Issue 26

Recently, I was thinking about the many topics that my Get Better Sound audio seminar attendees have liked most over the years.  The list is fairly long, but there has been a general pattern.

It took a while, but I managed to narrow that list down to those that have proven to be the most popular.  It occurred to me that instead of just submitting a topic, perhaps you could choose from those topics that interest you most and post a reply below.  That way we can discuss your favorite.

Here is my list – in no particular order:

If different loudspeaker manufacturers use fundamentally different set-up guides, who is right?

 Could your chair or sofa be damaging your music reproduction?  

 Why an equilateral loudspeaker setup can detract from your musical experience

 Precise Imaging vs. Tone?

 Depth vs. Presence?

 When exotic speaker feet, spikes, isolation devices, etc. can negatively affect your sound.

 Why you should remove unused speakers from your listening or short/cover them  

 Why wide dispersion for loudspeakers might be a bad idea for home audio  

 The one thing that your system must have to be musically satisfying  

 What are audiophile “sound effects” – and how do they affect our listening?  

 Why you shouldn’t place equipment or furniture between your speakers  

 The “around-the-corner” test  

 How to determine the acoustic transparency of a material to be used for room treatments or speaker grille cloths  

 How to know when you’ve gone too far with room treatments  

 The Top Three most important places for room treatments  

 How to avoid the ­worst sounding location for your system electronics and sources

 Fine-tuning your system’s tonal balance and stereo imaging with speaker placement

 How to use toe-in (speaker angle) to make your speakers seem to “disappear” sonically, as well as to affect their tonal balance  

 What happens when you listen at different seating heights ?

 Why you shouldn’t consider speaker placement final until you’ve discovered the correct AC polarity for all components  

 When you should consider trying an asymmetrical speaker/listening positioning for the best bass response  

 When you should consider a 45-degree placement for difficult rooms  

 Why you need to have an audio system “road map”

 The one thing you must do to make sure your vacuum tube electronics perform at or near their peak

 Vertical vs. horizontal bi-amplification  

 Bi-amping with similar amps vs specialized/different amps 

 Can you adjust spectral balance to +/- .5 dB with your electronic crossover?  

 When adjusting bass levels with a bi-amplified system, can you shift the crossover point to compensate for the lower or higher level you just selected?  

 Looking forward to seeing what interests you!

Note: These potential Copper articles will be excerpted and edited from existing Get Better Sound topics, as well as from their accompanying Quarter Notes newsletters.

Not only are room design and tuning important,  but having dedicated 30 amp circuits on the same phase are important as well.

My audio room was built with several and separate 30 amp circuits, each one utilizing wires in metal conduit.  I used PS Audio Power Ports as the outlets.

The room is 15′ x  25′, with 10′ ceilings. I used Michael Green’s Room Tune elements all over the room. I use a PS Audio P300 Power Plant to power my CD player, DAC and preamplifier: an Audible Illusion 3A Pre with phono Gold Board  for my turntable, an old MSB DAC, and a Cambridge Audio CD player. I also use a Richard Gray conditioner to power the amplifiers and the subs of my Vandersteen 5A speakers. The Vandersteens sit about 9″ into the room.

Have a system you’d like Copper to share with the world? Send us pictures and text through email here.

I’ve been involved with audio technology since the 1960s, and I’m still surprised—and a bit dismayed—to see the same myths repeated again and again. How “wire” functions is understood fully, yet I continue to see fantastic claims that defy basic audio science. Indeed, too much of what I read online and in the mainstream audio press is simply wrong. For example, the notion that audio gear can measure well but sound bad is a common belief that’s easy to disprove. Of course, this assumes the right things are measured.

Likewise, unless you believe pioneering mathematician Joseph Fourier was wrong, music is in fact composed entirely of sine waves, so measuring audio gear using sine waves is perfectly acceptable. But again, the right things must be measured. For example, you can’t only measure the distortion of a power amplifier outputting 1 watt at 1 KHz, as is common. Distortion often rises at lower frequencies, especially with tube amps that use transformers. It can also rise at higher, or lower, power levels, depending on the nature of the distortion.

Another place I see specs either misused or simply missing is loudspeaker isolation products. If you want to know how (or even if) the sound has improved after placing a speaker on an isolation pad, you need to measure the sound in the room using software meant for that purpose. Showing that a neoprene pad blocks vibration is meaningless if a speaker cabinet doesn’t vibrate enough to create any sound in the first place. Indeed, there are myriad ways people can be misled, either on purpose by equipment sellers, or by well meaning but misinformed audio journalists.

Two common myths that have been soundly debunked, yet are still often repeated, relate to the need for sample rates higher than the CD standard 44.1 KHz. Tsutomu Oohashi et al reported in 2000 the results of experiments they claimed proves people can perceive ultrasonic content, thus confirming for both audiophiles and sellers of “high definition” products that CD quality audio is inadequate. Unfortunately, they made a fatal mistake: They used only one loudspeaker to play several ultrasonic frequencies at once, so IM distortion in the tweeters created difference frequencies in the audible range. When the Oohashi experiment was repeated a year later by Shogo Kiryu and Kaoru Ashihara using six separate loudspeakers[1], none of the test subjects were able to distinguish the ultrasonic content. From their summary:

“When the stimulus was divided into six bands of frequencies and presented through six loudspeakers in order to reduce intermodulation distortions, no subject could detect any ultrasounds. It was concluded that addition of ultrasounds might affect sound impression by means of some nonlinear interaction that might occur in the loudspeakers.”

Audio engineers have been investigating ultrasonics for decades, yet no legitimate tests have ever found that people can hear or otherwise perceive frequencies higher than around 20 KHz. Another researcher, Milind Kunchur, thought he found a different way to prove that high sample rates are needed: temporal resolution. He claimed that ears can detected arrival time differences as small as 5-10 microseconds, which is true, but wrongly concluded that reproducing such small timing offsets requires a sample rate higher than 44.1 KHz. What Dr. Kunchur didn’t consider is that bit depth also affects timing resolution, and 44.1 KHz at 16 bits is in fact perfectly adequate to resolve timing to as fine as anyone can hear. This is elegantly proven in a video by Monty Montgomery of Xiph.org. The link below goes directly to that part of the video, though I encourage people to watch the entire video because it debunks several other common myths about digital audio:

Another incorrect belief is that the 96 dB dynamic range of 16 bits is inadequate. I’ve been an professional audio engineer and musician for nearly 50 years. I’ve heard hiss from analog tape and cassettes plenty of times. I’ve heard surface noise and crackles on vinyl records. But I’ve never once noticed background noise from a CD. If you analyze recordings with audio editor software, you’ll see that the ambient room noise is usually the dominant factor. Sometimes circuit noise from the microphones or preamps is louder, but the source noise is always greater than the -96 dB noise floor of CDs. With most recordings, if you play a silent passage the VU meter reads around -70 to -80 at best, which is equal to 11-13 bits. So there’s simply no audible benefit to 24 bits. The only thing bit depth affects is the noise floor. It doesn’t affect resolution, clarity, imaging, or anything else—only residual noise.

As you can imagine, some companies have a financial interest in proving that CDs are inadequate. But when tested properly, nobody has ever been shown to reliably identify a difference between CD quality audio and higher sample rates or bit depths. Again, this has been researched for many years, always with the same conclusion. As we skeptics say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” and so far there has been no such proof.

So what does affect audio fidelity? How can we know if a device offered for sale is really worthwhile or just snake oil and false promises? I saw in the comments for another Copper Magazine article someone ask for a list of “what matters” with audio. I can tell you that only four parameters are needed to define everything that affects audio fidelity: Noise, frequency response, distortion, and time-based errors. But there are also subsets of these parameters.

Noise is the background hiss from analog tape or electronic circuits. A close cousin is dynamic range, which defines the span (expressed in decibels) between the background noise and the loudest level possible before the onset of gross distortion. CDs and DVDs have a very large dynamic range, so any noise you hear is either from the original analog tape, was added as a byproduct during production, or was present in the room and picked up by the microphones when the recording was made. Subsets of noise are AC hum and buzz, electronic crackling, vinyl record clicks and pops, cross-talk between channels, and even windows that rattle and buzz at high volume levels.

Frequency response is how uniformly an audio device passes a range of frequencies. Errors are heard as too much or too little bass, midrange, or treble. For most people, the audible range extends from about 20 Hz at the low end, to just shy of 20 KHz. Subsets of frequency response are physical microphonics, electronic ringing and oscillation, and acoustic ringing. These subsets are less necessary for consumers to understand, but they’re important to design engineers and acousticians.

Distortion is the common word for the more technical term nonlinearity, and it adds new frequency components that weren’t present in the original source. When music passes through a device that adds distortion, new frequencies are created that may or may not be pleasing to the ear. The design goal for high fidelity audio equipment is that all distortion be so low in level it won’t be heard. However, in some contexts a modest amount of distortion can sound pleasing, which is why phonograph records and tube-based electronics are still popular. Of course, distortion is tolerable and even desirable in guitar amplifiers, but that’s music creation, not high fidelity reproduction.

There are two basic types of distortion—harmonic and intermodulation—and both are usually present together. Harmonic distortion adds new frequencies that are musically related to the source. In layman terms, harmonic distortion adds a slightly thick or buzzy quality to music. All musical instruments create tones having harmonics, so harmonic distortion in a power amp merely changes the instrument’s character some amount.

Intermodulation (IM) distortion requires two or more frequencies to be present, and it’s far more damaging because it creates new content that’s not related musically to the original. Even a small amount of IM distortion adds a dissonant quality that can be unpleasant to hear. Another type of distortion is called aliasing, and it’s unique to digital audio. Like IM distortion, aliasing creates new frequencies not harmonically related to the original, and so is unpleasant and irritating to hear. Fortunately, in most modern audio devices, all distortions are too soft to hear.

Time-based errors affect mainly pitch and tempo. When the hole in an LP isn’t quite centered, you’ll hear the pitch rise and fall with each revolution. That’s called wow. Analog tape recorders have a different type of pitch instability called flutter. Unlike the slow pitch change of wow, flutter is more rapid giving a warbling effect. Digital audio has a unique type of timing deviation called jitter, but with all modern sound cards jitter is so much softer than the music that you’ll never hear it.

Room acoustics could be considered a fifth audio parameter, but it really isn’t. Nearby room boundaries can create frequency response errors due to wave reflections combining in the air. Reflections can also create audible echoes and reverb, but those are time-based phenomenon that occur outside the equipment so they don’t warrant their own category either. Likewise, with power amplifiers, maximum output power is important. But that’s not related to fidelity—it merely defines how loudly the amplifier can play.

The above parameters encompass everything that affects audio fidelity. If a device has noise and distortion too soft to hear, a response sufficient to uniformly accommodate the entire range of audible frequencies, and time-based errors too small to be heard, then that device will be transparent to music and other sound passing through it. However, clarity and stereo imaging are greatly affected by room acoustics. Without question, the room you listen in has far more effect on sound quality than any of the audio components.

One final myth I’ll address is the notion that there are aspects of audio that “science” doesn’t know about, or might miss when measuring. This too is easy to disprove using the null test. A null test compares any two audio sources, and combines them at equal volume with the polarity of one source reversed. So as one wave goes positive the other is negative, thus canceling completely. After nulling the two sources, any residual signal that remains reveals their difference, and that includes artifacts you might not even think to look for. Nulling has been used to measure audio devices since the 1940s. If  there really was some aspect of audio that was unknown, it would have shown up long ago in a null residual.

[1] http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=10005

No story about the Dan can be told without raising up Roger Nichols. Nichols won 4 Grammy awards for Best Sound Engineer on four Steely Dan recordings, three of which are studio albums worthy of an article on the art of sound engineering each on their own, Aja, Gaucho, and Two Against Nature. Audiophiles rarely mention these albums in their lists of recordings they use to judge systems, but any one of these three are black book tools in judging the worth of a sound system.

And this is why I’ve chosen Steely Dan for a column usually given to influences in my musical life. Certainly the Dan was a heavy influence for me, being primarily a bass player and any music written or co-written by a bass player will have fat finger curls and dark turns through the spell of the swamp.  But a constant lurking elephant in this fascinating band is the care and obsession with how the songs are recorded. Roger Nichols was undoubtedly their George Martin and as critical to the success of the art of their obsession as Martin’s was to The Beatles.

From 1972 to 1980 Steely Dan released 7 studio albums with varied success, ending with Gaucho in 1980. They then went 20 years before sending up Two Against Nature in 2000. Two won three Grammy awards, Best Pop Vocal Album, Album of the Year, and Best Engineer Non-Classical for Roger Nichols. There was a lot of talk at the time that the Grammys were given more or less as lifetime achievement awards. In the 20 years between Gaucho and Two Against Nature the Dan had become FM radio/classic rock darlings. You couldn’t listen for an hour without hearing something from these guys, and albums that were not commercially successful like Countdown to Ecstasy became must-listen material.

However. Any casual listen to Two provides an insight into this obsession with doing recordings over and over until the track is perfect. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen ( the main men of Dan) used 53 musicians in the studio and only 26 made the final cut including 6 drummers (featuring Vinnie Colaiuta and Ricky Lawson) and Amy Helm on whistle. These guys were famous for laying down preliminary tracks, then bringing in drummer after drummer after drummer, then lead guitar after lead guitar after lead guitar, until they had the perfect cut. Didn’t matter if you were Larry Carlton, Lee Ritenour, or Hugh McCracken (all regular contributors). The end result was the divinity and commanded no indecision and brooked no appeal.

The astounding result is as spare as if there were four people in the studio. The attention to each instrument is palpable and perfect. Here is the first track off Two, “Gaslighting Abbie”.  This is a great example of the singular attention to each instrument as it builds from guitar/kick and cymbal/bass and adding as it goes. Pay attention to the attack of the snare when it comes in. You can hear the dynamic of the stick as it fwaps the snare head each time. As vocals are added the back vocals have a real percussive quality as does the horn arrangement. Throughout the recording you can hear each instrument with clarity and presence. Then a neat bass/piano break, followed by a filthy guitar solo by Becker. Ricky Lawson on drums and Tom Barney on a bass with a tone looking to mug you in a dark alley. Nothing lost and everything gained.

Shiver me timbers.

My first listen of a Dan song was in the spring of ‘73. I had begun a life of study at UConn the previous fall which quickly spiraled (upwards) into a series of freedom experiments that had less to do with attending classes and more to do with keg parties and the pursuit of the psychedelic bus. But I still had to maintain, and I ran through a series of student jobs that included wringing the necks of chickens and student union dishwashing. I clearly remember working in the dishroom on a clean spring afternoon when “Reelin’ In The Years” came on the radio. I hadn’t started playing guitar yet but I’d been listening plenty, and the opening guitar lick of that song got my full attention while the pots and pans I was working on floated through the back door of my consciousness.

This song has been played so any times on classic rock stations I don’t have to put a copy here. Everyone who knows this song, and the licks of Elliott Randall, can hear every bar in their head. I believe this to be in the top 5 guitar solos ever recorded. This song is all over YouTube in various live versions but you will never hear it done quite with the same bite and tone as this studio version. Randall was an absolute monster and this captures his best moment.

The first Dan song I learned when I started playing bass was “Kid Charlemagne”. This tune from The Royal Scam features Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie on the kit and Chuck Rainey on bass. These two had done a lot of session work together prior to this track and it shows. The funk stunk up and down this cut, and Rainey’s bass was hot and added significantly to my chop shop. (Side Note 1: This song was inspired by Owsley Stanley, Grateful Dead sound man and LSD chemist extraordinaire). But my true favorite to play was not a heavily bass oriented cut. It was from Countdown to Ecstasy and titled “My Old School”.

A semi-autobiographical track with memories from Becker and Fagen’s school days at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson (Side Note 2: Chevy Chase attended Bard at the same time and played drums in Becker/Fagen’s first band, the Leather Canary), the line-up was basically the original Dan band from Can’t Buy a Thrill with Becker still on bass. In the mid-70’s I was enamored with horn bands and loved, completely gator-boogied, playing with big horn bands. This particular band I was in, The Pass The Hat Band, had morphed drastically from doing country folk Jimmy Buffet/John Prine to getting more aggressive as we added more members, always looking to expand into more challenging material. This in fact broke the original band up as some originals either didn’t have the chops or didn’t dig the muse. We went from three acoustic guitars and bass to two electric guitars, bass, drums, percussion (RIP Rob Fried), piano and horns and started playing the stuff we were all loving at the time. And a perfect example was “My Old School”.

Playing that song live with a full band was the most fun I’d had outside the back seat of Mom’s Bonneville. The horn arrangement was a true percussive beauty, a classic specimen of the best a horn section can do. And we had a lead guitar player John Spencer who could play Skunk Baxter’s nasty solo perfectly. I came close to falling over every time we did this, it just knocked me out.

I’ve said this in another article, but you cannot experience getting to break open the bottle of a song quite like having to learn it to play live with great musicians. You discover all the little treasures a song like this tries to keep to itself. As great a song as “My Old School” is to listen to she still has her dirty little secrets that are revealed when you have to learn it and you’re dedicated to getting it right. One of the true pleasures of playing any instrument. We ended up playing a lot of great R&B material, including Otis/Blues Brothers arrangements of the greats/Little Feat/Tower of Power/Elvin Bishop, but “My Old School” was always my favorite. A slappin yer mother arrangement, right down to the vocals.

I’m trying to get tight with you that Steely Dan, despite only 9 albums in a 30 year span, are worth the study. From a pure musical journey to the obsessive studio work that produced some of the most interesting engineering ever done, this band, these guys, Becker, Fagen and Nichols created something that you overlook or dismiss at your jeopardy. Like an earlier article on Zappa, I had to cut this short for the column’s sake, but the study of how these songs were put together, whipped, worked, searched and stretched, then pushed back into the genie’s flask is a discovery of true art and a reward in itself. Join us at the edge of a grey lake where bodies surface like ghosts in a glass. Then do it again.

Ha. Got you. That was from Gaucho. Couldn’t resist.

[I hate to disagree with Woody, but when he says that audiophiles rarely mention Steely Dan albums… every true-blue audio geek I’ve ever known has had multiple copies of Aja, agonized over the awfulness of that remastered CD, hoped for the best from the new remaster, and yadda yadda yadda: all the trappings of a true fetish piece. Donald Fagen’s solo album The Nightfly, also recorded by Nichols, will be found on most of those same shelves, and “I.G.Y.” is often heard at audio shows. One final thing that I can’t resist: Jeff “Skunk” Baxter.  Who else, in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, has gone from being a Steely Doobie to a well-respected authority on missile defense, while still wearing that goat-roper ‘stache?!? It’s like something out of Buckaroo Banzai. You couldn’t make this stuff up!—Ed.]

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Kotivalo.

When I was 17, I discovered the compositional style called Minimalism.

I remember the moment very well. It was 1974, the spring of 11^th grade, and my mother was downstairs teaching Hungarian to a student. I put on what had become my favorite radio show (remember them? Sort of like a podcast but meant for thousands, rather than “personal”) –– “Diaspar”[1], on Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania FM station, WXPN. I recall that the subtitle was “Energy Music”, though that might be wrong.

Out of my Sony tape recorder speakers flowed this tone cluster of dense pianos — pulsing, gently hammering. I was dumbstruck. I had never heard anything like it — it was as if I was awash in a pointillist mist of slowly-evolving sound.

Suddenly, the sound of a great beast came thumping up my house’s stairs, and my mom’s (somewhat tall) student burst into my room: “I didn’t know you liked Steve Reich!” “Is that what this is? Who’s Steve Reich?” I suppose everyone has a moment of discovery of something that hits him or her like this (minus the large student).

I listened for the next 15-or-so minutes, rapt. The piece was announced as “Six Pianos”[2] on the just-released 3-record Deutsche Grammophone set called Drumming[3], and as soon as I could, I was in Philly and hunting for it. I can even remember when I found it – it was a major score.

I had been vaguely aware of a form of art music that wasn’t exactly modern classical, that wasn’t any form of rock or jazz, that used electric instruments unashamedly (like I did). And here it was, fully formed, in Reich’s album. The piece “Drumming”, played out over 4 LP sides, is a study in phase music, in which each of the sections (tuned bongos; marimbas and women’s voices; glockenspiels, whistler and piccolo), featuring gradually increasing numbers of players, articulates the pattern, until by the 4th section, it’s all there. (Yes, it takes a while.) Let me turn to the Wiki page on the record, for an explanation of phasing:“The piece employs Reich’s trademark technique of phasing[4]. Phasing is achieved when two players, or one player and a recording, are playing a single repeated pattern in unison, usually on the same kind of instrument. One player changes tempo slightly, while the other remains constant, and eventually the two players are one or several beats out of sync with each other. They may either stay there, or phase further, depending on the piece.”

So what I heard on “Six Pianos” was exactly that, spelled out on pianos. This turns out to be a little bit of genius — an elegant example of how to layer an ultimately complex texture from fairly simple materials. His “Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ” (the 6^th side of the album), is, like the 4^th section of “Drumming” likewise taking these same thoughts out into a more full scoring. And his rescoring of “Six Pianos” as “Six Marimbas” was an inspired choice (I can recall listening to the LP in the late 80s through a Moscode Super-IT phono preamp — it was noisy, it was imprecise, but man, was it holographic!)

I’m unsure as to whether it takes a certain inner ear to hear beauty in this kind of music — certainly, there’s something akin in this to Indian music; a sense of motion within stillness. I just know that I hear it like I hear little else. I heard Indian music at 10 (as I wrote early last year) and thought, “Aha! Music IS art!” I heard the minimalists at 17 and knew the truth of the idea.

As I write this I’m listening to an early 70s release on Shandar of Four Organs / Phase Patterns[5]. There’s something about hearing raw sound, spooled out over time; an appealing texture, and little else — the context IS the content, and vice-versa. Listen to Shem Guibbory’s transcendent take on “Violin Phase, for violin and tape (or 4 violins)” on ECM[6], written in 1967 and recorded in 1980.

Reich would (of course slowly) evolve in his compositions to embrace full orchestra (“The Desert Music, for small chorus and large orchestra”, 1984) and more complex content, like “Nagoya Marimbas, for 2 marimbas” (1994) — without losing anything of his signature identity. The third part of his “New York Counterpoint (for clarinet, bass clarinet and tape)” (1985) gets a jaunty stride going – you can feel the pulse of Manhattan in it — but it’s composer is unmistakable.

If you’ve read this far, the most effective way to get a lot of his work is to acquire the 10-disc set Works 1965-1995[7], though you’ll still have a few holes. Also of special note is the recent high-resolution release by percussionist Kuniko Kato on Linn Records, Kuniko Plays Reich[8].

Do I seem like a fan boy? I am (that’s the virtue of having a column in which I get to wax enthusiastic about whatever I want). At my 1994 wedding, we closed the ceremony with the composer’s “Tehillim”, his setting of Hebrew psalms[9]. I’ll discuss how we opened the ceremony, next time.

[1] The name comes from Arthur C. Clarke’s “The City and the Stars”

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Pianos

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drumming_Reich

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_music

[5] http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21584-four-organs-phase-patterns/

[6] Steve Reich and Musicians ECM New Series 78118-21168

[7] http://store.nonesuch.com/artists/steve-reich/works-1965-1995-digital-album.html

[8] http://www.kuniko-kato.net/en/project/kpr/

[9] Steve Reich and Musicians ECM New Series 21215