Copper
Quibbles and bits
DSD – Is It PCM, Or Isn’t It?
A few weeks back, a prominent person in the audio community shared with me their opinion that DSD is a different thing entirely from PCM, and was surprised to hear...
Contemplating Eternity
When I first started writing for Copper, my mandate was to write about digital audio. Frankly, I wasn’t sure how long Copper was going to last, but it seemed pretty...
The Lion and Albert
From the 1920’s through the 1950’s, one of the most popular English entertainers was Stanley Holloway, who carved out a niche for himself reciting comical poetic monologues in a northern...
A Survey of Recordings of Shostakovich Symphony...
Back in Copper #39 I wrote a piece on the unsung 4th Symphony of the great 20th Century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and I hadn’t managed to cover a selection of the available recordings, or...
Going to Hong Kong
British Land Forces, Hong Kong29th August, 1949 Hello Jock, Trying to keep a promise. I thought now would be as good a time as ever. Firstly because we are just about...
Ancestry
A while back, I started messing about researching into my ancestry. I can’t say I was particularly drawn to the subject, but my daughter Lorna subscribed to ancestry.co.uk and wanted me to...
The Sound Of Music
The entirety of the field of Philosophy arises from two fundamental questions – the Adam and Eve of Philosophy if you like. Adam asks “What is real?”, while Eve asks...
Sounds Good to Me
What attributes should an item of equipment in a sound reproduction chain possess in order to meet the objectives of high-end audio playback? One attribute we tend to think of...
30 Years
I am an ex-Pat Brit, living in Canada for the last 30+ years. During that time I have been back to the UK many times, but this year I spent...
To Sleep. Perchance to Dream.
What do we do, as a society, when we are obliged to face uncomfortable realities that require us to make major changes to things we have grown to think of...
20th Century Classical Music – the “Navel Gazin...
In the world of Classical Music, the end of the 19th Century brought with it the end of the “Romantic Era”, which had followed on from the “Classical Period” after the...
Everest
This year, so far at least, eleven people have died on Mount Everest, and most of us have seen the photograph of the ridiculous “traffic jam” of climbers in a...
Does Science Have to Make Sense?
The origins of science, and the scientific method, have to do with attempting to understand the world around us. Why things fall when we drop them. How to throw a...
A Murder of Symmetry
Ronnie McGill received a note, mysteriously signed “Michael Schumacher”, which offered him a friendly warning. “Vinny Spadina is figuring to rub you out”. This, naturally, was worrisome. Ever since he had...
21st Century Schizoid LP
It was all the way back in the 1980’s that consumer digital audio suddenly took root in the form of the CD, and before you knew what had hit you...
Lasers
Ever wondered how lasers work?…Wondered what it is that gives them the interesting properties they exhibit?…You have?….Good! This column’s for you. Lasers are all about electrons. Atoms are composed of a...
Great Opera
Here’s what I wrote back in Copper 72: “Many people can’t stand opera, and to be fair, you can see where they’re coming from. Hour after hour of tedious recitative, all in...
Monty Python's 3rd Symphony
“He’s done something no other composer has attempted. He’s placed himself at the center of his work. He gives us a glimpse into his soul. I expect that’s why it’s...
The Mikado
Our great Mikado, virtuous man,when he to rule our land beganresolved to try a planwhereby young men might best be steadied.So he decreed in words succinctthat all who flirted, leered,...
Audiophile Science
There is one consistent misconception that non-scientists have about science, and that is the Albert Einstein problem – the idea that major scientific problems can be solved by a lone...
Quantum Theory
Quantum Theory troubles many people, even some of those who actually understand it. That would include such luminaries as one of its founders, Albert Einstein, who expressed serious concerns with...
The Life of Brian
Havergal Brian was one of the most prolific English composers of the 20th Century. Many of you will be thinking “Havergal Brian”? Very few have actually heard of him, but that...
Audiophile Haiku
A haiku is a traditional Japanese form of poetry, although it is now appreciated worldwide. A Haiku comprises three lines of verse structured around a 5-7-5 pattern of syllables. The first and...
The Volume Of A Pizza
Numbers, and the mathematics that describe them, can help you with many interesting things, including the volume of a pizza. There are some wonderful surprises hidden in plain old numbers....
Beethoven’s Last Christmas
In 1825 and 1826, Ludwig van Beethoven was nearing the end of his life. He had fallen ill, was bedridden for over a month, and clearly felt his end was...
Information
6: “What do you want?” 2: “Information.” 6: “You won’t get it.” 2: “By hook or by crook, we will.” 6: “Who are you?” 2: “The new number 2. You...
40 Most Beautiful Arias
I wouldn’t normally give a “Rack Filler” CD a moment’s thought, but here I am actually recommending one! 40 Most Beautiful Arias is pretty much exactly what it says on the box,...
Oh, I Bumped Into Elton John Today...
Actually, it was in 2002, but that’s okay. I was in LA on business for a week, and found myself in Beverly Hills one evening, strolling along Rodeo Drive (as...
Lost Boys
John MacCormick My family moved to the city of Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, in the summer of 1968 when I was 13. My father had got a...
John Corigliano: Symphony No. 1
In the world of classical music, you typically need to die before your music gets taken too seriously. Kind of a bummer from a career-building perspective. So many major classical...
Building Teams
I spent the latter half of my career as an entrepreneur, building two venture capital backed technology corporations. These are proper, bricks-and-mortar, hardware-based companies, engaged in the development of real-world,...
“Are you SURE you want to do this?”
In Copper issues 60 and 61, I interviewed Princeton University professor Edgar Choueiri about his groundbreaking developments in three-dimensional audio. Choueiri took us through the mechanisms underlying the perception of...
If No One Ever Reads This Column…
…did I actually write it? There is a catchy phrase, “Perception is Reality”, which is often thrown about as a pithy epithet, although at times it shows up as a...
Goodnight, Irene
I do enjoy a Single Malt scotch … the good stuff. I mean the really good stuff. The stuff that’s eye-wateringly expensive. Consequently, even though I do have a selection of perhaps...
Command and Control
I have just read what is without hesitation the most … what is the correct expression here? … profoundly unsettling work of non-fiction that has ever passed through my hands. It is...
Me and Kenny Dalglish
I was born in Glasgow, Scotland. At age 10 my family moved to Leeds, in England. Three years later we moved to Leicester … my father and brother still live...
Dispersion
“Knowledge increases by diffusion, and grows by dispersion” – Daniel J. Boorstin One thing that audiophiles regularly fail to grasp adequately is how a sound wave propagates away from a...
Musicians, Restauranteurs, Plumbers
You read a lot of brouhaha within the audio community about how musicians are not making any money out of streaming services. There are so many streaming services available these...
Au Revoir, Dutoit
About ten years ago I shared an airplane ride with Charles Dutoit, the former conductor of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Dutoit had been principal conductor of the orchestra since 1977,...
Hi-Fi Shows
I was tasked by Editor Leebs to cover my local high-end audio show, whose formal name is “Salon Audio Montréal Audio Fest”, a name only a mother could love. The show has just...
Roll Over, Beethoven
If you were a professional orchestra conductor – or even a professional orchestra – it would behoove you to take steps wherever appropriate to promote the public perception of your...
De Vriend’s Beethoven Cycle
I wrote in the last issue of Copper about how the Mahler Symphony Cycle has more or less replaced the Beethoven Cycle as the reference standard against which modern conductors and orchestras...
Much Ado About Nothing
Sometimes the dumbest questions can be the toughest ones to answer. Take this one, for example: “What does space look like if you take everything out of it?”. On the...
That Whose Name May Not Be Spoken
In every corner of life there are guilty secrets, ancient truths that are never discussed, arcane knowledge that must be kept hidden, heresies that must never be spoken. And every...
Cross-country Skiing
I expect all of you will be well familiar with skiing, that glamorous sport that involves hurtling from the top to the bottom of a snow-capped mountain, while dressed in...
Bates—Mason, Not Norman
I have recently been introduced to the American composer Mason Bates, and in particular an album of three of his symphonic works recently released by the San Francisco Symphony. Indeed, the...
Loudness
It was Lee Atwater, a controversial campaign strategist for Bush Sr.’s successful 1988 presidential campaign who coined the phrase “Perception is Reality”. Unfortunately for Bush (but more so for Atwater, it must...
Brainz the Size of a Planet, Part 3
I have been describing the free-access crowd-sourced music metadata database MusicBrainz over the course of the last two issues of Copper. I started out by describing the need for what I...
“The Japanese Beethoven”
Modern popular music differs most significantly from classical music in that the original performance is considered to be the definitive expression, and any others that follow are generally considered to...
Brainz The Size of a Planet, Part 1
There is a seismic shift underway in the manner by which consumers interact with their music. We can feel the first tremors, and some of us are even starting to...