Essay -
"Accuracy, Distortion, and the Audiophile -
A Muse in Himself With His Woofers." - November, 1996
By Colin Miller
Distortion is a dirty word. Call it
euphonic. Call it pleasant. Call it pace, maple syrup, or blue
berry cupcakes if you like, but put distortion in the same
sentence with "music", and you've stigmatized the
experience for the rest of its dysfunctional existence. Extra
harmonics, tonal variations, microphonics, phase shifts, and
light induced hysteria have entered an arena of debate complete
with lions, tigers, bears, and a false dichotomy of audiophiles
and engineers. Some rush to swing the stick flinging around the
banner, "Distortion is irrelevant." Others, with
religious zeal, whip out their spec sheets and reply, with a good
old college cheer, "Numbers don't lie." The rest of us,
presumably the most open-minded, watch perplexed as stones and
derogatory missiles whiz past, making us take every necessary
effort to keep our poor aching heads and ears safe from stinging
projectiles. After all, if we can't listen, what's the point of a
war?
This sandbox altercation does tap a fundamental question though,
a question commonly debated by designers, consumers, and even
marketing executives. In the audiophile world of high-end
equipment, it's all really just about the music, isn't it? Yep.
Sure it is. My pet boa constrictor speaks French too. Let's take
a teeny look at what it really means to be an audiophile. For the
moment, put aside the snobbery, competition, and strange
fraternal instincts so common in our nature. Strictly defining
our ilk, what are we at the sticky core, after the hard candy
surface is stripped away? What's our chewy middle made of, that
it drives us into gasping panic every time some ignorant peon
suggests that sound quality isn't all that important?
First, is an audiophile necessarily a high-end audiophile? Of
course not. I like my technology too, and there's a lot of
satisfaction to glean from a well-designed, finely manufactured
piece of equipment, but that's not what defines an audiophile or
makes it eclectic. I consider myself an audiophile, and I've been
listening attentively for as long as I can remember sentience. At
three or so, in my mother's Volkswagen Rabbit, which incidentally
shared the garage with big jars of moldy apple juice, I ran down
the battery listening to AM radio in a monophonic point-source
array. Fisher-Price made my first audiophile turntable, with the
patented Chime Stylus for precision grooved polymer discs.
Eventually I graduated to stereo, a Fisher boom box with tuner
and cassette. And vinyl, did I get into it! On my oh so cheap
record player, 6 watt plastic enclosure speakers included, I had
albums from various hippie artist like those on "Free to Be
You and Me", and numerous story records; Superman, Puff the
Magic Dragon, Fox and the Hound, etc. It certainly didn't qualify
as high-end, but that little turntable introduced me to Peter,
Paul, and Mary.
My entry into components didn't begin until high school, as an
affair with my first receiver, a Scott 25 watt/channel job, and
from there it has only escalated. If you break down audiophile
into its simplest form, it's in the etymology. An audiophile
loves to listen. Some just have a more limited, or one might say
selective, taste in subject matter. Until I'm senile, I'll keep
my father's mildly resonant voice while he read Jack London's
"White Fang" to my sister and me, tucked away for gray
hot chocolate days. Haven't you ever gorged yourself on toe
tapping raindrops assaulting the bedroom window, which then drip
to the sill in maudlin fashion? I relish the sudden, yet graceful
surrender of a motorcycle engine giving way to a clutch lever and
wind jabbing under the helmet while crossing a reservoir dam to
the applause of crickets. Audiophiles love sound. Whether they
listen to birds, bees, or falling trees (for those still on that
philosophy trip,) an audiophile is one weird bug.
So, if an audiophile just likes to listen, then where's this
emphasis on music coming from? Most audiophiles happen to love
music, but many musicians are not audiophiles. Like technology,
the audiophile neither excludes or automatically incorporates the
whole of related genres. Conveniently, music consists of sounds,
morsels carefully patterned to stroke the intellect while
squeezing the kidneys. Music is not simply an end, but also the
means to much more. Some turn on their stereo to casually listen
or fill the background, much like television. The audiophile
turns down the background to crawl into the music, poke around,
and swim. Just as a wrestler will appreciate changes in body
position that most spectators find boring, an audiophile lolls in
hall reverberations, overtones, or whatever he or she can pick
out of that messy lump of sine waves. (If you would like to argue
about sine waves, look up Fourier Analysis, and click here to see
generic stylized example of harmonic distortion.) In my own experience, every time I listened to a
better recording, or better equipment, it left a taste in my
mouth which crept up into and through my inner ear so to persuade
my brain to chant three words: "Give me more."
Soundstage, depth, body, precision . . . these are nuances to
tempt a fool into a hunched slumber, much to a chiropractor's
delight.
I stumbled onto the pinnacle of my own hypnosis at a young
friend's recital. She plays viola, a student in the Northwestern
School of Music. She plays very well. She has a very nice viola,
costing as much as the two-channel portion of my home stereo. I
heard her play in a small intimate hall, shaped like a Greek
theater, except lined with hardwood instead of stone, and roofed
instead of open. I sat in the back, on the top of the house, and
what I heard was, well, miraculous. It wasn't 20 Hz. It wasn't
110 dB. It did something to me I didn't know you could do without
changing underwear afterwards. This little girl, five feet, no
more, with strings strapped on an ancient wooden box, exuded a
lush, ripe, honest portrayal of longing, rage, forgiveness, time,
and all her mottled faces cast off a swinging bough. I had my
soundstage, my depth, my precision, and more. I had reality, more
perfect than a purple velvet dress.
I have the tape cassette of that afternoon, still unopened, on my
desk. After almost a year, I haven't listened to it. Even if I
owned a tape deck, it will never come close to the memory I
covet. It cannot be as good. I haven't listened, but I know. I
saw the microphones, hanging like some fraudulent teenagers
gawking over a nude model. If I had been seated next to those
microphones, the experience would fall short miserably. A viola
at four feet, perpendicular to the sounding board, simply doesn't
sound the same as in the audience. Music halls have a functional
purpose. They break up and diffuse the sound, designed with a
designated listening area. Besides the limitation of a recording
being a reproduction, for whatever reason, recording engineers,
usually not audiophiles, often go for the "bigger than
real" approach and absolutely botch it. "Shove that
mike down her throat. The Ss and Ts don't hurt enough yet."
More experienced recording engineers tend to touch as few
controls as possible, but the less experienced, and the majority,
see a knob and use it. EQ, compression, you name it. Engineers
like buttons. Like most of us, they like control, and it's hard,
as human beings, to discipline ourselves.
The issue becomes then, as a consumer of recordings we cannot
change or influence, how close can we get to the personal
luscious flavors we crave? If I had my way at that recital, I
would have kept all bodies attending present for absorption, sans
consciousness and coughs, thanks to hypothetical pharmaceuticals
purloined from the student health center, and put directional
microphones on both sides of my head, and maybe two more on the
ceiling for latter mix in of ambient reverb, run straight to hard
disc, perhaps through tube circuits before mixdown and mastering.
Unfortunately, the painful reality is that I can't do that.
Still, though, there's always going to be something missing, in
any recording. Some recordings are better than bad, and some
actually impressive in contrast, but every canvas, besides
missing a dimension, has holes between threads. Aside from
visiting the real thing, an audiophile has two choices: fill it
in, or leave it out. This is where faces turn red, veins throb,
and Dr. Bob (a namesake who used to be my neighbor) gets out his
notepad and starts typing a rebuttal. Is distortion of the
recording, i.e., any change of the signal from the original,
inherently evil? It is, without any question, inaccurate. Perhaps
a better question, is it desirable? It may seem like restoration,
if it works well, but any change of the signal alters the output
from what originally went into the recording. If what went into
the recording was perfect, then absolute accuracy would no doubt
be everyone's goal. Thing is, a near perfect recording is rare,
if not impossible, and everyone's version of perfection differs
due to troublesome individual tastes. So now we have the answer:
"It depends."
What would the world of audio be without disagreement? A lot
quieter. And we know audiophiles love to listen, especially to
themselves. A camp commonly labeled, "subjectivist"
claims, based on their own preferences and personal observations,
that distortion measurements don't tell the whole story. The
"objectivist" camp, on the other hand, argues that
nothing cannot be measured. Who's right? They both are.
Measurements will not decide an individuals preference.
Similarly, given enough testing, and the cooperation of the
subject, preferential aspects can usually be measured to some
degree, assuming the inclination and capacity of both parties.
For an unfortunate length of time, some audiophiles have pitted
themselves, needlessly, against mechanical and electrical
engineers, while some engineers dismiss unfounded observations
due to lack of control criteria, often because they simply
disagreed. Ironically, more often they argued because they were
too busy listening to themselves to hear each other. What we
audiophiles tend to conveniently forget, under our
electro-magnetic stones and acoustically absorbent blocks, is
that these engineers make the reproduction of what we love in our
home possible. Without engineers, audiophiles would have to
content themselves with circling wet digits on the rim of a
crystal champagne glass and oozing about truth of timbre. Not to
imply that champagne glasses lack timbre, but if somebody
suddenly uninvented the inductor, I'd be very upset to discover
my voice coils missing.
I think that this aversion to demystified science stems from a
need to feel that we are right in our preferences, to believe
that we love the truth. Naturalness, neutrality, transparency,
etc. Someone once told me that passive preamps lacked neutrality
compared to their active cousins (wouldn't it be the other way
around, if anything?) Ha! Okay, throw in a couple extra buffer
stages and a gain stage, then attenuate it to compensate for the
gain stage, and BAM- more transparency. Yeah, right. The fact is
that he preferred the sound of his preamp, rather than the sound
of the music. Accuracy is truth, but accuracy sometimes, perhaps
most of the time, isn't all that the advertisements build it up
to be. For example, despite the inherent glamour, besides
building up the worlds supply of butts (a renewable resource),
smoking kills a lot of people, some of them pretty nice. Many of
the movie stars that look adorable on the screen aren't so pretty
up close, even if you're trashed on wine affectionately nicknamed
"Mad Dog." And, what you'll eventually have to tell
your children, should you have any, is that recordings aren't
perfect; in fact many of them are atrocious, and they (your kids)
may not even like all of them (recordings) in purity's
unforgiving stance. Do not despair. There is hope. I've got
lipstick for your kisses in dozens of seedy shades. It's called
"distortion."
Like fire, distortion can light up your house or burn it down,
depending on how you use it, and how well done you like your
meat, assuming you eat meat. I know it sounds nasty, opposite of
the ideals with the appliances, but most of us must live with
issues of practicality. If you're careful to apply it wisely, it
might just release that essence to massage your beleaguered lids,
melt into a point between them, and pick your butt out of the
recliner, anchored only by the bouncing grip of your feet on
carpet. (You must have carpet.) If an equalizer, a tube
saturator, or even, God forbid, a single-ended triode allows you,
in all profanity, to curl up what's left of your soul into a
fraying ball of twine, toss it into what smacks of heaven, and
get it back mostly untangled, who's to tell you it's wrong? Is it
inaccurate? Yes. So what? Don't justify it. Don't argue. Explain,
if you must, that it's just what you like, and leave it alone.
Daisies don't need help standing up. As unpopular as it seems to
have become in modern culture, I like poems, good poems. How many
good poets have you met who could write down in rhythm, a tale
without its own personality? Kind of defeats the purpose of a
poem, doesn't it? Life isn't a book report. Don't read it like
one.
Colin
Miller
© Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997
Secrets of Home Theater & High Fidelity
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