Issue 12

I am responding to the recent article on DACs and the quick brush-off of ladder DACs.

(Richard Murison’s “My Kingdom for a DAC”, Richard didn’t brush off ladder DACs so much as say that they were damned hard to build properly –Ed.)

There are several R2R or ladder DACs on the market and in my opinion and that of many others they are far superior to any delta-sigma DAC on the market. The best example is the Audio-GD Master 7 dac. Also, the great Audio Note DACs are ladder DACs. These DACs have a musicallity that delta-sigma DACs dream about. Delta-sigma dacs are used mostly because R2R chips are simply too difficult and expensive to make.The old R2R chips are expensive, hard to find and no longer in production.

I believe Mytek is making an R2R chip and Audio Note has one in development. Did a recent comparison of my Master 7 with a friend’s DCS stack and even he thought the Master 7 was better. The DCS is 10 times the price. Yes, a ladder DAC will not do DSD, but for me that is no great loss.

Alan Hendler

Doesn’t Like Tchaikovsky Either

Three cheers for Mr. Schenbeck. He writes concisely and entertainingly and, with his adroit embedding of musical examples, uses the electronic magazine format as it should be used. I look forward to each of his contributions.

Never much liked Tchaikovsky either.

Scott P
Lancaster, PA

What Happened To Scott?

Thank you for continuing to publish Copper. I just have one request – we need more music suggestions from Scott! In Issue #1, Scott introduced me to Kings of Convenience and I have been enjoying listening to their albums ever since. We need more music suggestions Scott. Please come back!

Jeff Maloney
Madison, WI

Canon 5D

One day about twenty-five years from now,
When we’ve all grown old from a-wondering how,
Oh we’ll all sit down at the city dump,
And talk about the Goodle Days.
Well you’ll pass the joint and I’ll pass the wine,
And anything good from a-down the line.
A lot of good things went down one time,
Back in the Goodle Days.
—John Hartford, from Aereo-Plain, 1971

In 1541, long before bread slicers were invented, Hernando DeSoto supposedly became the first European to see the Mississippi River. I say supposedly because he had to have had a scout who would’ve seen it first, but History is a cheating mistress.

No matter the circumstance, that had to have been a sight. The namesake of some of the ugliest automobiles in history, DeSoto had come from Spanish Florida and with 600 men went north and west to discover gold. He never found gold, but he did find that river, the heartbeat of America, a mile wide at some points, and at other places you could walk across without getting your socks damp.

John Hartford was born in New York City in 1938. While young his family moved to St. Louis where the river grabbed his ears and started singing to him. He grew up with two fascinations, the River and Music. He often said he would have worked on the river all his life but music interrupted. Thank you Lord.

At 13 John was an accomplished old time fiddle and banjo player. By the time Hartford was in his 20’s he’d moved to Nashville and had impressed enough people with his playing and songwriting that he recorded his first album in 1966.

In 1967 his second album was released with a new Hartford tune called “Gentle On My Mind”. The song was a sadly beautiful love song, and it caught the attention of Glen Campbell who made it his first #1 hit. Won 4 Grammys in 1968, two for Hartford. I still prefer hearing John sing it with just banjo, it’s a real killer lyric. You’ve all heard it but few have listened. The royalties followed John the rest of his life, and financed his simple career.

Hartford moved to the West Coast and began appearing on The Smothers Brothers Show and the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. If any of you are old enough to remember the Campbell show he did an occasional spot where he’d take a guitar and sing a song, accompanied only by a pre-long haired hippie Hartford playing banjo, or fiddle, guitar or mandolin. I remembered even though young and not listening to Bluegrass yet, and certainly couldn’t relate to Country. I remembered because I’d never seen this on a mainstream variety show, and had definitely not seen a format like this on any TV show period. Couple of guys just jamming on a park bench.

In 1970 Hartford became fast friends with David Bromberg. John wanted to make a non-traditional bluegrass/folk album that was deeply rooted in old time music and pot smoking. He talked Bromberg into producing Aereo-Plain with some of the master studio musicians of the day. Tut Taylor on dobro, Vassar Clements on fiddle, Norman Blake on guitar, and Randy Scruggs on electric bass. Except for the bass all instruments were acoustic, and recorded without overdubs or playbacks. They just played the song until Hartford and Bromberg were satisfied they had the right one in the can. Didn’t listen to any of the takes until they mixed it. Given the beauty of the tracks, that is fantastic. Without a stretch of any means, this was the Kind of Blue of Newgrass/folk/whatever.

Either because of that approach or in spite of it, Aereo-Plain changed bluegrass and not a few of my friends for the rest of our lives. Sam Bush (New Grass Revival) said “Without Aereo-Plain there would be no Newgrass”. Warner Brothers wasn’t impressed, and hardly promoted the album. Didn’t matter. That thing went from hand-to-hand across this country like DeSoto with the clap. Still considered one of the greatest string acoustic studio albums, ‘Aereo-Plain’ was and is a delight.

Bluegrass, an old and gasping genre, got a huge shot in the arm. There were many influences of the Newgrass/Bluegrass awakening, and those influences all blew up together with Hartford. Sam Bush started New Grass Revival with Courtney Johnson in 1972. Suddenly every summer there were fiddle contests everywhere. Guys like Doc Watson, Bela Fleck, Marmaduke, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Buddy Emmons, Commander Cody, David Grisman with Old and In The Way (with Jerry Garcia on banjo), and The Country Gentlemen appeared out of nowhere and appeared everywhere. The class still breathes today with the likes of The Punch Brothers, Alison Krauss, Jerry Douglas, and Trampled by Turtles. Hartford himself pointed back at Earl Scruggs, the nominal inventor of the three finger banjo style as the guy who started it all.

But above all of them John Hartford played with beauty, an obvious passion for his instruments, and a humble humor that shone through his smile and laughter during his live and studio performances. Mark Twang, a studio vinyl released in 1976 featured John by himself with a mike for his voice and instruments, and a mike for a piece of plywood he tap danced on for percussion. He talks and laughs through the introductions as well as the songs, all river songs and other ‘eccentric gems’ (critic).

This album was done specifically to capture the magic of a John Hartford live performance, where he’d get on stage with no amps, a few instrument cases, and that piece of plywood he miked up for his happy feet.

I had the true honor to see him a few times at an old stone mill turned nightclub in Willimantic, CT called the Shaboo Inn. That old barn seated 900 people, maybe 937 if you were willing to sit in the rafters. The stage was a platform maybe 4 inches high and gave a real close view to any act there. Artists loved the place, and often stopped in between gigs in Boston and New York. Situated between 2 rural colleges (UConn and East CT State) the audiences were appreciative, wild, and close.

I was in line with Diane before the doors opened one night and there was a commotion at the back of the line. I felt someone brush past me, a guy with long black hair carrying a couple of cases. It was John Hartford carrying his crap in by himself. As he went back out for his second and last trip, we saw him pull his stuff out of an old Ford Falcon wagon. I swear he had a couple of maple leaves stuck to his back like he slept in the back of that thing. Hartford often said he lived his life on the royalties of “Gentle on My Mind” by living simply, and I believe it.

He had a love of old folk and bluegrass, and he dedicated his life to reliving it. We enjoyed that trip, but it was his originals that always captured the imagination of millions with his passion, and especially that sense of humor. You have to hear “Don’t Leave Your Records in the Sun” to truly appreciate it.

Sometime during the 70’s Hartford got his river pilot license, and in between touring he worked on the steamboats and tugs on the Big Muddy as well as the Tennessee and Illinois rivers.

Also during the 70’s I picked up the guitar, fiddle and mandolin, and later the banjo. All because of John and his music. I was listening to Mark Twang last night while I was working on this piece, but I got completely distracted. You can’t listen to that and do anything else. I ended up listening to that album and had to finish this thing tonight.

John played all his life with the song of the great Mississippi singing in his ears. In the 80’s he contracted Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and by early 2001 he had to stop playing. The combination of that loss and the disease took his life on June 4 2001. My 47th birthday. I will never forget that moment.

Watch this video of two songs with my love and joy, to get a small sense of who and what was a John Hartford.

This column is different from previous installments of Vintage Whine, in two ways:

1. Previous subjects were pretty well known—for anyone familiar with the history of the American audio industry, anyway. Stan White isn’t well known.

2. Stan White is the first subject I’ve known, personally—which makes this both easier, yet more difficult, to write. The reasons will become clear as we proceed.

For audio geeks of the pre-internet era of the ‘70’s, classified ads in the back of Audio magazine were the best source of news about leading-edge tech as well as breaking brands and products. Given the when?-if-ever publication schedules of both Stereophile and TAS during that era, blurbs in the Audio classifieds often preceded news pieces in the other mags by as much as a year. –And as far as tweak brands went, fuhgeddabout Stereo Review and High Fidelity, the mainstream consumer audio mags of the day. Audio itself tap-danced between stodgy tech reporting (the brilliant but often opaque Richard Heyser), and a surprisingly whimsical view of the worlds of music and audio (Edward Tatnall Canby, Bert Whyte, Professor I. Lirpa!).

As with tiny classifieds everywhere, one could find sincere announcements of major breakthroughs, right next to straight-faced declarations of bombastic hype. That’s where I first encountered Stan White—somewhere between those two extremes.

Somewhere around ’75-’76, as a teenager already fully invested in high-end audio (intellectually, if not financially—I was a charter subscriber to TAS, because of another classified ad in Audio), I saw display classifieds in Audio for “Shotglass” glass-coned speakers from Stan White. I initially assumed that meant cones made out of something like my mother’s Pyrex baking dishes. “How is THAT supposed to work?”

Without knowing it, I’d been introduced to Stan White’s marketing, which often included cutesy, somewhat vague terminology that baffled as often as it enlightened, leaving one feeling a little annoyed. Ever had a too-loud uncle who tried too hard to be “hip”? Yeah, like that. The backlash of the Vietnam war was way too many graying guys with long sideburns and flowered shirts. My first take on Stan White and his products was of such a character, selling speakers that had barely escaped from a white van (no pun intended).

I was both right and wrong.

When my children see movies or TV from the psychedelic era of the late ‘60’s through the early ‘70’s, they tend to roll their eyes. My standard comment to them is, “you had to be there”. Viewing such things dispassionately from a distance cannot explain the laughable monstrosities of the era: think Bing Crosby’s wince-inducing album, Hey Jude, Hey Bing. How on Earth could that have been thought to be a good idea? –and yet, there it is.

Similarly, to look at either the White speakers or the sales brochure shown in this ebay listing is to cringe: who thought of the Bozo the Clown color scheme of sky blue driver-surrounds and clown-nose red center cap against a whitish cone?

Who was this guy Stan White?

Here’s what I know, based upon email correspondence and phone conversations with Stan, which took place between 2003-05: Stanley Fay White was born in Minneapolis circa 1920, and lived in St. Paul until the death of his mother when he was 7. Where he went from there, I don’t know–but he became involved in studying Physics, and like many others, enrolled in the armed forces in WW II.

Stan told me, “ I was a transatlantic weather forecaster. I was part of a small group that destroyed the U-Boat menace in early 1943. (planes and depth charges). I never lost a plane due to faulty forecast, ever. I was put in charge of General Brooks (Brooksfield, Texas) headquarters weather station at age of 21. I was the General’s pet. He used to win bets on my forecasts.” He also served for 18 months during the Korean War.

After being discharged the second time, Stan designed and began marketing speakers and amps that showed a curious mix of advanced technology and bombast. Look at this collection of ads and pics, and you’ll see technical claims that might cause an eyebrow to be raised, along with pretty girls and celebrity endorsements: Duke Ellington, great—but Charlton Heston?!? http://www.itishifi.com/search/label/Stan White

The ad for Stan’s “4D” speaker is noteworthy not just for the lovely young lady in the bizarre outfit, but for grandiose claims of superiority which are accompanied by surprisingly little information. Stan’s was certainly not the only hi-fi company whose ads featured such lingo—it was the ‘50’s, era of tail-fins— but even for the time, “4-dimensional sound with power and clarity you must hear to believe” and “THE MIRACLE OF MULTI-FLARE” are a little over the top.

Even a product info sheet simply describes the 4D as having “horns, horns, and more horns”. Its 5’7” height and 400 pound weight indicated it was a substantial product, and the 1954 price of $1500 was a substantial investment, as well. That’s around $13,400 in 2016 bucks.

That $1500 price was also more than double the cost of a JBL Hartsfield or Electrovoice Patrician, widely regarded as the best of the day. A Klipschorn was only about a third of the price of the 4D. In all the years I’ve dealt with vintage gear, I’ve never seen any Stan White speaker, much less a 4D, nor have I ever met anyone who had experience with them.

Were the 4Ds real, or just imaginary halo products created to cast glamour upon lesser speakers? I’m not sure.

Next time we’ll look at some patents, and some info that indicates that a bright mind was at work. But always…that hype….

Bill Leebens has bought and sold vintage gear since the days when it was new. He regrets that a goodly number of classic American components now reside in Japan, because of him. Mea culpa.

Warning: more Beatles content.

Of course, they’re many people’s favorite band (including, obviously, mine), so it’s not a surprise, but there happen to be a number of Beatle-related events around my life at the moment.

A couple weeks ago I went to an LP listening event—the UK mono version of Revolver was played at the Grammy Museum, at something called the Record Theater. I went as a guest of one of the perpetrators. Beforehand, we had a series of emails that brought writing this column to mind.

His argument was that the Fabs’ earlier songs were the better ones — although Revolver was a truly great album. But Revolver is where my real interest in music starts. And the audience for an article like this is the perfect audience to make my argument to.

I hear songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You” as fully within the tradition of the art songs of Schubert, Ives and so many others. I’m pretty sure Lennon and Harrison didn’t know that, and neither did I until much, much later. I first heard that tradition during later high school and college, and although I didn’t relate the form of one to form of the other at the time, I had become aware that there was a long history of songs comprising many kinds of structures and techniques – including pure tape construction.

Yes, you can play “And I Love Her” on similar instrumentation and in similar venues to “For No One”. It will take a wider palette to achieve “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Possibly even playing back a tape for an audience. And that’s where — well, maybe I’m just weird. But this is the “school” I grew up in, so plainly, I ain’t alone.

By the time the Beatles came along, there had already been decades of songs –– small, short works with vocals — breaking free from constraints of form, of venue, of methodology. Whether they knew it or not, they didn’t break new ground, but in ’66 they freed up their works from the standard issue pop constructions and constrictions.

And that’s where my ears grabbed onto it — although I didn’t know that, then, either. It made me a bit of an oddball with some of the folks I used to work with, because they defined songs much more narrowly for the most part. But it meant that I fit right in with, say, Jon Hassell. There aren’t lyrics per se in Hassell’s work, but there are voices. How they are used, and what they say, convey Jon’s meaning every bit as much as, “Bright are the stars that shine“, “The day breaks, your mind aches” or “This is not dying”.

Listen to a song like “The Postman” from David Baerwald’s Triage (1992). There are many voices: Baerwald’s, of course, but many others, “sampled in”, each contributing to the effect of the song. We could play it live — now. I think to pull it off 50 years ago would have required a stripped-down version, just me on 12-string and David singing (as in the studio), or us along with a very creative use of tape.

Of course, my friend’s argument isn’t, what constitutes a song? It’s, what constitutes a really good song? But now we’re into taste, and my taste turns out to be far too wide to feel that ranking one Beatles era-song over one from another era is a worthwhile effort. They are all songs, it’s all music — and some of it, to quote a character from a different art form, “burns very, very bright.”

Dan Schwartz is a parent, sort of a husband, and has been a musician of some years, having played on quite a few records – and even a few good ones. He’s recorded or played with Rosanne Cash, Bob Dylan, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Bernie Leadon, Dave Navarro, Linda Perry, Sheryl Crow, Stan Ridgeway, and was a member of the Tuesday Night Music Club. In his spare time, he used to write for Harry and Sallie at the absolute sound and the Perfect Vision. Professionally, he keeps trying to leave music, but it keeps coming to get him.

: more Beatles content. Of course, they’re many people’s favorite band (including, obviously, mine), so it’s not a surprise, but there happen to be a number of Beatle-related events around my life at the moment. A couple weeks ago I went to an LP listening event—the UK mono version of Revolver was played at the Grammy Museum, at something called the Record Theater. I went as a guest of one of the perpetrators. Beforehand, we had a series of emails that brought writing this column to mind. His argument was that the Fabs’ earlier songs were the better ones — although Revolver was a truly great album. But Revolver is where my real interest in music starts. And the audience for an article like this is the perfect audience to make my argument to. I hear songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You” as fully within the tradition of the art songs of Schubert, Ives and so many others. I’m pretty sure Lennon and Harrison didn’t know that, and neither did I until much, much later. I first heard that tradition during later high school and college, and although I didn’t relate the form of one to form of the other at the time, I had become aware that there was a long history of songs comprising many kinds of structures and techniques – including pure tape construction. Yes, you can play “And I Love Her” on similar instrumentation and in similar venues to “For No One”. It will take a wider palette to achieve “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Possibly even playing back a tape for an audience. And that’s where — well, maybe I’m just weird. But this is the “school” I grew up in, so plainly, I ain’t alone. By the time the Beatles came along, there had already been decades of songs –– small, short works with vocals — breaking free from constraints of form, of venue, of methodology. Whether they knew it or not, they didn’t break new ground, but in ’66 they freed up their works from the standard issue pop constructions and constrictions. And that’s where my ears grabbed onto it — although I didn’t know that, then, either. It made me a bit of an oddball with some of the folks I used to work with, because they defined songs much more narrowly for the most part. But it meant that I fit right in with, say, Jon Hassell. There aren’t lyrics per se in Hassell’s work, but there are voices. How they are used, and what they say, convey Jon’s meaning every bit as much as, “Bright are the stars that shine“, “The day breaks, your mind aches” or “This is not dying”. Listen to a song like “The Postman” from David Baerwald’s Triage (1992). There are many voices: Baerwald’s, of course, but many others, “sampled in”, each contributing to the effect of the song. We could play it live — now. I think to pull it off 50 years ago would have required a stripped-down version, just me on 12-string and David singing (as in the studio), or us along with a very creative use of tape. Of course, my friend’s argument isn’t, what constitutes a song? It’s, what constitutes a really good song? But now we’re into taste, and my taste turns out to be far too wide to feel that ranking one Beatles era-song over one from another era is a worthwhile effort. They are all songs, it’s all music — and some of it, to quote a character from a different art form, “burns very, very bright.” Dan Schwartz is a parent, sort of a husband, and has been a musician of some years, having played on quite a few records – and even a few good ones. He’s recorded or played with Rosanne Cash, Bob Dylan, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Bernie Leadon, Dave Navarro, Linda Perry, Sheryl Crow, Stan Ridgeway, and was a member of the Tuesday Night Music Club. In his spare time, he used to write for Harry and Sallie at the absolute sound and the Perfect Vision. Professionally, he keeps trying to leave music, but it keeps coming to get him.

During election season, we hear a lot of talk about “values”. We are not (thank goodness!) going to pursue the subject of personal values, the much-abused term that is at the heart of way too much campaign rhetoric. Instead, we’re going to take a look at a different sort of personal value, namely: how much is that thing worth to you?

The question obviously applies to most aspects of life. Just for the sake of avoiding an outburst of existential angst, we’ll stick to the subjects of audio, and music.

There are a lot of elements involved in determining value: the intrinsic worth of an item (the materials and workmanship required to make it), the deal offered (relative to the deal offered to everyone else), the immaterial influencers (is it just like the one dad had? Have I wanted one since 9th grade?—that pesky emotional baggage), and the market influencers (are there a million just like it? Is it the only one?).

Unless you’re emotionally frozen, there are triggers or associations that make things worth more or less for you. For example, in the vintage audio world, if I never see another Phase Linear 700 amplifier, I’ll be perfectly happy. The combination of an edgy sound quality and the experience of having seen several 700s after they’d burst into flames, ensure that I’ll never consciously seek one out. For others, reading Julian Hirsch’s rave review of the 700 when they were 15 might have marked it as an aspirational item, and propelled them into mowing lawns all year in order to buy one. Seeing one 40 years later might cause an overwhelming bout of nostalgia, and that person would likely pay more than any rational soul would.

Rarity, of course, has a major effect upon an item’s worth, and ironically, rarity is often more of a measure of societal rejection than of actual scarcity or merit. Consider the Dylan song, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”. Originally appearing on the album Another Side of Bob Dylan, it can often be found in Goodwill bins for 50cents or so, in either album or single version. But what if you simply must have that same song performed in the dulcet tones of actor Sebastian Cabot? Cabot’s 1967 album, Sebastian Cabot, Actor/ Bob Dylan, Poet in which he renders a recitative version of “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, is harder to find than Dylan’s original.

The whole issue of worth is one that almost all audiophiles encounter sooner or later; who amongst us has not heard the incredulous outburst from a friend or neighbor, “your stereo cost HOW much??”

Ironically, such comments often come from someone who just bragged about the cost of their new car or vacation house. Worth is reflective of personal priorities, and as such is highly personal: at the time I owned a system which included Magneplanar Tympanis tri-amped by Audio Research gear, a Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck and a Nakamichi Dragon turntable, I was driving a $200 Fiat sedan which looked as though it’d been run over by a semi. My wife didn’t care for the situation, but I was momentarily happy.

Clearly, there’s no accounting for taste…or worth!

Bill Leebens is Editor of Copper and Director of Marketing at PS Audio. He has been in and out of the audio business for over 40 years. Each time he returns to it, he becomes more cynical. He does not intend to go quietly.

You will all know the old chestnut where, if you focus clearly, it is often possible to pick out one individual conversation from among the hubbub of a noisy cocktail party. There may be a hundred people all talking at the same volume. Together, this forms the noise, and it sounds like we have a hundred times more Noise than the Signal, which is the one person we’d like to listen to. Clearly, the Noise overwhelms the Signal. Yet most of us have already performed this social experiment, so we know it is not too hard to actually listen to that one person. What, then, is going on here?

To understand this, we need to go back to the concept of noise. What exactly is Noise, and what makes it different from Signal? Basically, noise occurs whenever what we are observing appears to be random. Consider a sequence of random numbers. What makes them random is that we can discern no pattern or sequence within them, regardless of the level of analytical sophistication, whether real or hypothetical, that we can bring to bear upon them. If any such pattern can be established, then the numbers would not be random. Actually, generating truly random numbers is an astonishingly challenging task, as any expert in cryptography will tell you. And in audio, if a signal – whether an analog signal or a digital representation thereof – is totally random, then it comprises totally noise.

Having said that, there are many different flavors of random. For example, we can generate a sequence of random numbers that lie between 0 and 1. Or between -10 and +10. The other interesting thing is that we can generate random numbers where all the different numbers do not actually have the same chance of appearing. But is that random, you ask? Yes it is, and here is an experiment you can do yourself. Toss two coins (we will assume this to be a truly random process). Repeat this as often as you like and make a tally of the outcomes. Two heads or two tails will each appear about a quarter of the time. But the combination of a head and a tail will appear about half the time. In audio, the different flavors of random are usually referred to as Noise Colors. The noise signal itself may be random, but its frequency content can have any distribution that we like. For example, White Noise has equal components at all frequencies, whereas Pink Noise has lower components the higher the frequency goes.

A signal at a certain frequency can only be separated from the noise if its magnitude is higher than the magnitude of that fraction of the noise which occupies the same frequency space. Lets go back to the cocktail party. A hundred people are talking, all at the same volume. But you are only interested in your CEO, who is talking to The Chairman. You can hear him discussing his thoughts on the new Vice President, an appointment that everyone expects to be announced soon. The CEO’s voice is like one frequency component in an audio spectrum, where all the other peoples’ voices represent other frequency components. By concentrating only on the CEO’s frequency, you can tune out all the other frequencies and listen in on his conversation. Provided, that is, his voice stays above the residual background noise at that frequency.

So, finally the CEO leans forward, and lowering his voice, tells The Chairman who the new Vice President will be. But – dammit it all! – by lowering his voice, he has reduced it below the level of the residual background noise. And you can no longer make out what he says. But at least there is a lesson to take away. When the signal drops below the overall noise level, it is still possible to recover it. But when it drops below the level of that component of the noise which is at the frequency of the signal, then it is irretrievably lost. If the signal is fainter than the noise, it simply means that what you are listening to is indistinguishable from being random. Your only option is to change the way you measure the signal.

So how do we know what the level of the signal is at a particular frequency, and how do we know what the background noise is? The mathematical tool we use to analyze the frequency content of a signal is the Fourier Transform. It is called a Transform, because the original audio data is transformed into something that bears no immediately-obvious resemblance to it, and yet contains all of the information necessary to enable it to be transformed back into the exact original data. If you want to see what the math looks like, look it up on Wikipedia! The Fourier Transform of an audio signal turns out to be a representation of the frequency content of the audio signal. It is a mathematically-exact representation. If there is any frequency information that cannot be precisely extracted from the Fourier Transform, this is simply because that information does not actually exist in the original signal. Conversely, if you see something in the Fourier Transform, then, whether you like it or not, that means it is also in the original signal.

Taking our noisy cocktail party analogy, we can see what is necessary for us to identify a signal within a noisy environment. We have to strip everything away that we can identify as not being part of the bit of the signal we are interested in, and focus just on those aspects of the data that could actually be the signal. Provided we limit our thinking to the frequency domain, we can think this through quite nicely. Within the data, we will be able to identify the presence of a signal at a certain frequency, but only if the magnitude of the signal is higher than magnitude of all of the noise that is within a narrow band of frequencies surrounding the one we are looking for. And we can use a Fourier Transform to see whether that is in fact the case.

Richard Murison enjoyed a long career working with lasers, as a researcher, engineer, and then as an entrepreneur. This enabled him to feed his life-long audiophile habit. Recently, though, he started an audiophile software company, BitPerfect, and consequently he can no longer afford it. Even stranger, therefore, that he has agreed to serve in an unpaid role as a columnist, which he writes from Montreal, Canada.