive reality and home in on their prey, analog entices, beckons, calls like a siren to its possibilities, and harrowing trespass.  Sail through these waters poorly, and you will not pass unscathed.  But done with wisdom, luck, and perseverance one can pass into a new world.

If you have heard good vinyl with a reasonably good cartridge, you have met her relatives. If you have heard a full-analog disk with a very good cartridge, you have been invited to the wedding. If you have heard a direct to disk on a great system, you have met her children. If you have heard a live analog signal cut into a lacquer, then removed from the cutting lathe and played with a strain gauge cartridge – she has taken you by the hand and walked with you into the garden, and you will never forget that you cannot understand how all the stars and moons have been melted to make her eyes. No amount of  ones and zeros could be more than a  clone with some serious DNA aberrations. As evidenced by many, her charm persists even when she wears worn out jeans and an old sweatshirt.

In terms of engagement, as with any woman, it is not what you say, but what you do that determines if she will take your arm and travel with you. It is your commitment, your perseverance, your highly-visible determination to be willing to accept failure and continue as if that was part of your plan, that entices her.

She does not respond to lip service, does not respond to empty promises, will not look your way again if you are unwilling to accept her every beauty mark, her constantly changing mind. Analog is a kite that is directed by the constant wind, and if you wrap the string around your finger and place it near your ear, you will hear the angels directing her movements. If you never considered her, she will never consider you.  If you found her simple and old fashioned, you have perfectly managed to miss her allure.

Does she require that you hold her gently, and follow the rules so as not to cause her harm? You bet.

Does she ask to be poured slowly from the bottle, decanted, and sipped like a talisman of effort, as opposed to downing a shot of whisky with the predictable after effect? You bet.

Do you wake up from your session with her with your feelings intact and informed?

You’re darn skippy you do.

And if you are very, very smart, you will never lose her.

Peter Ledermann is Founder, CEO, and lead designer of SoundSmith, makers of leading-edge phono cartridges, electronics, and loudspeakers for over 30 years. He will present “Reproductive Private Parts (of a phono system)” at RMAF on Saturday, October 7, at  2:45 PM in the Marriott Aspen Amphitheater. Soundsmith Hyperion phono cartridges can be heard in Room 555 (Atrium), and Rooms 7024 and 8018 (Tower).

I hope you all had a great summer. I missed you!

This first story in my second season of writing for Copper is about…

revenge. It is also about audio. It’s about dealing with arrogance and the incredible confluence of both my high end hobby and my audio retail experience.

I will not, however, name the person who is the subject of this story or the audio manufacturer.  The manufacturer (still a major force in the industry) actually comes out looking really good but the ability for someone in the industry to put the clues together to figure out the particular individual that is at the epicenter of it and the fact that I hear that this person (for some reason) is still in the business has led me to conclude that the story and it’s lessons can still be compelling without naming names.

What I will say is that, to all those consumers who have ever been treated poorly by a salesperson in the audio industry and fantasized what you would do if you had the power to possibly ruin that person, you will really love this tale.

It began way back in the day….Spring 1983.

Twisted Sister had just finished recording our debut album for Atlantic Records called You Can’t Stop Rock n Roll.

We had spent the winter recording it at Jimmy Page’s studio called The Sol in Cookham, England.

All the Led Zep masters were in the studio as our producer Stu Epps (Jimmy’s studio manager & engineer) was also assisting Jimmy in the remastering of the CODA album.  We would walk into the mixing room in awe of being in the same room with all the master 2” reels for every Zep song ever recorded!

It was truly a magical time but, as an audiophile, I was eager to finish the recording and then go to Tottenham Court Road in London to visit the dozens of HI Fi shops that lined the High Street.

That was where I was exposed, for the first time, to brands like Quad electronics and speakers, Esoteric Audio, Pink Triangle, KEF, B&W, Linn/Naim, Mission, Meridian etc.

After deciding on a particular pair of speakers that I loved, I called a friend in NY to see how much they cost in the city.

As it turned out, if I bought them in London and brought them back myself, it was half the US cost.

And so I did.

When I got home and connected them, much to my dismay, the tweeter in one of the speakers did not work..

So much for saving money, I thought.

Well, I called the UK company and told them what happened. They were very friendly and gave me the phone number of their NY sales rep. I was told that he would be happy to solve this issue for free as I had just bought the speakers.

I innocently called the NY sales rep for the company and, about 30 seconds into my description of my London purchase of the speaker,  he interrupted me and started yelling

Fu*k you! it’s people like you (meaning me) that buys grey market oversees that fu*ks up the retail business. Go fu*k yourself, I will never help you! And with that he slammed down his phone.

Man Oh Man…I was not expecting anything like that. I could maybe have understood the issue had he just said “Look, I get you bought it overseas but I really can’t help you but you should call the company and see what they can do…

Something like that would have been disappointing but I would have understood. But no.

This response was not that.

This was the response (in my mind, anyway) of a mentally deranged narcissistic coke head on a bender.

Well…

I called back the UK company and told someone in management about the treatment I got.

The person was horrified that someone representing their company would treat anyone so badly.

The person told me that he would not only send a replacement driver but the entire wiring assembly as well just in case it was in the wiring.

Sadly, and I do mean sadly, this kind of bizarre arrogance was not isolated to just this one person. Over the next couple of years I was either insulted by other high end hi fi salesmen (who wouldn’t play the records I brought in to test gear because he didn’t like my choice of music ridiculed over the gear that I did have.

I have heard many horror stories about things like this from other consumers as well

The high end industry was actually rife with many dysfunctional idiots but I have to say that the worst of the worst was the New York rep for the UK speaker company.

Now it’s 1997 (14 years later) and I am now a salesman at Lyric Hi Fi.

I hadn’t talked about this incident in years and I tried, as an audio salesman, to never treat anyone with any kind of disrespect no matter how much I didn’t like them or felt they were wasting my time.

One day, however,  I walked into the Big Room at Lyric to ask Mike Kay a question about an order and lo and behold he introduces me to a sales rep who (you guessed it) was the same dude who was so unbelievably nasty on that phone call in 1983.

I shook the reps hand.

He was much shorter than I imagined (that maybe explained his  Napoleonic rant)

It appeared that the conversation with Mike Kay, Lenny (the store manager) and the rep was about to end.They all started to exit the room.

The room was huge and the doors and the room itself were sound proof. Once the door was shut, you could be murdered and no one would hear it.

First Mike walked out, then Lenny.

As it appeared that I was about to walk out as well, I slammed the door shut, then turned around and stared this rep in the face.

He looked a little stunned and said “Is there a problem?”

I then said “In 1983 I bought a pair of speakers in the UK. They didn’t work and I was told by a UK representative to call you, the NY rep.

I did and you yelled at me and cursed me out.

You told me I deserved the broken speaker and told me where I should put it as well.

Nobody has ever been that rude to me. All I did was do what your company told me to do and you basically told me to shove the speaker up my ass.

I then said, “This room is sound proof and I could just kick your ass now and no one would hear you!”

He started to sweat….and stutter…

“I was on medication” he pleaded.

“I’m usually not like that, really.

“I’m so, so sorry, really.  I apologise from the bottom of my heart, I’m really, really sorry, I should never have talked to you that way”.

Boy, I was really really enjoying this, believe me.

I just stood there for a minute as his heart was racing and fear welled up in his eyes.

I was never going to touch him.

I just wanted that apology.

I got it.

Over the next couple of years I heard more and more stories about this guy and, yes, he was rude and obnoxious to many, both in and out of the industry who reveled in my story and I was told that I did the world a service.

That made me feel even better!

Chalk one up for the consumer!!

“Is Israel a good country?” asked the captain. I was the sole passenger on a fifty-seat tourist boat sailing the river Nile some miles north of Cairo.

In 1991, accompanied by my wife and children we visited my sister who lives in Israel. I had read that Egypt had opened a consulate in Tel Aviv and you could fly directly to Cairo from Tel Aviv. I had resided in Israel during the Yom Kippur war in 1973 so the idea of visiting Egypt (Israel’s’ greatest foe during that war) was intriguing. It took a few days to get a visa and then I headed out to Ben-Gurion airport. Security in Israel has always been tight but this was ridiculous.  An hour after I had checked in, the security guard, for the third time, asked me “Where do you live? Where did you park your car? Why are you travelling to Egypt? Why is your wife not travelling with you?” He disappeared. Obviously he smelled something fishy. I was getting nervous as it was nearing boarding time. When he returned, I started to talk in Hebrew, My Hebrew stinks but I can get by. His attitude changed.

“Where did you learn Hebrew?” he asked. “In Scotland, for my Bar mitzvah” I said; I also added, “I lived here in the early seventies.” That smoothed the way and I was allowed to board the plane. I learned later from a friend who worked for Israeli Security that I probably had fit a particular profile; I had come to Israel with my family and was now travelling to Egypt alone.

Egypt Air was a disaster. The plane was packed and people had bags everywhere. They were stacked high in the aisle, on people’s laps and under the seats. I expected the stewardess to do something about the clutter but she didn’t seem to care and the plane took off. After we landed in Cairo about an hour later, the plane came to a full stop. Just when everyone was retrieving their bags, the plane started to move at high speed to another gate. We held on for dear life.

Traffic in Cairo is wondrous. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel and the driver never slowed down or stopped at any traffic lights. At one point we approached an intersection with a red light; there was a policeman standing in the middle of the road holding a stop sign. We whizzed past. The Corniche is a divided highway paralleling the Nile. My hotel overlooked it and the river. One morning my driver left the hotel and approached the Corniche. At the “No Left Turn” sign he suddenly turned left into three lanes of oncoming traffic, miraculously maneuvered to the center divider, crossed it then joined the flow on the other side. We survived. I suddenly realized why the Egyptians often say, “Inch’ Allah” (God willing).

Because of the recent gulf war, Cairo was empty of tourists. This made access to all the sights really easy. One morning I went to the Cairo Museum at 8a.m. there was no one there. Because of the low humidity, the exhibits are either free standing or behind simple glass cases. I visited the section dedicated to Tutankhamen (King Tut) In New York, many years ago I had seen the King Tut exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum. It was a whistle-stop tour with timed tickets and guards urging crowds to “move along please”. This time it was a delight. I was alone with the complete collection, and of course the famous golden death mask, for over an hour. There were rooms and rooms of Tutankhamen’s artifacts, many more than the smattering shown at the Met.

That afternoon I made the compulsory visit to the pyramids at Giza. I am somewhat claustrophobic and with great reluctance was about to enter The Great Pyramid, when my guide offered an alternative: horse back riding around the periphery; in those days you could ride right up to the structures and fairly close to the Sphinx. This seemed much more appealing and struck a romantic chord. Riding on the edge of the Sahara really was spectacular.

Later that day we visited Saqqara, which was an ancient burial ground. The pyramids there are much older and smaller than the ones at Giza. One of them was open. I approached the entrance, looked at the two-foot square entrance tunnel and immediately turned around. I then stopped and told myself that I would probably never come here again and not going inside was a mistake. I returned to the entrance. An older American couple was there and the man was nervous about going in. Showing bravado, I convinced him to enter with me. Little did he know I was using him as a crutch. Halfway down the tunnel there was a wide opening above us that allowed us to stand up. He and I needed some space to reduce the panic. After we calmed down, we continued. I never told him that high above that space dangled a massive stone block, probably the original seal of the corridor. The main chamber was airless and dimly lit. An empty stone sarcophagus sat in the center guarded by a tall man in a galabeya (traditional cotton robe). The insides of the pyramid were rather disappointing and made all that effort seem pointless. My friend turned to me and said, “Let’s go”. When we exited he couldn’t thank me enough for my help.

As Egypt was short of tourists at that time I managed to hire a driver for the princely sum of $35 per day. His name was Omar. One day he suggested a Nile cruise. We drove north along the river for about an hour. The boat was empty save for the captain and a 12-year-old boy, his mate. The captain’s English was good and we negotiated a price: $30 for 2 hours. He told me would see many famous residences where notables lived in the summer. At some point he started to play some very mournful music on his sound system. Umm Kulthum was Egypt’s most famous singer. Her style and vocal ability was renowned throughout the Arab world. As we sailed passed her house on the banks of the Nile, the Captain asked, “Is Israel a good country?” In the hope of having a meaty political discussion with someone local, I told him that I had come from Israel. I replied that it was a good country. He then continued,

“Do they have video stores in Israel?”

“Yes.” I replied.

“Do they have adult video stores?”

“Yes” I said again.

“How much jail time do you get in Israel for watching an adult video?” he asked.

I turned the question around, “How much jail time do you get in Egypt?”

“Six months minimum,” he said.

“In Israel you just go into the store, choose a video and take it home,” I countered.

His eyes widened, “Sounds like a good country.”