Issue 48

[If there’s a name that’s synonymous with wire and cables for electrical connections, it’s that of Belden. Belden is a multi-billion dollar corporation based in St. Louis, founded 115 years ago. The standard audiophile view of Belden is that of a sleeping giant with enormous capabilities but little interest in the cutting edge. Just as General Motors has channelled their immense resources to produce the cutting-edge Corvette ZR1, Belden has applied all their design and manufacturing capabilities to  high-performance audio cables for the audiophile market. Engineer Galen Gareis is the lead on the Iconoclast line of high-performance audio cables, and is happy to explain the science behind cable design. This is the first of several articles from Galen, with an assist from Gautam Raja. I hope you’ll read, discuss, and share!–-Ed.]

If you’ve spent money on high-quality interconnects or speaker cable, you may have wondered why a cable is designed a certain way, and how many of the supposed benefits are based on valid science—and not the snake oil that cable designers are often accused of. This series of articles is based on papers written by Galen Gareis to present one engineer’s view of audio cable design, discussing in detail every consideration of designing high-performance speaker and interconnect cables.

 When a cable carries a pure tone, perhaps a sine or square wave, then frequency and time are interchangeable, meaning that the only distortion of the signal would be attenuation. But music is far from a pure tone, and is a complex flood of frequencies in the 20 Hz-20 kHz range. When you send multiple frequencies down a cable, you introduce the possibility of time-based distortion, as different frequencies are affected differently by reactive variables such capacitance and inductance. Our ears are quick to hear the deterioration in fidelity based on frequency-arrival time and phase coherence.

To compound the issues, audio frequencies lie in an awkward electromagnetic region for conductors. Don’t forget that audio frequencies are at the bottom end of the spectrum; these are among the slowest, longest wavelengths of electromagnetic energy we harness.

Electromagnetic wave propagation: what exactly is the “signal”?

To understand why cable design has an effect on a signal in the first place, it’s important to understand exactly what this “signal” is, and how it “travels” along the cable.

Visualize the wire as a tube that’s the diameter of a set of marbles which you can push down the tube; the marbles are the electrons. Electrons don’t move without also causing electromagnetic fields, so now imagine a donut with its hole centered around this marble tube. This is the magnetic wave (B field). Now, take a bunch of toothpicks and stick them around the outside of the donut—this is the electric field (E field) produced by the moving electron.

To send a signal down the cable, we apply an electromotive force to the wire to move an electron down it— or in our example, push a marble into the “send end” of the tube. Something funny happens with the donut, though—the electromagnetic B and E fields. When the marble is just halfway into the send end, the donut and toothpicks are already halfway down the entire tube. When the marble is fully inserted into the tube, the donut and toothpicks are already at the end of the cable.

What is effectively happening is that when you insert a marble into the tube, a marble at the opposite end pops out as quickly. So the “signal” we use travels at the VP (velocity of propagation) of the cable, and not the speed of the electrons at all. Those move very slowly compared to the electromagnetic B and E fields.

This should make it clear why the structure and dielectric, or insulation, of a cable is so important. The signal travels more around the cable than in it, and largely through the dielectric.

Meet The Distortions!

Cable is far from perfect at moving electromagnetic waves in the audio band. The accumulating time-based distortions in a cable carrying an audio signal are clearly measurable. Better designs minimize those distortions, but every cable places more or less emphasis on each one depending on the design engineer’s concept of audible influences.

The Iconoclast development program has  documented many possible sources of time-based distortion—and there are undoubtedly many more yet to be discovered. The combination of these is much more significant than any individual source of time-based distortion on its own.

1) Varying velocity of propagation

To go back to our marble and donut example, a higher frequency would be represented by inserting a marble faster in the tube, with a correspondingly fast-moving donut. So with a multi-frequency signal such as music, the higher frequencies entering the cable reach the other end earlier than the lower frequencies.

Also as we saw, the “signal” moves down the wire’s outer circumference, and not in the wire. Therefore, the velocity of propagation of the signal (versus the velocity of the actual electrons) is determined by the dielectric or insulation material that the electromagnetic wave is predominantly traveling through. The slowing effect of the dielectric varies with frequency, throwing another variable into velocity of propagation—but giving us a way to play with it.

In one tested cable, the speed of a 20,000 Hz signal is about 110-million m/sec. The speed of a 20 Hz signal is about 5-million m/sec, or about 22 times slower. In other words, the impedance of a cable rises as we lower frequency due to the VP dropping, and capacitance value. Each is determined by the dielectric and the design spacing.

It is possible then, to tune the design of a cable to flatten the VP through the audio band, reducing the time errors across the frequency range. It is possible to measure the VP and show that a cheap spool cable has a much more drastic change in VP as frequency drops, than does a cable designed for audio.

2) Current and voltage phase relationship

Current and voltage are locked into a phase-shifted relationship, always. To send a signal down a wire, you apply a potential difference (voltage) and only then does current rise to meet this demand. When you have a capacitor in a circuit, you apply current, and only as current starts to reduce does a potential difference occur in the circuit, as the capacitor is now charged.

Thus, inductance and capacitance are responsible for a ninety degree time-based shift between current and voltage in all electronics, not just cable. And cables have measurable inductance and capacitance, so these locked-in relationships lead to all sorts of time-based issues in circuits and cables.

3) Impedance matching to the load

For a cable to transmit a signal with no distortion, it should connect to a load with the same impedance as the cable. But impedance is hard to define for audio signals, where the load is the loudspeaker at the end of a speaker cable, or the input section of a preamp at the end of an interconnect. After all, velocity of propagation varies with frequency, so impedance is not a constant. Also, speakers present a different impedance depending on frequency.

Another factor is that the wavelengths of audio signals are very long, even at 20 kHz. This means you can’t have a cable that’s long enough to propagate these signals, and this, plus an impedance mismatch, results in reflections off the load that cause distortion. Since the signal’s wavelength is many times too long to “fit” inside a given length of cable, the cable doesn’t yet have impedance. There can be reflections, but these are not to be confused with “return loss” reflections at RF.

[We will continue Time is of the Essence, with Galen Gareis’ explanation of time-based distortions found in audio cables, in the next issue of Copper.—Ed.]

In the last edition of Copper, I introduced MusicBrainz, a crowd-sourced, free-to-use database of metadata for recorded music. From a skeptical beginning, I have come to appreciate that MusicBrainz is actually a first-class resource, seriously well thought-out – one which has accomplished far more than I would have thought possible, and one which I enthusiastically endorse going forward.

MusicBrainz starts from the premise that the metadata typically associated with ripped and/or downloaded music is inadequate, and puts in place a framework to improve upon that. This is so much easier said than done. If you are going to improve upon something, you have to have clear view of what is wrong with it, and in what specific ways it has to be improved. In doing so, it is critical that the data structures you put in place can be applied to the widest possible spectrum of music styles and formats, and also that it is compatible (to the largest extent practicable) with the norms which have hitherto become accepted as standard practice. Both of these requirements involve challenges, and those challenges exist both as fundamental issues regarding how the database is structured, and problems regarding how the data will be used, viewed, and understood in the real world.

MusicBrainz is what is called a ‘relational database’. This type of database comprises lists of similar entities, together with tables of relationships that describe how items on one list relate to items on another list. For example, one list can be a list of people, and another can be a list of musical compositions. A Person can be related to a Work via a composer relationship. Typically a relationship is a two-way affair so that the Person is ‘composer of’ the Work, and the Work was ‘composed by’ the Person. Therefore the first things to understand about MusicBrainz are the primary lists. There are actually 15 of those lists, but only four of them form the vast bulk of the critical relationships in the database. These are Artists, Releases, Recordings, and Works, so let’s just focus on those.

Artists include both people and ensembles. The Beatles constitute an Artist, as do John Lennon and Paul McCartney. A relational database also allows for relationships within a list, so that John Lennon has a relationship ‘member of’ with The Beatles, as indeed does Paul McCartney, and The Beatles have corresponding ‘has member’ relationships with both Lennon and McCartney. Orchestras, choirs, conductors, and producers all end up as part of the Artists list, as do composers, photographers, lyricists, and arrangers. Mostly, though, Artists have important relationships with entities on other lists. So, for example, the only way we know if an Artist is a composer is if he has a ‘composed by’ relationship with an entity in the list of Works. This is very helpful in the big picture because, as we know, individuals can wear many different hats over the course of a career. Leonard Bernstein’s recorded oeuvre includes appearances as conductor, composer, and concert pianist. And ‘ambient music performer’ Brian Eno (much beloved of the NY Times crossword) appears in MusicBrainz as guitarist, keyboard player, percussionist, composer, lyricist, arranger, producer, engineer, vocalist, illustrator, chorus master… that list just goes on and on and on.

MusicBrainz is a highly structured and formalized environment, and the relationships that individual entities can have within and among each other are carefully controlled. Strict hierarchies are maintained. For example:

• Works are individual pieces of music, and have ‘recording of’ relationships to individual Recordings
• Recordings are specific recorded performances and have‘performance of’ relationships to individual Works
• Tracks are structural components of a Release (which is MusicBrainz-speak for an album). Individual Tracks contain individual Recordings;
  Releases contain one or more Tracks

This may be complicated-sounding – and in fact it gets even more complicated than this – but believe me, the complication is the necessary evil to be accommodated if the system is to apply smoothly and consistently across all the possibilities encountered in the world of recorded music.

Works can be broken down into multiple parts, each of which is in itself a Work, and has a ‘part of’ relationship with the parent Work. This is most commonly seen in classical music, where, for example, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony has four movements. In this case the symphony itself is a Work, and each of the movements exist in MusicBrainz as separate ‘part of’ Works. These ‘part of’ relationships can be nested as deep as you need. Works typically have a ‘composed by’ relationship with someone in the Artists list, and will often also have lyricist, arranger, or even ‘revised by’ relationships. Interestingly, one of the legacy aspects that MusicBrainz has decided to live with instead of imposing its own view is that it includes composer, lyricist, librettist, and writer as separate relationships, which can be viewed as conveying a certain ambiguity.

Releases are an important entity in MusicBrainz because music is typically released onto the market in self-identified collections, such as albums. Therefore albums, EPs, singles, and downloadable releases comprising just one item, all constitute Releases. But for most music, when we are talking about Releases, we are talking about albums. MusicBrainz allows for a lot of information to be stored in respect of albums, including release date, record label, catalog number, cover art, and a whole lot more.

Recordings in MusicBrainz are what we normally call tracks. A Release will comprise a number of Recordings, which are just the tracks on the album. Each of those Recordings will have its own set of attributes, including track number, duration, performers associated with the track, and so forth. One of the key things about MusicBrainz – which causes a lot of trouble – is the relationship between Recordings and Works, and this illustrates nicely one of the requirements I laid out at the start of this column, that the MusicBrainz database should be compatible with the widest possible spectrum of music styles and formats. In the classical music world any given piece of music may have many different recordings of it that have been released by various performers, or even by the same performers at different times. So it follows that a Recording and a Work cannot be the same thing. A Recording has to be a recording of a Work (read that sentence again in order to understand why I have been so anal with my use of capitalization and italics). In existing digital audio metadata no such distinction is made – so a track has both performers and composers, and there is no place at all for the Work, unless it is somehow (i.e. informally) captured in the track’s Title. In MusicBrainz it is only the Recording which can have performers, and the Work which can have composers – you cannot associate composers with Recordings, nor performers with Works. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

The second aspect of MusicBrainz that I want to cover in this column is the crowd-sourcing aspect. Crowd-sourcing means that – like Wikipedia as a well-known example – anybody can sign in and enter data. (As an experiment, some years ago, I made a minor edit to the official Wikipedia page for the state of North Carolina. Not an overtly controversial edit, but one with mild socio-political overtones, replacing a text which had slightly less mild socio-political overtones. I was interested to see how long it would last – and who would change it (and why). But, no, it is still there!)

MusicBrainz then has a community of Editors who pore over newly crowd-sourced data and edit out any errors or any data that do not conform to the MusicBrainz ‘style guidelines’. At least that’s the theory. In practice, based on what I am seeing, there are serious limits on how much of the submitted material the Editors can actually review, and as a result huge swathes of the database are not in strict compliance with the style guidelines. But this is not surprising when you consider that over 15,000 new Releases (i.e. albums) are added to the MusicBrainz database every month, a rate which is actually slowly accelerating. (Every time I read that number I find it so incredible I have to go back and check it again in case I made a mistake!)

Adding new data to MusicBrainz can be a tedious process, particularly since the available tools are not particularly user-friendly, but also because every time you want to add a relationship to an entity which is not pre-existing in MusicBrainz, you must first create that entity from scratch, a task which gets old very quickly. With modern (pop/rock etc.) music this often means creating a new Work for each track on the album, which is doubly tedious because you have to check first to see if the Work already exists (the process for doing that isn’t as simple or convenient as you might wish, for all sorts of irritating reasons). And there are always those occasions when you know that a track you are entering is a cover of another track which is already in MusicBrainz, but you find that nobody has bothered to create the Work for it. Because of issues like these, a great many Releases in MusicBrainz have neither performers nor Works associated with their Recordings, which means it is left to editors to step in and fill in the blanks. But there aren’t remotely enough editors to be able to keep up.

The complexity, and thoroughness, of the MusicBrainz database is at the same time its greatest strength and greatest weakness. Strength, because it allows the most comprehensive metadata relationships to be unambiguously assembled. Weakness, because if nobody is motivated to enter the data in the first place, then the strengths are quite irrelevant. By far MusicBrainz’s biggest problem is the paucity with which key data relationships have been entered by the community. With modern music in particular, it is surprising how few Releases in MusicBrainz actually have Works associated to their individual tracks. This means, among other things, that the composer relationships for such tracks is empty.

There are a couple of other important databases which are associated with MusicBrainz, and which form key parts of the MusicBrainz ecosystem. AcoustID is a bit like Shazam. AcoustID publishes an algorithm with which an ‘acoustic fingerprint’ of any given track can be calculated and the resultant fingerprint stored in the AcoustID database. This can then be used to identify the track. Somebody can then take an unknown piece of music, calculate its acoustic fingerprint, submit that to AcoustID, and, if a match is found, find the matching Recording in the MusicBrainz database. Of course, this requires that if a new album is entered into the MusicBrainz database, you need to be able to generate acoustic fingerprints for each track, register them with AcoustID, and then register the match with MusicBrainz. This is done using a free app called MusicBrainz Picard, and, naturally, can only be done if you actually have the music to hand. The other associated database is CoverArtArchive which is used to store cover art and other imagery associated with MusicBrainz data (because images themselves are not handled by the MusicBrainz database).

So that is a basic introduction to MusicBrainz, and believe me, there is more than ten times as much that I could have written if I had the space, and if I thought you had the patience to read it. So in the next and final MusicBrainz column, I’ll deal mostly with how you can use MusicBrainz to power a state-of-the-art music server.

Adam Sandler, in his impish introduction on Saturday Night Live to the original “Hanukkah Song”, quips, “There’s a lot of Christmas songs out there, but not that many Hanukkah songs. So, I wrote this song for all those nice, little Jewish kids who don’t get to hear that many Hanukkah songs…”

Truth be told, there actually are plenty of Hanukkah songs “out there,” both classic folk melodies and contemporary compositions, yet most of them (with one unfortunate exception, noted below) remain largely unfamiliar to most Americans, and even many Jews. But why? There are multiple reasons.

In most regions of the United States outside of large urban centers, Jews are still a small minority demographic, including the liberal, cosmopolitan city of Austin that I call home. Combine that with the sad tendency of American consumer culture to secularize and coopt anything that can be marketed for a profit, including the Christmas holiday, and the cloying, shopping mall soundtrack of the Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday juggernaut tends to drown out anything that might be out of the cultural mainstream. So yes, even with some comfort taken in that token dreidel or lonely plastic menorah hauled out of storage once a year among the tinsel and wreaths of your neighborhood Target or Walmart, Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song monologue gets at a certain, wistful feeling of cultural invisibility for many Jews at this time of year, and that includes hearing “not that many Hanukkah songs,” at least not in the public sphere.

Here’s one interesting irony: Hanukkah is a lovely and beloved holiday in much of the contemporary Jewish world and is historically significant, too, as it recalls a decisive moment in the survival of the Jewish people. Nevertheless, if one defines the phrase “major Jewish holiday” as a festival mandated in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the “Old Testament”), then Hanukkah, which is never mentioned in the Jewish Bible, is not even a major Jewish holiday – indeed, in its origins, it was not even a gift giving holiday. As you’d expect, the prominence of the Christmas season in America and the overlapping timeframe of the two holidays raised the profile of Hanukkah in this country, emphasizing (of course) the gift giving angle and inviting a certain cultural envy, at least in certain quarters, for the glitz, glamour and prominence of Christmas in American life. For all of these reasons, Hanukkah music doesn’t get a lot of air time.

I cannot go any further in this brief exploration of Hanukkah music without citing one exquisite irony: an astonishing number of the most beloved, English-language Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers. From Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” to Mel Torme’s great jazz standard, “The Christmas Song”, and encompassing less stellar examples such as Johnny Marks’ “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “A Holly Jolly Christmas”, many of the top twenty-five most beloved Christmas songs were written by Jews. (For a discussion of this phenomenon, see here.)

So, where are the Hanukkah songs?

Well, anyone who went to Hebrew school in America for the past two or three generations in the United States can sing the song, “I Have a Little Dreidel“ in their sleep. (This is the “unfortunate exception” I referred to earlier.) This ubiquitous ditty begins,

“I have a little dreidel

I made it out of clay

And when it’s dry and ready,

Then dreidel I shall play…”

It turns out that these lyrics were originally written in Yiddish and/or German, in which the titular dreidel was made out of lead, changed only to “clay,” in the English version in order to rhyme with “play.” In any event, there’s nothing particularly wrong with the song (heck, there’s even a cover version by Barenaked Ladies) except that the music gets on your nerves after a while and the lyrics don’t say anything particularly charming or interesting about Hanukkah. However, take my grumpiness about this innocent melody with a grain of kosher salt; I am a congregational Rabbi (and yes, audio nut and music lover) who wrestles with the fear that “I Have a Little Dreidel” is the only thing my Sunday School students will remember about Hanukkah. But my neurosis need not be yours.

In terms of Hanukkah classics, no listing would be complete without the great Yiddish tune, “Oy Hanukkah” (this version by the late Theodore Bikel is particularly sweet, although the English lyrics don’t translate the original Yiddish). Let’s also not forget “Rock of Ages” (“Ma’oz Tzur” in Hebrew). Here’s a lovely, up-tempo version of “Ma’oz Tzur” by contemporary artist Julie Silver.

Speaking of contemporary Jewish music, a search of YouTube or of the CD and download section of Amazon.com will yield both new Hanukkah songs and cover versions of old favorites. For example, check out this link from the website of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) entitled 11 Great, Modern Hanukkah Songs. And in the realm of cover versions, there’s a lot to choose from. Explore, for example, the two CD volumes entitled Festival of Light, which include contributions from artists such as Marc Cohn (of “Walking in Memphis” fame), David Broza and klezmer giants, The Klezmatics.

Speaking of klezmer (that violin- and clarinet-driven, Eastern European jazz mash-up) there’s a great degree of contemporary and classic Hanukkah klezmer music worth checking out. See, for example, this take on Oy Hanukkah by the fabulous Klezmer Conservatory Band:

And, whatever you do, do not miss this excerpt from a swinging, big band arrangement of Oy Hanukkah by the Eyal Vilner Big Band!

Holy moly, that’s tasty!

Finally, lest we leave you with the impression that all Hanukkah songs come out of the Ashkenazi (Eastern and Central European) Jewish world, be sure to enjoy “Ocho Kandelikas”, sung in Ladino (medieval Judeo-Spanish) by its composer, Flory Jagoda:

So there’s your tip-of-the-iceberg Hanukkah music intro. Hag urim same’akh (“Happy Festival of Lights”) to all who are celebrating. And whatever your tradition, may your life and our world be filled with greater goodness, love and light.

Old Joke.  There are 10 kinds of people in the world.  Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

But there is St Thomas Garnet’s theorem.  He postulated there are actually 3 kinds of people in the world.  Those who hate Christmas, those who are ambivalent, and those who adore Christmas.

Then they hung him.

What strikes me is that there are a significant number of folks that detest, or maybe just distrust Christmas.  Not bad people surely.  Just not..well, there.  What drives them crazy is Christmas ads after Halloween.  Christmas carols right after Thanksgiving.  And the knucklehead next door who’s putting out lights on his front lawn on Thanksgiving weekend.  You gotta drive by this guy’s house every morning and every evening thinking about this idiot’s utility bill.  And he’s got a kid that loves making snowmen.

But I never realized there are people who slide in and out of these groups at times.  I am suffering from this now.

I was always firmly in the camp of those who adore Christmas.  Every year I write these insipid letters to fellow employees dripping with cheer, chocolate, and reindeer.  Sage advice about how important it is to understand the reason we celebrate, to learn to appreciate the season and enjoy the wonder.  To capture that spirit of youth that anticipates and salivates as the great day approaches.  Go to the mall when you don’t need to buy anything and enjoy the decorations.  Volunteer at a local shelter or hospital.  Join a caroler group.  I’ve finally realized few read these things or care and this year I couldn’t care less.  If you hate Christmas that’s a you problem.

But I don’t WANT to hate Christmas.  I guess I don’t hate it exactly but I can’t get myself to care as I have in the past.  I’m going through the motions, decorating the house, wrapping presents because people are coming over and it’s in bad taste to hand them a gift in a plastic bag with the receipt still in it.

Having fun yet?

Now I have to write this column for Christmas.  One of the joys of my year has always been writing for Christmas, and in fact last year Copper featured my Christmas column and followed up in the next issue with my letter to the employees.  I could have easily written a column about another booze soaked rock star instead but I wanted to do this.

How do I get out of this funk?  Every weekend since Thanksgiving when we put up the decorations I come home from being away all week (I live 100 miles from work and stay up there all week) and I recharge as much as I can but barely get there then have to go back to work on Monday and stay in a room far from home.

But that didn’t matter when I was driving long haul for a couple of years.  I was always away from home and spent a few Christmases on the road but still felt the power of the season, even by myself in a truck bunk on Christmas Eve.  I am extremely lucky: I work for a great company that genuinely appreciates what I do.  However it is a very high stress job that is not a joy, but that was always true in the past as well.  I got sucked into manufacturing management decades ago with every fucking month end is a nightmare and the fiscal year end happening the week after Christmas which always threatened the holiday.  But it never did.  I was always able to separate the job from the holiday.

So what the hell is wrong with me this year?

I get now why my annual holiday epistles have little effect on people.  If you do care about Christmas you don’t need me explaining it to you and if you don’t care you don’t need me ranting at you.  And now I’ve managed to slip into that ambivalent cave of souls almost wishing the damn thing would just be overThis cannot stand. I’m getting old and probably only have 20 of these flippin holidays left so I can’t waste one.

OK. This cannot stand. I’m getting old and probably only have 20 of these flippin holidays left so I can’t waste one.

Last night when I came home I started working on this column but was having a shitty time of it.  I watched one of my favorite Christmas movies, The Muppet Christmas Carol, but no spark. This morning, a Friday where I typically work from home filling out surveys on one of the best survey sites I’ve found so far, I built a fire in the fireplace in the family room downstairs where my office is.   So there’s two cool things, I get to work at home on Friday and I have a lovely fire on a bitter cold morning.  The firelight is reflecting off the Christmas decorations all around the hearth and around the room.

I once wrote a short story for my brother’s kids that involved a boy who wished Christmas would hurry and come.  He was visited one night by an elf, a rather annoying little person, who made his wish come true.  But the boy woke up on the floor under the Christmas tree, all the wrapping paper around him, Dad in his pajamas reading a card from his mother and smoking a cigarette, Mom in the kitchen cooking and humming.  Christmas had come alright, but he had missed the best parts.  The anticipation of the week before, coming down the stairs during that week in the middle of the night imagining how the tree and presents would look in the morning dusk in a few days. Coming home in the late afternoon from playing in the park and seeing the lights on all the houses, with the lights on, yours the best.  Christmas Eve when Dad would puff the tree up the stairs and they’d decorate the whole house including spraying this weird white chemical stuff on the windows that looked like snow but smelled like formaldehyde, but when combined with a stencil would result in bells, stars and reindeer in the windows.

Then, that night.  Trying to get to sleep but having a terrible time because you knew some time tonight there would be the sound of hooves on the roof and a dragging sleigh.  But you do fall asleep and when you wake up, it takes a moment to remember it’s Christmas morning then you leap out of bed and spring down the stairs.  There it is.  The glory.  The quiet tree on pause waiting for the adulation of turning on the lights.  It’s still dark outside but the light from the streetlight outside with that special illumination reserved for winter reflecting off the snow filters through the window by Dad’s chair.  A pile of presents under the tree.  Watching the clock on the stove waiting for 7:00 which was the earliest you could wake your parents without getting killed.  Then at 7:00 and 30 seconds the bedlam of tearing into wrapping paper and then..discovery at last.

He’d missed it all.

I don’t want to wake up on the morning of 12/26 and realize I’d missed it all.  So Christmas has nothing to do with how others feel about it.  This column isn’t written for anyone but myself and I don’t care a flip if no one reads it.  It doesn’t matter if I don’t like my job, I’m good at it and I have to make it last a few more years.  Besides, very few people like their job and many don’t like their life in general.  Maybe that’s it.  Christmas is about the birth of Christ, of course.  But it’s also about hoping for just a few days when Life doesn’t suck.  It can be confusing.

OK some years it’s work. Some years are so bad you have to push Life out of the way and work in some eggnog.  Now we’re getting warm.  Maybe that’s why alcohol is a staple this time of year.

I’m going to fix myself an eggnog and brandy and go sit by the fire.

I mean this with all my heart.  Make Christmas merry.

In the 1960s, the folk music revival opened up a place for artists who loved traditional British song as much as they loved creating new material. Chief among those trad-influenced songwriters were the likes of Richard Thompson and his band Fairport Convention. If you’re wondering what became of that tradition, look no further than English singer-songwriter and guitarist Matthew Hegarty, leader of Matthew and the Atlas.

They started recording in 2009, self-releasing the EP Scavengers. The song “Beneath the Sea” gives a sense of the longing and darkness in their sound, qualities that have remained through the years in every version of the band and change of stylistic preferences. In the band’s early days, folk was the predominant flavor, although this waltz melody would never be mistaken for a traditional ballad; it’s clearly written after alt and Britpop bands like Radiohead and Oasis had paved the way.

Matthew and the Atlas’ originality began to emerge in the 2010 EP To the North, which also marked their debut with indie label Communion Records (where they were the first signed artists). Hegarty’s voice is as striking as the songs themselves. In “Veins of Your History,” his melody seems to reach back to the dawn of time, reminiscent of Dylan’s incalculable sadness in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” The backup singers sustaining single syllables helps to give the illusion that the song is ancient. And note the mournful use of low brass, making the line “Oh, my love, you’re not alone” sound like it’s probably a lie:

Other Rivers was the group’s first full album, released in 2014. The most obvious characteristic of this collection is its departure from folk roots. Electric and acoustic-electric guitar and bass now join the drum kit and keyboards.

The wistfulness of “Into Gold” is brought out by the reverberating sound production. This is a song of a man lost in an unkind world: “I’ve been following stones I’ve thrown / I cannot seem to leave those days alone.” Hegarty, it turns out, had every reason to feel lost and traumatized. The songs on this and their most recent album reflect an autobiographical horror – Hegarty was attacked and stabbed nearly to death!

Other Rivers also includes a slick new recording of “To the North,” the title song from their earlier EP. There’s less of a raw folk sound now. The constant ostinato keyboard pattern is mesmerizing, and makes for an unusual combination with vocal harmonies out of American country music.

Hegarty shows off a pleasing baritone in “Out of the Darkness.” The melody is almost operatic. But the song acknowledges Hegarty’s folk roots in a surprising way, not so much in the musical style as the imagery in the lyrics. The British ballad tradition is filled with tales of the fantastical, and some of Hegarty’s language recalls such songs: “Deep below the earth I might have found you / High above the tower I could not see.”

Matthew and the Atlas’ latest album is Temple, released in 2016 and also on the Communion label. And, for the first time, they have made official music videos — one of them, anyway, for the title track “Temple.” I can’t say it contributes to the experience of listening. As for the song itself, the usual themes of loss and melancholy are still in the lyrics and arching melody, but the busy-ness of the arrangement (especially the nervous snare drum patterns) seems to work against that mood:

“Old Master” gives a better demonstration of the band’s current sound. They have not given up on their folk roots, not by a long shot. In fact, they released an acoustic version of Temple as well as the rock-tinged one. This video, a live performance from the Mahogany Sessions, shows how the band combines an acoustic foreground with an electronic backdrop. In the chorus of this delicate song, Hegarty also gets to show off an ethereal falsetto in short vocalise passages; he seems to want to contrast those heights with the very bottom of his range. While the verse melody is repetitive, the lush arrangement keeps the ear engaged.

It’s no surprise that Hegarty counts Nick Drake, Tom Waits, and Leonard Cohen among his favorite songwriters. More recent comparisons put him in the company of Bon Iver, Damien Rice, and Mumford & Sons. In the work of all those artists, lyricism shines a light in the darkness, but the darkness is cherished for its own sake. Matthew and the Atlas are walking down that same road.

“It was the Armani coat that sealed the deal,” said Mike Creek.

“What Armani coat?” I asked.

Act One.

Music Hall, my company, had been in business for about two years and I was doing quite well but I had no cash. My first product was a Revolver turntable, which I introduced to the US market in 1985. As I was new to the industry I had no idea that turntables were on their way out, and CD players were in. Never underestimate the value of ignorance.  Introducing a new turntable in the mid-eighties was madness but I was too inexperienced to know this.

About six months prior I had picked up distribution of Creek Audio out of London. The line consisted of 2 integrated amps and an FM tuner and they were selling quite well, but I needed a pair of speakers to complement the line. At that time, the hottest small speaker on the market was the original Wharfedale Diamond. I decided to call up Wharfedale to see if they could make something for me. I spoke to the export manager, told him my tale and he said, “How would you like to buy some Diamonds?”

“But isn’t Harvey Rosenberg your US distributor?”

“Yes, but he owes us a lot of money.”

I asked the price and the minimum order quantity and said I would get back to him.

I made some phone calls and discovered that there was quite a demand as the speakers had been unavailable for a while. I soon sold about 50 pairs when I called the now-closed J&R Music World.

J&R was a very successful audio and music store, which had been around since the early seventies. In the eighties they dominated the New York electronic and music scene. I spoke to the buyer and asked if he needed any Diamonds.

“You have Diamonds?”

“I can get them.”

“How many can you get?”

“How many do you want?

“Four hundred pair to start?”

My heart stopped.

“Can I have a purchase order?

“Absolutely.”

He mailed it to me (This was pre email and even FAX)

I called Wharfedale to order five hundred pair. They were thrilled but asked for all the money up front.

I was broke.

I contacted my father-in-law, showed him the PO from J&R and he very nicely agreed to lend me the money. I sent the money off to England. About four weeks later the speakers arrived and I delivered the order to J&R. Never having done business with them, I sweated for about six weeks and finally the check came. It was quite large, enough for me to repay the loan and come out ahead. I continued selling Diamonds for over a year and sold thousands of them. The factory invited me to visit to see if I wanted to be their US distributor but after listening to the rest of the line, I realized that the Diamond was a mistake. The other speakers were terrible and I am convinced the Diamond was just a lucky combination of parts that magically played music. We parted amicably and I have to say that Wharfedale gave an early boost to the fledgling Music Hall.

A few years later I met the Wharfedale folks at summer CES in McCormack place in Chicago, which, to this day, I think, was the best venue for that show. The sales manager introduced me to the managing director of the company. He said,

“This is Roy Hall. Remember all the Diamonds he bought? He was the one who saved our bacon.”

It turned out that the company at that time was in financial trouble and my large purchases (on borrowed money) helped to keep them afloat.

Act Two.

I had been selling Revolver turntables for about a year when I heard that Mike Creek was looking for a new US distributor. My friends at Linn Products made the introduction at a Hi Fi Show in the north of England and Mike Creek and his brother-in-law, Ian, presented the line and explained the ethos of the company. I listened to the amps and decided that they sounded amazingly good. I told Mike that I would be returning to the UK soon and would like to visit him and his factory in London.

The factory was in the back of Mike’s house, it was small but seemed to be well organized and was very busy. This was in 1986 and Creek was a market leader in the UK. At that time, Mike had a lousy US distributor, who wouldn’t order anything until he had received prepaid orders from his customers. This was no way to run a business.

Mike took me upstairs to meet Susan, his wife. She was particularly beautiful and spoke with a sultry English accent. Quite a stunner! Susan ran the business side of the business while Mike the manufacturing arm and Ian, the sales.  I was mightily impressed.  I was new to the business and this seemed like the big time. I spent a few days with Mike and Susan and Mike basically agreed to let me distribute the line. When I returned home, I found there was a real dearth of musical products in Creek’s price points and business really took off. So much so that within a couple of years the US had become Creek’s number one export market. Mike expanded his lineup over the years but one day asked me if there was any little product he could make in addition to his current line. I asked around and one of my reps suggested a stand-alone phono amp. Mike thought it a good idea and he quickly produced one.

We showed it around and it was an instant success. Over the years thousands were sold worldwide and it spawned a whole range of small box phono amps, DACs, and headphone amps.

The first one was called OBH-8 then OBH-9, 10 11 etc.

Mike had asked me to name the product, as it was my baby. Eight years prior to this, I had contracted testicular cancer and had a testicle removed.

The 8 was for 8 years of being cancer free, The OBH stands for, “One Ball Hall”

It’s been one of our most successful products.

A few years ago, on the telephone, I asked Mike why he chose me to be his distributor. I knew that quite a few other companies had approached him.

He answered, “It was the Armani coat that sealed the deal.”

“What Armani coat?” I questioned.

“The one you were wearing the day you visited us in London?”

“I don’t own an Armani coat.”

“Yes you do. Susan said that you must be rich because of the raincoat you were wearing.” The only coat I could think of was a raincoat I picked up years ago on sale in Macy’s bargain basement. I went to the closet and checked the label.

It said, “Armani”

Leave it to an indy hipster musician with several different noms de scène de musicien (stage names) to angst over having too much music.

Funny thing is—I agree with him.

James Jackson Toth is a musician who has worked in a number of genres under a number of names. As an alt-country/freak folk/whatever musician, Toth is best-known by the name Wooden Wand, for some reason. Leaving that aside, he’s written a thoughtful piece for the NPR website entitled, “Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment in Dedicated Listening”. Think of it as Future Shock for the streaming world.

As well as being a musician, Toth started writing record reviews and working in a record store as a teenager in the ’90s. Soon, he felt as though he’d hit the mother lode: free promo copies of new releases started arriving, in abundance.

Toth: “By the end of any given week, I had more music on my desk than someone only a century ago was able to hear in five lifetimes, and all without spending so much as a dollar.

“Then came the Internet.”

With the introduction of file-sharing came the rush: “It was incredible. I missed a few shifts at the record store and definitely lost a few nights of sleep. I remained indoors and had to be reminded to take regular meals. Only in retrospect can I see that my obsession with music — once the proud badge of the misfit, the precocious autodidact — was beginning to resemble something prosaic and common, like an addiction to World of Warcraft or Internet porn.”

Toth notes that ” When you’re young, few things keep you caring about a thing more than feeling like you’re the only one who really cares about it. [My emphasis—Ed.]  I know far more today about albums I hated in 1990 than I do about my favorite albums released last year.”

And then—the resultant flow of new stuff became overwhelming, and induced in Toth a strange panic, a sense of being overwhelmed, besieged. He found that he stopped remembering or caring as much, and not only was it all too much, but there was no cessation of the too-muchedness. The pace of accumulation didn’t just stay the same—it kept increasing: “My collection was starting to feel like an albatross, and, ironically, was cutting into my recreational listening time. On New Year’s Eve 2013, I made a resolution: ‘Less stockpiling; more listening.’ Like most resolutions, this one was mostly forgotten by the first week of February.

“And then one day, a revelation: It occurred to me that it was no longer just difficult to hear all the music I’d amassed, but impossible. I mean literally, mathematically impossible: I calculated that if I lived another, say, 40 years, and spent every minute of those next 40 years — that’s no sleeping, no eating — listening to my collection of music, I would be dead before I could make it all the way through. That means there are records I own today that I will definitely never hear again. It was a sobering thought.”

Toth had crossed over from being a collector, to being a hoarder. I’m sure many of us have reached that point; in my own life there came a time when the thousands of records and thousands of books ceased to be a joy, a constant source of assurance of a warm, enriching presence in my life. Instead, they were a burden, a challenge just to maintain a reasonable living space with so much stuff. I was no longer keeping my pretties…they were keeping me.

Like Toth, the upkeep, movement, and shuffling about diminished the amount of time spent actually enjoying those treasures—and indeed, what time was spent with them was no longer an uninhibited joy, but was overshadowed by the everpresent specter of the need to do something.

Let’s assume you’re a music fan of the new school, and don’t have any LPs, CDs, or whatever: you have files on a portable device, or computer. Or…if you’re a music fan of the newest new school, you don’t even have that. With almost everything conceivable from some streaming service somewhere, why even bother with downloads?

If that’s the case, the Jenga piles of CDs, the slip-sliding stacks of LPs are all gone. Are the panic attacks gone?

Probably not. For one prone to anxiety anyway, one of the hardest things to do is to simply choose. Given unlimited choices, the result for the neurotic amongst us may not be a sense of joy, but…paralysis.

After the initial rush created by unlimited horizons upon the internet, don’t most of us stick to a few familiar refuges?

I welcome the opportunity to freely explore more types of music, more performances, than ever before.

But still: some days I stare blankly at the screen and end up choosing something familiar. It’s just another example of the Kinda Blue syndrome.

I sometimes wonder what the late Alvin Toffler would say about our world today. The rate of change has skyrocketed since he wrote Future Shock way, way back in 1970. Just think: cable TV was a nascent industry in most of our country; newspapers and magazines were king; cassettes were just becoming popular; V8s were the motive force of choice.

We’re well beyond any form of shock, much less one related to the future; the here and now is enough of a challenge.

Think there’s a market for a book called Present Paralysis?

What does an oboe sound like?

If you fancy yourself a connoisseur of yin/yang balancing acts, oboes might well provide your soundtrack. On the one hand: honey. Golden, slow-pouring strands of melody. Sweet, thick.

On the other: vinegar. Tart little bites of tone that sting, then linger in your mouth, their acidity reminding you—perhaps too much at times—of life’s realities.

Handel liked oboes; he usually added some to his violins to get a more penetrating sound. The string sections in his orchestras for Messiah and other works were juiced up, oboes on top, bassoons on the bottom. Bach liked oboes too. The St. Matthew Passion requires four; they also appear in the Brandenburg Concertos and the Orchestral Suites, not to mention the oboe concertos. He showed enormous affection as well for their deeper-voiced siblings, the oboe d’amore and oboe da caccia. You can hear those more melancholy voices in the obbligato arias of the Passions and in many of the church cantatas.

So it’s no surprise that Mozart found himself drawn to the oboe. Maybe it had something to do with oboist Friedrich Ramm, whom Mozart met at Mannheim in 1777. They became drinking buddies, so when Mozart found himself in Munich finishing up Idomeneo, he also fashioned an Oboe Quartet (K370) for Ramm. An oft-recorded work, it offers a Classic-era model of how to pair the oboe with other instruments—in this case members of a string quartet minus the first violin, whose role the oboe assumes.

Except, of course, it can’t really do that. An oboe is not a violin. Its pitch compass and dynamic range are both more restricted. Plus, it can’t move around with the same flexibility. And then there’s the whole honey vs. vinegar thing.

A recent recording of Mozart’s Oboe Quartet shows us just how well Mozart managed to strike a balance anyway:

The oboe is definitely in charge. Yet it drops out often enough to sustain the illusion that the strings are, if not exactly equal partners, at least still in the game. I’m sure you noticed how the first time the violinist plays lead, it’s with the tune; when the oboe re-enters, it’s with a subordinate, concluding phrase. Following that, the strings do a call, the oboe a response. Nicely balanced, although thanks to the distinctive timbre of the oboe—and its placement in a higher register—we’re never in real doubt as to where attention must be paid.

This is from a lovely recent album called “A Tribute to Janet” from Nicholas Daniel and the Britten Oboe Quartet (Harmonia Mundi HMM 907672). You can read about them here. I think they do a bang-up job with the Mozart—it’s virtuosic, playful and heartfelt in all the right ways. But what really sold me on this album were the other selections. I was particularly pleased to hear a Quatuor by Jean Françaix (1912–1997), because I love Françaix, one of the most underrated of 20th-century composers. We’ll sample some of that light-hearted work in a moment.

First, though, a bit of heavier lifting. The Britten Oboe Quartet is comprised of principals drawn from the Britten Sinfonia; both ensembles honor Benjamin Britten in name although they have no direct connection with the musical activities at Snape, Suffolk, that Britten fostered. Composer Oliver Knussen (b. 1952) did enjoy a long association with Britten, his music, and Snape’s Aldeburgh Festival. “A Tribute to Janet” honors Nicholas Daniel’s teacher Janet Craxton, whose London Oboe Quartet gave first performances of the Knussen and Françaix works included here. So it’s quite appropriate that their debut album feature works by Knussen, Françaix, and Britten himself, who wrote a likable Phantasy op. 2 for oboe quartet as a teenager.

Knussen’s Cantata op. 15, written when he was 25, is actually the more interesting work. In it, he adopts the idea of a “cantata” as a series of brief, contrasting sections flowing from one to the next with (in Daniel’s words) “a kind of controlled freedom” that includes recitative-like moments in which oboe and strings play at different speeds. This is a technique similar to those that Ligeti and Lutosławski developed (using the terms “micropolyphony” and “limited aleatorism” respectively) well before young Knussen gave it a try.

What struck me about Knussen’s Cantata, though, was its fascinating exchange of similar gestures between strings and oboe. They toss the same motives back and forth, sharing “data” in a way that actually highlights the differences between their idioms. It’s as if Knussen were showing us that, hey, we can talk, but I’ll still be me, while you do you. Listen:

By opening up the work’s texture and making its structures more fluid, Knussen is able to emphasize the contrasting aural identities of the instruments in a way that wasn’t possible (or desirable) for Mozart, given the constraints and conventions of his time.

Finally, Françaix. Classic forms and neo-classic tunes. Wit and warmth. I’m not a big fan of so-called comfort food—give me exotic ingredients and plenty of heat—but I sure like this guy, who wrote a lot of chamber music for or with winds. Check out the Vivo assai from his 1970 Quatuor pour cor anglais, violon, alto et violoncelle (yes, a cor anglais is an English horn, big sister to the oboe):

And this, one of two meltingly melodic slow movements in Françaix’s five postcards from nowhere near the edge:

The recording, too, manages a delicate balance. Vivid and intimate, it never tips into harshness. For once the nasal sound of the oboe and the sometimes-indelicate rasp of the strings don’t dominate proceedings in a bad way. Bravo to producer/engineer Andrew Mellor, and to Harmonia Mundi for shepherding the debut of a singularly successful small group.