Issue 56

Specifically, Neumann LDCs, or Large Diaphragm Condensers.

You know how they sound. Everybody knows how they sound. They’re the most ubiquitous recording mics there are. But just in case:

You know those glorious RCA Living Stereo recordings? Mostly Neumann U-47s and M-49s. You know those guys The Beatles? Neumann U-48s were their vocal mics.

We’ve grown to love the sound of these mics over the early years of recording — so much so that we think that’s how things actually sound.  But of course they don’t. They’re “realer than real”. I’ve actually come to think of them as approximating how we wished things sound.

Many years ago, I had an email conversation with the great recording engineer Tony Faulkner, who bought many of the Neumanns from RCA when they stupidly sold them off. I recall him telling me that he favored M-49s and M-50s, although he bought one of RCAs U-47s. He had many occasions in which he put it on a soloist, only to have them fall in love with “their sound” afterwards. The quotation marks aren’t there just because that’s how Tony put it; they also signify his enjoyment of the musician falling in love with the tone of themselves as heard through the ultra-romantic U-47.

The M-49 is considerably closer to reality than the U-47, but both enjoy a highly “enhanced” upper-midrange. And when used as a vocal mic, or for example close-micing a ‘cello, you can get quite a beautiful sounding proximity effect from them (this is a bump in the lower-end sound of a microphone, resulting from being near a source) — think Sinatra. Do you think he sounded like that? It’s a bit (well, a lot) like lenses and photography. But when we can see something looking different than we know it to be, it’s obvious.

The first mics I bought were a pair of Tim de Paravacini’s The Mic[1]. (These were called Darth Vader’s Razors at Bill Bottrell’s studio.) Tim designed them around the Pearl (nee Milab) dual-rectangular capsule. The capsule was intended to move the resonant frequencies up out of the upper-mids and to the high frequencies. Coupled with Tim’s hand-wound transformer (as big as your fist), you have a formidable mic. As the opportunities came along, I bought some old Neumanns and a couple of AKGs. One of these AKGs, an early 70s C-24 (a 2-channel mic), went to Tim for him to do his treatment on. An AKG is generally a brighter mic than a Neumann. Originally the C-24 had a single tube inset into a circuit board and an inadequate transformer. What Tim did was to remove the 6072 tube, reduce the size of the circuit board, and fly two miniature AC701 tubes off the sides of the board, opening up a lot of real estate in the mic for one of his real transformers. The effect was to add an at least an octave on the bottom end and to smooth out the top end. It’s still ultra-real sounding, as in a bit too real, but not as “hyper” as before. David Bock [interviewed in Copper #10-–scroll to page 8–-Ed.] has called my C-24 “the best sounding mic in LA”.

At some point in the last twenty-years, I introduced David Bock to George Cardas, and together they cooked up a variation of Tim’s mics — the Bock 5Zero7. What this has, unlike David’s more typical round-capsuled mics, is an oblong capsule, essentially doing Tim’s rectangular capsule one better. I plan on getting a pair. Don’t know if I’ll have any call to use them, but they should be had.

I was tasked by Editor Leebs to cover my local high-end audio show, whose formal name is “Salon Audio Montréal Audio Fest”, a name only a mother could love.  The show has just ended, and you’ll find my take on it elsewhere in this issue.  But in the meantime, the task of writing that report has prompted me to contemplate my long and varied history with audio shows.

Like most readers of Copper, that history began as an ordinary man-in-the-street consumer.  OK, so some of you are women-in-the-street, while today’s sensibilities require that we also recognize LGBTQs-in-the-street.  FWIW, all were in evidence at this year’s “Salon Audio Montréal Audio Fest”, which wouldn’t normally merit a mention except to observe that it wouldn’t have been the case not so many years ago, when the audience would have been something like 90% old men and 9% less-old men.  Meanwhile, as a less-welcome sign of progress, I find myself having transitioned inexorably from the less-old group to the plain-old group.

More recently, I have been attending this and other shows as an exhibitor, either in our own BitPerfect room, or helping out in another manufacturer’s or dealer’s room.  Now, finally, I find myself pen-in-hand, with a photographer in tow (my son), missing only a natty fedora with a press card stuck jauntily in the hat band.  And at the end of it all, the thought struck home quite forcefully that one’s approach to an audio show is significantly different, depending on which hat you’re wearing.  I had expected that attending the show as a reporter would be no different from attending as a consumer … I’d just have to write it up afterwards.  But it’s not so simple, and it seemed to me that my thoughts on that warranted a Copper column all of its own.

With my Joe Consumer hat on, prowling the show used to be quite easy.  If you liked the sound in a particular room, you’d stay awhile, and just enjoy the music.  Maybe you’d ask the room’s host to play something more to your taste.  And if you didn’t like the sound … well, you’d just mosey on over to the next room.

But now, all of a sudden, I find that I’m Clark Kent, the earnest young cub reporter, and, much to my disappointment, we no longer have phone booths in 2018 from which to emerge and heroically fix a crappy sound.  Did you ever notice that Clark Kent never actually wrote any normal everyday man-bites-dog stories?  No, whenever he needed to make like a journalist he’d just pop into a phone booth, and all of a sudden Superman shows up and saves the planet with yet another hold-the-front-page tale of derring-do.  But this isn’t happening for me.  I’m in a room where a seriously expensive system is delivering a sound that just isn’t getting my mojo going.  I’m supposed to write about it, and I’m not sure what to do.  Maybe I’ll just mosey on along.  Where’s that dratted phone box when you really need it?

Let’s talk a bit about the music.  Back in my good old Joe Consumer days I don’t suppose I ever gave a thought about what music was being played.  Mostly it all sounded so much better than my own system that I was happy just to sit back and listen, and fantasize about winning the lottery.  Back in the day, if you were really keen you would bring your own plastic bag of LPs, or ones you just bought at the show and were dying to hear.  As LP gave way to CD, you would bring your own bag of CDs.  And since you could fit a lot more CDs in a bag than LPs, people would turn up to an audio show lugging half their entire music collections with them.  Bottom line is, if you didn’t like what was playing you could ask them to play something more to your taste.  And mostly they would oblige.

Then, in 2012, CD players vanished from audio shows as though they’d been outed as Bill Cosby fans. Every room was powered by a computer audio source.  And if you were smart, and sufficiently au courant, you could bring your tracks of choice on a USB memory stick.  So you still didn’t care much what was being played.  And last year we went so far as to bring a Mac Laptop containing a substantial music library, our own software to play it, and an audiophile-grade USB cable to connect it straight to the system’s DAC!  One way or another, we had the option to audition equipment using our own music.

This year’s Montreal Audio Fest surprised the hell out of me.  Just about everybody was using a turntable as their audio source of choice.  It’s like when the gas station at the corner of the street puts their price up.  Before you know what’s hit you, every gas station within 20 miles has put their own price up.  That’s what apparently happened here.  A stone tablet fell from a mountaintop someplace, bearing the commandment thou shalt source thine demo with a turntable.  And so it was.  High-end – even ultra-high-end – turntables were absolutely everywhere.  Consequently, since nobody has come to an audio show with a bag full of LPs in over 30 years, it became all but impossible to get your own music played.  A few hopefuls could be seen toting CDs or memory sticks, and in most rooms they’d be mostly out of luck.  But even so, if the show’s apparent overriding message, that a vinyl resurgence is the happening thing, how come nobody had brought more than a milk-crate’s worth of LPs as their source material for the entire show?

So, for the duration of the show, we were treated to girl-with-guitar music and intimate, small-combo, jazz, all on vinyl.  It was a perfect storm.  There I was, having to listen carefully to everything I heard with a view to presenting an informed critique.  But the music being played just didn’t allow me to get a decent handle on the overall capabilities of the systems.  And there wasn’t much in the way of options to hear different selections of music.  Hearing nothing but audiophile-approved dross in room after room, with very little in the way of respite, is rather soul-destroying, regardless of how good the equipment is.

The problem is really quite a simple one.  Manufacturers want to demonstrate their systems in the best possible light.  A warts-and-all approach doesn’t interest them.  They want you to hear the things their products do well, and not the things they don’t.  And frankly, bottom line, it’s hard to fuck up Shelby Lynne.  So you’re going to hear your fill of Shelby Lynne (a term I use in a generic sense to cover the whole “audiophile voices” repertoire), all day long.  But who can blame them?  I imagine if there was a school for selling audio equipment, that would be lesson one on day one.  There were photocopies of the classic Charles Rodrigues cartoons, familiar to Copper readers, taped to the walls up and down the hallways, and I’m sure one of them somewhere must have lampooned this very issue. [Checking…and unlike those content-thieves, we pay for the right to reprint them!—Ed.]

I believe in a different philosophy.  Whenever BitPerfect exhibits at a trade show we have a diametrically different approach.  We want people to hear what the music they normally listen to sounds like.  I don’t want them listening only to what I want them to hear.  So I play both good recordings and bad recordings.  But always recordings that someone in the room – even if that someone is only me – likes to play for their own listening pleasure.  We are a digital audio company, so all of our music lives on a NAS, and it is relatively trivial to bring the NAS to the show and use it to power the system.  I have about 40,000 tracks on it, and so there is a pretty good chance there’s something in there for everyone.  My goal – one I sadly cannot come close to fulfilling – is always to try to ask every person who comes into the room “what can I play for you?” and whatever that is, I’ll do my darnedest to play it.

For example, I have “10,000 Days” by Tool.  Why?  Because somebody went to the trouble of bringing it to the show because he wanted to hear it played on a $50,000 system.  It took 3 minutes to rip it to my NAS so we could play his track of choice.  It’s still there, although I don’t believe I’ve played it since.  I think that kid was happy, even if the room cleared pretty quickly.  Then, later, we had quite a crowd who sat through Leonard Bernstein’s legendary 1959 recording of The Rite Of Spring (we just played Part II).  It may not be the world’s finest recording, but it is arguably one of the world’s finest recorded performances, and our amazing system had the audience transfixed for a short while.  Then there was the time I played a track of Bowser and Blue, a politically incorrect Anglophone comedy act from Quebec, to a staunchly francophone audience, threatening to provoke a re-enactment of the Richard Riot (Google it), but in the end most of them stayed and listened.  And laughed along.  It sounds like it was recorded on a Walkman.  And at the end of the day, here in Montreal if you want to fill your room to the rafters, all you have to do is play Crime Of The Century.  Loud.  Works without fail, every time.  Yet nobody seemed to have it in their milk-crate of LPs.

So the talking point is this.  What is your objective, as an exhibitor, having paid out upwards of $2,000 for the privilege of exhibiting at a high-end audio show?  Do you want to play the role of the cynical salesman (I use the term salesman pointedly, since saleswomen are seldom cynical), and only let your audience hear what you want them to hear?  Or do you want to work with audience, find out what it is they want from a system, and show them how well your product can deliver that?  Put me in the latter camp.

And then you need to add the reporter to the mix.  The reporter will sit down as you cue up your own implementation of the Shelby Lynne playlist, and you’ll know that, deep inside, another part of him just died.  Even if your system really is well and truly awesome.

Michelle Zauner’s domain name uses neither a dot-com nor a dot-net. It has a dot-rocks. Seriously, her website is JapaneseBreakfast.Rocks. And if you click on the tab labeled “Quest,” you enter a custom-made role-playing game designed around characters from her songs. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Zauner, a singer-songwriter and the true identity of Japanese Breakfast, is the coolest cat in the room.

It’s not that she’s has a powerhouse voice. And wow, she sure does mumble sometimes when she sings. But once you get used to her manner, you can appreciate her devotion to songwriting and her ability to share her view of life through her compositions. Then there’s that smirk — on her face, in her voice, and in her lyrics – that gives Zauner an air of wisdom beyond her years.

She’s also one of the most determined touring artists I’ve ever seen. Her gigs calendar shows her booked almost daily for the next few months, playing clubs and festivals all over the US, UK, and Europe. With that schedule, she rarely goes home, but when she does, that home is in Eugene, Ore., where she grew up.

For a few years she escaped the Pacific Northwest for Philadelphia, where she settled in as singer/songwriter/guitarist with a quartet called Little Big League. Despite their standard rock band format (singer, two guitars, bass, drums), Little Big League stretched outside the standard sound and into a kind of faux electronica, with Ian Dykstra playing percussion in an emotionally distant, metronome-like way, and the guitars pulling and bending long notes like synthesizers.

This genre isn’t called dreampop for nothing. The otherworldliness of “Take It to a Weird Sad Place,” from the album Tropical Jinx (2014), is a good example of Zauner’s singing: breathiness, a touch of vocal fry, and diction that she might use for talking to herself. It’s effective, though, especially when combined with those floating guitar lines.

The punk tune “Sucker” shows Little Big League’s other side, with a blend of anger and dark humor and a raging sound. The woman in the song is trapped in her marriage and trapped in her house: “I’m a dog, I’m a wife, I’m a dog, I’m nothing, and this calls for some drugs.” Zauner and her guitar know how to scream when they need to.

If fate had taken a different turn, Zauner would probably have stayed in Philly with Little Big League. But when her mother became ill with cancer, she felt she needed to move back to Eugene. And so, longing for an artistic release despite not having a band anymore, she created Japanese Breakfast. It’s less a band than a persona, and it seems to suit Zauner well, as a nod to East Asian pop styles both in sound and presentation.

Unlike some solo acts in this age when there’s a recording studio on everybody’s phone, Zauner has not gone full introvert. She relies on fellow human musicians, not just layers of herself or synth samples, on the Japanese Breakfast albums and in live shows. The first album, Psychopomp (2016), uses five collaborators on guitar, keyboard, clarinet, drums, and strings. The album’s name comes from the Greek mythological concept of a guide who leads the souls of the living to the land of the dead.

Given the situation in her family life, the grim mindset is not surprising. And Zauner already had a tendency toward seeing the world through gray-colored glasses even before her mother’s illness. In the song “Heft,” the musical tone is different from anything by Little Big League, more straight-up rock. The lyrics are about how depression never seems to go away for good, repeating the line “What if it’s the same dark coming?”

As Japanese Breakfast, Zauner has intensified her exploration of the dreampop landscape. “Moon on the Bath” has no lyrics; it’s 89 seconds of thoughtful electronic exploration that would have intrigued Edgard Varèse:

The second and most recent studio album under the Japanese Breakfast name is Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017). Zauner has said in interviews that a line from the song “Till Death,” inspired by her mother’s passing, gives some context to the whole album. It explains what she was going through when she wrote it: “Insomnia, haunted dreams, stages of grief, repressed memories, anger, and bargaining.” “Till Death” points out how unfair it all seems: “All these celebrities keep dying / while cruel men continue to live.”

But don’t expect the album to be an endless philosophical slog seeking the meaning of life; that’s not Zauner’s style. There’s also more standard pop subject matter. “Boyish,” originally recorded by Little Big League, gets a splashy makeover on Soft Sounds from Another Planet. (Zauner has a history of re-recording her songs; and why not? Classical and jazz musicians make multiple recordings of the same pieces as a matter of course.) This heartbreak song, in a lonesome style that manages to simultaneously evoke Roy Orbison and Radiohead, is especially notable for Zauner’s crying guitar riffs:

The song “Machinist” led to the alien robot character in the game on Zauner’s website, and the song’s manga-inspired music video and its electro-pop sound also urge the listener to hear a science fiction element in this track. But the lyrics deal with an unresponsive lover, using a robot as a metaphor: “Heart burning hot enough for the both of us / I never realized how much you were holding back / All the times I felt so plugged in / You were tuning out.”

Sometimes life hands us all pain and loss, and it rips us out of the places we’d prefer to be. Good for Michelle Zauner for making the most of a tough situation and letting it fuel her creativity.

When Franz Schubert first played his song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) for a few friends in 1828, they were amazed by how dark and grim it was, with most of the songs in minor keys. The text was a set of introspective poems by Wilhelm Müller imagining someone returning to a place where he had fallen in love and had his heart broken long ago. Fortunately, musicians and audiences have come to love the cold beauty and deep sadness of this work, as is obvious from the many new recordings of it released just in the past year.

The most satisfying of the recent recordings is the Harmonia Mundi pairing of tenor Mark Padmore and keyboardist Kristian Bezuidenhout. I say “keyboardist” even though Bezuidenhout is playing modern piano on this album because his background as an early music specialist on harpsichord and fortepiano informs his playing here.

For example, on “Gefrorne Tränen,” Bezuidenhout’s detached notes (which he manages even while pressing the sustain pedal!) perfectly replicate the distinct sounds the title’s “Frozen Tears” might make as they plop into the snow from the jilted lover’s cheek. By 1828, the modern piano was spreading in Europe, thanks to Parisian developments in the instrument. Still, fortepianos remained more common at the time, and historically informed performance tends to favor fortepiano for these salon-style works by Schubert. Bezuidenhout doubtless has this in mind even as he tickles his Steinway.

No tracks from this album are available on YouTube, but you can hear the complete recording on Spotify:

Padmore gives an understated performance. In these days when an intensely emotional interpretation of this cycle is coming into vogue (see mention of Ian Bostridge below), there’s a good argument for introspection in these poems that are really just internal monologues of a guy wandering around on a winter’s day. That said, Padmore can conjure up some fire when the text demands it, as he does in “Der stürmische Morgen” (The Stormy Morning).

Another top-notch Winterreise to come out lately is by baritone Florian Boesch and pianist Roger Vignoles on the Hypérion label. Sorry to say, there is no free (legal) way to share any tracks here; if you’re an Apple Music subscriber, you’re in luck. All I can offer is this “mini-teaser” on YouTube:

Even that little taste shows the delicate, intricate phrasing of both singer and pianist. Boesch has remarkable control of his sound at very low volume, a skill that serves him well in these introspective pieces. “Frühlingstraum” (Spring Dream) is so beautiful that it’s almost painful, and hearing this recording reminded me all over again why Schubert is one of the greatest melodists who ever lived.

The internet age has changed the whole concept of making and releasing a recording. Yes, there are still record companies and professional studios and industry contracts. But there are also unaffiliated musicians with a dream, some recording equipment, and a little tech and social media know-how, able to release their own recordings under their own steam. Schubert’s Winterreise recently received such treatment via YouTube.

Tenor Robert Petillo and pianist Todd Fickley recorded the song cycle in a performance at the Eliot Society in College Park, MD. Considering how live the hall’s acoustics are, they managed to make a decent sound recording. Petillo has an agile and pleasing voice, and Fickley provides strong rhythmic support.

What makes this recording special is the way it was released. The entire cycle was put on YouTube, each song with its own video featuring a still image, a watercolor winter scene by artist Betsy Marsch. It’s suitably meditative to stare at her artwork as you listen, and the English subtitles are a helpful touch. Here’s the opening song, “Gute Nacht” (Good Night):

Is it one of the great Winterreise recordings of all time? No, but it’s a solid performance, and I admire the musical democracy – the evened-out playing field, if you like – its release represents.

Of course, people sing Winterreise in concert all the time. The live version that has received the most attention in recent seasons is The Dark Mirror: Zender’s Winterreise. This experimental theater piece is a re-composition (my stomach knots up when I write that word) of Schubert’s song cycle, with the piano part reconstituted for orchestra and exotic percussion, the songs edited down, and an ornate staging by Netia Jones. Here’s a peek:

When tenor Ian Bostridge (whose interpretations of the original voice/piano Winterreise are always breathtaking) toured this version in 2017, critics seemed moved by his performance but somewhat baffled by the presentation as a whole. They wondered: why create a version of Schubert’s vocal masterpiece that changes the original score?

I would ask the same question about the Winterreise, released in 2017 on Coviello Records, by conductor/composer Gregor Meyer, who adds a newly created choral score and edits the piano part. I mean, seriously, why did the world need this? This recording is not on Spotify or YouTube, but you can hear the complete tracks of “Lindenbaum” and “Einsamkeit” (Loneliness) at this link.

German baritone Daniel Ochoa gives a convincing performance. His voice is rich, if sometimes a little wobbly, and he maintains the thread of melancholy that most performers pull through this truly melancholic song cycle (Bostridge, with his fits of fury and madness, being an exception). But Meyer’s new version does not help Ochoa convey the text. Take “Lindenbaum” (Linden Tree), for example.

Cristian Peix plays the piano introduction to “Lindenbaum” in the usual Schubertian way, full of energy and motion (remember, this is the composer who loved programmatic accompaniment so much that he used a piano to represent the irregular turns of a spinning wheel in the Faust-inspired “Gretchen am Spinnrad”!). Here the piano phrases swirl like gusts of wind through the linden tree’s branches. So, it starts off as it should.

Then the voice comes in. In Schubert’s original score, the piano slows down at this point, moving chord by chord in the same rhythm as the notes of the melody; this gives the voice a kind of percussive determination. Apparently Meyer decided that the doubling of the vocal line in the piano was nothing more than redundancy, so he stops the piano part when the voice comes in. And he has his choir, the Vocalconsort Leipzig, create a velvet backdrop for the solo voice by sustaining the syllable—I wish I were making this up—“Oooh.”

Hey, I get that the choir sounds pretty. But “pretty” is not an intelligent musical reason. What does Meyer think Schubert missed that the choir adds? That’s an especially important question when you consider how reducing the carefully textured piano part and replacing it with shapeless choir vocalise changes the whole color of the song.

To my mind, Winterreise is one of the most perfect pieces of music ever written. Don’t mess with it. But, by all means, keep singing it. There’s no such thing as too many recordings. I’ll be happy to listen to all of them.

So many concertos, so little time.

When I decided to devote two whole TMT columns to (ahem!) Violin Concertos After Beethoven, my aim seemed simple: I would sort through a pile of recent recordings, find the best and/or most provocative specimens, and report on them. I would not, could not attempt a comprehensive survey, but I might explore a few ways in which violin concertos have evolved, morphed, deconstructed, or otherwise left the building over the last hundred years.

Alas. I was besieged by bouts of remorse every time I remembered another Great Concerto I was leaving out of my non-survey. No Barber. No Bernstein. No Stravinsky. Nothing Anne-Sophie Mutter had wrung out of Lutosławski. My list of shamefully neglected masterworks grew longer and longer. The last straw arrived when I saw Mark Lehman’s review of British Violin Concertos (Naxos 8.57391; see below) in TAS. Then I stumbled upon a website devoted to BVC’s, with none of the Naxos contributors (Patterson, Leighton, Jacob) even mentioned. Elgar was there, but not Britten or Vaughan Williams! Or Thomas Adès, for peat’s sake (actually not a heartbreaking omission). Somehow this cured me.

So here are a few not-quite-random thoughts about recent concerto recordings. We’ll begin with lesser-known music, then move on to the completely unknown, while glancing occasionally at Part 1’s original chew toy: abstract formalism vs. narrative or programmatic themes. You don’t need me to tell you about Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or Bruch. But we will start with recognizable music.

For instance, lately I’ve been struck by just how ubiquitous the music of Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) has become. He wrote in a lush late-Romantic style that nearly everyone enjoys. And he gave us not one but two violin concertos! Listen to the opening of Concerto No. 1 (1916):

Gorgeous, right? Plenty of rhythmic vitality, plus color: delicate, quicksilver swarmings from various instruments. Then that breathtaking lyrical entrance by the soloist. Szymanowski seems to have been inspired partly by his friend Tadeusz Miciński’s poem “May Night”:

Donkeys in crowns settle on the grass –
Fireflies kiss the wild rose –
While death flickers over the pond
And plays its wanton song.

Brings to mind A Midsummer Night’s Dream, except for the bit about death (Divinely Decadent, that). We should bear in mind that this was composed during the upheavals of World War I, which found Szymanowski relatively isolated. But he had already had transformative experiences: sexual awakenings in the Mediterranean and North Africa, performances heard elsewhere of Pelléas et Mélisande, The Firebird, and Petrushka. He met Stravinsky in London and initiated a friendly correspondence. Later, he read extensively: Greek tragedy; histories of Islam, ancient Rome, and early Christendom; Plato, Da Vinci, Persian poetry. All this helped him break with German Romanticism and led to a period of enormous creativity, resulting in the Violin Concerto No. 1, Symphony No. 3 (inspired by Jalāl ad-Dīn ar-Rūmī) plus many songs and chamber works. In short, he became Szymanowski!

Here’s another taste:

You’ll be reminded of Debussy, Scriabin, and Richard Strauss, plus some refined Orientalism. Quite a heady mixture. Formally, this is a continuous, freely ordered fantasy, although you can break it down into rondo form. So: narrative. Definitely narrative.

Szymanowski’s second violin concerto was the last major work he completed. Its one-movement structure is not unlike that of No. 1, but the folk influence of the Tatra Mountains, where Szymanowski had a villa, is obvious:

We have been listening to a new recording of the two concertos plus a third by Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876–1090)—a perfect aggregation, I think—from Tasmin Little and the BBC SO conducted by Edward Gardner (Chandos CHSA 5185). Fine performances, sterling hi-res sound. Highly recommended. (Gardner has also recorded the Szymanowski symphonies in hi-res for Chandos.)

Indeed, Szymanowski is big these days, so I wasn’t surprised to find another new recording of Concerto No. 1 in my review pile. It’s a very good one too, from Anne Akiko Meyers and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Kristjan Järvi (Avie AV2385). As good as her Szymanowski is, though, the real treasure here is a Fantasia by great Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, which Meyers commissioned in 2014. She wrote about her experience at length for Gramophone, so I’ll quote from that:

In December [2014], I flew to Helsinki to meet Rautavaara and perform the work for him. . . . [His] apartment was flooded with a special light that only seems to exist at the edge of the earth, overlooking the sea. . . . After I played Fantasia, he looked at me and repeatedly said, “I wrote such beautiful music!” We all laughed and agreed. . . . I was amazed that he made no changes to any notes or dynamics. Everything was in place just the way he wrote it. Fantasia is transcendent and has the feeling of an elegy with a very personal reflective mood. . . . I thank him from the bottom of my heart for writing a masterpiece that makes me cry every time I listen to it.

You should listen to it too. There’s a SoundCloud track at the bottom of that Gramophone piece with the whole Fantasia on it. Very nice recording, incidentally, done at London’s Air Studios, and exceptionally good liner notes by Jim Svejda.

Time for more challenging terrain. This next concerto is called Under City Skin, for violin, strings, and “surround sound” (more precisely, a mixture of musique concrète and synthesized materials). You may have trouble figuring out which is which. Was that a bird, or violin harmonics? A Mercedes-Benz revving up, or a tone generator? We begin by following a pair of high heels through a typical Hitchcock soundscape:

If you listen patiently with few expectations, it grows on you; the surround sound helps. This ambitious, interesting work by Rolf Wallin is featured on an SACD from BIS (2242) along with Eivind Buene’s Miniatures and Violin Concerto. In the latter, you’ll recognize the music of that concerto’s third movement:

Right out of the Berg concerto. Really quite evocative in this new context, though. I liked it, just not as much as Wallin’s piece.

As I mentioned, Mark Lehman likes a new Naxos recording of British Violin Concertos. So do I. Violinist Clare Howick pulls together three relatively conservative works by Paul Patterson (b.1947), Kenneth Leighton (1929–1988), and Gordon Jacob (1895–1984). Tuneful, lively, and sturdy, all of them. Here’s a bit of the Patterson:

But let’s move quickly on, to end with some kale-laced quinoa: 21st Century Violin Concertos from Harriet Mackenzie and the ESO conducted by Kenneth Woods (Nimbus Alliance NI6295). Includes music by Patterson (Allusions for two solo violins and strings), Deborah Pritchard (b. 1977), David Matthews (b. 1943), Robert Fokkens (b. 1975), and Emily Doolittle (b. 1972). It’s a collection unified only by Mackenzie’s involvement with these composers, so you may find it uneven. I liked Pritchard’s Wall of Water (2014), inspired by paintings of Maggie Hambling. There’s a promotional video on YouTube, but it doesn’t give you a very good idea of how the music unfolds. Check out Mackenzie’s complete performance with the Aldeburgh Festival Orchestra:

You can purchase only the tracks you wish here, on a Chandos website. Try Doolittle’s short, lovely falling still, its narrative focused on rain and birdsong, if you’re on the fence about other selections.

Next: 2018’s Greatest Hits so far.

Our focus this time in Industry News will be on a thread that connects a number of businesses that have been in the news, including mentions in this column. Businesses run on cash: that’s hardly a news flash. But how and why they get that cash can affect their ability to respond to adverse circumstances, and ultimately, to survive.

Borrowing money to take a publicly-traded company private, is not a new concept. Such transactions are generally called leveraged buyouts, or LBOs. The earliest large-scale LBO in modern America was executed by Henry Ford and his son Edsel in 1919. The Fords borrowed $75 million from a consortium of east coast banks and were able to buy out other shareholders and take the company private, and under direct control of the Ford family. The total purchase price of $106 million was considered staggeringly-large at the time; equivalent to $1.6 billion today, it’s hardly chump change, but pales in comparison to deals that we routinely see today.

The US economy had a downturn in the early ’20s, and Ford faced a cash-crunch due to the debt-load (a situation that we’ll encounter again as we go on). Enforcing stipulations of the dealers’ contractual agreements, Ford forced dealers to take more inventory, which had to be paid for. By doing so, Ford effectively transferred their singular, massive debt to hundreds of dealers, and disaster was avoided. A cautionary tale, no?

Ford went public again in 1956, and while the Ford family only owns about 2% of all shares today, they still control 40% of the voting power at the company. That 2% of shares puts the value of Ford family holdings at just under $1B, and the family’s voting power/control  is considered a major reason why the company was able to avoid bankruptcy in 2009, while the other major US automakers, GM and Chrysler, required government bailouts.

During the 1980s LBOs and the wacky world of M&A (mergers and acquisitions) went berserk, with big-money deals funded by issuance of high-risk, high-yield (if you were lucky) bonds. Old-guard financial types quickly labeled such bonds, “junk bonds”—and they were sometimes right. Private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) were leaders in the field, and in 1988 executed the LBO of RJR Nabisco. At $25 billion, it was the largest LBO of its day (equivalent to $50B today, give or take a billion or two). [We dwelled upon KKR in The Audio Cynic some time ago, as well—Ed.]

Those highly-leveraged deals lost favor after many went kablooey. In the years since we’ve had the dot.com bubble, the real estate boom-gone-bust that led to the 2008 recession, and most recently, a likely bubble in the tech world. Have we learned anything? Maybe. Maybe not.

Looked up a stock quote on Toys R Us lately? You can’t, because the company was taken private in 2005 by KKR, the Vornado Realty Trust and Bain Capital. (Bain was until recently the owner of D+M Group, previously D&M Holdings, owners of Denon, Marantz, and Boston Acoustics, and recently sold to another holding group, Sound United. A few years back the group sold cash-cow McIntosh in order to pay down the debt incurred by buying up brands. Sound familiar?)

So how’s Toys R Us doing? Carrying $5 billion in debt, with service of that debt burning through $400M/year, the company couldn’t afford to update its properties. The worn-out, aging stores, coupled with declining market share courtesy of Amazon and Wal Mart, led to a Chapter 11 filing last fall. A weak Christmas season didn’t help, and in January the company announced intentions to shut down 182 US stores, and UK operations were sent into receivership. On Wednesday, March 14, the company announced that all 700+ US stores would close. Say goodbye to 33,000 jobs. Sadly—and perhaps ironically—Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys R Us, died a week after the closure announcement, at the age of 94.

How about the country’s largest owner of radio stations? They’ve got to be doing well, right?

Clear Channel Radio managed to pile up $8B in debt while buying up stations nationwide, then was acquired by Thomas H. Lee and Bain Capital (are you sensing a common thread here?) by racking up another $10B in debt. Ultimately, the company, awkwardly relabeled iHeart Media, accumulated $20B in debt. As ad revenue from iHeart’s 850 radio stations declined, the company branched out into concert production and online assets. In February, the company was unable to make a scheduled coupon payment of $106M—and on March 14, iHeart Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Odd that it occurred the same day that Toys R Us announced the shutdown of all stores: clearly a bad day for Bain.

“Worn-out, aging stores”—sound like anyone else? We’ve looked at the perilous situation of Sears several times: here , here, and here.  Once the country’s largest retailer with thousands of stores, Sears also failed to keep up with the times. A merger-of-sorts (think of Daimler-Benz and Chrysler) of Sears and K-Mart took place in 2005, led by hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert, and saddled the company with major debt and created a new entity, Sears Holdings. Between them, the two struggling chains had 3,500 stores. Lampert realized that the company’s most valuable assets were its extensive real estate holdings and its brands: DieHard, Craftsman, Kenmore.

Lampert sold off much of the real estate, and shut down hundreds of stores. At this point, only about 1,000 stores remain: 570 Sears stores, 432 K-Marts. The Craftsman brand name was sold off to Stanley Black & Decker; DieHard batteries and Kenmore appliances are now sold through Amazon. Meanwhile, same-store sales dropped 14% last year compared to 2016, and overall sales dropped 25%. Sears’ last profitable year was 2010, and the company has lost $10.8B since then.

Debt? Interest payments in 2017 totaled $539M, and Standard & Poors dropped the company’s credit rating to “Ca”, the lowest level of  junk. S&P also warned that it expects Sears to begin defaulting upon its obligations.

In the midst of this doom-saying, Sears managed to post its first quarterly profit in three years—not because of a spike in sales, but because of  a $470M boost from the new tax bill. Overall, 2017 was still a disaster, with losses of $357M—almost a million dollars per day.

Another Industry News poster child is Gibson Brands, parent of Gibson Guitar and a number of audio brands—which we’ve previously looked at here, here, and here. A decade-long buying spree has left the company with a half-billion or so in debt, while the market for guitars and other musical instruments is in decline.  While CEO Henry Juszkiewicz remains confident about the company’s viability, almost no one else is.

As early as last year, fears surfaced of the company defaulting on its debt, and recently Standard & Poors downgraded Gibson’s credit rating yet again to CCC-, a low “junk” rating indicating that default is imminent.

A likely outcome is that the company will be thrown into involuntary bankruptcy by its creditors, with some companies sold off, others shut down. CEO Juszkiewicz is the only person expressing optimism regarding his continued tenure at the empire he built, as layoffs begin worldwide in  Gibson companies.

Who says business is boring?

Part 1 of this article in the previous issue ended with the design brief for conductors in a speaker cable. I described why I chose a star-quad geometry using a  20-mil wire diameter in a 24-wire (12 bonded pairs) woven polarity. We continue with the next subheads under the Design Brief for speaker cables.

2) Dielectric materials

Again, Teflon® was chosen as it is the best solid dielectric there is. I needed a thin wall to bring the wires close together for inductance reduction, but capacitance is an issue with 24 closely spaced wires.

A capacitor is two parallel conductive plates with an insulator between them. To lower capacitance, I wanted a low-dielectric-constant plastic (Teflon®). To achieve the required low capacitance, more needs to be done to “thicken” the insulation without increasing loop area effects. This seems impossible to do, but it isn’t with the woven design described above. The final insulation wall was driven by balancing capacitive gains with inductive reduction. Dielectric geometry allowed this balance to be accomplished.

3) Dielectric geometry

The requirement to meet capacitance also drove the design to a weave pattern. Each polarity is separate; there is no interweaving of same polarity wires. What if we had wires with several AWG sizes? Current will flow along the path of least resistance. This does not mean current won’t flow in specific wires, just that the majority of the current magnitude is shifted to the easier path. Every wire will have current at all frequencies. The magnitude will change and follow Ohm’s law. Many differing wires sizes and electrical lengths can impact the signal arrival times across the audio band based on physical conductor lengths in composite wire-size designs.

If we take two wires with the same skin depth (same frequency point being considered), but one wire has twice the surface area, more current will flow into the larger surface area wire. It offers less resistance. But, the lower resistance wire is larger, and not ideal if we want the current across the wire to be more uniform. Bigger wires are better at lowering resistance at a given frequency because they have the most surface area. We use this at RF with a “skin” of copper to carry the lowest, yet still high, frequencies efficiently. The wire’s core under the copper is a material that is “filler” and has no current flow, such as steel or aluminum.

At lower frequencies the current is diffusion coupled evenly through the entire wire. So if you send just low frequencies, use as low a DCR wire as you can get.

Those are the extremes. Audio is weird in that we need to improve current coherence through the wire while it is trying to move to the outside surface. We don’t care about attenuation as much since it is negligible at audio frequencies. We make the conscious decision to go for forced current coherence with more small wires. This technically violates the practice of more “surface” area for lower attenuation at high frequencies for current coherence. Big wire offers more surface area for lower attenuation, while small wire offers better current coherence, but higher attenuation.

With interconnects, if you use one wire, the current delivery has to be considered to the load. RCA and XLR cables have near zero current flow into the high impedance load, so we can go for signal current coherence and suffer little attenuation. Speaker cables can’t use too few wires as there are 20-30 amps coursing through a speaker cable.

Good audio performance is about trying to time align the low and high frequencies, so the best and most consistent way to do this is to use more small wires that add up to the low frequency DCR needs, and are small enough to force the wire to see more and more cross sectional current usage at higher frequencies. This means several small insulated wires that all need to be the same “single” wire.

The unique woven design does a lot to reduce inductance and associated capacitance. How is 59% reduced inductance over a single bonded pair achieved?

A. ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD CANCELLATION

• Star quad wire arrangement. Allows ideal geometry for low field strength
• Bonded-pair like polarity wires. Allows star quads to be formed throughout the weave
• Separate polarity fields are not parallel, to reduce field reinforcements. Fields between polarities have some cancellation since they cross at angles, and are not ever parallel. (Wires that cross at ninety degrees cancel completely)

B. CAPACITIVE REDUCTION

• Low dielectric constant plastic. Thinnest possible C-C with the lowest cap
• Woven pattern averages out the wire-to-wire distances significantly. Woven pattern separates the wires, and “tricks” the bulk capacitive value to be far lower

The last point on the capacitive reduction is also what we like in a flat design, but it is inconsistent. Average distance between any two wires in a braided polarity, and thus between polarities, is far more consistent. The weave moves all the wires evenly, and consistently, to a closest proximity position and a maximum proximity position throughout the weave. Capacitance and inductance do vary, but in a controlled and expected way. The fattened weave holds overall capacitance to an unexpectedly low value of 45 pF/foot in a cable with such high conductor count.

Low inductance leverages the same current direction in the bonded pairs, combined with the star-quad wire geometry periodicity. And finally, the tight textile weave between polarity halves, forces a low loop area, and with wires never being parallel, further reducing inductance.

The overall reactance of the cable is shown in the graph below:

The chart illustrates a significant drop (yellow trace) in cable impedance compared to 1313A (blue trace). We know why this happened. The velocity, although variable, is nearly the same at each specific swept frequency point. We need to look at frequency-by-frequency calculations. The capacitance is linear across the entire audio band so that’s a set value.

We have a set value of capacitance, and a nearly set value of velocity (there will be slight variation) at a given frequency. What is changing is fundamentally the capacitance between cable designs for “impedance” characterization. The impedance equation is influenced by the change in capacitance, and thereby is the lower measured impedance, as the capacitance is in the denominator of the impedance equation. Increasing the capacitance from ~16 pF/foot to ~45 pF/foot decreases ICONOCLAST cable impedance. Speaker cables require low inductance, and need to get there without shooting capacitance through the roof.

Design is the overriding requirement, and materials, alongside unprovable theory, are second. Now we know why ICONOCLAST has the capacitance it does, as I can balance the inductance to industry-leading values, and still keep capacitance low, yet not so low as to increase impedance too much relative to the input requirement. Cables go up in impedance as you drop in frequency, the opposite of what we want. Listening tests have to decide if the superb inductance or impedance matching with much higher cable capacitance is ideal. Quick calculations will show capacitance problems with 8 ohm cables at audio once an amplifier is attached.

Don’t ignore the reactive time constants of L and C. We want an 8 ohm cable with no L and C, and zero resistance, and you can’t do that. Getting cable “impedance” reasonably low is more reliably safe for amplifiers.

4) Shield material and design considerations

I kept this topic here on purpose. Some may already know that the signal levels of low impedance cables negate the need for a shield. And that’s a good thing because a shield over a speaker cable is darn near always a bad thing for two reasons:

1. A shield will always increase capacitance of the cable. The question is how much.
2. To mitigate the capacitance increase, the shield must be moved significantly away from the core polarities, increasing the size of the cable.

Shields are only beneficial if the environment demands them. View a shield as a rain coat; great if you have water flying around but a major hindrance if you don’t. Coaxial cables are an exception as the shield defines the cable’s natural impedance. The ground-plane proximity and uniformity are vitally important with short-wavelength RF cables. Coaxial cables allow just that. Audio is not RF, and these shields are more FUD devices (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) than than actually beneficial. This is especially in speaker cables whose signals are orders of magnitude over the background noise.

Audio seldom needs shielding on low-impedance cables and this is because magnetic fields decay rapidly with distance. The best defense is to move the low-frequency electromagnetic cables away from one another. The foil and even braid shields are higher frequency shields that are ineffective at much below 1 MHz. Magnetic fields lines need low permeability shield material (something a magnet will stick to) to route flux lines away from sensitive devices. A Faraday cage is a good example of a magnetic shield device. Low permeability metallic shields are a pain to use because they are stiff and heavy. Distance is the best remedy.

5) Jacket design and material considerations

All ICONOCLAST cables use FEP (fluorinated ethylene propylene) as the jacket to reduce UV-sensitivity and plasticizer migration, and provide chemical resistance. The cables are designed to last decades.

Summary

Little has been left to chance in the design of ICONOCLAST cables. All the products are born from strict measurements and the management of known electrical parameters. Belden’s philosophy is to make as low and R, L, and C cables as technically capable. The improvement to some may be unimportant. To others, and using different systems, they can be significant. The closer we manage the knowns, the better the tertiary elements will move along with those improvements.

All cables “react” differently. ICONOCLAST is designed to offer the most benign interaction possible between your amplifier and speaker by leveraging high-speed digital design principles to the much more complex audio band.