Issue 19

I’ve been thinking lately about close listening, and the way it tends to be categorized as an “audiophile thing.” It conjures up images of someone in a darkened room, sitting alone in a special chair, eyes closed, listening in some kind of state of rapture or in an analytical fugue state. The concept of just sitting and listening to music is possibly one of the most alien to folks who don’t consider themselves audiophiles, right alongside paying astronomical sums for cables. It tends to be met with something almost like fear: “I just can’t DO that, just sit and listen and not do anything else!”

We’re not much good at doing one thing at a time. There’s a reason “mindfulness” sells a lot of self-help books; we’re used to doing eighteen things at once, and then feeling vaguely guilty about how we can’t seem to concentrate on just one or two, while simultaneously feeling guilty that we’re only doing one or two of the many things that keep us busy. We crave that feeling of “flow,” where we’re fully absorbed in a task and all the stuff clamoring for our attention shuts up. It’s one reason I like driving, particularly driving stick shift: it demands enough physical and mental connection for me to feel busy, but leaves enough of my brain free to wander. It’s the only thing I know better for thinking than the shower.

Driving and listening to music are almost inextricable for me, as they are for many people. I’m a little oldschool when it comes to music in the car. I like trying to pick up local radio stations while I’m on the road. Radio isn’t what it used to be, but you can still find small joys, like a station that’s playing nothing but mariachi, or lucking into an oral history of the Count Basie Big Band. And of course, if I can’t pull in a good radio station or handle listening to Katy Perry’s latest one more time, there’s always the CD player.

I have lazy habits when it comes to CDs in the car: inevitably I’ll go around a mountain bend, lose my radio station, and switch to the CD, only to realize with faint exasperation that I’ve had the same CD in the car for over a month now. And switchbacks at 65 MPH are not the time to go fumbling in the glove box for a replacement.

So, Josh Ritter‘s Beast in its Tracks for the umpteenth time it is. Funny thing is, it’s during these repeated listening sessions that I often really fall in love with an album. It starts to weave itself into my days. I start to become intimate with it in a way that I don’t when I’m listening at home, where I can skip around or wander out of the room, distracted by a task that just can’t wait, tempted out of the flow by responsibility. A friend of mine recently made a similar observation, mentioning that she’d left her copy of Beck’s Morning Phase in her car for weeks and subsequently realized that it was the first time she’d listened to an album all the way through in years. Since college, maybe. And by the time she finally remembered to take the CD out her car, she discovered that she had grown emotionally attached to an album for the first time in a very, very long time. “I’m going to have to try this listening thing more often,” she said.

That listening thing. You mean, that thing you used to do when you were a teenager, wearing your earbuds and looking out the bus window pretending like you were in the music video? That’s close listening. That thing where you love a song so much that you keep hitting “repeat”? Close listening. And that thing where you leave the CD in the car until you have the order of songs memorized and you all of a sudden find yourself thinking about how really great the background vocals are on the third track after hearing it fifteen times? That’s close listening, too.

I think sometimes as audiophiles we spend too much time describing our hobby as though it was mystical and rarified and so very different from the way other people experience music, when it might be easier to explain if we started from the places that aren’t so different after all. The way a song gets under your skin and will always remind you of a specific rainy day driving down the coast. The way you just need to hear that drum kick in, one more time. The way you can close your eyes for a minute and follow the throughline of a harmony while the bus grinds its way through a traffic jam. The kinds of things that get a busy surgeon to say, “I need to do this listening thing more often.”

CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, has made a large impact on a lot of industries, and it’s meant to. For one thing, ALL trade in elephant ivory is banned — globally. I suppose we might debate the merits of this program, but no, we won’t; not here. This is a program that is unequivocally both necessary and does a lot of positive things. For one thing, we may continue to have some of these materials to work with.

Two weeks ago, I spent the weekend at the Fretboard Summit, a gathering of luthiers and guitar players organized around a magazine called the Fretboard Journal. It was fabulous weekend, with much music, many instruments, old and new, and non-stop discussions. From one friend’s perspective, the most interesting events were the unscheduled ones. One such unscheduled event found Rick Turner, a long-time friend who has built many of my instruments, and me in a conversation with Bob Taylor, co-founder of Taylor Guitars. Bob told us an interesting story.

Many of the woods used to build guitars are now endangered, and/or builders are required to purchase them already cut to a particular size in order to keep employment in their native countries. Ebony is just such a wood, on both fronts. A couple years ago, Taylor’s wood supplier in Madrid called with news. The ebony supplier in Cameroon was available. So…

Bob and his new partner, Vidal de Teresa of Madinter Trade, went to Cameroon and discovered two things that he told us about: on the day when they were being shown around, when they sat down for lunch, most of the workers at the mill didn’t eat lunch. Bob asked about them, and was told they couldn’t afford the meal.

And he discovered that for every tree cut down to get the virtually pure black ebony that was so prized in the rest of the world, 10 trees were cut down, found to have too imperfect a grain, and left on the forest floor. You can read about his journey for yourself, or watch the video:

I’ve been aware of Taylor for years — I own one of the acoustic bass guitars they made for a few years (perfectly black ebony fingerboard, of course), and almost bought one of the 6-stringed instruments (I bought a 50s Gibson instead, and have since thrown it over having discovered 30s Martins). But in the last decade I haven’t paid any attention. So I was surprised by the depth of his commitment to both the forest and the people who making a living off of it. If you could see Bob’s photograph’s of the factory when he first visited, and how it looks now…

Like many other audio companies, DeVore Fidelity began as a hobby. Designer/owner John DeVore graduated from RISD (the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence—alumni include Seth McFarlane, Marin Mull, Dale Chihuly, Nicole Miller and most of the Talking Heads), played drums in a number of bands, and worked as a salesman at both Sound By Singer and Stereo Exchange in Manhattan.DeVore “always built [speakers]”, as he puts it, beginning while at RISD in 1986. During his time in retail he was able to compare his creations with well-known audiophile favorites. In the late ‘90’s he built a design which worked particularly well, and he christened it “The Gibbon”. The name was partly a playful reaction to the hyper-serious product names often found in audio, and partly an  homage to his uncle  Irven  DeVore, a well-known primatologist and anthropologist. The practice still continues: DeVore’s three product lines are the Gibbons, Orangutans, and Silverbacks.

The whimsical entry to DeVore Fidelity’s shop in the industrial-strength Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Beginning DeVore Fidelity in 2000, DeVore was able to leave retail in 2001, and devote all his time to designing and building speakers. In that year he moved his shop to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in order to be closer to cabinetmaker Anthony Abbate; a year later, the two moved to a larger shared space in the ‘Yard, where they still are.

Do I really need to label this? This place is huge, with dozens of giant buildings.

The company made a major splash around 2002 with the Gibbon Eight, a slender two-way that featured proprietary crossover topology, a side-firing port and a tweeter placed below the midrange, elements found in many DeVore designs. Much of the Eight’s notoriety came from the fact that several initial review samples went out, and never came back: all the reviewers bought them. Later updates included the Super Eight and 88; the Nines and (most recently) the 3- way Xs followed.

The

The Gibbon X (Photo from DeVore Fidelity).

DeVore’s designs have always been more efficient than your average monkey coffins (a term used by the late Harvey “Gizmo” Rosenberg which seems perversely apt in this case), with sensitivity around 90 or 91 dB and an uncommonly easy load.  Because of these characteristics, Gibbons were often found paired with tube or low-powered SET (single-ended triode)  amplifiers.

The O/96 (Photo from DeVore Fidelity).

Maximizing designs to pair well with low-powered SETs, DeVore introduced the Orangutan series, broad-baffled two-way speakers with largish woofers that bring to mind a new-millenial take on classic designs like the Altec Valencias. The O-93 is a floorstander with a 10″ paper cone woofer and a silk-dome tweeter mounted in a slight horn; the O-96 is a standmounted floorstander (if you can follow that), with similar drivers to those in the 93, but with beefier motor structures on both. As you might expect, the models are 93 and 96 dB efficient.

So what does the future hold for DeVore Fidelity? Short term, perhaps an “Uber-Orangutan”, with hyper-tweaked drivers and even a little more sensitivity than the O-96. Beyond that, who knows? DeVore’s combination of musicality, flawless worksmanship and puckish originality is unlikely to go out of style.

And thank goodness for that.

In Copper #18, we addressed the critical importance of getting the smoothest bass from our main (full-range speakers).  This step is foundational for properly integrating our subs to the main speakers.

 Before we get into our promised next section on installing/integrating our subs, we should briefly address two related issues…

1 – Power up, volume down – While you are getting your mains to have the smoothest bass, and when you are making final adjustments to them to achieve the best presence and tone they can provide, it’s important to have your subs powered up, but receiving no signal.  Since you won’t be listening to them and they cannot make any sound if the input is turned down completely, the question is why even turn them on?

We don’t want the subs’ bass driver(s) to be moving around in response to the sound emanating from the mains. I’ve heard this phenomenon referred to as sympathetic resonance.  What a poor description!  IMO, unsympathetic resonance is more correct.  Why allow the subs to interfere with our voicing of the mains by allowing them to play along with the mains, but probably out of tune and time?

While not perfect in its effect, powering up the subs more effectively locks the sub driver in the ‘zero’ position.  During this time I keep the subs nearby the mains – in an area where I am likely to locate them after our upcoming tests – maybe three feet or so away, perhaps beside them but more likely in an arc somewhere slightly or even directly behind them.

2 – Time Delay – Without going into the sometimes argued time delay issue, let me say that it doesn’t seem to be an issue when we are likely going to bring the subs in at about 30 Hz, give or take a few cycles.  At these frequencies, with their very long wavelengths (say, 32-40 feet long), this issue seems to be irrelevant (although 0-180 polarity of the subs is still important – which we will discuss).

So let’s get on with our sub installation/integration…

Aim to Please

No one seems to talk about this issue, nor have I ever seen it in practice, except on my voicing sessions, but – short of balance, crossover frequency selection, subwoofer volume, and polarity – (all of which we will discuss after this article), it is the vitally important next step to properly integrating your mains to your subs. And when done, the musical impact is substantial, as compared to before, with one possible exception to be mentioned later.

Everyone sits their subs down (hopefully in a good place), and points them essentially straight ahead.  That means that, unless they get lucky, chances are that their subs could perform at a higher level, and they will never experience the potential improvement.

May I suggest a better placement method?

And it is not the oft-repeated “place the woofer at the seat and walk or crawl around the room near the main speakers to hear/discover the best place to put the subs”.  We are gonna do something with a substantially higher success ratio.

Before we go into the sub placement and direction technique, I want to make another suggestion that you obtain an RTA: a Real-Time Analyzer.  (Hold on now – this is not about using it to measure the set-up – please hear me out.)  As I mentioned earlier, they can be quite inexpensive, and sometimes almost free.

If you own just about any full-range speakers and a pair of subs, the expense of a RTA system is relatively insignificant. Operating it is simple – it doesn’t require an engineering degree for what we will be doing.  For example, we will only care about the frequencies below 100-120 Hz.

If you choose a system that requires a mic, be sure to get one with an omni (pick-up pattern) capsule.  They are several inexpensive mics out there from Behringer, Dayton, Audix, & others.  A quick search on Amazon or elsewhere will turn up a decent selection.  Also, be sure that whatever system you use to display the measurements has an adequate mic preamp.  This is one reason I tend to like the Studio Six Digital AudioTools RTA.  Its onboard calibrated mic is generally acceptable for our task. And fir even higher accuracy, it’s a snap to use their iTest mic with your iPhone or iPad. Just plug its mic cable connector in to the charger outlet, and not only does it work, it automatically calibrates the system to that mic!

The reason we want to use a RTA when possible is that it dramatically saves time and it eliminates the typical human error that is prevalent when trying to evaluate the sub placement by ear at low frequencies.

FWIW – I have been using a 1/3 octave RTA for this particular room/speaker voicing task since 1979.  Although I have occasionally had to voice sub placement & angle by ear, I cannot imagine being captive to that technique, particularly in this app/centric age in which we live.

Why 1/3 octave, you ask?  I’ve found that 1 octave is too general, not showing what is really happening.  Sixth octave or higher measurements tend to confuse the casual user (and me).   Maybe it is TMI – Too Much Information. It seems as if 1/3 octave is more similar to what we are likely to hear.

We want to use pink noise as our source and set the RTA on flat, unweighted (not A or C weighting).  As mentioned before, run the pink noise at a level that is 20 dB above the (flat weighting) ambient room noise level.

Of course you could do this by ear if need be, but as I mentioned above, it is much more difficult and time consuming.

Ten step process

1 – We will place our mic or other measurement device at the by-now-optimum listening position, at ear height.  By now optimum, because we found it in Copper #18.

2 – To begin, assume the sub is approximately three feet away from the mains.  We will test our directionality at each location in a 3 feet-from-the-speaker arc and try several other locations to find the best one.  You may not end up at 3 feet, but this gives us a starting point.

 3 – We’ll do one sub at a time.  Keep the other one powered up but turned down.  Be sure to cut off the main speakers.

4 – Set the sub to crossover at a much-higher-than-expected setting – say 100-120 HZ.  We do this so that we can see any resonances that will be present before we apply the crossover at a lower setting.  Even though we will roll-off the sub at a lower frequency, we do not want to allow a big peak (room resonance) at say, 50-60 Hz.  If the peak is large enough, it will still contribute to a muddiness sometimes attributed to a “slow” sub.

5 – After we have noted the frequency response (peaks and dips) of the sub when pointed straight ahead, let’s rotate it 90 degrees to the side, generally pointed at the opposite channel’s speaker.  Before this rotation, we want be sure that we have noted (it’s best to write it down) any obvious peaks & dips, their amplitude, and their frequencies.

6 – We will do the same measurements with the sub now generally aimed at the opposite speaker.  You will notice some change in response.  For now, just keep a record of it.

7 – Do the same with the sub pointed backwards.  Yes I know that it looks weird.  But if that is the best direction, you can find a way to obscure the back panel.  I know, because my own pair face backwards.  And visitors who come here for the RoomPlay Reference sessions consistently report that it was the most musically involving listening session they’ve had, short of live music.

Again, note the differences.

8 – Fire the sub towards the adjacent wall. Again note the differences.

Depending on your curiosity and patience, do the same process again at another location along the arc.  I generally do it at three positions.

9 – When you find the best location & direction for your sub (smoothest bass), depending on your curiosity and patience, you may want to try a position that is between the two best – in other words at 45 degree angles.  This usually pays off, if for no other reason than you have confidence that you have found the best location & firing direction for that sub.  Later, if you wish, you can try other locations – say on a slightly larger or smaller arc.  However, what you have found almost certainly  eclipses what you could have gotten otherwise, so I usually leave it there and may come back at a later time if I have the time & patience.

10 – Now we will do the other sub.  Caution, DO NOT expect that it will end up in a similar location or direction.  Rooms can be different, and unless yours is especially well balanced dimensionally, or you get lucky, it may be different.  We only care about the result at this point – the smoothest bass.

Be sure to turn the first sub down or disconnect its input.

We will finish with the set-up techniques (sub balance, level, crossover point, polarity, etc.) next issue.  As with this issue, in Copper #20 there will be some things you can do (that I do not generally see or hear mentioned) that can make a real performance difference.  And except for relative balance, the rest of the way will be by ear, not by measurement.

Oh, the possible exception that I mentioned in the Aim to Please first paragraph? Maybe you will get lucky and your subs will work well without much effort and with them facing directly ahead.

Good luck with your project!  Done properly, it will pay musical dividends for years to come.

See you next time!

I have to tell you, blind musicians fascinate me.  Not because they obviously can play without looking.  I have been doing scales up and down various necks as long as I can remember and the patterns you learn become second nature.  I get that.  Sighted performers playing with passion can play with eyes closed, or even with the instrument behind their head.  But that’s because they’ve practiced a piece so many times they have the patterns memorized.

But a guy like Doc, blind from infancy, never saw a guitar neck.

Arthel ‘Doc’ Watson was born in 1923 in Stoney Fork Township near Deep Gap, North Carolina.  This boy was from the SOUTH.  He had musical parents who encouraged him to develop skills to deal with his disability.  They gave him a harmonica when he was about 7, and got his first stringed instrument, a fretless banjo, for his 11^th birthday.  A fretless banjo.  Fretless.  His dad heard him fooling with a neighbor’s guitar and promised he’d buy Arthel one if he could learn a song in a day.  Family legend has it he learned ‘When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland’ by the Carters, and Pop bought the kid a $12 Stella.  Doc joked later in life that playing that guitar was like playing a barbed wire fence.  I’ve had guitars like that; they’re great for muscle development but man you gotta want it bad.

Doc was playing professionally around Raleigh before he was 20.  He picked up the electric and started playing in bands, primarily country because it paid the bills.  He eventually settled exclusively on the steel acoustic and began developing a flat pick style that even he said ‘shocked’ audiences.  He performed on street corners and nightclubs.  Here’s a picture of Doc and Clarence ‘Frog’ Greene street performing in Boone, NC in the 50’s.  I’m going to find a friend and nickname him Frog.

I do have a friend named Phlegm.  He is the nephew of a dear friend, and due to odd family circumstances they were fairly close in age.  Bill nicknamed Timmy ‘Phlegm’ when they were kids because Tim was always, well, a little wet.  The name stuck, and we’ve called Tim that his whole life.  Bill was the master of nicknames.  Somehow mine morphed from Woody to the Bone Man.  Phlegm had his own variations, like Phlegm Ball and Phlegmingo.   I love the look on folks’ faces when Tim unabashedly sticks his hand out and introduces himself.  You don’t come across many adults who introduce themselves as Phlegm.  We’d been calling him that for so long it became natural and lost it’s meaning to us and him.  New folks take some getting accustomed.

Doc Watson’s career took off at a later age.  He was 40 in 1963 when he played the Newport Folk Festival.  The rise of the folk music revival suited Doc’s style perfectly.  Not only did he have an encyclopedic knowledge of folk and American roots music like bluegrass, but he could play like the wind.  He pioneered the flat pick bluegrass guitar style learning fiddle tunes, which is still the best way to begin learning this technique.  Bob Dylan described Watson’s playing as listening to running water.  And that’s a beautiful analogy.  His solos ran with such fluidity you could hear the sound of summer drifting in and out of the cattails.

Watson started playing with his son Merle in about ’65 and toured as Doc and Merle for the next 20 years.  The folk craze started dying down towards the end of the 60’s but got a shot in the arm in 1972 when several big names in country music, including Doc, Mother Maybelle Carter, Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff and Merle Travis recorded Will the Circle Be Unbroken with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  Doc played a Jimmy Driftwood number called Tennessee Stud on the album and that became a standard in Doc’s shows for the rest of his life.  This cut actually chokes me up a little.

Merle Watson died tragically in 1985 when a tractor he was driving flipped over on him.  Doc retreated in grief from playing for a short time but returned supported by guitarist Jack Lawrence and T. Michael Coleman on bass.  I was lucky enough to see Doc with Merle in the late 70’s at a bluegrass festival in Hartford, Ct.  That was one of the softest and perfect summer nights I’ve ever experienced.

If you’ve gotten through thus far you’re at least partially interested if not an avid Doc Watson fan.  My first experience was a Doc and Merle album I picked up in 1975 called Two Days in November because it was recorded in two days in 1974, later winning a Grammy for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording.  If you have no other recording by Doc you should have this one.  It truly encapsulates much of Doc’s different styles.  This is Poor Boy Blues from that recording.

We lost Doc in 2012 at 89 years old.  He performed pretty much until the end, there are vids of him in a 2009 concert at 86.  He sounds great.  Doc left behind a discography that defines and underlines a great American musical tradition, the performance of folk and bluegrass, and specifically, just wonderful music.  We were fortunate that we realized his power and legacy long before he was gone so there is a wealth of recordings and videos that will keep him close to our hearts forever.  It was first famously said of Johnny B. Goode, but Doc Watson absolutely played the guitar like ringing a bell.

I’m fascinated by materials, which I ascribe to a childhood obsession with spider webs: how could something that’s barely there, be so strong? In college I focused on materials science and internal combustion engines as part of a program in mechanical engineering (and a double major in journalism—go figure).

I mention this because when it comes to the study of audio, I‘m drawn more to the physical and mechanical aspects of design than to electronics. Mechanical bits like structures and transducers are just easier for me to understand, and while I have a basic understanding of circuit types, I just don’t find them that interesting. But an FEA analysis of a tweeter diaphragm or a tonearm, interferometry studies…NOW we’re talking. And I can geek out on reports of new materials like nobody’s business.

Lab-grown diamond tweeter domes from Accuton/Thiel & Partner.

As many have pointed out elsewhere, mechanical design in audio is a study in contradictions: an ideal speaker material would have zero mass with infinite rigidity; a tonearm moving across a record should have infinite mass to control the cartridge while simultaneously having zero inertia (or zero mass and infinite inertia, in order for the moving elements of the cartridge to work without interference from the arm….aaaghhh!). Clearly, these are contradictory requirements, and it’s impossible to achieve both sides of the equation. The best designs are the best-balanced compromises.

Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus, was a brilliant structural engineer who often valued lightness over strength. The result was that Lotus usually either won races—or went out with a catastrophic structural failure. Chapman was once faced with a dilemma in the design of his first closed passenger car, the Elite: it needed 2” more headroom. Raising the roofline 2” would spoil the aerodynamic profile, and lowering the seat 2” would weaken the monocoque structure. A helpful bystander suggested, “why not raise the roof 1”, and lower the seat 1”?”

An apoplectic Chapman replied, “I can’t do that! That’s a bleedin’ COMPROMISE!!”

…to the lightweight skeletal base of Rega’s  RP 10.

Logically enough, no one in audio has obsessed over mass as much as speaker designers. Early designs made use of the materials available—for the most part, paper for cones and phenolic for the diaphragms of compression drivers. Paper cones were stiffened by tapering, adding ribs, and varying the thickness of the paper itself. Paper cones were naturally light, and well-designed ones resisted break-up; when they did break up or wear out, however, the results were ugly. Many still prefer the characteristics of paper cones (which tend to have lower-q resonances) than stiffer but more-resonant plastics, ceramics, and so on.

The ultimate in low-mass speakers is of course the plasma or ionic drivers we discussed in Copper # 18. The opposite can be seen in the heavy cones often found in subwoofers, where the need for stiffness, coupled with massive magnet assemblies, make lightness less of a priority.

What’s the point of all this?  If you look back at the history of audio (as we often do here), you’ll see that almost every conceivable material or configuration has been tried at one time or another. It seems to me that those who believe in One True Path in audio—and boy, there are a lot of folks out there who do— are missing a lot of interest, and possibly missing out a lot in enjoyment, as well.

But that’s just me….

Gentrification. Some view it as imperialism incarnate, a way for big companies to force out long-established, historically-important businesses and create yet another outlet for their overpriced, overhyped goods. Cynics and pragmatists—like me— tend to simply view some of it as inevitable, and the way of the world. Oh, well.

Sad? Sure. Disgusting? Often. …And your point?

Do we need another Starbucks, Sephora, or Urban Outfitter? Oh, HELL no. But without consistent long-range planning—and what city has that??— most cities simply yield to opportunities to cash in with new developments. While it lasts, it’s a gold mine for builders, contractors, plenty of folks. The fact that local history, heritage and cultures are disappearing in front of our eyes is generally swept aside.

Yes, I’m thinking of you, New York City. Here’s a city that bans Big Gulps but does little to protect or preserve historic districts. It is a little crazy-making.

As the infestation of hipsters and tech money spreads through cities like New York and San Francisco, what happens to the outposts of our obsession…audio dealers?

Back in the “Greed is Good” days, the Masters of the Universe were known to spend their 6- or 7-figure annual bonuses at NYC audio salons such as Sound by Singer. Time went on, Wall Street tanked, and Andy lost his lease. That event, back in 2010,  could be viewed as the falling of the first domino.  (Andy is still around, with a smaller facility and limited hours. But still.)

Now that the Wall Streeters are back making major money again, big-bling stereos have lost ground to better apartments, Maseratis, Patek Philippes, whatever. There are no doubt big toys being bought, just not stereos, for the most part. Every dealer I know of around the city says business is “okay”—nothing more.

And meanwhile, the costs of retail space continue to soar. During the last year, Joshua Cohn’s Ears Nova closed due to a lost lease. Dave Wasserman, longtime owner of  Stereo Exchange, one of the city’s largest and oldest dealers, confirmed that they will be closing their retail space and transitioning to another structure,  which will be announced soon. Alumni of Stereo Exchange include speaker manufacturer John DeVore and the late Stereophile reviewer, Wes Phillips.

What does “lossless” mean in audio terminology?  It seems like a straightforward question, and you will undoubtedly have an answer at the ready that says something along the lines of it being the attribute of an operation which permits you to turn a bunch of numbers into a different bunch of numbers, and then turn them back again exactly as they originally were.  But there are shades to losslessness that bear due consideration.  To be (lossless) or not to be (lossless), that is the question.

As we discussed last time around, a Fourier Transform takes data in the time domain and expresses it anew in the frequency domain.  Both views represent the same data in different ways, and (mathematically) the two views can be losslessly transformed back and forth between one and the other.  Let’s take a single channel track of 60 seconds duration sampled at 44.1kHz.  There are a total of 5,292,000 audio samples.  If I take a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of the whole thing, I end up with a frequency spectrum comprising the frequencies from 0Hz to 22,050Hz, separated into 2,646,001 equally spaced bins (that’s half as many bins as samples, plus one bin).  Within each bin I have both the amplitude and phase of that specific frequency (with the exception of the first and last bins, which have no phase information).

In effect the DFT breaks the data down into the exact mathematical formula for the original waveform.  It will in this case comprise the sum of 2,646,001 different Sine waves.  All I have to do is plug the frequency, amplitude, and phase information from the DFT into each one, sum them all together, and I will have fully reconstructed the original analog waveform.  Think about that.  Because it is a mathematical formula, it means I can calculate the amplitude of the original waveform at any point in time – even at points that lie arbitrarily between those of the actual samples which comprise the sampled data.  This is another way of confirming that the original signal can be perfectly recreated from the sampled data, provided the Nyquist criterion has been met.

This concept is useful, because we can use it to perform some interesting thought experiments.  Suppose I decide to mathematically re-sample that waveform at a sample rate of 176.4kHz, or 4 times the 44.1kHz of the original.  This will give me, in effect, the original 44.1kHz samples, plus an additional 3 new samples equally spaced between each adjacent pair of original samples.  [Here I am choosing to carefully align my 176.4kHz samples so that every fourth sample lines up exactly with one of the original 44.1kHz samples.  I don’t necessarily need to do that.]

First I will observe that if I can perfectly recreate the original waveform using only the original 44.1kHz samples, then the additional samples are quite superfluous.  Second I will also observe that this particular 176,400Hz data stream can be seen as comprising four distinct interleaved 44,100Hz data streams.  I can separate those four data streams out.  One of them will comprise the original 44,100Hz samples, but the others – by necessity – will each comprise slightly different numerical values.  Although they are different, each of these data streams clearly encodes the exact same original analog waveform, and can (and will) recreate it exactly using the procedure I laid out above.  Because of this, each of these different 44,100Hz data streams can therefore be recognized as being lossless transformations of each other.

Let me extend this to a more general principle.  If an analog waveform is strictly band limited, then any two digital samplings of that waveform – provided they are carried out at sample rates that meet the Nyquist criterion, and the sampling is executed with absolute precision and perfect timing – will be lossless transformations of each other.

At the risk of hammering on Fawlty-esque at “the bleedin’ obvious”, let me make the key practical point in all this.  It relates to whether upsampled audio files are any better than “ordinary” 44,100Hz files, from a perspective of fidelity.  If the higher sample rate file was obtained by conversion from the original 44.1kHz file then at best it can be a lossless conversion.  But it can never be inherently better.  Which isn’t the same as saying your DAC can’t make a better job of converting it to analog, but that’s a different matter entirely.

Steinberg: Passion Week

There once were two young Russian composers, Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and Maximilian Steinberg ((1883–1946). They both studied in St. Petersburg with Rimsky-Korsakov, although Steinberg was the one actually enrolled at the conservatory. Rimsky treated them both like family, although Steinberg was the one he took to Paris for Diaghilev’s Saison Russe. And Steinberg was the one who married Rimsky’s daughter. Why, then, is Stravinsky the one we’ve heard of?

Because Stravinsky left for the West: first Paris, then America, ending up in L. A. He helped invent modernism, wrote music like The Rite of Spring (Paris) and The Rake’s Progress (Venice, New York), and never—well, hardly ever—looked back.

Steinberg remained in Russia and continued Rimsky’s romantic-nationalist vein. Even within that vein, his Passion Week (1920–23) is an outlier. It’s not a tone poem on folk themes or an opera based on national history. It’s a lengthy a cappella choral work. Most of its movements draw on traditional chants sung in the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s the only such work Steinberg ever wrote, although precedents existed: Gretchaninov’s Passion Week (1912) and Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil (1915). Steinberg would have been familiar with both.

His timing, however, proved to be spectacularly bad: With the Bolshevik Revolution going on, repression against the church had already begun. Soon all performances of sacred music were banned throughout Russia. Undaunted, Steinberg journeyed abroad in an attempt to get Passion Week performed. He got it published, but no record exists of any European performances. A copy of the score was left with Steinberg’s student Dmitri Shostakovich, who in 1957 passed it along to Russo-American conductor Igor Buketoff, who began looking for a choir that could do it justice. He never found one.

Years later Buketoff’s daughter and niece brought the music to conductors Steven Fox and Alexander Lingas. An American publisher brought out a new edition; Fox’s Clarion Choir and Lingas’s Cappella Romana performed it. CR’s recording came out last year; now Fox’s performance has been issued on a new Naxos disc (8.573665). Passion Week is finally getting the attention it deserves. Here is an excerpt:

The noble Joseph,
when he had taken down Thy most pure body
from the tree, wrapped it in a clean linen shroud, and,
having anointed it with spices, placed it in a new tomb.

All the texts, in Church Slavonic, are drawn from Holy Week services preceding Easter. Each calls to mind a specific scriptural event or liturgical occasion from Holy Week; together they form a series of meditative responses to Christ’s suffering, death, and imminent resurrection—the Passion.

Preceding five of Steinberg’s choral settings, the singers present the original Kievan or Znamenny chants for the same texts. These not only provide a welcome change of texture, they also allow us to hear how Steinberg integrates chant into his settings. As you heard, Steinberg enlivens his polyphony through counterpoint and divisi scoring in up to 12 parts; his harmonic palette also tends to be more adventurous than that of his predecessors.

The Clarion Choir, 33 young New York professionals, sing musically, powerfully, and with convincing style. The recording, done in a cathedral sanctuary, is robust, vibrant, and transparent.

Johnson: Considering Matthew Shepard

Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard (Harmonia Mundi HMU 807638.39; SACD) is also a passion setting. In its greater length and stunning array of choruses, hymns, crowd scenes, individual meditations, and “recitations,” it invites comparison to the monumental Passion oratorios that Bach created for Leipzig.

The difference is that Johnson created this work to mourn and commemorate the murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old university student savagely beaten by two men outside Laramie, Wyoming on October 7, 1998. He died in a Colorado hospital five days later. In the aftermath of these events, as the Shepard Foundation’s Jason Marsden writes in an introductory note, “All of us who knew him, and millions who did not, joined in grief and outrage and demanded the world change.” This vicious crime helped spawn a new generation of LGBTQ activists and an outpouring of artistic work, perhaps the best known of which are The Laramie Project plays. To those works we can now add Johnson’s Considering.

Craig Hella Johnson, hitherto known mainly as the gifted conductor of Austin-based professional choir Conspirare, emerges here as a major creative talent. Given what he has achieved, it’s possible that from now on he’ll be “that gifted composer from Austin.”

The work’s three sections run nearly two hours in performance. That’s fitting; attention must be paid. The wonder is that Johnson and his collaborators, poet Michael Dennis Browne and author Lesléa Newman, not only keep their narrative afloat, they sustain a long, variegated story arc with no dead spots. While touching on several American hot-button issues, their gentle, unforced approach allows listeners to keep breathing as they grapple with the story and its implications. Undoubtedly some people will find Considering’s approach too timid, too NPR, too Minnesota-nice (Browne was Stephen Paulus’s librettist for thirty years) to do justice to its subject matter.

But there’s something to be said for an approach that reaches out, preaches beyond the choir. Consider the music: blues, C&W, a bit of black-gospel-lite, some Arvo-Pärt-like tintinnabuli, Hildegardian chant, and—at telling moments—both hate-spewing turba and tender cowboy yodeling. (The text repeatedly invokes the stark beauty of the Wyoming countryside, which slightly surprised me.) This creative team doesn’t entirely avoid the sentimental or derivative, but then they are pitching this piece to a wide swath of ordinary folks. With its mixed choir and eight-person instrumental backing, it can also be performed by ordinary folks. I hope that happens.

As performed by Conspirare, Considering is unfailingly musical and occasionally heartbreaking. HM’s hi-res sound is good, although I wish they had done more to open out space in the multichannel mix, and (especially) to create a distinctive ambience for the spoken “recitations.” It need not have been so faithful to the concert-hall experience. Both music and subject call out for a bigger soundscape.

Fairouz: Zabur

One other passion setting deserves your attention. That is Zabur, an all-stops-pulled-out oratorio by Mohammed Fairouz. Barely 30 years old, Fairouz is already a prolific, visible, and oft-recorded composer. An Arab-American, he willingly tackles difficult issues including religious conflict, international terrorism, and the Middle Eastern refugee crisis. His workmanship is usually superb; Fairouz is already a master of the craft of Western composition. Nevertheless, by choosing ambitious subjects and treating them in conventional ways, he may be confirming the limitations of youth. There’s little in Zabur that would have troubled Mendelssohn. Fairouz’s neo-romantic style, with its tasteful orientalist touches, carefully calculated climaxes, and lyrical relief passages, apparently sets the hearts of major donors and commissioning agencies aflutter: “It was the vision of this body to realize a work for chorus and orchestra that speaks not to our differences and what tears us apart, but of our shared values and [what] unite[s] us as humankind.” It seems wrong to question such aims, and that is partly what troubles me about them.

Sung in a mixture of Arabic and English, Zabur (Naxos 8.559744) depicts a group of people huddling in a shelter under artillery fire who ultimately meet a violent end (performed twice for maximum effect). To learn more, you may want to consult the composer’s essay. The libretto, by Najla Saïd, posits a source of inspiration and catharsis—the artwork of children—not unknown to students of the Holocaust. Like that of Fairouz, Saïd’s work is earnest and well-crafted. Whether Zabur will contribute to greater understanding and compassion remains open to question. But we don’t ask such questions about the Verdi Requiem. Should we ask them here?

The recording is sourced from a recent live performance in Indianapolis.

An excerpt: