Issue 55

Consolidation in the publishing world is nothing new, but it is nonetheless an odd coincidence when the sales of two major English-language audio magazines are announced on two sequential days.

Stereophile was founded by J. Gordon Holt in 1962. Holt had previously been a reviewer for High Fidelity, and created Stereophile to focus upon how audio components actually sounded in use (radical concept, no?). Holt sold the magazine to Santa Fe businessman Larry Archibald in 1982, and in 1986, John Atkinson left the editorship of  the UK magazine Hi-Fi News to become Editor of Stereophile–a role he still holds.

In 1998, Archibald and Atkinson sold the magazine to Petersen Publishing, best known as the originator and publisher of Hot Rod and numerous other automotive and specialty magazines. Just a year later, Petersen was acquired by EMAP USA, the American arm of an English publishing conglomerate. Two years later, in 2001, EMAP’s US magazines were acquired by Primedia, which sold the magazine in 2007 to Source Interlink, a publicly-traded distributor of print and physical media. Following major financial reversals,  Source reorganized as a closely-held company in 2009, and then sold its magazine holdings in 2013 to Golden Tree, an asset management company which labeled the magazine holdings as TEN: The Enthusiast Network.

On March 22, it was announced that the magazines and websites that comprised TEN’s Home Tech Network (Magazines: Stereophile, Sound & Vision, Shutterbug; Websites: S’phile, S&V, Shutterbug, AudioStream, Analog Planet, Inner Fidelity) had been sold to AV Tech Media Ltd., the UK-based publisher of Hi-Fi News, Hi-Fi Choice, Home Cinema Choice, and a number of other special interest and hobbyist magazines. The group also produces the annual Hi-Fi Show.

When Stereophile began in 1962, it was an irregularly-published, slender magazine with limited circulation. Archibald and Atkinson transformed the magazine into a real, mainstream publication, gaining strength during the period when old-guard audio magazines like High Fidelity, Audio, Stereo Review and many others either vanished or were consolidated into other titles. With a monthly circulation of about 71,000, the magazine continues to be the industry leader. The new, more-congenial ownership should only serve to make it even stronger.

Just as The Enthusiast Network appears to be pruning its publications in order to concentrate on automotive titles, the Haymarket Media Group in the UK appears to be following the same path. Haymarket publishes the successful and long-running Autocar, What Car?, and Pistonheads titles, and on March 21, announced the sale of What Hi-Fi? and four other magazines to  Future Publishing in the UK.

Future’s comments on the purchase prove that corporate-speak is, sadly, not limited to the US: “These brands will present Future with the opportunity to continue its strategy of organic growth in line with its content monetisation strategy….This acquisition is a further demonstration of our strategy to develop evergreen content that connects with communities and further diversifies our revenue streams.”

Congratulations?

What Hi-Fi? is the best-selling audio magazine in the UK, with an average monthly circulation of around 28,000. The field has contracted a good bit: five or six years ago, the magazine’s circulation was close to 80,000.

I’ve been involved in theater most of my life—my parents ran an amateur English theater group, performing everything from David Mamet to William Shakespeare to Neil Simon to Harold Pinter . (I thought it’d be fun to yaw you back and forth across genres and the Atlantic there.) They now run a performing arts center just outside Bangalore, India, with a packed schedule of drama, dance, and music.

I started working for the group as a lighting designer, and after a workshop in 1994, began writing plays. My two most recent full-length plays were part of a “TheatreScience” project, written in collaboration with scientists from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore. We spent weeks on the beautiful NCBS campus, talking to microbiologists, shadowing them in their labs (including one session that started with a live rat and ended just minutes later with finely sliced rat brain on a glass slide), doing workshops together, playing frisbee soccer, and hanging out in the canteen.

If there was a theme to this immersive research, it was the recurring line, “I / We don’t know.” The scientists were almost proud to say it, and said it often. There were two reasons for these frequent declarations of ignorance. One was that the pursuit of knowledge is specialized to an extreme. A microbiologist who spends years studying how one particular protein crosses one particular cell wall is in danger of knowing less about science in general today than a layperson who reads popular science journals such as… well not Popular Science… have you seen it lately? (Anyone here remember Omni?)

The other reason is that while we can break down many processes to an enzyme and cell-wall level, stepping back and understanding how it works in the context of a multicellular being causes an exponential leap in complexity. The answer to nearly every “multicellular” higher context question I asked (including, “What are the potential uses of this research?”),  was simply, “We don’t know”.

You probably know where I’m going with this, but let’s detour abruptly into my other passion: bicycling. Two wheels and a frame—this is a system that’s many orders of magnitude less complex than even a single cell. (If you’re not sure about that, ask a microbiologist to describe in detail the mechanism by which a virus crosses a cell wall—it’s a Greek epic over many acts, with heroic enzymes, sneaky sidekicks, protein choruses, side skirmishes, and much love and loss.)

Cyclists have been obsessed with speed since the very start, and yet it’s only in the last couple of years that the industry is waking up to what retrogrouches have insisted on all along—that supple, tubby tires are just as fast, or even faster than, skinny tires. The problem was belief in isolated numbers—tests on rotating steel drums showed that, as expected, a narrow, harder tire with a smaller contact patch had less friction, and therefore, lower rolling resistance than a wider, softer tire.

The road may be long and winding, or take you home to the place you belong, or even become your bride, but it is not a steel drum. So guess what happens when we take those tires out of the lab and put them on your bicycle? They become part of a system, and now, those fatter more supple tires conform to road irregularities, absorbing the shocks that narrow, 100+ psi tires transfer to the frame and rider. So the fat tire tends to dissipate the energy of bumps as heat from tire flex, and the narrow tire tends to use that energy to lift up the rider, and counter forward movement. And also, since we’re now part of a system, we have to consider effects that are hard to measure such increased rider efficiency due to greater comfort, and increased rider enjoyment in terms of flow.

That brings us to an interesting reason why so many cyclists firmly believe that a narrow, high pressure tire is faster. Jan Heine, the irascible cyclist behind Bicycle Quarterly magazine, has been writing a series of blog posts debunking myths in the cycling world. In the post about tire width, he writes about a placebo effect involving vibration frequency: “The faster we ride, the higher the frequency at which our bike vibrates, because our tires encounter road irregularities at a higher speed. However, narrower tires also increase the frequency of the vibrations they transmit. Basically, a bike with narrow tires feels faster even though it may actually be slower.” [You can see Heine, Jan. 2018, January 3. 12 Myths in Cycling (1): Wider Tires Are Slower here.]

The “problem” with this system then, is that it connects with a galactically complex multicellular being, whose perceptions of the world are either easily fooled, or really only just being fully understood. And that only one aspect of the system is considered in the “proof”. For example the many people debunking high-resolution digital music saying it’s just wasting space by encoding ultrasound, not realizing, among other things, the complexity of digital filters and their effect on the audible range.

Recently, I was watching a series of videos presented by someone we’ll call Paul. Because he’s called Paul. Even though he is an audio engineer making a product that asks me to part with my hard-earned (well… earned) money, I was heartened to hear him say those three most important words: “I don’t know”.

Looking down the comments though, there was disappointment and even mild outrage that he uttered those words in public. Now, I know that a scientist beheading rats in the depths of a research lab is not an engineer whose work has a retail price tag on it. I understand that an audio engineer with a hi-fi brand needs to answer your questions about the how’s and why’s of its designs. But also consider this: An audio engineer uses years of training and experience to design a circuit or cable, knows what to change to affect the sound, knows how to listen for these changes and understand what they mean in the long term for the system (remember, higher vibration frequency doesn’t mean a faster bicycle), and then knows how to consistently recreate this sound over tens or hundreds or thousands of units in a manufacturing process.

So why is it such a let down if he says he doesn’t know the exact mechanism by which changing this capacitor or that fuse changes the sound? Isn’t it far more important that he’s open to the fact that it does change the sound, and therefore “listens” to capacitors (and resistors and solder and connectors), rather than just finding ones that meet the specs on paper, and slapping them into your high-fidelity product?

I’ve been lamenting for a long time now that people find saying “I don’t know” harder than passing kidney stones. People like that have a conviction about everything that I don’t have about anything. I realize that I can’t let them intimidate me, and I need to stop apologizing for being an audiophile, and that doing so is, in some way, apologizing for being me.

Now, to screw my courage to the sticking-place and write that review on power cords. Yes, I heard a big difference.

It’s June 1929.  A young man in his early thirties takes the long train ride, 750 miles, from Jackson, Mississippi, to Richmond, Indiana.  It’s so hot in the coach compartment the ground outside hardly seems to move outside the open windows.  The train route runs from Jackson up to Memphis where it picks up the Mississippi River and follows it all the way to Cairo, just to pick up extra humidity.  The ride takes two days and one night with stops and in the summer of 1929 there wasn’t a cool spot on the entire ride, even at night.  When the young man arrives in Richmond on June 14 he’s exhausted, hungry and damp.

Charlie Patton and a fellow blues dude named Walter Hawkins walked the mile from the station to the Starr Piano Co. backed by the Whitewater River.  Owned by the Gennett family, they had their own recording company with the studio in the back of the piano factory.  Gennett had already recorded Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael.  They were well known for jazz but it was Paramount Records recording north of Chicago, and owned by the Wisconsin Chair company in Grafton, Wisconsin, that had specialized in recording the blues.  But they had never recorded anything from the rich Mississippi delta where blues had its own distinct rhythm and flavor.

In Jackson a man named H. C. Speir owned a mercantile and record store on Farish Street in the black neighborhood of Jackson.  He moonlighted at night as a talent scout for blues record companies, searching for the next great thing.  And he found a few.  Speir had a metal disc machine in his store he would use to record artists who came from all around, then sent the discs north to the record companies to arrange for formal recordings.  Bluesmen like William Harris, Son House, Skip James, Joe (who was also blind) Reynolds, Robert Johnson, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bo Carter and Willie Brown were auditioned by Speir and sent to recording studios.  Speir also auditioned Jimmy Rodgers and turned him down.  HC must’ve been hung over that day.  Happens to the best of us.

Charlie Patton lived 140 miles away from Jackson on the Dockery Plantation in a remote part of the delta near Ruleville.  Patton had been playing for years around the area in dances and beer halls and had heard of this guy in Jackson who could get you recorded.  Charlie and Speir connected somehow and Speir drove three hours to the plantation to listen to Charlie and loved what he heard.  He sent a disc to Paramount who wanted to record Patton as their first entry into the Delta Blues.

But as it happened Paramount in 1929 was moving out of Chicago and into a new studio back at its home base in Wisconsin.  Weird move but there you go.  (They went out of business 6 years later, go figure.) So Paramount made a deal with Fred Gennett from Gennett studios to set up sessions and record discs while they moved.  The deal was Gennett was paid 40 dollars by Paramount for every track recorded, a pretty nifty sum per song in 1929.  So when Charlie walked into the Gennett studio on that sweltering day in Indiana Fred told him “Give us everything ya got.”   And he did.  14 of the 60 recordings Patton would make in his life were done that one day in June.  June 14, 1929 has been called the day that changed the blues.  OK, I’m calling it that.  Sue me.

Patton was known for his stage antics, including playing the guitar between his legs, behind his back and behind his head (right, Jimi?) and his recordings really showed his mastery of the guitar and slide as well as chord voicings and sheer vocal power.  Listen to the little guitar trinkets in this recording from that day in Richmond.

Now, a note for y’all.  These are not great recordings.  When Paramount went boing in 1935 they sold off all their metal masters for scrap and many ended up lining chicken coops.  All that remain are a few old 78’s which are pretty battered.  So you have to listen to hear what I’m talking about.

During the vid is a cartoon of Patton with his guitar over his shoulder by R. Crumb.  Anyone who doesn’t know who dat guy is needs to ask me.

 

This next cut recorded at Gennett you can hear his guitar playing accompanied by hitting the top of his guitar in an alter rhythm that seems to be off the cuff.  Also from 1929  ‘Screamin and Hollerin Blues’.

 

There are videos all over the internet on how to play this next song with the slide.  Most are done with an expensive steel  guitar with a resonator which captures the sound Patton got with a cheap rudimentary instrument.  And a few of the vids even include the vocal.  It’s actually worth listening to a few of those then go back to Patton’s recording to understand how instrumental he was.  Folks are still today posting videos on how to play like him.  Here’s ‘Banty Rooster’.

 

Patton’s use of syncopation on the strings and guitar, the call and answer of his voice and the slide underlined this style called Delta Blues.  In this recording of ‘Spoonful Blues’ you can hear him talking back to himself as well as leaving off the signature title at the end of a phrase to finish with the slide.

 

By the way, this is not about drug use like Howlin Wolf’s later ‘Spoonful’.   Listen and use yer imagination.

This next is ‘Shake it and Break It’.  I included this because Charlie had the heart of a bluesman but he used vaudeville and humor in a lot of his stuff.  This recording is an example of his rag style.  By the way, if Country Joe ever said he didn’t use this for his Vietnam anthem recorded at Woodstock he was a liar.

 

After the Gennett/Paramount recordings Charlie became a star.  Suddenly he was no longer an itinerant performer, but typically booked for plantation dances, dance halls and entertainment palaces all over the South with an annual concert in Chicago and recording sessions in New York.  Stories from the newspapers and accounts of his performances spoke of his ability to not only pack them in but hold his audiences spellbound.  I’ve read in enough places to make it at least half true that he could be heard up to 500 yards away at an outside county fair without amplification.  Plantation owners would kick him out because workers would stop working when they heard him start to play.  Patton could rev the crowd into barrelhouse frenzy then calm everyone down with a couple of gospel selections and still enrapt the audience.  Apparently playing behind yer head would always wow ‘em.

In 1933 Charlie married his common law wife and sometime recording partner Bertha Lee Pate and settled in Holly Ridge, Mississippi.  He’d been diagnosed with a heart ailment but the resting was too late.  Charlie Patton passed on April 28, 1934.  But not before recording this with his wife Bertha, his last recording, a few months before his death.  From 1934 ‘Oh Death’.

 

Only 4 recordings remain of these two together and it’s sad.  She was really good.

Charlie was buried in an unmarked plot on a plantation in Holly Ridge.  In 1990 John Fogerty heard there was no marker and researched Patton’s death.  He found a cemetery caretaker in Holly Ridge who claimed to have been at the burial.  Fogerty paid for a gravestone and its erection.  Good onya John.  Good onya.

Chennai, capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu on India’s southeastern coastline, is home to the five men who make up The F16s. Billing themselves as a “Madras/Bangalore-based Dance/Punk band with a penchant for the weird,” the group has been recording and performing for about six years. There are many indie musicians in India, but few who write in English. And fewer still who present such an odd view of the world in their songs.

On the band’s first EP, Kaleidoscope (2013), “My Shallow Lover” is a good song to plunge in with. You get the ska-inspired guitar sound, somehow simultaneously frantic and laid back; it’s no accident that the other, more famous band named after a type of military jet is the B-52’s (and plenty of folks have also made the obvious comparison with Vampire Weekend).

And then there are the bizarre, flippant lyrics with the twisted sense of humor, in this case expressing how ridiculous love is when jealousy makes it self-destruct: “I wear an ego and he’s wearing Speedos. / Should I laugh or cry?” Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter: “I don’t give a f*** about who you love…’cause I’m more important than you.”

 

This early recording also includes some more serious, philosophical material in “Avalanche.” However, the lyrics, full of vague metaphors about being overwhelmed (“We try to paint the ceiling, but my walls are falling down”) are the less important element of this song compared to how it demonstrates the strength of the band’s individual musicians.

Those musicians are the laconic, deadpan, shades-wearing Josh Fernandez on vocals and guitar, and his cohorts: Shashank Manohar on bass, Harshan Radhakrishnan on keyboards, Vikram Yesudas on drums, and Abhinav Krishnaswamy on guitar. All of them have impressive resumes in the Chennai indie scene. It’s also clear that they work well together to develop interesting arrangements. I especially like the interplay between the two guitars on this track.

 

The F16s’ early tracks seem to specialize in frustrating conventional expectations (a compliment, in my opinion). On the 2014 EP Nobody’s Gonna Wait, the song “Jacuzzi” is as baffling rhythmically as it is lyrically. The intro beat is so obscured by layers of syncopation that it feels like polymeter (more than one time signature simultaneously). Once Fernandez’s vocal begins, the meter straightens out, but then there is the meaning to contend with.

The lyrics evoke a nebulous feeling and flashes of imagery, nothing more concrete. That’s characteristic of The F16s. Although the musical style is very different, I’m reminded of REM’s lyrics, which often mean absolutely nothing when you just look at them on a page, but take on an indefinable but important meaning when they’re sung. Here’s “Jacuzzi” with the lyrics included in the video:

 

As determined as they are to be original, The F16s couldn’t resist some standard pop influences in the frustrating-love-affair song “Blackboard.” The simple repetitive melody with short, unresolved phrases is accompanied by non-threatening guitar patterns and a steady beat. They seem to be channeling Coldplay tracks from 15 years ago.

 

The F16s’ first and only full album is Triggerpunkte, which came out in 2016. Triggerpunkte boasts the engineering talents of Christian Wright of the famed Abbey Road Studios. But it’s more than the mixing that makes this album the group’s most accessible work yet, thanks to some new musical influences.

Keyboardist Radhakrishnan has said in interviews that the album’s title refers to how emotions can be triggered in humans. To that end, the music is more sensitive than their earlier efforts. “Moon Child,” in a relaxed island style, lets Fernandez show off his vocal range (both in terms of pitch and expression) more than usual. The two acoustic guitars make the texture pleasingly translucent, a nice change of pace.

 

That’s not to say the F16s have lost all their strangeness, either rhythmically or lyrically. It’s just more subtle now. “Cannibal Life II” has an off-kilter R&B vibe. What should be smooth as a Seal track gets a hyper undertone from techniques like out-of-sync synths, staggering drum beats, and tremolo electric guitar. The lyrics are hard to understand (and have not been posted online, unlike for their earlier tracks), but snippets like “It’s quarter past three in the morning / it’s quarter past three in my brain” indicate that Fernandez is singing about the dodgy, exhausting existence of a working musician.

 

And they’ve finally created a solid attempt at a pop hit that doesn’t sound retro. The single “You Could Use Me As a Weapon” — lyricist Fernandez calls it “vague interpretations of love, romance, and melancholy…just a song about how the youth feel” – has that combination of vocal angst and constant motion in the accompaniment that really sells these days. Judging by the band’s current tour schedule, it’s caught the public’s attention.

 

As they’ve grown older and more popular, The F16’s have started to sound less indie, even if their status has not technically changed. It’s a danger of success: you taste a little sweet approval and begin to craft your music specifically to repeat the experience. I’m hoping their second album, whenever that shows up, goes back to celebrating their “penchant for the weird.”

“What did you say to Mr. Segal?” My boss grabbed my arm and pulled me aside.

“Who’s Mr. Segal?” I asked.

Through some fudging about my education on my resumé, I landed a job as a market representative in the corporate buying office in Macy’s department store on 34th Street in Manhattan. I was a senior executive. This came with one distinct perk. I was given a key to the senior executive washroom, allowing me to pee alongside the big shots in the store. What a thrill.

My job was to do market research in furniture. Before entering the hi-fi business, I had worked in various furniture stores in the UK and Israel, so I had a fairly good knowledge of the field. The job was really bullshit. We did all this so-called research for the corporation, and the buyers usually ignored us and did their own thing. My boss’s boss was Kenneth Straus. He was the great-great grandson of one of the original owners, Lazarus Straus, who partnered with Roland Macy, the founder of the store, thus the name. Kenny was an honorary member of the New York City Fire Department, and was an avid collector of fire-engine memorabilia. His office was resplendent in fire-engine red. His carpet was red, as was his secretary’s typewriter; his filing cabinets and desk were also red. Interestingly he had a framed letter mounted on the back of his office door. His great grandmother, Ida, wrote it. The postmark was the Titanic, and it had been mailed from Queenstown in the south of Ireland, near Cork. This was the ship’s last stop before the ill-fated cruise. In it she expressed concern over the voyage, and Mr. Straus thought this was a premonition. Even though there was a place for her in the lifeboats, she refused to leave her husband Isidor, and they both died when the ship sank after it struck the iceberg.

He was not a very demonstrative person but he always got excited when the sound of a fire engine siren wafted into the hubbub of the offices on the thirteenth floor. When this happened (as it did frequently on 34th Street) he would stand up, run to the window, and look out. This occurred no matter what he was doing, and frankly, we were glad when it happened, as he never seemed to contribute anything positive to the conversation. (I attended his funeral many years later out of sheer curiosity. Among the speakers were Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of New York, the fire commissioner, and the police chief. When the service was over, his coffin was hoisted onto a fire truck and slowly driven away. The traffic on Madison Ave was stopped as the cortege moved downtown on this uptown avenue).

My boss, let’s call her Kathy, was a large woman, over six feet tall, with shoulders like a football player. She was loud but really charming and smart. We hit it off right away. She had worked at Bloomingdales and really knew her stuff. One of my jobs was to organize meetings for the five or six different divisions around the country. Before they were consolidated into the name Macy’s, there was Bamberger’s in New Jersey, Burdine’s in Florida, Bullock’s in California, and a few others. To teach me how to arrange these meetings, Kathy suggested that I monitor a meeting that was happening that weekend for the Domestics division (the exciting world of sheets and pillowcases). There were about 20 people in the conference room. On the table were samples of sheets, comforters, and towels. For about two hours, executives in suits droned on about the electrifying universe of shmattes. This was my first introduction to corporate speech: the ability to talk authoritatively about a subject without actually saying anything. When they finally finished, a short, elderly man stood up, and in a few words dismissed the previous speakers, and said in a clear and concise manner what action should be taken. At this point we broke for lunch. I noticed that the old man was eating alone and went over to join him.

“I really liked what you said,” I remarked.

“Really?” he replied.

“Yes, the others were talking nonsense and you were the only one who made sense.”

“Thank you. Was there anything else you didn’t like?”

I said that the whole meeting seemed like a waste of time, and could have been made much shorter if people hadn’t blathered so much. He nodded and sensing that the conversation was over, I left. That’s when my boss grabbed my arm and said, “What did you say to Mr. Segal?”

I told her what I had said, then asked, “Who’s Mr. Segal?”

She looked at me in horror. “Mr. Segal is the chairman of Macy’s!”

A few months later a buying trip was arranged for my boss, a senior vice president, and a couple of executives. They were travelling to Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. I was jealous, but as I was low on the totem pole, I didn’t expect to be asked, and I wasn’t… until one day, a week before the trip, Kathy asked me to come into her office. She told me that Pan Am, to celebrate the inauguration of non-stop flights between New York and Tokyo, had given Macy’s a free ticket, and as their trip had already been booked and paid for, they decided that I should join them. I was thrilled; I had never traveled to the Far East. I sought out a co-worker who had just returned from Hong Kong and asked him about the food.

He said, “The food in Hong Kong is great. When you leave the Macy’s office in Connaught Road, you make a right and at the next corner, there’s a McDonald’s.”

This is not what I wanted to hear.

I flew to Tokyo on this seemingly endless flight. Not so amusingly, they only had one movie on the plane, which they played three times. It was Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot. Not his best. On arrival I was high as a kite, and dashed around the city like the mad tourist I was. To my great delight, I loved Tokyo. My job was to visit the department stores, and look at the furniture displays. At that time, Danish modern was very popular and the simple aesthetic of Danish design blended perfectly with Japanese sensibility. I had arrived a day before the others, so I had ample time to explore. When my boss and the others arrived I was super enthusiastic, and was greeted by scowls and grumpiness. Apparently not everyone enjoys traveling. The next morning my boss asked me if I had brought a measuring tape with inches on it. I had forgotten to bring one, and this caused her to scream and yell at me. She also threatened to send me home for my lack of professionalism. I shut my mouth after that.

After Tokyo, we flew to Manila in the Philippines. There were many factories in that country making rattan furniture, which was popular in the US in the mid-seventies. On arrival, army personnel sporting automatic rifles surrounded the plane. We were told to stay in our seats while some soldiers entered and escorted a young man off the plane. I heard later that he was wanted for anti-government activities, and had been extradited from Japan. This was during the Marcos era and martial law was in effect. A curfew was imposed from 10pm until 6am every night. This didn’t really affect us but had a profound effect on the locals. One evening while taking some air outside the hotel, a man appeared out of the bushes and offered me a woman. Not only was she beautiful, he said, but because of the curfew, I could keep her all night. It turns out that even a curfew can be an advantage for some people. I demurred.

From Manila we traveled to Taipei in Taiwan, then over to Hong Kong. One evening my boss said, “Get dressed up, we’re going on a date.”

A car picked us up and took us to a ferry terminal where we boarded a luxurious boat and were seated at a table next to the window. The boat took off and slowly cruised around Victoria Harbor, which is spectacular. This was in 1976 before the building boom that has completely crowded out the green hills that overlook the waterfront. It was a truly romantic setting. At one point we began to dance, and Kathy started to come on to me. I was unused to this and a bit surprised. I stepped back a little, and again, she pressed herself against my body. This happened a third time and I sidestepped her advances. The next morning, I left for Tokyo and the flight home to New York. A week or so after this, Kathy returned and made my life a living hell. Everything I did was wrong. I was put on warning and fired a month later. I knew this was sexual harassment, but to prove it was beyond my ken.

Her parting words really stung. “This is the best thing for you. You may not think it now but you don’t belong in corporate America, and will do much better on your own.”

She was right, but it still hurt.

#MeToo

Talk about in medias res. In “Daughters, Part 1” we stopped virtually mid-sentence after introducing Milica Djordjević (b. 1984), Serbian composer now based in Berlin. The waves she’s making in Europe are only beginning to lap at these shores; soon you’ll hear more. Her story is a fascinating one. Barbara Eckle’s notes for Wergo WER 6422 2 fill in some background: war-torn 1990s Belgrade; piano lessons; a newfound passion for painting, succeeded by a passion for theatre; then dual enrollment at the School of Music (piano again) and university (physics); further studies in composition and audio engineering at Belgrade’s University of the Arts; post-grad work in Strasbourg, Paris, and Berlin.

Don’t dismiss these wanderings as dilettantism. They offer compelling evidence of the opposite: fierce multidisciplinary engagement. Since the mid-19th century if not before, creative musical spirits have routinely sought inspiration in literature, visual arts, scientific discovery, and more. That trend intensified during the 20th century, with many composers becoming printmakers, inventors, and poets—not to mention a few architects and engineers, like Xenakis, who became composers. Eckle cites a Samuel Beckett quotation as Djordjević’s creed:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It serves as epigraph for FAIL (2010), scored for cello and live electronics.

Djordjević has a newer album, stars – rocks – metals – light, available through the col legno website. Tracks are also provided on the composer’s website and on Spotify. (The track I most enjoyed was Sky Limited, for strings.) YouTube offers Quicksilver from that album.

I don’t recommend listening to several of these pieces in quick succession. They’re not meant to be absorbed in that way—indeed, they can’t be. Avant-garde creators expect that in performance their works will be dispersed among chunks of “standard” repertoire or else among contrasting pieces by other living composers. Otherwise, the concert-goers’ experience would become, to quote one of my old teachers (referring to an all-George-Crumb recital), “like eating three banana splits in a row.” A Djordjević “portrait” CD is intended as a document, not an evening’s entertainment. (Construct your own set list.)

Djordjević’s career trajectory shows what women in Western nations can do now; check out the prizes and awards she’s won. This is not to say that women have achieved parity—note the relative paucity of European females who have won Siemens awards and portrait CDs, for example. But it does point to a vastly better-developed support system for emerging composers. Since 1986, Wergo (a division of Schott Music) has, with the support of the German Music Council, issued a hundred “Porträt-CDs” of mostly younger Europeans.

Bear in mind that pioneering 19th-century women like Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Wieck Schumann were actively discouraged from composing at all—Mendelssohn had to publish some of her earliest music under her brother’s name. Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) used social privilege to some advantage in gaining commissions and performances, as did an American, Amy Beach (1867–1944); both were tolerated in part because women composers were rare enough to be celebrated as eccentric curiosities. Almost invariably, however, their work was deemed insufficiently masculine, or somehow lacking that “divine spark,” or simply derivative.

Can we talk about derivative for a moment? Yes. We may as well concede it: everything has been done before. The last hundred years of musicking have at last exhausted every possibility out there for turning sound into meaning. (The notion of meaning itself now attracts useful counter-arguments.) Thus if you read what passes for Comments on YouTube, you’ll find an occasional wag who warns any fan of Djordjević’s Quicksilver to reconsider Schaeffer, Penderecki, and Sciarrino, “then pose yourself the question about originality and imagination again.” In other words, somebody got there first with microtextures or electronica or whatever, so that game is over, and Penderecki won.

What pointless drivel! It’s not the vocabulary that counts, it’s the way those components are shaped into narratives so that a voice—a recognizable, individual human voice—will speak to you. Haydn used variations on the same vocabulary to write over a hundred symphonies, not to mention quartets and sonatas. I guess nobody told him it’d already been done.

Djordjević actually seems both atypical and typical: exceptionally talented, but part of a growing crowd of young artists clamoring for attention. She doesn’t remind me so much of Penderecki as of Rebecca Saunders, whose music similarly tends to emerge from liminal spaces where tone meets noise, where desire and fear conjure ghostly squeaks and grumbles, where brutal explosions occur. Way back in the early 20th century, when Schoenberg and Stravinsky were forging new paths, a wise person noted that a lot of good music could still be written in C major. For today’s avant-garde, we should bear in mind the corollary: a lot of good music can still be made with tire irons and Whoopee cushions.

To round out the historical picture a little more, let’s consider Florence Price (1887–1953) and Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962). The latter is one of the most-performed American composers alive today, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music and multiple Grammy awards. The former was the first African American woman ever to have a work performed by a major American orchestra. Although she toiled in relative obscurity during her lifetime, her music is now experiencing a “modest revival,” as New Yorker critic Alex Ross puts it.

Both these women have written violin concertos, interesting ones. (And since we’ll get back to exploring violin works in our next column, these pieces, like Lebowski’s rug, help tie the room together.) You can hear decent portions of Price’s two violin concertos online, in this New York Times article. To hear even more of her music, courtesy of WQXR’s Terrance McKnight, click on Price’s name in the previous paragraph. The value of Ross’s New Yorker essay lies in its even-handed analysis of the precarious situation Price occupied within American classical music’s neurotic confines. For her, isolated in Southside Chicago, there were no Pulitzers, Gravemeyer Awards, Music Council grants, or lively, powerful women’s networks like those in which Lisa Bielawa, Kati Agócs, and their peers thrive today.

It helps that violinist Er-Gene Kahng has given Price’s rediscovered violin concertos a really good recording. Her reputation had suffered over the years from indifferent and/or incompetent recorded performances. Here is Kahng’s reading of Violin Concerto No. 2, a single-movement work with “advanced” harmonies written late in Price’s life:

 

Antonín Dvořák famously advised American composers to stick with folk nationalism, and Price took his advice to heart, although she avoided ragtime and jazz like the plague. More crucial for her was Dvořák’s basic vocabulary, based on Brahms and seldom venturing into Wagner or Debussy territory. That’s what makes her Concerto No. 2 fascinating: it does venture, at least here and there. No. 1 is far more conservative; Ross admits that some passages are “so obviously indebted to famous Romantic concertos that one suspects Price of putting us on.” She wasn’t, though. She simply knew what a masterpiece should sound like, and she desperately wanted to be part of that crowd.

Higdon is also a conservative, but of a later era. She has been able to adapt certain components of avant-garde language by embedding them in settings that otherwise possess the lyricism and formal clarity of Mendelssohn. It’s not simply that she avoids scaring the horses. She seems to like all those sounds. Listen to the opening of the Violin Concerto (2008):

 

I love that we first hear all those twittering, vaguely birdlike sounds (violin harmonics). And then the soloist re-enters low in her range, and it’s warm, sustained, ultimately songlike too, but distinctly non-avian. The music works itself to quite dramatic heights, glissandos and such tossed toward us in an utterly natural progression of events. Terrific performance, of course.

This Violin Concerto won Higdon the 2010 Pulitzer. Here she is interviewed by her soloist (check out parts 2 and 3):

 

Higdon on Hahn: “She can play anything. So I was like, okay, I’ve gotta dream really big.” Good call. This is a big piece; it partakes of the grand virtuoso tradition, which affords the audience similarly grand pleasure.

Works of a humbler scope abound on a more recent Higdon recording, All Things Majestic (Naxos 8.559823), comprising four tone poems on scenery from the Grand Tetons, a viola concerto, and an oboe concerto. This album won a couple of Grammys earlier this year, including one for Higdon’s Viola Concerto. (None for the live recording itself, which is merely serviceable.) There are some fine moments: start with that concerto, written for Higdon’s colleague Roberto Díaz, director of the Curtis Institute of Music.

 

[Sorry if the header pic of the Haden Triplets was misleading—I was looking for a daughter-y pic that was less inflammatory (cough) than the pic on “Daughters, Part 1”—Ed.]

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 face of it, that would seem to be a trivial question.  A philosophical, or even a metaphysical one perhaps.  But really, it’s a tough old nut when you look into it deeply enough.

Lets start with the entire universe.  We’ll push a magic button that makes everything in it disappear.  All of the galaxies, the stars, the interstellar dust and gas … poof!  All gone.  Even you as an observer can no longer exist, since you would render the universe non-empty.  So the first thing to consider would be this.  If the universe is infinite, but there is nothing in it, how could we even know that?  How can we measure or assess the size of an absolutely empty space?  There is nothing for any measurement tool to measure.  It raises the troubling question of whether space can actually exist at all in the absence of anything to occupy it.  I mean, how would we actually know one way or the other?

We know quite a few things about “essentially-empty” space, since there is quite a lot of it out there.  Our entire observable universe is in practice a totally empty void, populated with the odd observable object that we can use as reference points.  That observation process is a key tool here, because the light that travels in our direction from a remote galaxy has to cross vast distances that could amount to as much as several billion light years without encountering anything to block its path.  And the number of stars and galaxies out there which send their light our way is actually uncountably large.  So even though the vastness of space is as close to totally empty as makes no difference, it is still absolutely teeming with so much stuff that it really isn’t a good enough stand-in for our notion of “absolutely empty space”.

But nonetheless, it is a fair observation to say that the light which has travelled across vast expanses of interstellar and even intergalactic space to get to us had to cross large tracts of totally empty space en route.  Let’s think about that … about light travelling across vast tracts of empty space.  How does that work, exactly?  How does light travel across nothing?  We might be tempted to dismiss this as a trivial question if it were not for one key thing.  In 1887, the famous Michelson-Morley experiment discovered that the speed of light appears to be independent of the relative motions of the observer and the source.  This stumped the scientists of the time, which led to all sorts of new theories to attempt to explain the result, but none of them proved adequate until Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, and his more complete 1915 General Theory of Relativity.

So now we know that light travels through the vacuum of empty space at a very particular speed, and we know that this speed is invariant regardless of the relative speed of the observer.  But if there aren’t any observers, let alone any reference points against which to establish the relative speed of an observer, what are we to make of the propagation of light?  Indeed, what, if anything, would be its “speed”?  It harks back quite remarkably to the old philosophical chestnut of whether a tree exists if there is nobody around to observe it:

There was a young man who said: “God,

must think it exceedingly odd

that our sycamore tree

ceases to be

when there’s no-one about in the quad.”

In other words, how is it possible for light to propagate at all in a totally empty universe … and can light therefore exist in such a universe?  After all, waves must ultimately be observable disturbances in something.  One approach postulates that light waves are related to disturbances in the fabric of space-time.  So if space itself was well and truly empty, then it could no longer be defined, and it would follow that it would also be impossible to speak of time.  [The prominent physicist-mathematician Roger Penrose has a lot to say about this in his Conformal Cyclic Cosmology theorem.]  Given that speed is ultimately a relationship between space and time, this has a measure of appeal to it.  But it remains more of a mathematical argument than a theory of physics, and doesn’t ultimately take us anywhere (… unless Penrose is ultimately proved correct).

There is another philosophical question that relates to the concept of totally empty space.  If there was nothing whatsoever in space, we could no longer talk about the relative sizes of things.  The most colossal volume of space – say, for example, the entirety of the current observable universe – would be no different from the tiniest conceivable volume, such as the space occupied by the most fundamental of fundamental particles, a quark.  With nothing in it to give it scale, there would be no way whatsoever to distinguish the infinite from the infinitesimal.  This is a big problem for physicists, because there are troubling issues (i.e. quantum effects) that come into play in all aspects of physics as dimensionality reduces, just as other troubling issues (i.e. the expansion of the universe) come into play when we consider dimensionalities that head toward the infinite.  Just as nature abhors a vacuum, physics abhors the infinite.

So it is that the consensus among physicists is now coalescing around various notions that empty space is not in fact empty at all.  At a quantum level, empty space comprises discrete chunks of ‘space-time’, formulated according to the various theories under consideration.  These are sometimes described as “virtual particles of space-time” which are perpetually popping into and out of existence, and are often referred to by various catchy terms such as “cosmic foam”.  A popular terminology these days is the “Higgs Field”, with its related detectable particle the “Higgs Boson” which has recently been detected by the boffins at CERN.  If these theories are correct, then space itself comprises a kind of roiling foam of virtual space-time particles.  It also places lower limits, not only on the physical size of anything, but also on time itself, which then becomes a “temporal foam” comprising quanta of “discrete time” which ping in and out of existence.  Something you could perhaps mention next time you’re late for a meeting.

These theories actually have remarkable depth to them, and delve into concepts that would seriously trouble the layman, if not all but a tiny minority of the experts themselves.  And of course, they open themselves to all sorts of yet more complex layers of questions, such as “what is a quantum foam of the Higgs Field actually made of”, and similar tasty tidbits.  Whole fields of physics are now concerning themselves with this stuff.

Meanwhile, back in our own particular corner of civilization, we prefer to argue over whether power cords sound different  …  J

In this series, we've discussed the basics of audio cable design (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3), RCA and XLR interconnect design, and now we look at speaker cables. These are a very different animal than high input-impedance interconnecting cables. A speaker cable connects to an extremely inconsistent 2 to 32 ohm (or even lower and higher!) reactive load created by the speaker. RCA and XLR interconnect cables see a much more consistent and resistive load, making their electrical measurements far easier to predict. While speaker cable also suffers from the non-linearity of the velocity of propagation in the audio band, it has an additional challenge. It has to be lower in impedance to better match the speaker load, but when the velocity of propagation is going down, this naturally increases the cable’s impedance. How is all this managed? This paper is a walkthrough on how ICONOCLAST speaker cable addresses some of these issues.

Design Brief

1) Conductors

The first decision is how much CMA (circular wire area) you need based on the application. This isn’t always an exact science, as the cable length and speaker type will change the calculated answer. The speaker cable becomes a part of the crossover network in the speaker. The amplifier sees both components as one load, and it’s easy to see why this is a reactive relationship. Speakers vary by design so their “back EMF” load into amplifiers varies. Amplifiers of differing design react to the back-EMF differently, and the overall performance can be hard to predict. The goal is to “remove” the cable as best we can between the amplifier and speaker. Cables should not be tone controls, but then that’s the goal of every component! The analysis below looks at the calculations made to settle on the total CMA for benign reactions to the frequency response of a typical set of loudspeaker loads. And yes, these are not real-time resistive loads but as always, an approximation. To avoid speaker frequency-response interactions, the general rule of thumb is that you want the total speaker-cable resistance to be less than 5% of the speaker impedance plus the cable resistance value. For most practical applications of 0 to 35 feet, 9,600 CMA per polarity should work well to be resistively invisible to the speaker or amplifier. We want the load to be the speaker, not the cable. How we get to the approximate 9,600 CMA per polarity is the hard question. For those that want the easy way out we have one: 1313A, a basic Belden speaker cable. If we want to design a better measuring cable, let’s see what can be done with Belden technology. In order to figure out what best to do, I looked at things that indicate what not to do. We all know by now that multiple smaller wires are better than one fat 9,600 CMA solid or stranded wire--to a point! At this stage I’m listening for time-based issues with the audio. You want the signal to be most uniform through the wire for improved current coherence (more identical frequency-arrival times). To make that happen, we decrease the wire size so that the skin-depth penetration goes deeper into the wire, evening out the differences in current magnitude with respect to frequency. This technique better aligns the signal speeds through the wire. I said “better” as there is no perfect way to do this, but we can certainly be better. The depth is calculated based on frequency and material. The wire size does not change the penetration, it does change the minimum current found in the center of the wire. The smaller the wire, the closer the center current magnitude matches the surface current as signal frequencies go up. Studies were made on various geometries that would hint at what type of conductor to use, and how many. Once we limit ourselves to the ~9,600 CMA resistive box, what are the various design limitations inside this parameter? Probably the easiest starting point is a cable with multi-sized wires is a flat design. Yep, just keep lining up smaller wires and stop when you reach the proper AWG size. But when tested, there are issues with parallel-wire that lead (pun there?) me away from this simple design. Above is a Teflon® ribbon cable I used to test polarity symmetry, and capacitive symmetry within each polarity. This data is available if you are interested. It says that the consistency of flat cable is not perfect. The closer each wire gets to the opposite polarity, the higher the capacitance, and more robust the ground reference. For all intents and purposes, each and every wire in this cable acts like a separate wire. Any cable with more than one wire per polarity will have this issue to contend with. How can we do better on capacitance control in each polarity? For the answer to that we need to turn to inductance. When you separate the two polarities in a flat design, inductance is seemingly well controlled. Each parallel wire has current going in the same direction in each polarity half, so the magnetic fields cancel one another. The closer to the center of the ribbon cable you go, the more the opposite polarity’s different current direction upsets the symmetry of the inductive cancellation. There is non-linearity through the “flat” polarity, too, but it is worse near the edges of each polarity where the “design” changes. Two wires with the same current direction next to each other cancel some of the fields gauss density between them, and two wires next to each other with opposite polarities reinforce the magnetic field lines. Below are two close proximity wires, with negative going into the page, and positive coming out of the page. Notice that the current direction “adds” between the wires with the magnetic field flux lines in the same direction. If we flip the current direction of one of the wires, the currents cancel but now we have two of the same polarity to get the cancellation effect. This is the problem with zip-cord. We can get low capacitance, but it is not practical to get the lowest inductance. To prove the point, a single bonded pair used in ICONOCLAST measured by itself is 12.5 pF/foot and 0.196 uH/foot inductance, about what 1313A reference zip cord is. This isn’t the best reactive variable balance of L and C for a premium current delivery cable. Also, in the tested flat design there are inconsistent ground plane issues that have to be resolved, and there are inconsistent electromagnetic field cancellation properties. The problems are locked-in by the geometry of this cable specimen, same as the issues with zip-cord. Can we use what is good about a flat cable, and mitigate the bad aspects? The answer to that question lies in a bonded pair used at radio frequencies, and to get to the answer for speaker cable, we need to re-invent what a bonded pair does at audio. First, what is a bonded pair? It’s simply two co-joined wires—a geometrically consistent zip-cord design with superior adjacent-wire bond technology. The precision C-C of each wire controls impedance at RF to an incredibly small variation. A plain zip cord doesn’t have the symmetry complexity, giving it poor magnetic field cancellation properties. Adding wires to the zip cord to make it a flat cable just adds to the capacitive and inductive “cable in a cable” issue, as every wire follows its own drummer. Coherence is improved with more small wires that add to the same CMA, but we don’t really have a single like-polarity for each signal anymore. Tests show the inconsistent capacitance in a flat arrangement. Tests can also show the inductance issues with zip cords. A single bonded pair is 0.196 uH/foot inductance. This value is far too high for the state-of-the-art R, L, and C cable that is the intent of the project. How is using another bonded pair zip-cord component going to fix this mess? The answer lies with XLR interconnect cable. We need to build star-quad arrangements of bonded pairs. Visualize the currents using the right hand rule: Like the XLR design we discussed, two bonded pairs in a quad arrangement show ideal field cancellation. This property of star quads tells us fundamentally we need two polarities using many wires in a star-quad arrangement. The eventual solution was a compromise, as is usually the case in audio cables. The design devised a way to create star quads throughout, a process that varied between near perfect, and slightly imperfect. It was done with 100% consistency within each polarity so every wire measured the same inductance and capacitance to the opposite polarity, and made significantly lowered inductance with only a moderate rise in capacitance. The capacitance was increased on purpose, I might add! More on why I did that later. The image shows the variation in the star quads between like bonded pairs in a polarity. The question is, Does it work? Capacitance measured 45 pF/foot between polarity wires, and inductance measured 0.08 uH/foot. Capacitance variation, and the electromagnetically tied inductance variation, is superb. The difference in reactive stability between each wire in a single polarity, and between each polarity measures significantly better in ICONOCLAST. Tolerance is +/- 0.5 pF @ 1 KHz or more than five times tighter variation than the 8R28064 flat cable. To arrive at the 9,600 CMA DCR requirement, the wires were braided on a GHz capable braider. The braider needed a symmetrical arrangement, so an even number of bobbins was chosen (12), giving 24 wires per polarity. 9,600 CMA / 24 = 400CMA per wire, or a 0.020” 24 AWG wire. Many braid design iterations were trialed before I froze the design around the proper braid relationship to arrive at a suitably balanced reactive cable measurement. People will “guess” that ICONOCLAST is a bonded pair Ethernet cable, and it is not. The reasons and design are not the same at all. All that is the same is the coincidence of a 24 AWG solid copper wire, common to Ethernet. Each polarity is braided and flattened--yes, our flat shape! We essentially “fold” the flat cable over on itself into one polarity. Then, opposite polarities are tightly bound to keep loop area to a minimum, critical to inductance as the formula is geometry controlled, and not determined by the material used for the dielectric. An awful lot of testing was done to identify the weaknesses of various designs. We wanted to avoid:

• Inconsistent capacitance in each wire
• Inconsistent inductance in each wire
• Inconsistent ground plane interaction between wires and polarities
• Inconsistent wire DCR among all wires
• Poor polarity DCR values (too high or too low total CMA)
• Inconsistent dielectric performance between each wire
• Poor frequency coherence in each wire

After all the testing, a 20-mil wire diameter in a 24-wire (12 bonded pairs) woven polarity was created to match the design to the electromagnetic requirements. The final design that drove the final wire size is 100% symmetrical in every measure on every wire. Woven single polarities achieve class-leading performance in polarity-to-polarity and wire-to-wire consistency, while also providing exceptionally low reactive variables. The superposition of the magnetic fields drive inductance down from 0.196 uH/foot to 0.08 uH/foot, a 59% reduction in inductance, while holding capacitance to just 45 pF/foot. L and C can be changed based on the woven design, and was optimized for speaker cable applications. Look for the second part in the next issue!