Perhaps I’m dating myself by the title of today’s article, referring to commercials which touted the superiority of Memorex audio cassettes over other, woefully inferior brands. Each commercial would feature well-known performers (I seem to remember Ella Fitzgerald among them) whose recorded performances are interleaved with them doing it live, as listeners cheerfully admit to being unable to distinguish one from the other.
Memorex’s campaign was effective but hardly groundbreaking. Thomas Edison himself used precisely the same tactics to advertise his Diamond Disc cylinder recordings back in the nineteen-teens. A singer would stand beside the machine and weave her voice in and out of the record as it played. The audience would be hard-pressed to determine when she really was singing, or when it was the Diamond Disc they were hearing. At least that’s what the publicity materials say, as Edison repeated the "taste test" in cities and towns throughout the country.
Years later some of the singers involved admitted that they sang deliberately quietly and with a pinched tone in order to blend in better with the Diamond Disc sound. After all, acoustic records come nowhere near to live sound. Acoustic records are tinny and scratchy; they are limited to minuscule frequency and dynamic ranges; they offer virtually no soundstage or sense of dimensionality. If that weren’t bad enough, the players of the era put out only modest volume, far lower than live music.
The best acoustic records—either cylinders or flat discs—aren’t as bad as you might expect, though. Consider this 1917 Edison "Blue Amberol" cylinder, made from a substance harder than the usual wax and able to take—and maintain—a more deeply-impressed groove with more detail. Imagine this recording made new again, the hiss and fuzzy groove distortion removed, played by an onstage machine positioned at human height. Since the voices more or less drown out the accompaniment (good because instruments didn’t reproduce anywhere near as well as the voice), it starts to make sense that for many people the discs came across as uncannily realistic.
Part of it lies in simple psychology: they had been told that they wouldn’t be able to hear a difference, and if that pre-conditioning weren’t sufficient, an auditory Stockholm Syndrome clicked in. People who take such tests are generally inclined in favor of the product being tested—otherwise, why would they bother showing up for the demonstration? They wanted to like Edison’s Diamond Discs, just as so many decades later they wanted to like Memorex cassettes. (We mustn’t overlook the possibility that their enthusiasm had been bought with hard cash.)
But even that stops short of explaining the situation in full. The rest of the answer comes with recognizing that people’s ears require training in order to become discerning. Consider the eartraining that makes up part of a musician’s education. It isn’t that young musicians can’t hear in some fundamental sense, but they need training in order to discern all of the various components that go into hearing a musical composition—both from the outside-in as they listen to a performance, and from the inside-out as they hear music inside the privacy of their own heads, either by reading notated scores or just via the creative imagination. It’s very much a skill that can be honed, regardless of one’s natural level of propensity.
Distinguishing audio quality also requires conditioning and training before the ear is ready to make the finer judgments, although the base-level stuff is usually quite easy—say, distinguishing between a CD played on a sleazy boombox and that same CD played on a sophisticated audiophile system.
Audio sophisticates might be surprised at just how little many folks actually hear. One such person’s reaction to hearing my B&W 803Ds, Fasolt & Fafner, was they sure have a lot of bass.
Well, Fasolt & Fafner do have a lot of bass. They can vibrate the entire house. Hell, they can vibrate the entire block. But that’s not what makes them great speakers. You can get bone-jarring bass from cheap speakers, after all.
But you can’t get Fasolt & Fafner’s clarity, nuance, responsiveness, and sense of sheer size in a cheap speaker. El-cheapos lack F&F’s ability to pinpoint a sound in space and hold it there perfectly, or to keep the disparate elements of a complex orchestral texture clearly separated. More than anything else, though, el-cheapos lack F&F’s musicality, their active participation in the creation of a beautiful sonic landscape.
So much audiophile energy goes into chasing the chimera of the perfect reproduction of live sound. Why bother? You really can’t turn your living room into Carnegie Hall or Fillmore East; your living room is your living room. No matter how close you think you come to that ever-elusive ideal, your listening room will remain a poor second, a substitute for the real thing. Even a quarter of a million bucks won’t buy you that perfect reproduction. Nor should it. The point of fine audio is the creation of beautiful sound, not its duplication.
Great sound equipment doesn’t get out of the way of the music by virtue of contributing nothing to the performance, because it can’t help but contribute: every binary digit being turned into analog current, every electron whizzing along a wire, every vibration of a speaker driver, every push of air from speaker into the room, contributes to the sound. No: a great sound system serves the music by presenting it in such compelling guise that we forget the machine and lose ourselves in the music. Think of a fine sound system as being Alfred Brendel playing Schubert; we are moved simultaneously by Brendel and by Schubert—it’s the combination of the two that matters. Think of a cheap boombox as being an incompetent hack whacking through the same Schubert piece—the whacking is likely to drown out any sense of Schubert. I don’t think that a totally transparent sound system is any more possible than a totally transparent performer, or any more desirable for that matter.
So even though it can be shown conclusively that tube amplification contributes far more distortion than solid-state, or that vinyl records lack the frequency and dynamic range of digital, there are a lot of folks out there who prefer tubes to transitors and vinyl to digits. It’s not about accuracy; it’s about beauty. That’s why I love B&W 800-series speakers so much: they are musical instruments in and of themselves. My 805s models in the home office remind me of a small Bechstein grand, all nimble and golden-toned, while those lordly 803Ds in the living room are a 9′ Hamburg Steinway, nuance and warmth but also massive substance and power. They have character, personality, and interact with their enclosing rooms. Each system creates its own unique soundscape, each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses.
One reads reports from time to time that people sometimes actually prefer the sound of compressed audio files like mp3 over uncompressed and/or lossless files like AIF or Apple Lossless. That’s a lot less weird than it seems at first blush. I’ve done a few informal tests for myself, comparing the same recording in an AIF file to mp3 at 320kps and AAC at 256kps. Typically the compressed files are noticeably thicker-sounding than the uncompressed variety—the compression is muddying up the instrumental texture. On a mediocre sound system that just might come across as an advantage. I remember that as a kid I found the Szell/Cleveland recordings to be kind of harsh, but that’s because my cheap RCA record player couldn’t handle the pristine clarity of Columbia’s engineering. Those same recordings heard on Fasolt & Fafner reveal an entirely different story—they’re warm, nuanced, positively glowing, while at the same time sporting textures of amazing clarity and transparency.