Progress is Indeed Progress

I’ve been digging a delectable new CD: Gershwin by Grofé, from Steven Richman and the Harmonie Ensemble of New York, on Harmonia Mundi. As the title implies, the album is devoted to Ferde Grofé’s orchestrations of Gershwin’s music for the Paul Whiteman band. That includes the original version of Rhapsody in Blue for jazz band, but it also means a heady cornucopia of those deliciously slick Whiteman dance numbers, all performed to a T and brought to spanking new life via Harmonia Mundi’s irreproachably superb engineers.

Just for fun, I think, the record producer included “The Yankee Doodle Blues” twice—the first time using Harmonia Mundi’s pristine digital recording technology, but for the second time the same performance is captured with a 1909 Edison cylinder recorder. This might be a subtle dig to those quasi-cultists who insist that we’ve been heading steadily downhill since those glory days of 78 RPM shellac discs. Now, it’s true that a 1909 cylinder isn’t going to provide the same audio fidelity as, say, a 1920 flat-disc Victrola, but at the same time the demonstration makes an irrefutable case in favor of modern recording technology. The 1909 version may offer the faded charm of a sepia-tinted stereopticon or a flickery silent movie, but considered solely as an audio recording it sucks major doo-doo. You can barely even figure out which instrument is playing. Wow and flutter—antique hi-fi terms now tossed into the dustbin thanks to digital technology—are woefully audible. The saxophone sounds as though it’s playing underwater, in fact.

But the 1909 version carries a slight ting of spurious “authenticity”, in that it sounds just like the recordings we have of the Whiteman band, of George Gershwin playing the piano, of Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer, of Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives, of Arthur Nikisch conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. For those of us born after the Jazz Age (and, given the passage of time, that’s just about all of us) there are no real memories of the real, vibrant sound of the bands of the day. It all comes through records, and thus it’s all mixed in with the sound coloring of those recordings: the constricted nasality of acoustic recordings, the ribbon microphones of early electric discs with their buttery midrange and restricted treble, the snap crackle pop of vinyl grooves, the swoopy equalization curves, the in-your-face closeness of 1920s electrical recordings, the deep boomy resonance of monophonic records from the 1930s. Just as many of us envision the 1930s as being in black & white (because our “memories” come from movies and photographs), I think many of us “hear” the Jazz Age as being in scratchy monophonic sound, limited to a few thousand kHz in the midrange of the sonic spectrum.

Hearing the music of that age in modern sound can be a revelation; so that’s what they really sounded like! The experience is not unlike seeing one of those few surviving color films showing the world of the 1930s—it wasn’t all silvers, grays and blacks à la Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Those gray women’s suits just might have been cherry red; those black Ford Model A’s might have been forest green or lollipop yellow. But there’s something subtly weird about Gershwin in color; he belongs forever in a black & white tuxedo, in a black & white room, playing a black & white piano, all of it in tinny monophonic sound replete with pops, buzzes, and clicks.

To that end, I rather wonder about the current fad—for that’s what it is—in audiophilia for vacuum tubes. Of all the outdated technologies that deserve to be retired forever, surely those glowing dinosaurs should lead the list. Audiophiles who go in for tubes are faced with retail challenges should a tube burn out (and it will, sure as the sun will rise). After all, it’s not as though you can run down to the local hardware store and pluck a new one off the shelf. One has to be a certain age to recall “tube tester” machines that were found just about everywhere, including the drugstore and the supermarket. But only factories in far-off places make tubes; once as common as rolls of toilet paper, they have become exotica.

Look at any issue of Stereophile and take note of the tube gear; almost without exception, the tubes are placed prominently on the outside of the case, or at least in some kind of cage that makes them visible. That wasn’t the case when tubes were the standard technology; manufacturers went to great lengths to hide them. After all, those tubes required gobs of goosed-up AC current, dangerous as hell. Stick a finger back there you’d be lucky to escape with no more than a nasty burn, because the family Philco was essentially an electric-chair-in-a-box. But those glass tubes with their glowing filaments are now objects d’art to the vacuum-tube connoisseur, and the ownership of tube-based (hence expensive) equipment makes a statement. Bragging rights.

I don’t buy any notions that vacuum tubes produce superior sound to solid state circuitry; what I recognize is that tubes produce different sound. Although “distortion” is often bandied about as a negative attribute of reproduced music, “distortion” refers broadly to anything in the recorded sound that wasn’t there in the original source. Distortion can be quite pleasing. Consider that mellow buttery sound of 1930s ribbon microphones. As unbiased reporters of the sound in question, ribbon microphones are dismal failures at their appointed task. But as creators of a general sonic gestalt, they succeed admirably. It’s almost impossible to dislike the sound of one of those big RCA ribbon microphones, even though without question the sound has gone through significant transformation on its way from source to end product.

The 1930s ribbon microphone sounds like the 1930s: it sounds like old movie soundtracks, it sounds like recorded radio broadcasts of FDR’s Fireside Chats. It conjures up memories (however faux) of that era, just by the virtue of its sound quality alone, no matter what the content of that sound might be. Record Diane Sawyer and the ABC Evening News with a vintage RCA microphone and she’ll emerge as Eleanor Roosevelt.

Tubes + vinyl do for the 1950s what ribbon microphones do for the 1930s: they provide a certain distortion that elicits memories of a time when tubes ruled. The 1960s saw massive and wrenching change; by the end of the decade we had been through assassinations, Vietnam, civil unrest, campus unrest, the Summer of Love, and all manner of shift that must have seemed to some folks as though the world itself was coming to an end. Another, less-heralded, change that occurred during the 1960s was the steady retirement of tubes in favor of solid-state technology. No more waiting for equipment to warm up, no more tubes to burn out, no more heat, no more hiss, no more being murdered by your record player. By 1970 you could tote decent-quality sound around with you, although the real revolution along those lines was still to come. Refusing to part with your electricity-gulping, wall-filling console stereo was one way to cope with the unnerving transformation just past; at least you still had your beloved Capehart with its thick swoosh and whop-blop bass, a comforting reassurance of a time of tail fins, American military superiority, and guys with short hair.

So when I hear tube-based stereo equipment, and view its deliberately retro design complete with bakelite knobs and toggle switches, I hear and see nostalgia, not sonic superiority. There is a beauty to the sound, especially the big-ticket stuff from elite manufacturers like Cary Audio. But you pay dearly for that nostalgia, not only at the counter, but over time by goosed-up electric bills and tube-replacement costs.

Maybe I’m as much geek as audiophile, but I’m unabashedly gung-ho on the advances we’ve made in audio technology. I am no more interested in regressing to tubes any more than to vinyl records with their attendant difficulties (cleaning them, protecting them, worrying about the mechanics of tone-arm placement, all that crap.) I’m glad that stuff is there for those who want it; an open market is a fine thing, indeed. But at the rate some audiophiles are going, I rather wonder if we might wind up with somebody tooting the sonic glory of a 1909 Edison cylinder machine, bubbling how much we have lost since going to flat discs and stereo.

Nope, nope, and nope again. The “I Got Rhythm” variations are dancing around my home right now, courtesy of a digital stream sent via WiFi from a Mac Pro in my home office to a Mac Mini in the living room, turned into a pristine analog signal by a Benchmark DAC1 USB, amplified by the ballsy muscle of an NAD M3 dual-monoblock (solid state!) amp, and given sparkling life by Fasolt and Fafner, the glorious B&W 803D speakers.

I don’t need no stinkin’ Edison cylinders, and I don’t need no stinkin’ tubes.

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