Issue 49

[In the last issue of Copper, we began a series of articles by Belden engineer Galen Gareis on the science involved in the design of audio cables. We continue here with Galen’s explanation of the varieties of time-based distortions found in audio cables, and will conclude with Part 3 in Copper #50.—Ed.]

4)  Capacitance and inductance with respect to frequency

Capacitance, the ability of the cable to store a charge, is set by the dielectric (the insulation). Some dielectric materials like PVC are not linear, meaning they respond differently at different signal frequencies. More stable dielectric like Teflon offer frequency-linear capacitance. So: the quality of insulator material makes a difference.

Teflon has the lowest dielectric constant of any solid plastic, offers a low capacitance with the thinnest walls of any material, and is durable. It is also expensive to buy and process, but is used in good cables because of its performance, in spite of the cost.

Cheaper dielectrics need a greater wall thickness to achieve the same target capacitance, but a thicker dielectric means a greater space between the two conductors of a cable (the loop area), which increases inductance. This moves us further from the ideal goal of a cable with zero reactance.

5)  Rise-time and decay-time distortions

All cables store and release energy (current or voltage) reactively to the frequency being electromagnetically moved through the wire, adding time-based distortion.

A cable is very reactive to voltage changes at low frequencies. This is because any capacitance absorbs low-frequency AC voltage changes, and starts to look like its carrying a DC signal. As you go up in frequency, the effect drops away, and the cable becomes more “resistive”, with less reactance to voltage change. The cable’s capacitance is very stable in a given design, but the capacitive reactance is frequency-specific. As the frequency goes higher, the reactance decreases.

Another way that cable capacitance causes a problem in RCA and XLR interconnects is with current inrush. Interconnects terminate into a very high impedance, which limits current flow. When you apply a voltage across an interconnect, there’s a momentary inrush of current to “fill” the capacitance of the cable. Cables with lower capacitance mitigate the inrush current issue, but even so, this causes current to “lead” voltage, causing a time shift in the signal.

RCA and XLR interconnect are terminated in the “infinitely” high impedance (47k-ohm or higher). This looks like a pure capacitor to the Input/ Output stage. A capacitor looks like more like short circuit initially, and becomes an “open” as time progresses and the capacitor is charged to a steady state condition. I/O devices have to behave with the initial in-rush current and not current-limit the signal.

In speaker cables, it is changes in current that carry the signal. A speaker cable sees a pretty low resistance load (2-32 ohms) so there is a large current magnitude in low impedance speaker cables. These changes are affected by the inductance of the speaker, which varies depending on frequency. Inductance opposes current flow, so we see that the speaker signal is affected non-linearly by the speaker load. The resistance, or reactance, to current flow increases as frequency increases.

Since voltage leads current in an inductive circuit, we again see a time shift caused by speaker cable—but this time by inductance, instead of capacitance as with an interconnect. Another consideration for speaker cables is that the speaker’s impedance is very non-linear where the spectral current density is highest—namely, at low frequencies. Ideally, we want a speaker cable that is purely resistive, but that’s impossible since a cable is a vector of capacitance and inductance.

6) Skin effect and Rs (proximity effect)

Skin effect is a tendency for AC to flow mainly along the outer surface of a conductor. Skin depth is the point inside a wire where the current decreases to 37% the surface current magnitude. While this depth varies based on material and frequency, it does not vary by wire size. So as we reduce wire size, the current magnitude is larger through a greater proportion of the wire. Keep making the wire smaller, and the current magnitude in the wire’s center gets gradually closer to the surface current, especially at higher frequencies. DC diffusion couples through the entire wire’s cross section.

So why do higher frequencies travel more along the surface? A wire’s impedance (AC resistance) is driven by its self-inductance, or the tendency of changes in current to be impeded by the wire itself. Since these changes occur more frequently with higher frequencies, wires have higher resistance as AC frequency goes up. And so, as frequency increases, the current finds the path of least resistance, which is closer and closer to the surface, where the self-wire inductance is nearest to zero.

The Rs of a cable, also called Proximity Effect, changes WHERE current flows in closely spaced wires. The electromagnetic field “pulls” the current to the inside surface of two parallel wires, and removes the current from the outer reaches away from the two most closely spaced wires. More current amplifies the proximity effect. Larger wires see a very pronounced rise in Rs as frequency goes up. Much of the conductor is “empty” of current. Smaller wires are most “filled” with current as the same aggregate AWG size takes several more smaller wires and this decreases the current in each wire and mitigates proximity effect. Current is divided between each wire, and less current in each wire mitigates the proximity effect. Smaller wires also improve the current linearity through the wire’s cross section as frequency increases, further mitigating proximity effect.

The skin effect and the proximity effect both superimpose themselves, and are best managed with more, smaller wires to make each conductor more efficient.

Once we flatten the velocity change as best as we can with a good dielectric design, we also need to time-align the effects of the dielectric at all frequencies using small wires. Bigger wires will cause even more signal speed change relative to frequency, because the inner electrons are so far from the dielectric material. But even at the same frequencies, a bigger wire can cause time variations—because the high frequency currents nearer the “skin” travel faster than that same current near the center of the wire, causing an effect known as group delay. Low frequencies will ALWAYS travel slower then high frequencies in passive cables, so the issue will always be with us through the audio electromagnetic spectrum.

[We’ll conclude Time is of the Essence next issue—Ed.]

No, not this Editor. Continuing from my last column, inspired by the arrival of a big batch of old issues of The Absolute Sound, The Editor referred to is TAS‘ founder, HP—Harry Pearson. For decades, his pronouncements could make or break new companies in the peculiar fiefdom of high-performance audio. Judging by his portentous (and sometimes pretentious) writing, and the dozens of stories I’ve heard— Harry relished that authority and command. I only knew him the last decade of this life, and by that time the growth of what he called The High End had diminished, and so had his influence. But that’s a subject for another day.

As I’ve mentioned, I subscribed to TAS way back at the very beginning—the first year of the mag. While I no longer have those very early issues to refer to, I think my memory of HP’s pronouncements of that era are pretty clear (which is more than I can say for anything that’s happened recently). From the very beginning there were lists of The Best, according to Harry.

Initially, those lists included components that seem pretty modest compared to the megabuck monoliths of today: the ADC XLM induced magnet phono cartridge; stacked/double Advents (top one upside-down, so the two tweeters were clustered in the center); the Dahlquist DQ-10, which was around for years in various configurations, mirror-imaged, with added sub-woofer, without….

How cheap was cheap? The ADC XLM was around $90, which was about as much as one could spend on a readily-available cartridge those days (most of those pesky moving coils came later). A single pair of Advents was as little as $210 in vinyl, $240 in walnut veneer. In 2017 bucks? The ADC XLM would run about $520, which can still buy a pretty good cartridge today.That vinyl pair of Advents would run about $1216, and the walnut pair, about $1390. In the ’70s there were plenty of bookshelf speakers that cost less than the Advents (including smaller models made by Advent themselves), so they weren’t the cheapest things available—but they were reliable performers which most listeners could live with for many years, for far less than the cost of, say, a VW Beetle. In the world of college dorm  and young professional stereo systems, Advents were ubiquitous. Can we say the same of any $1400 loudspeakers today?  I don’t think so.

In those early days of TAS there were frequent interactions with designers and company reps—which was not something one had generally seen in Stereo Review. But then, aside from Julian Hirsch‘s almost fetishistic love of the AR-3a, one rarely read in Stereo Review that stereo components actually sounded different. Peter Pritchard from ADC was frequently around TAS  in those days, as was Jon Dahlquist, and the double Advent review was commented upon by Advent product manager Andy Petite—who later founded Boston Acoustics.

But of all the industry gurus, William Z. Johnson of Audio Research Corporation, Jim Winey of Magnepan, and (as mentioned last time) Arnie Nudell of Infinity Systems appeared the most often—and their products couldn’t be considered cheap by any standard. The Audio Research SP-3 started out at $595, a singularly high price for a preamp until Mark Levinson came on the scene. The Magneplanar Tympanis were $1200 or so, and Infinity’s first product, the Servo-Statik 1, was $2000, at a time when that was the cost of a VW Beetle (there’s that damn car again!). And things only went up from there. In 2017 bucks: $3,445, $6,948, and $11,580, respectively.

Pearson seemed to view the three as fellow explorers of a new world, and goaded and sometimes guided by HP, the three made major advances in  the art of sound reproduction for several decades. Early on in the game, HP even created a hybrid speaker with the woofer section of a Magneplanar Tympani and the mids and highs of the first Infinity Reference Standard (IRS), correcting what he saw as the deficiencies of both systems, and pushing their creators to make the next generation of speakers far better.

Time went on, and as the world changed, so did the market for home audio. Music is ubiquitous and mostly free. At least one generation is used to hearing whatever they want wherever and whenver they want, and don’t expect to pay. The quality of the music may be awful, and the quality of the sound may be dismal—but it’s free. Musicians are starving, and streaming services are losing money—but it’s free.

It takes a stubborn soul to pursue quality audio in an atmosphere like this. But here I am—and so are you. I’m grateful for the efforts made by guys like Harry, William Z., Jim, and Arnie—and everyone else who has devoted their efforts in pursuit of the sound of music.

And we ain’t dead yet. Not by a long shot.

“If you touch me again,” I yelled, “I will kill you”— and I meant it.

I travel quite a lot, and often the high point of the day is eating in local restaurants.

China.

On one of my many trips to China, I brought my son Ilan with me. Ilan is a chef of modest fame and loves to eat and try new things.

In Guangzhou we went out to a famous restaurant that specializes in exotic ingredients. After wading through various items like crocodile head and stinky tofu (disgusting), drunken shrimp (literally live shrimp swimming in alcohol that, slowly stop moving so you can pick them up, decapitate and shell them then pop them in your mouth) deep fried silkworms and two varieties of snake, Ilan called me over and said, “Dad we must try these.” He showed me a box full of large black beetles. They were about two inches long and very much alive. I demurred but Ilan insisted and we ordered them.

They arrived a few minutes later and had been sautéed in chili oil with scallions. They looked the same but they weren’t moving. I put one in my mouth and bit down. It crunched just as I thought it would and burst open. A yellow pus-like custard oozed through my teeth. I looked forlornly at Ilan and he said, “These are great.” He then gobbled down some more.

Italy.

My wife and I were driving through Tuscany and decided to look for a restaurant. We were descending towards the Mediterranean coast and entered a town. It was poor and run down and my wife Rita said that as Tuscany is so beautiful, why would we want to eat in such an ugly town? It was a logic that I couldn’t dispute so I made a U-turn and started to drive back the way we came. A few kilometers up the road we saw a sign advertising a restaurant at the next intersection. We hung a left and continued down a secondary road for about 20 minutes. I was about to give up when another sign with an arrow said restaurant ahead. Fifteen minutes later we came to a building nestled in some cypress trees. We entered into a yard that had about 20 cars parked in it. All of them had Swedish license plates. The building appeared to be some sort of hotel or hostel, but there was no one around. We walked through the corridor and entered a courtyard in the back.  There were some tables and chairs strewn around and the whole place was a bit messy. There was a makeshift kitchen set up near one of the entrances and a canopy was strung over one corner next to the wall. Sprawled out underneath, a fat man and a younger skinnier version of him were fast asleep, snoring. As we approached, the fat man snorted, woke up and rubbed his eyes.

I said, “Ristorante?”

“Si,si, entrare,” and he pointed to one of the tables.

We sat down and a few minutes later, after tucking his undershirt into his pants, he came over.  He produced a hand written menu and sat down beside us to help us choose. His English was quite good.

All the pastas were handmade by him and his brother. His mother made the sauces. The fish was Orata or Spigola, (all locally caught) there was Agnello (lamb) Manzo (beef) Vitello (veal) and Antara (duck)

We then noticed that there was a vegetable garden on the side of the courtyard and we started to experience that wonderful feeling you get when you realize something special is about to happen.

The meal was spectacular and the wine (Tuscan, of course) was delicious.

After the feast, I asked about the Swedish cars. He told us that every year for the past ten years, groups of Swedish tourists book this hostel for the summer months and a rotating group of Swedes spend their vacations there. He and his brother have the cooking concession. They cook them breakfast and dinner and during the day the Swedes, who all love to hike, explore the Tuscan countryside.

They told us that no one ever comes for lunch and it was their pleasure to cook for us.

Israel.

During the Yom Kippur war in 1973, my wife and I volunteered to work in a Kibbutz in the Galilee. It was situated next to an Israeli air force base and planes were taking off and landing all day long. Watching a fully armed Mirage F1 taking off at night is an awesome and fearful sight.

It was apple picking time and my wife and I had the stimulating job of sorting apples – thousands of them. They were bobbing in large vats of water and we had to sort the good from the bad and then sort them by size and quality. There are no words to describe the tedium of this job. Fortunately, I was called back to work after two weeks and we happily fled back home to Ra-anana.

It was a miserable time in Israel. Some of our friends were at the front. The fiancé of my wife’s cousin was a tank commander and he had disappeared. (His body was later returned from Syria thanks to Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy.)

To cheer us up one night, we decided to go out for a meal. This was a big deal as we had little money and never ate out. We visited Mandy’s in Tel Aviv. Mandy Rice Davies owned Mandy’s. She along with Christine Keeler were high class “call girls” whose intimacy with the rich and famous eventually led to the downfall of the British war minister, John Profumo and the discrediting of the British Conservative Government. This was a big scandal in the early sixties and as a seventeen year old adolescent, I avidly scoured the newspapers for any salacious content. After the scandal abated, Mandy married an Israeli, moved to Tel Aviv and opened a restaurant.

The restaurant was low key and rather elegant. It was half full when we sat down. We ordered our meal and during the main course, I noticed this burly man with sunglasses checking out the place. Two other men in casual clothes, who moved from table to table looking at everyone, soon joined him. This seemed odd when suddenly, Moshe Dayan, Israel’s minister for defense walked in. He was accompanied by a couple of Israeli generals and a small entourage. They sat at the table next to us and seemed to be in a jocular mood. Their conversation was animated and judging by their levity, we deduced that something monumental was about to happen. This raised our spirits enormously and we went home feeling good for the first time in three weeks.

The next day the cease-fire with Egypt was announced.

France.

On a recent visit to Paris, my wife informed that we were going out to eat one night with an old art school buddy. He was an Israeli who had finished art school, subsequently moved to Paris and married a Frenchwoman. We arrived at the restaurant and a few minutes later, they walked in and joined us at the table. As Moshe sat down, I smelt the most god-awful stink. I couldn’t believe it. The guy must have farted when he sat down. I couldn’t breathe. We made the usual small talk and then he did it again as I experienced a wave of nausea.  I wanted to tell Rita but the only secret language we had was Hebrew. The food came and again he let go but it was even worse than the other two. I almost threw up and had trouble talking. I subsequently bowed out of the conversation. I really didn’t know what to do when, after the dishes had been cleared, the waiter came over to us and said, “I want to apologize for the smell, we have had a sewer break in the street and as compensation, we would like to offer dessert for free.”

Portugal.

On our last day in Portugal we decided to eat out in one of the many town squares in the heart of Lisbon. Our family, my wife, son and daughter, mother-in-law, my sister and brother-in-law, and their children had just spent ten days in Lagos in the Algarve. Lagos is a pretty town but it had been inundated with British tourists and residents and the character of the town was marred by their influence. Restaurants sold fish and chips, warm beer was available in the pubs and copies of the Daily Mail and Daily Express were everywhere. Food stores sold British canned food. The nadir was something called “Breakfast in a can”, or, “All day breakfast”. The slogan on the can read, “For an all day tasty filler with, Baked Beans, Sausages, Mushrooms, Pork and Egg Nuggets, Bacon”. Need I say more?

We had rented a beautiful house for this family reunion. The food markets had fresh seafood and produce and as we had a couple of chefs in the family, we ate well.

The restaurant in Lisbon was one of many catering to tourists. Most menus were rather similar, fish stews, roast suckling pig, rabbit, baccala (dried salt cod), “arroz de galo” (chicken and rice). The one we choose featured, “naco na pedra” (steak cooked on a hot stone).  We ordered some appetizers and a bottle of wine. At one point I went to the bathroom. The way there took me past the kitchen and I noticed some pieces of dried out, disgusting looking meat being reheated on the grill.  On returning I saw that the main courses were already served and on the plate in front of my daughter, I saw that shitty piece of meat I had seen on the grill. My daughter was trying to cut into it with little success when I said, “Stop eating, we’re leaving”. I calculated how much we owed for the starters, called the waiter over, handed him the money and told them that the food was unacceptable and we were leaving. We stood up to exit and he said, “Order something else”.

I said, “No! This food is an insult”

He put his hand on my arm and suggested we discuss this in the kitchen. I looked in and there were two large chefs with knives in their hands. I said no again and we started to walk away. He said he would call the police and I said, “Call the police. I want you to call the police”.

Until recently Portugal was a dictatorship and calling the police probably wasn’t a good idea, “They will be on his side,” said my wife.

By this time, the square was deathly quiet and everyone was watching. I started walking and that was when he grabbed me and a fury swelled inside me. Memories of all the bad meals I had eaten as a tourist over the years flowed through my head.

“If you touch me again,” I yelled, “I will kill you,” and I meant it. I went right up to him and stared into his eyes. He went white and slunk away. My wife was shocked, my children were full of admiration and I was spent. It took me a whole day to calm down.

Both the Beatles & The Rolling Stones released 2 albums in 1967.

For the purpose of this face off (and because I, alone, make the rules) we are only dealing with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (known hereafter as SPLCB) and the Rolling Stones’  Their Satanic Majesties Request (known hereafter as TSMR).

The Stones released Between the Buttons in January of ‘67, and it’s very much an album with a 1966 vibe.

The Beatles technically released Magical Mystery Tour in late December ‘67 but it didn’t enter the Billboard charts until january 1968.

With nowhere near the hype and fanfare of the 50th anniversary release of SPLHCB, ABKCO, the Stones catalog label, felt that TSMR deserved the same kind of attention to detail and historical analysis with an extensive (and expansive) anniversary package aimed right at the heart of Stones completists such as myself.

With the Beatles 50th anniversary re-release of SPLHCB, EMI (and Apple), knowing how important this anniversary was and fully understanding the demand of their audience, created many different configurations and options to satisfy fans and collectors alike and offered increasingly more expensive packaging configurations, depending on how much you wanted to spend to get into the minutiae of Beatles SPLHCB music:

On Vinyl, the package includes the 2017 stereo re-mix plus a full album of selected alternate mixes in correct song order. The CD versions are stand-alone or deluxe packages of new remix, original mono version plus 2 discs of alternate tracks from the album at various stages of development plus Blu-ray and multi-channel music options.

With The Stones—the ABKCO package for TSMR, while impressive, just gives one option in a single deluxe package.

You get a total of 4 items: 2 vinyl album versions, one stereo, one mono (not re-mixed) and 2 CDs, one stereo, one mono— both however in hybrid SACD.

The Beatles have never been released in SACD. EMI are not believers in the format but have released the entire Beatles catalog in FLAC on a USB stick.

This audio comparison between SACD and FLAC may, one day, be the subject of another article. Suffice to say, as I have the capabilities to play music in many formats in my home studio, I will tell you that if you are a Stones fan and have as SACD player, ABKCO has done the Stones a great service by releasing their music this way.

How that relates to this article will become apparent.

I have very distinct memories in 1967 of the first time I heard both albums. I heard SPLHCB with a large group of friends on June 2nd 1967. I probably played it 100 times that summer and a couple of hundred times afterward.

Such was, and remains, the importance of that album in my life and millions of others around the world.

In December 1967 I was in the East Village in NYC visiting a friend who lived on 10th st & Ave A. There was a head shop around the corner from his apartment and it was there that I bought TSMR on Saturday December 9th. Unlike the release of SPLHCB in which all the record stores and radio stations blared the release date for weeks, the release of TSMR was a complete surprise. I also bought Cream’s Disraeli Gears at the same time. I did not play these albums at my friends house as his record player was not as good as mine, so I waited until I got home later that night.

So, here then was the difference between the two albums (SPLHCB & TSMR) at the time.

First off, in June 1967 I had yet to smoke weed so I listened to SPLHCB totally straight until September when I started getting high.

Many of the songs on the album, especially “Within You, Without You” and  “A Day In The Life” took on a much greater perceived heaviness and significance when stoned a couple of months later in the fall of ‘67.

I listened to the TSMR album totally wrecked from the onset.

The Rolling Stones, Their Satanic Majesties Request

At first I was impressed by the trippiness and scattered nature of the music but that lasted a very short time and soon it just went into rotation with all the rest of the incredible releases from that year.

Why?

Because, quite simply. It was not a Stones album to me.

There was no blues. Anywhere.

First the cover….really?  Trippy in 3D and they had to put the Beatles heads-slightly hidden- on it (after the Beatles put “Welcome The Rolling Stones” on  the cover of SPLHCB)   and…wear costumes? (Jagger in a magician’s hat??)

Then the music: Parts of it sounded like the Kinks (“2000 man”) The Moody Blues (“2000 Light Years from Home”), Pink Floyd (“In Another Land”).

It was way too disjointed and seemed like a desperate attempt to try to keep up with the entire psychedelic music scene and of course, their seeming nemesis, the Beatles.

I listened to it enough at the time to decide that it wasn’t worth my time in later years to go back.

Until now…

I was so intrigued over ABKCO’s decision to deluxe market the album that I bought it.

Well,  Now I get it. I get it in ways that only time helped to put in perspective.

There is a booklet in the package and the stories about the making of the album and the bands observations are actually priceless.

While the press at the time created the fiction the the Beatles and Stones were bitter rivals, the truth was that they were very close, especially in 1967 when they were frequently at each others recording sessions. Mick, Keith and Brian played and sang on various Beatle tracks and John & Paul sang backup on some Stones songs.

Yes, they were competitive, but the Beatles had the enormous advantage of better timing. Sgt. Pepper came out and ushered in the Summer Of Love, bright, sunny and with songs like “With A Little Help From My Friends” and “When I’m Sixty Four” in short, very Beatle-y and very poppy sounding.

TSMR came out in the winter. It was dark, cold and the band themselves had not only spent the better part of ‘67 trying to make a follow up to Between the Buttons, but members were arrested and their lives were as disjointed as the album now appears. There really wasn’t continuity to the recording process, hence the scattered nature of the music and the drug combinations went past LSD and weed and ventured into heroin, which only enhanced the darkness and foreboding nature of the final product.

And now, in 2017, after listening to the re-mix of SPLHCB about 50 times over the last 2 months I had the opportunity to finally settle down to listen to TSMR (in SACD) and possibly re-evaluate my reaction to it.

First disclosure, there was no weed (ok, maybe a non-opioid prescription drug or two, hey i’m 65) involved in this relistening.

Here is the first big insight:

Even though SPLHCB had no official single released to promote the album, there was much for the newly minted FM free-form radio stations to play.

The title track going into “A Little Help From My Friends”, “Lucy In The Sky, With Diamonds”, “She’s Leaving Home” and “A Day In The Life” ruled the FM airwaves

On TSMR, not only did I have no clear memory if any of the songs were played much on radio, the commercial nature of the album was not then (nor now, for that matter) apparent.

Strange, as the Beatles and Stones seemed to at least compete with each other for hit radio dominance.

Probably thanks to George Martin, who always seemed to be the creative cartilage between the Beatles and EMI, the band’s corporate entity, The Beatles always had to have a commercial target to aim for. The Stones, on the other hand, had their manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham to keep them focused.

Interesting then that TSMR was the first album produced by Mick & Keith after the firing of ALO.

This could have been kind of like the inmates running the asylum.

But was it?

The most commercial songs (actually released as singles) on TSMR were the Bill Wyman written (and sung) “In Another Land” (Very Syd Barrett/Floyd sounding during the verses) and “She’s a Rainbow” which, along with “2000 Man” and “The Lantern” could have easily worked on Beggars Banquet.

Songs like “Citadel” and “2000 Light Years From Home” are, in retrospect, great, classic Stones track.

This leaves the opener “Why Don’t We Sing This Song All Together”, “Sing This All Together (see what happens)” “Gomper” (A boring and indulgent attempt at to evoke the eastern influenced “Within You, Without You”) and “On With The Show” as silly experiments & bookends.

That makes 6 out of 10 tracks that truly can stand alongside almost anything they ever created and, in the final analysis, I find the album does hold together much better then I remembered. I have had it on repeat for the last week.

Also here is where SACD comes in. If you are lucky enough to have this capability on your CD player, the sounds originally recorded are much fuller and realized or remembered. I found the production of TSMR remarkably sophisticated for being Mick & Keith’s first production outing.

Because of the very, very trippy 3D cover, 5 absolute classic songs: “The Lantern”, “In Another Land”, “2000 light Years From Home”, “Citadel”, and “She’s A Rainbow”, I give it a Psychedelic Factor: 8 out of 10.  Not dated sounding at all.

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

We all know the story of the production of SPLHCB.

The new SPLHCB re-mix is outstanding.

The album has also been analyzed to death and most of the readers here have already decided where in the world SPLHCB stands in their collective craniums.

In short, it is the greatest pop/psychedelic album ever made.

But is it the best overall?

When analyzing SPLHCB for me, in 2017, the question remains:

How many great tracks are there?

To me, the only track I really don’t care for, (and one which almost no one ever mentions) is “Good Morning”.

And so, now with both albums freshly minted and re-released in 2017 I can say that, while SPLHCB deserves all the accolades it has received, the Rolling Stones, under tremendous pressure of both external and internal forces, arose to the occasion with TSMR, and, shedding their blues roots for the only time, came surprisingly close, after much re-listening, in my opinion, to a masterpiece.

So then, how should we look at these two albums, now 50 years later and with all the perspective that comes with time?

In the case of the Beatles SPLHCB, its release upended the music business (as they had a habit of doing!) and set a bar so high that they may have equalled it (Revolver,  Abbey Road) but never surpassed it.

Sgt. Pepper remains their greatest perceived artistic statement by the greatest pop/rock band on earth

Because, well where do I begin?  The amazing cover? The songs? The timing of the release as the entry point of the “Summer OF Love”, The sheer unified international swoon over all the hidden meanings like  LSD (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds)? The majesty of the end of “A Day In The Life”, The sheer beauty of “She’s Leaving Home”, all the new (read backward tapes) sounds, The new 2017 remix… etc. etc. etc.

I give Sgt. Pepper a Psychedelic Factor: 9.9 out of 10.

As for The Stones, having then gotten psychedelics out of their system, they went back to basics and over the next 4 years and released, in succession,  4 of the most consistently incredible albums in the history of blues-based Rock ‘n’ Roll:  Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and  Exile On Main Street.

Can there be a 10/10?

There are only 2 albums left to this face-off…

Next issue, I will riff on the final 2 contestants and the verdict between:

—Cream’s Disraeli Gears

—Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

I have been describing the free-access crowd-sourced music metadata database MusicBrainz over the course of the last two issues of Copper.  I started out by describing the need for what I term ‘rich metadata’, and then gave an overview of MusicBrainz itself.  In this final installment I want to discuss a practical application for MusicBrainz in a real-world consumer product like a Music Server, and conclude by mentioning some of the limitations and drawbacks that remain posed by MusicBrainz.

Fundamental to the concept of a Music Server is the metadata associated with the music in the server.  So if iTunes (to use a widely-recognized example) is able to display your music by Album, including images of the Album Art, lists of track names, performers, composers and the like, it is only because it has access to that information in the individual tracks’ metadata.  Try importing a track into iTunes with no metadata and see what you get!  So metadata is mission-critical to the whole concept of a functioning Music Server, and the more in-depth and detailed the metadata, the richer can be the experience of using the Music Server.

Simple software like the aforementioned iTunes gets all its metadata from your music files.  That doesn’t make for an enticing user experience.  These days, most music files come with basic metadata, which is why you do actually see data when you import them into iTunes.  But if you ever ask yourself why certain data isn’t displayed in iTunes, it’s probably because that data isn’t in the files in the first place.  So if you want to develop your own Music Server, and you want it to improve upon what iTunes has to offer, you need to be able to find better metadata than iTunes can find.  This is where resources like MusicBrainz come in.

So here I am, and I’m writing the software that imports the first track of the first album into my new Music Server, and I want to download its metadata from MusicBrainz.  How do I go about that?  Let’s just assume I am importing the least helpful possible category of track – one that has no metadata at all associated with it.  So I don’t even know what song it is.  How can I find that on MusicBrainz?  It turns out there a tool to do just that.  I can include in my Music Server App a process to analyze any given music file and produce what is called an Acoustic Fingerprint (if you are familiar with Shazam you will have some idea of the concept).  I can submit my Acoustic Fingerprint to a free on-line service called AcoustID, and if it has that fingerprint on file it will give me a whole bunch of information about the track.  Included in that information is usually a direct link to the track on MusicBrainz.  So, finally, I can go to MusicBrainz, and download a whole raft of metadata associated to my track.

It sounds brilliant – and it is – but life is never quite as simple as that.  You will encounter a number of obstacles which in some cases cannot be worked around at all, and in some cases can only be resolved by logic of the if … but … and … so variety which always sounds straightforward in the general but falls apart in the particular.  Let me give you a couple of specific examples.

Here’s how the music industry works.  The Bee Gees’ record label owns the rights to all their recordings.  They sell those rights separately to distributors in different countries.  After a while the Bee Gees stop releasing new albums and so the distributors grow impatient and start to release Greatest Hits and other compilation albums.  Usually this will be done at the prompting of the record label who can support the activity with album art, material to fill the booklet, and such like.  So the Greatest Hits albums in each country will tend to look the same.   But sometimes a track that was generally a bust turns out to have been a big hit in, say, Paraguay.  So the Paraguayan distributor will want that track on his version of the Greatest Hits release.  We end up with multiple versions of the Greatest Hits album.  And it just goes on from there.

So here I am with a track I am trying to import into my new Music Server.  AcoustID has identified it as the Bee Gees track “Massachussetts”.  However, MusicBrainz now tells me that the following Bee Gees albums all feature this recording:

• Horizontal
• The Studio Albums 1967-1968: Horizontal
• Best of the Bee Gees
• The Very Best of the Bee Gees
• Best of the Best
• Bee Gees Story
• Bee Gees Gold, Vol 1
• Best Ballads
• Greatest Hits
• Their Greatest Hits: The Record
• Number Ones
• Tales From the Brothers Gibb: A History in Song 1967-1990
• Mythology The 50th Anniversary Collection
• For Whom The Bell Tolls

Go on, how many of those could you have named … ?  And to complicate it further, the track also appears on a number of compilation albums that combine tracks from various other popular artists.

My task may be made a little easier if I already had some metadata in my files to be going on with.  For example, if the file’s metadata said the album title was “Horizontal” then I would be able to home in on the best match straight away.  But if my metadata said “Bee Gees Greatest Hits” what would I do then?  That’s not on the MusicBrainz list.  Of course, whoever entered “Bee Gees Greatest Hits” into my metadata may have made an error, or may have intentionally edited “Greatest Hits” to avoid confusion with another album of the same name from another artist.  Or the album may actually exist, but nobody has entered it into MusicBrainz yet.  MusicBrainz can’t help you if you’re dealing with problems like that.

You see, a big problem is that the MusicBrainz’ database is far from complete.  For example, if I do a MusicBrainz search for recordings of the Duke Ellington standard “Caravan” I find a staggering 202 different Recordings of it.  It is possible, of course, that some of these could be duplicates that need to be merged together, but let’s ignore that for the time being.  However, if I next look separately for all of the Recordings on MusicBrainz entitled “Caravan”, there are thousands of them!  The large majority are not associated to a Work, and so it is not immediately clear how many of those are covers of the Ellington classic.  But a good many of them evidently are, and so if one of those albums is in your music library, MusicBrainz won’t know if is a recording of the Ellington tune, and furthermore, won’t know who to credit with the songwriting (or composer) credits.

This is something that will annoy jazz aficionados in particular.  If a song is playing, you would really like to be able to click on that song title and get a list of other covers of that song in your library.  It would be doubly frustrating if you know for sure that you had such a cover version, but your Music Server was unable to find it.

Lets go back to the end of the last-but one paragraph.  There is an important limitation there.  Writers don’t write Tracks, they write Works which are then recorded and made into Tracks.  To hammer the point home, in MusicBrainz a Track itself does not have a writer (or composer) … only a Work has that.  So if an album has been entered into MusicBrainz, but the person entering it has not entered the Work relationships for each Track, then there can be no songwriter or composer metadata associated to those Tracks.

This is both a weakness and a strength of MusicBrainz.  It is a strength, because it is the only way to cleanly handle a milieu where, for example, there can be multiple entirely different and unrelated songs, all having the same title, but having different writers … such as “Caravan”.  But it is a weakness because of the workload it imposes on someone who has to enter this information.  This workload arises primarily because each time you create a new Work in MusicBrainz it becomes incumbent upon you to search MusicBrainz to establish that the Work has not already been created.  And having created the Work, you will have the same issue to deal with when it comes to adding in the writers (or composers).  Choosing an obvious example, in MusicBrainz there are currently nine different persons called “John Smith”, as well as a John Stafford Smith, a John Christopher Smith, a John Angus Smith, a John “Jubu” Smith, and a Johnny Smith.  Is your “John Smith” one of these, or will you have to create yet another one?

Few people who have the patience to enter a new album into MusicBrainz have the additional patience required to enter what you might call a “minimum desirable” selection of metadata.  And if you’re the impatient sort, and take shortcuts, you could end up entering bad data.  Hopefully somebody would pick that up and correct it, but oftentimes they don’t (particularly when the data in question is obscure), and the bad data will be struck in there for a long time.  In any case, it can take a good hour out of your day to do a proper job of entering a single album, particularly if the Works need to be created.

Myself, I tend to enter an album into MusicBrainz whenever I import it into my Music Server, if it’s not already there, and I’m usually quite diligent.  Since January 2017 I’ve been a prolific contributor.  But sometimes even I get discouraged.  For instance, I recently entered the album Xover by Blue Lab Beats (I got it as part of my B&W Society of Sound subscription).  The principals of this band have both real names and stage names (which is not immediately obvious from the album credits), and many of the contributors (performers, writers, etc.) look as though they too may have both.  So, concerned that I may spend a lot of time and effort entering erroneous data that I know nothing about, I simply declined to enter any Works relationships for the Tracks on the album.  Maybe someone who is more au courant than I will step in at some stage and create the missing relationships.

Another significant issue is that the tools available to enter data into MusicBrainz are arcane and sometimes quite opaque.  There is little in the way of educational material to help you climb what is a rather steep learning curve.  There are a few web browser plug-ins that can be used to automate some of the more cumbersome tasks, but frankly, you’ll need to have climbed very close to the top of the learning curve before you want to consider messing with those.  The support community is not an easy place to hang about in, unless you are very comfortable with IRC (unlikely, if you’ve never been a hacker).  And the ‘Style Guidelines’, which are there to guide you through the morass of ambiguities that you quickly encounter, are like road signs here in Montreal – they only really make sense to people who have already figured out what they are trying to say.  Having said all that, the MusicBrainz community is a very welcoming and a very helpful one … not to mention exceedingly intelligent, diligent, and well-informed.  It’s just not particularly user-friendly.

As a crowd-sourced enterprise, and a free one at that, MusicBrainz relies on the freely-given contributions and efforts of individuals around the globe.  If I have encouraged you to get involved, that can only be a good thing.  Even if all you decide to do is make sure that your own music library is properly represented on MusicBrainz – and you can do that at your own comfortable pace – that would be a great thing.

It’s been 141 years since Bell’s first call over the device that became the telephone. 140 years ago, Edison’s phonograph became the first device that could play back recorded sound.

Has there been anything truly new in audio since those days? Is it likely that we’ll see anything earth-shaking in audio, come 2018?

I would argue that the answer to both questions is a guarded “no”.

Hardware has changed through the years, as has software (assuming one could say that “software” existed 140 years ago; I suppose Edison’s cylinders and the discs that followed qualify for that label), but the signal-paths and flow-charts have remained remarkably unchanged. In moving sound from one place to another, there are always two transducers involved, one at the source end, one on the receiver/reproducer end. A transducer is, of course, something that changes one form of energy to another: on the source end, the microphone/transducer converts the physical energy of sound into an electrical signal, and whatever there is on the other end of the chain—-loudspeaker, headphone, whatever—reverses the process by converting the electrical signal back into physical energy. As is true of every conversion process, something is lost (signal strength) and something is gained (noise, distortion) along the way.

That process is largely unchanged from the sender/receiver chain of Bell’s first ‘phone. Edison changed the sequence by adding a storage method that could be played back: bizarrely, others had created methods of recording sound, but no one had previously created a recording method that could actually be played back. Weird, no?

These days we have a variety of record/playback mechanisms. Edison’s method was essentially mechanical, in that a signal groove was etched into the foil/wax cylinders, and that same groove was traced by a mechanical sound-head. Early acoustical disc recordings were made in a similar manner; electrical recordings added microphones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers to the process. The type of microphones, amplifiers, and speakers have evolved through the years, but the process is largely the same.

The link in the chain that has evolved the most is that of recording/storage. We’ve gone from mechanical to electromechanical to electromagnetic to digital electronic storage, with a bewildering array of formats, codecs, whatevers. At this point music can be stored in a NAS, on a variety of cards, hard-drives, solid state drives…and the list goes on and on. But the chain is still basically the same.

As we enter 2018, can we expect to see anything there that will shake the fundament of the audio world? That’s highly doubtful. Most changes in audio these days involve user interfaces and how we access and use our media—not changes to the media or the means of reproduction. The world of iPods and computer audio brought major changes to the way in which we can move, store, and access our music, but subsequent changes have largely been incremental, evolution rather than revolution.

I’ll take a look around CES for signs of anything revolutionary in audio—but I expect the show to be dominated by drones, soon-to-be-forgotten gadgets, and much hoopla regarding autonomous autos. I fully expect this CES to be my last, because of that.

But if I’m wrong, and the Next Big Thing in audio is right there, hidden away on the 29th floor of the Venetian…rest assured that you’ll be among the first to know!

In the first two installments, I talked about a bit of the history of electric basses, and covered the innovations that came from Alembic. This time, I want to discuss the next logical step, and one very much of its time: the building of basses, but in particular necks, from materials other than wood.

Although the use of metal to make a neck wasn’t unknown, in particular the famous Rickenbacker (or Rickenbacher) “frying pan”, a lap steel guitar cast from aluminum in the early 1930s, it wasn’t until the early 70s that the design took hold, for a brief spell. The Veleno, from 1972, was made entirely from aluminum — and it was indeed strange. Keith Levene and I ran across one briefly, which excited him a lot, since he was one of the more notorious players of the guitar. But in 1974 a more practical design took hold, for about five years: the Travis Bean.

Bean was a luthier and machinist from southern California who implemented an ingenious design incorporating an aluminum neck, through-body style — like a sculpted I-beam, with pickups mounted in it and, most commonly, a body made of koa hung on and around it. (I’ve always wanted a TB2000 bass, but not so much that I went out of my way to get one). Gary Kramer came out of Travis Bean Guitars to start his company a couple years later, they were mildly different (the neck had wood inserts), a bit less expensive, and in my opinion nowhere near as cool as the original. The goal of these instruments, as near as I can determine, was sustain, and the Beans in particular did a great job of that — they’d ring forever.

All of which brings us back to Rick Turner and Alembic — this time partnered with Geoff Gould, of San Francisco. Gould worked for a company that made satellite dishes, and, witnessing Phil Lesh and his very heavy Alembic bass in 1974, began contemplating lighter instruments. He brought the idea of working with graphite and carbon fiber embedded in epoxy to Turner and Alembic, and together he and Turner got a patent on the concept — along with molding the first graphite neck, shown at the instrument trade show in January of ’78 (and then sold to John McVie).

Gould formed a company he called Modulus Graphite, at first to make graphite necks for Alembic, and then to make guitars with those necks. Quoting Wikipedia: “The name is a reference to Young’s modulus, a measure of the stiffness of an elastic material, used in the field of solid mechanics. Carbon fiber has an exceptionally high modulus.”

The advantage of graphite was hugely seductive to players like me — the ever-curious. (I had already made the discovery of what a difference a denser neck material made in tone and sustain: using the original strings my Alembic was set up for, called Superwounds, which tapered to the core where they went over the bridge as on a piano, an low “A” struck on it would ring for 2 minutes and more.)  The necks had the distinct advantage of being relatively impervious to a lot of weather–related effects, which wood notoriously doesn’t. A bit lighter than metal (the necks were hollow), sustain ‘til the cows came home, and free of weather effects: what’s not to like?

A sort of dead-end, but one of the most fascinating, were the Gittler guitars and basses. These were machined of steel rods — and that was IT. In fact, the basses were just four steel rods, a fretless electric bass, with the pickups contained within the lower part of the rod. (The guitars were similar at the base of the instrument, but then reduced down to a single rod with fret-rods embedded in the single rod.) I had a 2^nd Alembic for a little while: a “continuously-fretted” bass, a fretless with a sheet of stainless steel for a fingerboard, but that bass ran into problems, so I attempted to get a Gittler. We went around for months, until he concluded that he couldn’t find anyone to machine the rods to his satisfaction.

At around that time, Tony Levin told me about a man in Brooklyn who had built him a prototype of a bass that was essentially similar, but made of graphite. He insisted I go to see him, which I did. Ned Steinberger had built a few prototypes, and had one left which he wouldn’t sell. But he promised me that he’d make me one as soon as had a company. And a year later, it came. The Steinberger Blend, his term of art for what it’s made from, is slightly different from the Gould/Turner patent, but it’s still a composite instrument. I’ve played that bass continuously for 35 years – for the past 32 years, I’ve dropped the tuning a 4th, and for the past 30, it’s had one set of (cryogenically-treated) strings on it. The instrument plays a huge part in my sound on Jon Hassell’s City: Works of Fiction.

Wood, then metal, then composite — now the trend is back to wood. For me personally, rather than having to choose, I’ve used all of these instruments for a very long time, interchangeably, whenever something in me calls for it. I’ll hear something in the music calling for evenness, sustain, and I’ll grab a graphite-necked instrument. I’ll hear something that wants a resonant, hollow sound with a minimum of sustain, and I’ll grab the old Kay.

I never know until the red-light goes on just what’s called for.

[Basses are property of, and photographs courtesy of, the Schwartz California Institute of Bassology–-Ed.]

It’s holiday season as I write this, and I can’t help feeling grateful for the bread I’ll break and the people with whom I’ll break it.

This year I also feel like thanking Chandos, who’ve done more than their share lately to nourish a new Golden Age of great orchestral recordings. At least two world-class conductors are exclusive Chandos artists: young(ish) Edward Gardner and venerable Sir Andrew Davis. Between them they helm the BBC SO, Bergen Philharmonic, Melbourne SO, et al. for an ever-expanding Chandos symphonic catalog. Although I’m still digesting the last crumbs of the Charles Ives feast that Sir Andrew gave us recently, I’m also eagerly anticipating Gardner’s Bartók Concerto for Orchestra; he’s already shown us what a terrific job he can do with other Bartók.

But today, in this space, let us just praise Ralph Vaughan Williams (“RVW”; 1872–1958), especially his late music, especially his last three symphonies, Seven–Eight–Nine. In 2002 Chandos recorded RVW’s Sixth and Eighth with Richard Hickox and the LSO, a performance easily preferable to Davis’s 1994 Eighth (BBC SO, Teldec; now available in this collection). As for Seven and Nine, Davis’s recent outings with the Bergen PO are unlikely to be bettered for a long time.

What first won me over to Davis’s RVW—and reawakened me to Vaughan Williams himself, if I’m going to be honest—was Symphony No. 7, the Sinfonia Antarctica (Chandos CHSA 5186). You might raise an eyebrow there. Years ago, in the old New Grove, Hugh Ottaway dismissed this work as “arguably neither sufficiently symphonic nor sufficiently programmatic” and thus “the least successful of the mature symphonies,” a label that apparently stuck. Well, nonsense!

No. 7 did originate as music for a film, Scott of the Antarctic (1948). And it does boast some truly cinematic moments. Nowadays you can easily compare the film score with the symphony: just get the new Dutton Epoch SACD of the complete Scott score, then listen to Davis’s reading of the symphony. You’ll hear that RVW came up with wonderful material for the film, then successfully wrestled much of it into the longer-form requirements of a symphony or tone poem. Although really, by 1952, when RVW had completed the new work, who would have argued that such categories still mattered? (Remember that in 1952 l’enfant terrible Pierre Boulez had already begun work on Le Marteau sans maître, a watershed chamber work that would both extend and resist the serial techniques then dominating music’s ultra-modern sphere.)

RVW was no ultra-modernist. Nevertheless his work on the Scott project led him out of a creative crisis. The spiritual desolation he felt after World War II was reflected in the morbid final movement of the Sixth Symphony, an Epilogue played sempre pianissimo that wanders between E-flat major and E minor and drifts off without ever resolving.

This musical standoff “found its physical counterpart,” according to Ottaway, in Scott’s polar wastes, whereas RVW’s

sense of challenge and endurance was re-engaged by the story of Scott’s last expedition. Moreover, the human values represented—heroic endeavor, loyalty, dedication, personal warmth—were a timely corrective to the [Sixth].

Vaughan Williams ultimately achieved a profound synthesis touching nearly everything he wrote in the last ten years of his life. Not since A London Symphony (1913) had RVW dared to incorporate so wide a range of imagery. He discovered new tone colors—including the tuned percussion he jokingly called “‘phones and ‘spiels”—but also found ways to reconcile hope and despair, offering “tragic but resilient humanism” (Ottaway) in his music. Listen:

Within those three minutes of the first movement, you can hear this music’s rich scoring, with contrabassoon, bass clarinet, and low brass adding their peculiar deep notes; also the music’s astonishingly wide dynamic range, captured transparently, effortlessly by engineer and label chief Ralph Couzens; also the enlarged sound palette provided by xylophone, celesta, harp, and wordless female chorus; also (!) a wind machine. Pretty good for an 80-year-old. Pretty good for anyone.

The pictorialism of the Scott music surfaces again and again throughout this symphony, not least in the Scherzo, with its depiction of whales and penguins frolicking seaside:

Davis follows No. 7 with Four Last Songs (1954–58), on poetry by the composer’s wife and muse Ursula, orchestrated in 2013 by Anthony Payne. Baritone Roderick Williams is their subtle, supple interpreter:

Procris is lying at the waterside,
the yellow flowers show spring, the grass is green,
before a gentle wind the thin trees lean
towards the rushes, the rushes to the tide.

She will not see
the green spring turn to summer, summer go
in a long golden dusk towards the snow,
with eyes so lit by love that everything
burned, flowed, grew, blossomed, moved on foot or wing
with the guessed rhythm of eternity. . . .

Finally, we get the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1926–31) in its 1946 arrangement for two pianos and orchestra, the original version having proved so difficult that it was never taken up by a capable soloist. Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier do the honors here. This music is altogether more robust, rhythmic, and percussive than most of RVW’s output. Like the Sinfonia Antarctica, its Wall of Sound will test the limits of your equipment (apologies to Phil Spector and to the ghost of Vaughan Williams, who won’t appreciate being associated with a murderous felon).

And so to Vaughan Williams’s Ninth, which occupies the other half of Sir Andrew’s Job album, reviewed favorably elsewhere. I put aside my own copy months ago, partly because RVW’s concept—the Book of Job as filtered through William Blake’s Illustrations and further refined as “A Masque for Dancing,” replete with Sarabandes, Minuets, and a Galliard—struck me as irredeemably twee. I have since revisited this recording, partly because of the Ninth, a very fine piece indeed, its flugelhorn and saxophones continuing the composer’s experiments in timbre. The Ninth amounts to a valedictory survey in other ways too: its key is enigmatic E minor, like that of the Sixth; its initial inspiration may have been Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, although little remains of that program besides the Andante’s tolling bell at the end. Other influences abound; no surprises, only evidence that RVW’s powers continued to thrive.

I may also revised my opinion of Job. It contains some lovely passages, like this, “Elihu’s Dance of Youth and Beauty,” which leads into a “Pavane of the Sons of the Morning”:

Recommending these late works is easy. It’s like pointing a friend toward a good tailor or grocer; know that you will be in good hands. Enjoy!