Issue 13

Terri and I were vacationing in France a few years ago and had stopped at a roadside vineyard for lunch. I spied this great art of old vines creeping up the side of the building, offset by the window.

The point of contact between the cartridge’s generator system and the actual moving vinyl record is of course the stylus, mounted on to the cantilever. The stylus has to cope with the enormous forces thrust upon it, and stay tracking the groove. Just like every other part of a record playing system, it will impart its own mechanical vibrations and resonances upon the sound vibrations passing through it. Keeping the stylus mass small helps reduce record wear and increase fidelity.

It is not just the size, but the shape and the finish which matter. All styli are amazing works of art; the skill in making and mounting the most basic shapes is immense, and some of the more complex profiles are mind boggling.

A simple ‘spherical’ tip is somewhat frowned upon in High End circles, but if small enough and well polished, they are perfectly valid stylus types. The natural progression from a ‘spherical’ tip, is to carefully polish two sides, and make it more elliptical; usually to a ratio of 1:1.5. Lower priced ‘ellipses’ may well have a lower ratio; more expensive, a higher ratio. Even more expensive and more difficult to manufacture are the ‘line contact’; the diamond is now machined to form very sharp edges, much finer than either the spherical or elliptical types. Different manufacturers give all these quite fancy names, but the premise remains the same, a very small contact area with the vinyl record.  The most famous development of this type is worth mentioning, this was by a chap called ‘Shibata’ in Japan, it was developed to extend playback bandwidth enough resolve the 45 KHz signal required on Quadraphonic CD 4 four channel discrete records.  This wide bandwidth cannot harm stereophonic replay, either.

The last type of stylus profile was developed by the famous Dutch firm of Van den Hul: Under analysis, they concluded the best stylus profile to replay records with was one very similar to the record cutter itself, with refinements so it didn’t damage your precious records on play back. There are of course variants, and competitors such as Fritz Gyger, Paratrace, MicroLine, etc.

A ‘spherical’ stylus type has minimum contact with the groove. The more you progress through elliptical and fine line through to Shibata, the stylus sits very snug in the records groove, with the whole edge of the stylus in contact with the record groove wall.

As mentioned earlier, the stylus is mounted on to the cantilever, which transmits all of the vibrations/musical information in to the main body of the cartridge. The cantilever needs to be ultra rigid, and ultra light, most commonly it is a thin-wall metal tube, but sapphire, carbon, and other exotic materials have been used. Mounting the stylus tip is no easy thing. More budget designs simply ‘glue’ the tip in place, whereas more expensive types use ‘clasps’ not dissimilar to those used on a diamond wedding ring. Somewhere in between,  the end of the cantilever tube is formed in to a ‘flat’ and the stylus tip pierced through. It is obvious alignment is critical – and with all these microscopic procedures you can begin to appreciate why some styli and cartridges cost as much as they do!

Cartridge generators, the parts that turn the mechanical energy in to an electrical signal, are no less complicated and varied. The four main types of generator system are crystal (which are not really hifi – I am wasting no time on these) moving magnet, moving coil, and moving iron.  Moving magnet, or MM, is possibly the most common type. At one end of the cantilever is the stylus, at the other a tiny tiny magnet(s). The vibrations wiggle the magnet in front of (usually) four small coils. These four coils can be a ‘reasonable’ size and are reasonably sensitive, producing a fairly healthy output in millivolts (usually quoted between 3 and 7 mv). The coils are wired in a ‘sum and difference’ arrangement, which translate the up and down and side to side movements in to distinct left and right audio channels. For more information, check out Alan Blumlein’s classic 1930s patent and text on stereophonic sound. MM cartridges tend to be quite light and compact, and are what is classed as high compliant cartridges. They suit lower to medium mass arms.

Moving coil ( MC) switch this around: the magnet is fixed, and the coil is attached to the end of the cantilever. The coils need to be microscopically tiny; to remain low mass enough  to track a record correctly, may be only 25 turns of wire used per winding. Different armature designs vary from a cross shaped device (like an ‘X’), to winding directly in the cantilever. In most MC cartridges a fairly substantial (heavy!) magnet is fitted. This gives the advantage over a MM cartridge of saturating the coils with magnetic flux, which makes for a very linear response.

MC of course have their problems. Those coils need connecting to the back of the cartridge pins with micro fine wire (usually a continuation of the coil itself) and those tiny tiny coils are only capable of generating very very tiny outputs in micro volts, some as low as 100 uV. This places demands on the amplifier chain, and requires nothing but the finest arm cables to connect it. Moving coils weight quite a bit too. The heavier the magnet, the more linear the performance – but the higher the mass. The smaller the coil, the more linear the performance, but the lower the output.  High output moving coils exist: they literally have much larger coils, compromise exists here.

Easier for the electronics to be more linear, but a slightly less linear cartridge. Ortofon patented the stereo moving coil cartridge back in 1961. It, again, was pretty much identical to Blumlein! But through the 1960s and 1970s, you either paid Ortofon to use their patent, didn’t bother, or came up with something else. Audio Technica  came up with something else: their cartridges are based on a record cutter in reverse. With just two coils ‘on top’ of the cantilever. The current en vogue Neumann  DST uses a similar system too, but with the coils virtually ‘sat on top’ of the stylus- certainly gets around some cantilever problems!  But post-1983, when Ortofon’s patent run out, it was a free for all. And most manufacturers use a generator system pretty similar to this classic design.

London DECCA produced the most successful moving iron pick-ups. Again, there isn’t much of a cantilever, in fact there isn’t one! A ‘T’ shaped armature has the stylus at its base, and the iron inductors are placed within a set of coils above and below the iron inductor (a magnet sits on top of the entire structure). In a conventional stylus a cantilever has a critical ‘pivot point’ between the stylus and the generating system – some manufactures go for a very short cantilever, others a long one. The DECCA has none. There can be no doubt the powerful sound this gives. But it is very unkind to record, and record wear is somewhat enhanced compared to more standard methods.

There are of course variants on these themes. B&O moving micro cross (in recent years revived by Soundsmith), Technics HPC, Grado, plus some outright oddities: STAX electrostatic (more electrets!) ribbon, strain-gauge, optical….

As you can see, there are very many variables in cartridge design. Is a MM cart with a line contact stylus better than a moving coil with a spherical tip? Answers on a post card, although yours truly has always been more of a ‘coil fan! It must also be remember the smaller the stylus tip, the smaller it moves in the groove, and the smaller its output. The lower the output, the better your electronics better be!

The most important thing to consider is arm compatibility. A high mass cartridge (low compliance) needs a high mass arm; otherwise it will distort and mistrack. A low mass, high compliance cartridge will likely be ‘bottomed out’ by an arm too high mass. Sadly even manufacturers get this wrong. And with all these variables, you can see why! Once you have the right arm, its vital to align it with the record groove correctly. Not just the tracking error, but also the vertical tracking angle, or VTA. A spherical stylus is quite unfussy about this in comparison to a Shibata, which is critical. Failure to set this right will mean a very expensive Shibata will mistrack, and sound much worse than styli a quarter of its price.

Whoever said record players are easy?

Perhaps I am one of those increasingly rare birds who never had to learn to love opera. When I was all of 11, my father brought home a deluxe, faux leather-bound 3-LP RCA Victor tribute album to the iconic Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso (1873-1921). When he lowered the ridiculously heavy arm of our Garrard turntable onto the deeply moving sextet from Donizetti’s opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Caruso, Galli-Curci, et. al. began to sing, I exclaimed over the six voices projected by our Bozak loudspeakers, “Daddy, I’ve heard that before!”

“Yeah, you broke it when you were 2,” was my father’s reply.

From that day forth, I spent many an afternoon playing those three Caruso LPs over and over. Verily, opera, and specifically the acoustic recordings of Caruso, Galli-Curci, and Tetrazzini singing 19^th and early 20^th century opera of the suffering Italian sort, was in my blood from the time I was weaned. As I became a teenager, I may have spiced my listening with Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and finally Donovan, but I always returned to Caruso.

Nor was I alone in my love of Caruso. My father, who was born and raised on Broome Street, on New York City’s Lower East Side, told me that the day Caruso died, people all over his immigrant neighborhood, in both the Jewish and Italian ghettos, brought their wind-up phonographs to their windows and played Caruso records for hours on end. Everywhere you went, all you could hear was the sound of Caruso singing his heart out.

My father also told me that when Caruso sang at the Met (New York’s Metropolitan Opera), he often tended to look up, toward the people in the balconies. All the lower income immigrant standees at the backs of the upper tiers felt that Caruso was singing, not to the rich patrons in the orchestra and boxes below, but rather to them. They loved him all the more for it, and considered him one of their own. In my own way, I did too.

But that was a century ago. For Americans raised on rock ‘n roll, country, pop, hip-hop and the like, the postures, vocal production, and overall conceit of opera may seem strange. Indeed, the carefully trained voices of opera singers are miles apart from the straight tones of pop and jazz artists.

But if operatic vocal production and convention may seem strange to some, imagine how someone from another culture might feel upon discovering, for the first time, a rock guitarist gyrating like crazy and making all kinds of mean faces while strumming and plucking strings and occasionally turning a knob or pushing a pedal. Heavy metal, hip-hop, and the like all have their own performing conventions that are no more natural than high sopranos projecting high E-flats throughout the house. I don’t want to make a big case out of this, but in what way are some of the accents that we’ve come to take for granted from pop singers any more “unnatural” than the carefully enunciated takes on language common to operatic vocalism?

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect that most younger readers, or those who do not come from backgrounds steeped in classical music, will immediately take to opera. It is, after all, seen by many Americans – the audience I’m writing for – as a “foreign” art form, in which people in sometimes ridiculous costumes pretend to be kings and queens, heroes and heroines, or various permutations of maidens in distress and the saviors thereof. It is also true that singers sometimes awkwardly move about the stage, flailing their arms and braying like overstuffed bulls on their way to the slaughterhouse. So many of the plots are antiquated, and far too many scenarios ridiculous.

Then again, such a stereotypical description of opera is wildly outdated. A large number of modern productions of older operas attempt to update the scenarios in some way, often by transporting the setting to the 20^th and even 21^st century. They also tend to favor singers who can act as well as they sing, and look convincing in their roles. Sometimes those updates work, and sometimes they’re unconvincing or preposterous. Nonetheless, it sure makes things juicy when a woman whom a 19^th century opera originally consigned to live out her days in a convent instead sings her final aria (song) while turning tricks on a street corner amidst a smattering of empty syringes.

Cultural Relevance

Another prevalent misunderstanding is that all operas are either in Italian, German, French, Russian, Spanish, or some other “foreign” language, and address the events of earlier periods. We now have a large catalogue of contemporary operas in English (and other languages), many of which directly speak to the most pressing issues of our time.

Thanks to recent revivals that have restored music and dialogue that was previously cut, the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (1934)

is now accepted as one of the first great American operas to deal with quintessentially American subjects. Two decades later, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah

Susannah (1955) addressed stultifying intolerance. (Benjamin Britten broached the same subject in Britain with Peter Grimes (1945)).

Gian-Carlo Menotti’s opera, The Consul (1955),

addresses issues that arise when would-be immigrants trying to flee oppressive regimes and run into bureaucratic red tape.

Closer to the present day, America’s John Adams is especially known for his politically-themed operas, among which are Nixon in China (1987),

The Death of Kinghoffer (1991),

and Doctor Atomic (2005).

Other topical English-language operas include Anthony Davis’ The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986),

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole (2011),

which follows the comic-tragic rise and fall of model Anna Nicole Smith, and an opera that first made it to New York City this spring, Daniel Schnyder’s Charlie Parker’s Yardbird [see this article and this one as well].

Jake Heggie, who has become one of America’s most successful opera composers, first made his mark with Dead Man Walking.

The opera, which by some accounts is the most frequently performed American opera today, addresses the death penalty in the most heart-wrenching, compassion-inspiring manner imaginable. Audiences are generally reduced to tears at good performances of the work. Another of Heggie’s large scale operas, Moby-Dick (2010), was a huge success. I was so moved at its San Francisco Opera premiere that I attended a second time during the run, and remain convinced of the opera’s greatness.

In the past three months, I’ve reviewed two new politically relevant operas by Americans, both of which lend themselves to fairly intimate chamber settings: the two-act version of Jake Heggie’s Out of Darkness (2016), which deals with the Holocaust – its second act specifically addresses the Nazi oppression of homosexuals – and Gregory Spears’ Fellow Travelers (2015?), which addresses the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy Era in which untold thousands of homosexuals discovered their governmental careers and lives wrecked by McCarthy’s anti-gay witch hunt.

What is Opera?

But perhaps I get ahead of myself. Let’s take a giant step backwards, and do a little Opera 101.

Opera is an art form that melds both sung and instrumental music with text (libretto) in a manner that is hopefully both dramatic and theatrically compelling. Merriam-Webster calls it “a drama set to music and made up of vocal pieces with orchestral accompaniment and orchestral overtures and interludes.” The Cambridge Dictionary, in turn, calls it “a formal play in which all or most of the words are sung, or this type of play generally.”

The definition of opera gets really dicey when you try to distinguish opera from musical theater of the American sort. It’s equally challenging to differentiate European and American operetta (light opera) from full-fledged operas that include spoken as well as sung dialogue (recitative). When Bizet’s ever-popular opera, Carmen, is performed complete, it includes spoken dialogue. Ditto for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).

The choice of venue also figures strongly in categorization. George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, for example, is considered musical theater in some circles because it premiered on Broadway rather than in an opera house. But when you take into consideration that it had no choice but to premiere on Broadway because its all-Black cast (then called “all-Negro cast”) was not allowed to perform in an opera house, and then examine its overall structure in unabridged form, its identity as an opera becomes clearer. Is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd musical theater, or is it in fact an opera that got its start in a musical theater context?

Grooving on Opera

Appreciating opera takes some effort. While it’s certainly possible to play excerpts of melodic, 18^th and 19^th century arias in the background and be touched by their beauty, listening to a complete opera requires far more concentration. Especially if the opera is in a language you do not understand, and the libretto (story) is well thought out and complex, it can be extremely challenging to figure out why people are either singing their hearts out or laughing it up without following the libretto in print or as projected in live performance and video. As for the longer operas of Richard Wagner, or operas that are not strictly tonal, listening without following the words closely is more often than not an invitation to frustration, if not to outright futility and abandonment.

Even before I attended opera, my appreciation for opera and art song grew exponentially as I began to listen to and acquire multiple recordings of the same arias I encountered on that seminal Caruso reissue album. For the first time, I discovered that the accompaniment matters. In fact, in some cases, e.g. Wagner and Strauss, the orchestral accompaniment is as or even more crucial to the musical message as the vocal line.

I also discovered, through listening to recordings and attending live performance, that people performed the same arias very differently. Not only were their voices different, but they also sang at different tempos, and made different interpretive choices as to what words and notes they would emphasize, when to linger or speed up, etc.. Some of these choices, of course, were dictated by conductors or technical limitations, including the length of a 78 record and union rules about overtime. But just as many were determined by the individual temperaments of the singers.

What finally opened opera and art song wide for me was discovering how each voice resonated differently within my being. Some singers made beautiful sounds but left me emotionally uninvolved. Others, including singers who were technically imperfect, touched me so deeply that I went to sleep with their voices in my head, and heard them when I awoke.

For years – decades in fact – I spent hour after hour comparing voices and interpretations on my own. It was only in 1999, when I was first offered the opportunity to write a CD review, that I realized that I had spent a decent part of my teenage and adult years developing my critical listening skills by comparing recodings.

Certainly, it is not necessary to do what I did in order to love opera. Indeed, many people who have season subscriptions to opera companies, and have been attending opera for decades, have never spent time comparing interpretations. They are content with letting the beauty of the music wash over them.

For people with a taste for discovery and adventure, however, listening to the same classic Italian aria performed by sopranos Emmy Destinn, Rosa Ponselle, Claudio Muzio, Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Mirella Freni, Leontyne Price, and Anja Harteros – or, to turn to tenors, Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, Jussi Björling, Giuseppe di Stefano, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, Piotr Beczała, Josef Calleja, and Jonas Kaufmann – is to discover an oft-astonishing range of musical and emotional expression. The more deeply you explore, the more the emotional and spiritual vistas of opera can open to you.

Throughout this introduction to opera, I link to performances on YouTube. In doing so, I in no way wish to suggest that the sonically compressed files found on YouTube can convey the huge range of color and emotional that singers devote their lives to. Rather, these carefully chosen links will give you a taste of what great singing sounds like. If you’re moved by what you hear, please check out the singers who speak to you via CD, LP, or hi-res downloads.

End, part I

If the internet is good for nothing else, it’s great at destroying a good story by providing factual evidence to the contrary. The flip side is that by widely and instantaneously distributing falsehoods, it’s also excellent at spreading nonsense.

Jim Smith discussed the latter in issue #12, in his discussion of things we KNOW are true… but just ain’t so (“The ACK Attack and Uncommon Knowledge” ). In this column, I want to look at the former, in a very specific case.

Most of us are hugely patronizing and unremittingly arrogant when it comes to viewing the past. “Oh, look at how much smarter we are now,” we think. A classic example of a tsk-tsk-producing comment is one we’ve all heard a million times: In 1899, the US Commissioner of Patents, Charles H. Duell, was alleged to have said, “everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Only one problem: he never said it. The quote appears to have originated in the humor magazine Punch in 1899, where the statement was made as a joke. Imagine a flippant quote from The Onion turning up in 2133, being taken seriously by historians: that’s about the same.

“So, Leebs,” you may ask, “what’s your point?”

My point is that it’s often easy to adopt the attitude of that quote, or of Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.”  And the reason it’s easy to adopt that attitude, especially in mature technical fields like audio, is that there seem to be few fundamental breakthroughs. The advances we see are primarily rehashes of old findings, adapted to new technology or simplified for automated mass production.

In other words: ho-hum.

Diligent readers of Vintage Whine know that the moving coil loudspeaker dates back a century with Jensen, and that needles tracing grooves go back 140 years to Edison. Amplifiers? Also nearly a century old. Microphones? Basically the phonograph, in reverse, and just about every technology imaginable has been utilized—I’ve even read of using a small sample of radioactive material, whose emissions through air would be modulated by soundwaves, and would thus able to produce an output signal. Voila”! A mic!

So what is there in audio these days that’s really new? Diamond-dome drivers? Advances in materials science applied to Edgar Villchur’s 1958 patent. Plasma speakers? Siegfried Klein wrote about ionic drivers in the early ‘50’s, and the singing arc was known in the 19th century.

What about digital audio? Binary representation of data goes back to the 19th century, and PCM goes back to 1937, with Reeves in the UK. Class D amplification? Pretty much every type of circuit and power supply that you can think of were explored by the end of World War II, if not earlier.

Certainly, not everything that can be invented, has been invented. And yet: try to come up with something in audio that is truly new, and not just an advance in materials science, or a repackaging of old ideas.

Let me hear from you: what is there in audio that is really, really NEW?

Best answer gets a free PS Audio LANRover USB Transporter, MSRP $599 US. Paul McGowan and I will judge the responses, and our decision will be final, no whining allowed. If you win and the prize shows up on Audiogon, we will hunt you down and kill you. (Seriously. I am so not kidding.)

Tell us what you think! Give it a shot! Send us an email here.

Today’s DACs, with a few very rare (and expensive) exceptions, all use a process called Sigma Delta Modulation (SDM, sometimes also written DSM) to generate their output signal.  A simplistic way to look at SDM DACs is to visualize them as up-converting (or ‘upsampling’) their output to a massively high frequency – sometimes 64, 128 or 256 times 44.1kHz, but often higher than that – and taking advantage of the ability to use a more benign analog filter at the output.  In fact the bit depth is also reduced (usually to 1–3 bits) in order to simplify the process of digital-to-analog conversion at ultra-high bit rates.  That is a bit of an over-simplification, but for the purposes of the point I am trying to make today, it is good enough.

Doing such high-order up-conversion utilizes a great deal of processing power, and the provision of that processing power adds cost.  Additionally, the manufacturers of the most commonly used DAC chipsets give away very little about their internal architectures, and don’t disclose the most significant details behind their approaches.  Many DAC manufacturers are therefore quite coy about how their product functions, and this coyness is often expressed through cavalier usage of the terms ‘upsampling’ and ‘oversampling’.  Many of those manufacturers employ DAC chipsets with prodigious on-chip DSP capability (such as the well-known and widely used ESS Sabre 9018), and then fail to make full use of it in their implementations.

Let’s consider a hypothetical example.  We’ll take a 44.1kHz audio stream that our DAC chip needs to upsample by a factor of 64 to 2.88MHz, before passing it through its SDM.  The best way to do this would be using a no-holds-barred high-performance Sample Rate Converter (SRC).  However, there are some quite simple alternatives, the simplest of which would be to just repeat each of the original 44.1kHz samples 64 times until the next sample comes along (a process sometimes called a zero-order hold).  What this does is to encode the “stairstep” representation of digital audio we often have in mind, in fine detail.  (Personally, I would refer to this as oversampling rather than upsampling, but marketing types don’t tend to listen to engineers!)

If we are going to use this approach, though, it comes with consequences.  As mentioned, it results in the accurate recreation of the stairstep waveform at the output of the DAC.  The effect of this stairstep is to add additional distortion frequencies to the analog output waveform.  Fortunately, these distortions will all be at frequencies above 22.05kHz, where no original audio data was encoded in the first place.  The analog output filter will therefore require a brick-wall response to strip them out, which means that it is not so ‘benign’ any more.

So, instead of our DAC applying a zero-order hold to the incoming 44.1kHz waveform, suppose it uses a high quality Sample Rate Conversion (SRC) algorithm to properly upsample it.  Such algorithms incorporate digital filters to filter out the alias signals which are encoded above the Nyquist frequency of the incoming audio stream.  The result is a clean signal that we can pass into the SDM, and which will be precisely regenerated, without any stairstep, at the DAC’s output.  A good upsampling algorithm will exhibit essentially no ultrasonic residue, so we no longer need an aggressive, sonically worrisome, analog brick-wall filter.

Let’s take another look at these two scenarios.  The first needed an aggressive analog brick-wall filter at the output, but the other in effect had the same brick-wall filter implemented digitally at an intermediate processing stage.  If the two sound at all different, it can only be because the two filters sound different.  Is this possible?  In fact, yes it is.  An analog filter has sonic characteristics that derive from both its design, and from the sonic characteristics of the components from which it is constructed.  The digital equivalent – if properly implemented – only has sonic consequences arising from its design.  There is a further point, which is that digital filters can be designed to have certain characteristics which their analog counterparts cannot, but I’m not going into that here.  The bottom line is that, if properly designed, a diligent DAC designer ought to be able to achieve better sound with this ‘upsampling’ approach than with the previously discussed ‘oversampling’ approach (again, I must emphasize this is MY usage of those terminologies, which is not necessarily everybody else’s).

Using the ‘upsampling’ approach I have just described, it should make little difference whether you send your music to the DAC at its native sample rate, or if you choose to upsample it first using your playback software’s built-in upsampler.  However, that assumes that the upsampling algorithm used by the DAC is at least as good as the one used by your software.  There is no guarantee that this will be so, but to be fair, most half-decent modern DACs do employ sophisticated upsamplers.  If your playback software gives you a choice of upsampling algorithms then you can sometimes get to hear this for yourself.  A few years back, specialist algorithms such as Izotope were very popular for this purpose.

The bottom line here is that if your DAC is any good, you should expect it to sound better (or at least as good) with your music sent to it at its native sample rate than with it upsampled by your playback software – even if you are using Izotope or something similar.  If it doesn’t, the difference is probably down to whose upsampling implementation is better.  For some time now it has seemed to me that a good measure of a quality DAC is that it sounds better – or at least as good – with no upsampling applied by the playback software. (FWIW, This is how I use my own PS Audio DirectStream DAC.)