Issue 192

Anyone who is not willing to spend more than say $15 on an audiophile component’s power cord should stop reading this right about now. You see, when Serguei Timachev of Stealth Audio Cables offered to send me a sample of his company’s $8,200 Dream 20-20 power cord, I knew that it was an offer that I could not refuse. I have heard good things about Stealth’s products for many years. To boot, the 20-20 is a photogenic looker.

Too many audiophile power cord manufacturers use a certain famous brand of connectors, off-the-shelf copper or silver insulated conductors that are thoughtlessly arranged, and a simple ground circuit. They then slap onto the cord a branded jacket and a four-digit price tag.

The Dream 20-20 is a whole different animal, as of course it should be for the kind of money that will buy a family of four a whole lot of necessities even during these inflationary times. Just as an example, Stealth states, the 20-20’s complex, vibration-reducing, matrix conductor geometry consists of 176 interwoven, individually isolated, oxygen-free copper wires that together are almost an inch thick.

On the outside, the Dream 20-20 features something that I have not seen before – a ferromagnetic collar that slides over the cord’s external length. Stealth states that moving the collar allows the user to tune the cord’s “sound” by manipulating resonances in and around the signal path. Examining the rest of this impeccably-made power cord revealed an extreme attention to detail. The ground pin on the male version of the proprietary connectors, for example, is serrated, i.e., it has teeth that help the connector securely grip the AC receptacle.

The Dream 20-20 won't be mistaken for any other cable. 

The Dream 20-20's moveable ferromagnetic collar.

After I broke in the Dream 20-20, it was time for the rubber to hit the road. Finding the approximate areas where the collar caused the cord to perform its best in my system was quick work. As Stealth claims, in or about those areas, everything starts to come into focus in a way that is akin to adjusting a camera’s lens. Finding the exact sweet spot is a lengthier process that can likely be accomplished in some hours, preferably by two people, one who adjusts the collar’s position and another who listens.

Undoubtedly, the Dream 20-20 is among the highest-performing of the many power cords that I have auditioned.

In case you are in the under-$15 crowd and are still reading, I can convey something that was written a long time ago by another reviewer whose name I unfortunately cannot recall. The rough gist of what he said is that while ultra-expensive power cords may not provide the best value in audio, pairing a state-of-the art component with an inexpensive cord that does not let the component reach its full potential is an excellent example of decidedly bad value. Let the hate mail begin.

Above: views of the proprietary connector.

Another look at the adjustable collar.

This article has been edited from the original version. 

Howard Kneller’s audiophile adventures are documented on his YouTube channel (The Listening Chair with Howard Kneller) and on Instagram (@howardkneller). His art and photography can also be found on Instagram (@howardkneller.photog). Finally, he posts a bit of everything on Facebook (@howardkneller).

In a world where more and more people find themselves unable to consume more than a few minutes – or seconds – of media at a time, Gideon King is bucking the trend and making music that speaks to his soul.

As the leader of New York City soul/jazz outfit Gideon King & City Blog, he takes what he does pretty damn seriously. Of course, the entire project (and its success or failure), in many ways, rests on his capable shoulders. But that's not the heaviest part of the whole thing.

The really weighty stuff comes in through the exhaustive creative process that the veteran guitar wizard and multi-instrumentalist undertakes as he opens up his musical soul. And in doing so, a kaleidoscope world brimming with expansive sights and sounds is vividly apparent to everyone in his orbit.

King's latest installment, an EP titled Splinters, is yet another example of the ever-inventive musician's hyperactive creativity. (Copper’s Ray Chelstowski interviewed King about his 2022 EP Whatchya Gonna Do in Issue 155.) To some, King embodies a modern-day musical genius (and he’s been called that), while for others, he's a rare example of success via jazz in a pop-dominated era. But to King, none of that matters.

Gideon King & City Blog, Splinters, album cover.

What does matter, is that the music he chooses – keyword – to make speaks to his soul, and his bandmates and listeners. In an age where ever-more soulless, trivial, bland, and forgettable tunes crop up daily, for Gideon King, the possibilities are truly endless.

In support of the Splinters EP, Gideon King talked with Copper to recount his origins in music, while giving a snapshot of his creative process as well as his opinions on the state of music today.

Andrew Daly: When did music first enter your life?

Gideon King: A heightened consciousness of music visited me when I was about seven years old. My brother was sort of a prodigy jazz piano player, and I went to sleep almost every night hearing him develop into a great modern jazz piano player. At the same time, my hippie sisters were listening to Neil Young and the like and standing by the genius of these rockers. Of course, my parents insisted classical music was the revealed word. They were all right and wrong, and I sat at the nexus of these competing obsessions.

AD: What moments early on shaped you as an artist?

GK: The first time I heard a truly artfully interwoven mix of rock and jazz, I was altered as a human. I realized it was okay to at once crave the complexity of jazz and, to some extent, classical music and allow the poetic abstractions of [Bob] Dylan and Neil [Young] and Steely Dan to guide my imagination. I realized one could have their musical cake and eat it too.

AD: Tell me about the recording of your new EP, Splinters.

GK: Four originals. One cover. Lots of work. Lots of fun. I'm proud of this one because the recording process for the first time largely produced what I envisioned. The musicians in my band are world-class badasses. We used a mixture of old-fashioned recording techniques with the employment of modern devices. We get in a room, usually with a skeleton [of a song], and I stand up (although our pianist often writes some chord changes for tunes) and then bring the song to life. It is chaos until a vibe somehow emerges. Controlled chaos and open minds scramble a nice egg.

AD: What sort of gear did you have to work with in the studio? Why did you make the choices you did?

GK: We use it all. Real instruments, god forbid. Real mics. Pro Tools. Analog summing mixers. Arturia [synthesizers and software]. Custom percussion (just making noises with everyday objects). I use tube amps, but mostly Fractal [Audio Systems] products for guitar tones. Fractal's stuff is pretty amazing – [they offer] all kinds of guitar [emulations]. The truth is, having a broad palette of toys allows one to shamelessly engage in trial and error. One thinks they know what they want until they hear what they need. Know what I mean?     

AD: Tell me about your songwriting approach. 

GK: I don't like linear themes. I don't like lyrics that tell an obvious story. This is what I hate about modern songwriting. The subtlety is largely dead. "I love you. I want your body." Garbage. Lyrics have become boring and stupid and reliant on cliches and expressions. I just want to present disparate ideas that suggest a story or idea and then let the listener create.

AD: What songs stick out most, and why? 

GK: Well, we have only released two so far. "Splinters" is my favorite in many ways. I just like the movement of the chord changes and the funk chorus. It's a reflection of my love for Pat Metheny. "Turn Off The Sky" has gotten a good reception with editorial playlists. Proud of the lyrics of that one, and our percussion team created a killer vibe.

AD: What moment or moments from the sessions for Splinters stand out most to you?

GK: You know what? I think we have achieved something special. I think we have created an environment where people create without egos. We laugh and work till we drop. We don't take things personally. When an idea doesn't fly, we move on. The most special moments for me are when we abandon an idea. You have to destroy things to make anything.

Gideon King & City Blog. Courtesy of Prospect PR.

AD: What has the response been to the music so far? What experiences have you had in terms of touring and promotion?

GK: More and more people come. More and more people follow us. We ain’t Coldplay, that's for sure. We have a long way to go. The shows we have played have been packed, so that's cool. It's hard. It's hard to grow a following. It's hard to become huge when you think social media is sort of intrinsically idiotic. But what the hell…we make music.

AD: Does making music in a low-attention-span world frustrate you?

GK: Yeah, it's a joke. Music managers tell you to have short intros and "get to the hook"; otherwise, you won't get playlisted. So that is charming. All those brilliant instrumental sections of Steely Dan won't fly now? Pink Floyd wouldn't get playlisted? I don't know.

AD: How do we fix the issue?

GK: I'm not sure. The problem is that the medium, an auditory medium, has become more visual. The image is eclipsing the sound. People want music to be a sort of soundbite that helps them to dance or work out, not [something that] digs deep into their souls. Listen, these are a series of negative generalizations. Many folks appreciate great and labor-intensive music. But less and less. Sad. I eat food for the way it tastes, not the way it looks. I eat music the same way.

AD: What's next?

GK: World domination. Taylor Swift opens for us. We have over one billion streams on every song within three days of the release – that sort of thing. Or the alternative is we make more and more music and more and more people get to know us, and we scratch and claw our way to having a huge catalog of really nicely-crafted tunes that people listen to.

Header image courtesy of Gideon King.

Here's an old-school Signet TK6020 cartridge analyzer. I used to use one of these when I was Harry Pearson's setup person at The Absolute Sound. You'd use the TK6020 in conjunction with a test record. Signet was the higher-end division of Audio-Technica.

I spent a lot of time looking at this meter back in the day. And I had completely forgotten about this piece of gear until Howard Kneller sent me these images, courtesy of The Audio Classics Collection. Ah, memories.

And should you want to deviate from the...flat...response, you could do so with those front-panel tone controls. 1979 JBL ad for the Model 4313.

This isn't just any circa 1960s or '70s stereo console. It's part of the collection of the Norman and Vi Petty Rock 'N' Roll Museum in Clovis, New Mexico. Buddy Holly and the Crickets recorded some of their hits at Norman Petty Studios, as did Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings, Buddy Knox, Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, and many others. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Greg Gjerdingen.

We return to the surrealistic audio zone with this 1979 Marantz ad. Good thing I had a Marantz Model 2216B receiver at the time.

Howard Kneller’s audiophile adventures are documented on his YouTube channel (The Listening Chair with Howard Kneller) and on Instagram (@howardkneller). His art and photography can also be found on Instagram (@howardkneller.photog). Finally, he posts a bit of everything on Facebook (@howardkneller).

Part One of Don’s show report ran in Issue 190.

Editor’s Note: You might have noticed that some of our show reports happen sometime after the shows occur. This is because of a variety of factors – it takes time to collate all the notes and photos, our writers are busy and don’t do this full-time – and your undemanding editor doesn’t ask that they stay up all night to work on their show reports. Also, the shows have become too big for any one person to cover, so it can be informative to get different perspectives even after the fact.

Butcher Block Acoustics

Butcher Block Acoustics has proudly displayed their wood audio racks, speaker stands and amp stands for a number of years in AXPONA’s Expo Hall and Record Fair. The company also offers a wide variety of anti-vibration accessories. Their products are a great alternative for those looking for a more traditional look for their audio systems.

 PS Audio

PS Audio had a beautifully-appointed room on the main floor of the show, featuring a demo of the ultra-high-end aspen FR30 speakers driven by PS Audio electronics, including their flagship BHK Mono 600 power amplifier and a sneak preview of their upcoming AirLens Music streamer. The room was always crowded and bustling with activity, clearly a big draw for the audiophiles and industry insiders at AXPONA.

 Bob Carver Corporation

After the licensed builder of his products shut down in 2022, industry legend Bob Carver resurrected his old company and Bob Carver Corporation is selling his designs today, backed by a new team assembled from engineers from the aerospace industry. A mix of vintage and current Carver products were on display at the show. The current line consists of the vacuum-tube RPM V12 preamplifier and three vacuum-tube amplifiers.

If Bob was there, I did not see him. It would have been nice to have met him, given his name and products were so prominently displayed in the audio magazines of the 1980s when I first entered the hobby. Years ago, I did get to have lunch with Matt Polk, founder of Polk Audio, after Polk VP and PR contact Paul DiComo set it up for us. It was almost surreal sitting at a table with him in a Chinese restaurant in Baltimore, when as a teenager I would constantly see him in Polk ads wearing his white coat!

 Phillips Design

Loudspeaker manufacturer Phillips Design had a well-appointed room (complete with an authentic vintage Modeline floor lamp that looked quite expensive) to show off their “Speakers for the Modern Home” exhibit, which seemingly drew inspiration from two products of the past. The Philips Design OH-16 speakers look like taller versions of the 1960s and 1970s Zenith Z565 “Circle of Sound” omnidirectional speakers, and the round cabinets and custom wraps are reminiscent of the Ohm Acoustics Sound Cylinder Walsh speakers. The OH-16 speakers feature an upward-firing coaxial driver and a down-firing woofer. Customization is one of the big draws here, as the speakers are available in a number of finishes and varieties of wood, metal, and upholstery trim. It would be interesting to hear these outside of a show. They start at $4,500/pair.

MBL

Germany’s MBL demoed their always-impressive Radialstrahler 101 E MKII omnidirectional speakers (shown in the header image of this article) to a rapt, packed room. These speakers are rare and expensive at over $90,000/pair, and if you have never heard them, it is worth a trip to the show just to have the opportunity to experience their magic. The speakers were mated with the company’s Reference Line electronics; MBL offers it’s Reference, Noble and Cadenza ranges of components that include CD players and transports, CD players, a DAC, preamplifiers, and stereo and mono power amplifiers.

Mission

Storied British manufacturer Mission is producing products in the UK again and were showing off the latest version of the Mission 770 speakers, featuring classic styling with updated components. The sound was warm, detailed, and  satisfying, with a fullness that is a characteristic of speakers with wider, boxier cabinets, as compared to many modern speakers which have adopted taller, narrow cabinets and “creative” port designs. In fact, speakers with larger cabinets were in evidence throughout the show, demonstrating a new appreciation for such designs and what they can do. The Mission 770 speakers sell for $5,000/pair and are distributed in the US by American Audio & Video.

 Plinius and Alta Audio

New Zealand’s Plinius Audio used Alta Audio Adam speakers ($17,000 - $18,000 per pair depending on finish) to demonstrate their high-end high-power amplifiers, and their preamplifiers and phono stages. The Plinius amplifiers drove the Alta Audio speakers without strain, and the system sounded fantastic. The Plinius gear has a passing resemblance to vintage Perreaux electronics, also from New Zealand, interesting given the shared country of origin but perhaps just a coincidence. pliniusaudio.com

Kanto Audio

Audiophiles looking for affordable powered speakers would do well to check out Kanto Audio, a standout in the segment for their inexpensive yet fine-sounding powered speakers and subwoofers. Many models were on exhibit at AXPONA, including powered subwoofers and speaker stands to go with them. [Full disclosure: the editor occasionally does some work for Kanto. – Ed.]

Technics

Panasonic has continued to expand its Technics high-end audio brand and some of their best equipment was on display at the show. The $1,099 SA-C600 Compact Network CD Receiver is an all-in-one solution that incorporates much of Technics’ best technology, including sophisticated digital signal processing, a phono stage, and a room correction system that can be controlled from a smartphone. It can obviously be used with any pair of speakers, but the $1,099 Technics SB-C600 bookshelf speakers are a logical match and the combo is often sold together.

SVS

SVS has long been known for their exceptional subwoofers, and their passive and powered speakers and audio components have been winning awards for years as well. I have known Nick Brown of SVS for years, and he treated me to a demo of the $1,199.98 SVS Ultra Bookshelf speakers driven by the $699.99 Prime Wireless Pro SoundBase digital amplifier, a compelling combo for under $2,000.

Q Acoustics

British speaker manufacturer Q Acoustics has made a name for themselves over the past few years by delivering audiophile-quality sound at affordable prices, most notably with their $449.00 per pair 3020i bookshelf speakers, which have won awards from both lifestyle and audio publications. At AXPONA they highlighted their new 5000 Series speakers that feature C3 Continuous Curved Cone technology, which uses woofers with a unique smooth curve profile, said to optimize reproduction throughout the frequency range and to smoothly integrate with the tweeter. The $1,499 5040 towers sounded rich and refined, and were competitive with a lot of far more expensive speakers I heard that day. The new cone design is definitely something special, and I expect the new 5000 Series will play to the same critical acclaim as the 3020i.

Header image: MBL Radialstrahler 101 E MKII loudspeakers.

Octave Records has released The Art of Hi-Fi Volume 02: Soundstage, the second in its series of reference-quality recordings that showcase a different aspect of high-fidelity audio reproduction. The Art of Hi-Fi Volume 02: Soundstage offers a series of tracks that enable listeners to tell if their loudspeakers and system are set up optimally, to achieve a soundstage that can provide a three-dimensional sound field that has depth, width, and height, and extends beyond the boundaries of the speakers and even the room walls.

The Art of Hi-Fi Volume 02: Soundstage was recorded live at multiple venues as well as at Octave Studios, in order to present a range of sonic environments from up close and personal to expansive.

Volume 02: Soundstage literally begins and ends with a bang as flamenco dancer Salli Gutierrez, accompanied by Steve Mullins and a large band, dances on an old platform stage on “Sevillanas: A la Puerta de Toledo and Traditional Instrumental Melodies,” and “Alegrias (Excerpts).” “Diporti di Euterpe, Op. 7 No. 4: Lamento,” performed by Duo Azure, captures the exquisite piano playing of Dr. Jessica Nilles Kressin and the soaring purity of soprano Ekaterina Kotcherguina in the spaciousness of the First Congregational Church UCC in Boulder, Colorado, while Mozart’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major, K 157 was recorded in Octave’s studio in a more intimate sonic space.

Trumpeter Gabriel Mervine plays “Aurora” with his group in a small jazz club, and you’ll feel like you’re having a night out, sitting at a table in front of the band. Jessica Carson’s heartfelt performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” demonstrates the ways in which spaciousness can be created in the recording studio, as Jessica sang seven different parts at varying distances from the microphone, with different degrees of reverb. Other tracks feature a bluegrass quartet, jazz combos, and more. 

Volume 02: Soundstage was recorded live and in the studio in pure DSD 256 on the Pyramix recording system. The microphones and placement were optimized for each track, to bring out the spaciousness, presence and dynamics of the original performances, 

All tracks were recorded, mixed and produced by Paul McGowan and Jessica Carson, and mastered by Gus Skinas. Volume 02: Soundstage features Octave’s premium gold disc formulation, and the disc is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible by using any SACD player or a PS Audio SACD transport. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download, including DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DSDDirect Mastered 352.8 kHz/24-bit, 176.2 kHz/24-bit, 88.2 kHz/24-bit, and 44.1 kHz/24-bit PCM. (SRP: $19 – $39, depending on format.)

I talked with Paul McGowan about the subject of soundstaging.

Frank Doris: Let’s start with the basics for those who might not be familiar with the concept. What is soundstaging, and why is it desirable in an audio system? What should people listen for? 

Paul McGowan: Thanks, Frank, that’s a great question. For 99 percent of reproduced music lovers, there is no such thing as a soundstage. It’s a totally foreign concept. Just picture listening on a pair of earbuds or to an Amazon Echo, or Sonos player. It’s just music coming out of a box or filling your head. Now, picture a real 2-channel high-end audio system. What happens? Those speakers disappear, and in their place, the three-dimensional image of musicians playing live forms behind the loudspeakers. That’s soundstage.

FD: What should people listen for regarding some of the specific tracks on this album? How can they use the album to help them achieve a better soundstage, or verify that their system is set up optimally?

PM: As mentioned above, we should expect the speakers to disappear and the music to form a palpable soundstage behind the loudspeakers. Take for example Track 6 (String Quartet No. 4 in C Major, K 157 by the Longmont Symphony Orchestra String Quartet), a lovely Mozart quartet performed in the studio. When we recorded this performance we made sure we balanced the microphones and mix so that you got a great sense of intimacy while not relying upon the closeness of microphones to achieve it. You hear this as a complete disconnect from the speakers – as if the musicians are in the room – yet not so distantly miked as to be far away. Intimate yet detached.

Secondly, the spatial aspects of Volume 02: Soundstage are optimized to create a playback room much bigger than your own. The first and last tracks on the album, recorded live, feature a good-sized group of musicians seated upon a wooden stage. We have singers, acoustic flamenco guitars, and foot-pounding dancers that all add up to an extraordinary experience.

FD: How should speakers generally be set up to achieve a proper soundstage? And is there such a thing as an exaggerated soundstage, either from speakers that are, say, maybe placed too far apart (I know you’d get a “hole in the middle” here), or from recordings that exaggerate the effect, maybe through artificial reverb or phase manipulation or something I’m not thinking about?

PM: My preferred setup is normal spacing of about 8 feet between speakers and the pair placed about one-third of the way into the room. That last bit, where the speakers have room to breathe behind them, is essential. When the speakers are too close to the front wall (the wall behind the loudspeakers) there are all sorts of problems created, not the least of which is that there’s no physical space to imagine the musicians playing on that imaginary stage. Very important.

FD: It seems to me that soundstaging is tied in with resolution and to perhaps a lesser extent, lack of distortion. In other words, if your system can’t resolve enough detail, you won’t get a sense of depth and spaciousness. Would you agree or disagree?

PM: Not sure I totally am on board with that. Much has to do with the recording – how it’s mixed, how close the performers were to the microphones that recorded them (the closer they are the more they will come from the speaker rather than the soundstage). That stated, once you have a great reference recording you can trust, like Soundstage, then it comes down to the setup of the system, and mostly the ability of your loudspeakers to reproduce that three-dimensional image accurately. Truth be told, most speakers struggle with this. It’s one of the reasons we went the route of designing and producing our own line of speakers: frustration with what’s commercially available that we could recommend to people. The PS Audio aspens image so effortlessly it’s a joy to recommend them.

Lastly, and to your point, once all that is in place and working at its best, electronic improvements can have a significant impact of soundstaging. Lower distortion, better slew rate, all that.

FD: There are other aural cues to give listeners a sense of relative depth of instruments and vocals, such as differences in volume (the louder something is on a recording, the closer it will seem to be) and tonal balance and amount of reverb. How important do you think these are compared to the ability of a system to resolve fine detail?

PM: I think they go hand in hand. As you correctly mention, levels of volume and tonal balance – all controlled in the mix – are important, but system setup and its resolving power are essential to get right or none of that will matter a whole lot. 

FD: Why did you choose the soundstage as the second volume in The Art of Hi-Fi (after Volume 1: Bass) instead of, say, dynamic range or tonal accuracy? I personally would love to see you do a volume on the latter – tonal balance is important to me and figuring out if a recording has an accurate tonal balance can be maddening.

PM: It’s a great question and the easiest answer is that I am fascinated and enamored with soundstaging in a system. It’s my first go-to, to get everything right. It’s how I tell whether a new design works or doesn’t work. It’s the single most important element in a system to me personally. Tonal balance is important but I am struggling to figure out how I might present that if not by a series of comparison tracks. And maybe that’s what we do, but for now, I am a little clueless how to create such an album and keep it worth listening to as an entire work that you can just put on and enjoy. Maybe you can’t?

FD: It seems to me that audiophiles got obsessed with the idea of soundstaging after Harry Pearson started talking about it in The Absolute Sound around the mid-1970s if I recall correctly. Is this what you remember? And I think many reviewers and audiophiles came to chase soundstaging at the expense of other attributes in an audio system.

PM: Well, you’re not wrong. In fact, it was Harry Pearson himself who got me so revved up about soundstaging. Stan Warren and I had already discovered it on our own using our Maggies (Magneplanar loudspeakers) and our electronics, but I had never really known what was possible – not until Harry dropped my jaw with the Infinity IRS III speakers. I remember listening to “The Look of Love” (from the Casino Royale original soundtrack album) and hearing for the first time ever, how Dusty Springfield was so obviously in an isolation booth. How did I hear that? Through soundstaging. The orchestra was clearly in a big room, but when Dusty started singing, I could tell the room size changed dramatically. It was a real revelation.

Back in Issue 122 and Issue 123, I had gone into the concept of loudness in the articles “How Loud Is a Record” and “Eight Decades of Wrong Assumptions: the Loudness Wars.” Today, I am going to go into a somewhat related topic, which is that of signal levels. This topic is complicated enough to require an entire book dedicated to it, leather-bound and letterpress printed, to really do it justice. As such, I will narrow it down to a discussion of signal levels on popular music distribution formats and will entirely skip the more involved concepts such as LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) and so on.

When recording audio signals onto any medium, metering and describing signal levels is a very important part of the process. If done properly at the production end and assuming that properly-engineered playback equipment is used, and the equipment used at the listening end is compatible with each other (some bold assumptions to be making in this sector), the average consumer may never need to worry about or have any understanding of signal levels. The serious listener, however, or those who may be using professional audio equipment at home, may wish to understand how signal levels apply to their enjoyment of recorded music.

Sounds in real life are a localized modulation of the atmospheric pressure caused by acoustic disturbances. The lower limit of signal levels in acoustic phenomena has been defined as the average threshold of audibility of the human auditory system, described as 0 dBSL, which corresponds to a pressure of 20 µPa (micropascals). This is our reference for sound pressure level (SPL). Leaves in the wind in an otherwise quiet surrounding read approximately 20 dB SPL, an airplane taking off would register around 120 dB SPL, and go on.

But is there an upper limit? Not in any real natural terms. Sound can get loud enough to cause pain, discomfort, serious injury, permanent damage, or even death. Sonic weapons have been in development for a long while and the numbers in the dB SPL scale will far exceed the levels at which anyone reasonable would listen to music. As such, the dB SPL scale has a lower limit but no upper limit. Technically, even the lower limit is not strict, as the numbers can be negative, but it probably won’t be audible anymore. The dynamic range of sound possible in terms of physics and acoustics exceeds the capabilities of the human auditory system and far exceeds the capabilities of sound recording and reproduction.

Basking in the glow of VU meters: a familiar sight to probably every Copper reader. Here's a TASCAM 122 MK II and 122 MK III, courtesy of Agnew Analog Reference Instruments.

Once sound has been converted to electricity after being picked up by a microphone, it becomes an AC signal. A common reference in the electrical realm is the dBu, with 0 dBu corresponding to 0.775 VRMS (volts RMS). This is neither an upper nor a lower limit. In the electrical world, signals can go much higher up than 0 dBu (or +4 dBu, which is a common studio reference), and also much lower. The audio signals can become so low as to become entirely buried within the inherent noise floor of the electronic circuit they are passing through. At that point, the audio signals are no longer recoverable, so this becomes a lower limit. However, each electronic circuit has a different noise floor, so this lower limit is left undefined. It will depend on the equipment being used. Ideally, the equipment used at the recording and mastering stage will have a much lower noise floor than the equipment used by the consumer at home, so the ultimate noise floor would be limited by your choice of playback equipment and not by the recording itself. Ideally, that is, in very much the same way that people holding any kind of public office should ideally not be corrupt.

The upper limit is also not defined. Essentially, one could keep on increasing the electrical signal level up until the electronic circuit starts to clip the signal. But even this is sometimes done on purpose to enhance the sound in the process of music production, with the most popular example being guitar amplifiers.

Simplified illustration of signal clipping. When an amplifier (or device) can't pass the signal without distortion, clipping occurs, so named because it looks like the peaks of the waveforms are cut off. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Gutten på Hemsen.

One could increase signal levels even further, to the point that the electronic circuit is entirely destroyed. That would be a pretty hard limit. However, each electronic circuit will exhibit a different clipping point and a different damage threshold. As such, an upper point cannot be easily defined. We can go much higher and much lower than the electrical dBu reference, which is just a reference for convenience of measurement.

The electrical signal, with only a nominal level and undefined upper and lower limits, will subsequently need to be recorded onto a convenient storage medium.

This is where things get interesting. Storage is no longer part of the electrical realm. Signal levels can no longer be described using an electrical reference.

First came the mechanical grooved disk (aka the shellac, then the vinyl record of today), where signal amplitude is proportional to stylus velocity. The reference there is essentially miles per hour, but arranged in metric measurements and the more convenient format of cm/s (centimeters per second). The correct SI units would have been m/s, but the numbers would look daunting. The most common reference was established by the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) and was a peak lateral velocity of 7 cm/s at 1 kHz, which equals an RMS lateral velocity of 5 cm/s, again at 1 kHz.

As with dBu, this is neither a maximum nor a minimum. The minimum would be the point where the signal disappears under the noise floor of the medium, which, in the absence of serious defects, is the random signal generated by the playback stylus tracing the individual molecules of the material the record is made of. Different materials and different stylus geometries have different noise floors. To further complicate matters, the noise floor is not linear with frequency. The lower limit, therefore, remains undefined.

The upper limit is also not linear with frequency, which means that at different frequencies, the maximum level capability is different. As with the lower limit, there is no hard upper limit on disk records. A limit can be reached in one of several ways.

If the duration of the recording on one side of a record is long, the grooves need to be packed closer together (recording pitch), and especially at the lower frequencies, one groove could even have the possibility of cutting into the neighboring groove. Even if the duration of the material permits a wide spacing of the grooves, very high levels at low frequencies could cause the playback stylus to jump out of the groove (which is technically a playback limitation, as the cutting stylus and cutter head will have successfully recorded that information onto the disk). At high frequencies, velocities could get so extreme as to render it impossible for the playback stylus to trace the groove, either due to geometric constraints or to inertia, or both. Extreme signals at low frequencies could mechanically damage the cutter head and at very high levels at high frequencies, the drive coils can melt due to excessive temperature being reached.

The FloKaSon Reference Series TestDisk-001. Courtesy of FloKaSon.

Between 1 to 3 kHz, where our hearing is most sensitive, (please refer to the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness contours for further reading on this phenomenon) the usable range between the noise floor and the loudest signal that can be recorded and successfully played back can reach 120 dB. At low and high frequencies this figure is reduced.

In the next episode, we will look at the minimum and maximum of signal levels encountered in magnetic tape recording.

Header image: Waves Audio VU meter plug-in. Courtesy of Waves Audio.

If popularity is a sign of importance, one peek around the show floor at a CanJam, Capital Audiofest, or NAMM show makes clear how important headphones manufacturer Audeze has become. Over a relatively few years, they have become one of the best-known companies in audio. So devoted are Audeze fans, folks have full-sized tattoos of their headphones, pictures of which are often sent to the company. I first heard one of their planar magnetic models in 2014 at a Pepcom press event in New York City. It was their then-new and revolutionary EL-8, the first headphones on the market to have an Apple Lightning connection, complete with a DAC in the cable.

The EL-8 was launched just before the introduction of the iPhone 7, which was the first phone to drop the headphone jack. Forbes actually wrote an article saying that the EL-8 was proof that Apple was removing the jack. The rumor mill went into overdrive, but Audeze actually had no inside knowledge of that move. However, they were credited as being ahead of the curve, something that founder Sankar Thiagasamudram finds funny to this day. The real reason they created the Apple Lightning cable was that Audeze felt that Bluetooth wasn’t up to the necessary audio standards. 

Audiophiles weren’t going to use Bluetooth as the chipsets weren’t up to snuff at that point, yet Audeze recognized they needed to attract new users. By using the Lightning port, they could showcase their headphones to audiophiles, with no hit on the audio quality. It was purely serendipitous that Apple subsequently dropped the headphone jack, which was great news to Audeze, who was struggling to get the word out about their company, which had its beginnings in 2008.

The EL-8 was unlike any headphones I’d ever seen. They didn’t look like earlier Audeze models, which my wife Nancy thought resembled waffles on the sides of your head – a decidedly un-sexy look. By comparison, the EL-8 were gorgeous and sleek, designed in collaboration with BMW. Plus, they had that crazy new Audeze Cipher Lightning Cable with integrated DAC and amplifier.

Even though the first years of Audeze were like more of a hobby, in 2014 they were poised to make it a real company. The sound of their headphones was open and clean, with the fastest response I’d ever heard. There were only three companies I knew at the time who were making that sort of planar magnetic driver, the others being Fostex, and HIFIMAN. (Copper’s John Seetoo interviewed HIFIMAN founder Dr. Fang Bian in Issue 137.) Now of course there are scores of folks who have jumped on the planar bandwagon, but at that time there were two pioneers in the consumer audiophile space, with Audeze being one of them.

Planars weren’t unheard of. Yamaha had planar magnetic-driver headphones in the 1970s, but they didn’t take off. Fostex later came out with both a planar microphone and headphones, which users loved to modify, and that are still manufactured to this day. (On a side note, Mark Cohen was then VP of sales for Fostex, later joining Audeze in 2013. When it seems that everyone in audio knows each other, it’s not just a perception.)

On a personal level, I’ve gotten to know co-founder Sankar Thiagasamudram, which has been an unexpected pleasure. I feel I have a better understanding of what drives him, as well as what Audeze is trying to accomplish. Spending time talking with him is immensely enjoyable and our conversations veer from subject to subject as hours slip by.

Sankar Thiagasamudram in the Audeze offices.

The thing about thinking about audio reproduction is that it sometimes requires non-linear thinking. Successful audio engineers and innovators often bring a wide variety of questions and pursuits to the table. Listener psychology, fit and finish, aesthetics, perceived value, engineering, pride of ownership – every consideration – everything is on the table during the creation of a new product.

It’s not just market forces that compel companies to continually introduce snazzy new products; for serious companies it’s about making sure that refinements to their products consist of more than a new logo or color scheme. One gets a sense there is a certain joy in the “what if we tried this?” ethos that’s in the air at Audeze. Sankar is keenly aware of the competition, and in what differentiates their products from others. He also has an ear on future trends. One of those trends is the trickle-down theory as applied to audio, maybe the only example of trickle-down theory that has actually proven to work. In audio as in technology, what were once found in incredibly expensive products have become more affordable.

While Audeze has headphones that sell for thousands of dollars, among their most eagerly-awaited models are those that will sell for a few hundred dollars, such as the upcoming Manny Marroquin-inspired MM-100 planar magnetic headphones set to retail for $399, or the Maxwell planar magnetic wireless gaming headset at $299. (Marroquin is a multiple-Grammy-award-winning mixing engineer.) Sankar promised a loaner set of the MM-100 so I can compare them to their more expensive audiophile parent, the MM-500. In my initial listening to the MM-100, audio trickle-down is alive and well, as the MM-100 and Maxwell were both seriously good-sounding headphones. One of my favorite Audeze headphones is the company’s older LCD-1, which were also only 399 bucks, and the MM-100 is its replacement. I just love listening to the LCD-1s. They were like a great, but not fancy or expensive bourbon, and being smaller and lighter, I often took them traveling.

From the MM-100 to the top-of-the-line $4,500 CRBN electrostatic headphones, every single driver used in Audeze headphones is born right here in their factory. Over the past couple of years Sankar had invited me to visit him at their facility in Santa Ana, California, and finally I was able to take him up on his offer. Audeze’s home is an unprepossessing commercial building, a few minutes from the 55 freeway, which is one of the busiest roadways in California. 

When I got to the building, I couldn’t figure out a way in. The front door was blocked with two large steel- and concrete-filled security barriers. Eventually I remembered that the entrance was on the side near the parking lot. There was indeed a door, next to a Tesla happily charging away. 

I found Sankar, busy on a phone call. He gestured that it was OK to wander around. It was later in the afternoon so the factory was pretty quiet, but there were still folks working, so I had a chance to peek at this, peek at that, and view different products in every state of completion. Sankar found me, and apologized for me having to go in the side door. It turns out there was a very good reason the security barriers were there, which was to prevent “smash and grab” robberies through the glass front of the building. I’m going to digress a little here, but it’s to address some issues that readers may not be aware of, which is that the industry is affected by crime and the theft of intellectual property.

As an example, in 2016, someone backed up a van to Audeze’s loading dock with so much force, it knocked down the actual metal frame of the entire loading dock, which as it fell totaled Mark Cohen’s new Mercedes SL550, which he had parked inside the dock to keep it safe while he attended the 2016 CanJam New York. The thieves went on to steal several pallets of completed headphones. I was amazed. I mean, we were minutes from John Wayne Airport, Irvine, and Costa Mesa, and Lido Isle and Newport Beach are only a few miles away. Audeze was located in an everyday commercial business park. Seriously, robbery? Criminal gangs?

Sankar, who was telling me the story after he’d gotten off the phone, looked at me and said, “No, it’s not a joke, this is absolutely real.”

We both walked over to a metal door with a small 1-inch hole in it, covered with tape. A few feet away was a three-foot-square patch over another hole. He told me a story of how a gang from Fresno, (where there recently had been a huge bust of drug cartel members in scores of houses) drove down to burgle a Sephora, which they did by stealing a van stocked with new merchandise, and afterwards targeted Audeze. Why? There are no headphone-sniffing dogs yet, Audeze is a known high-end luxury brand, and headphones are small, easy to move, and in high demand. So, the small hole was drilled by the gang, and they had inserted a flexible video camera to scope out the area to spot any video cameras or motion sensors. These were well-equipped pros, so once they determined the coast was clear, they cut the access hole in the metal door and went in.

Sankar pointing out the hole that burglars drilled to insert an endoscopic video camera.

Unfortunately for their dastardly plans, they didn’t notice a motion sensor directly over the door, and when they entered the alarms went off, so they grabbed a handful of headphones and took flight. Amazingly, the gang were caught by the California Highway Patrol, as the van’s license number had been captured on security cameras during the Sephora heist, and they nailed the crooks. It was kind of surreal, even though I suppose Audeze could take this as a backhanded black humor kind of compliment. Sankar explained they had lost entire pallets of headphones from three different robberies, hence the barriers and increased security.

The panel that burglars cut out of the metal door to avoid triggering the contact sensors.

He discussed another threat to his company and the industry in general. It’s a scam where buyers purchase real Audeze headphones, open the box, and replace them with cheesy, obviously fake counterfeit knockoffs. Then the scammers return the headphones to Amazon, which are then sent to Audeze. The scammer gets the real headphones, Audeze gets a fake pair in return, and the money’s already been refunded to the scammer by Amazon. This is not unique to Audeze, it’s widespread and other companies have similar problems.

Another problem is companies who basically pick and choose bits of existing products, manufacture a new product based on ripped-off technology, and undercut the real companies. What irks so many manufacturers are the reviewers and consumers who don’t recognize that some of these products aren’t the sellers’ inventions, but taken from the original companies’ hard-earned tech. To attack this problem, Amazon has created its Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (https://brandservices.amazon.com/anticounterfeitingexchange).

All that aside, touring the Audeze factory was a great experience. The employees I met were friendly and happy to show me around, and show off what they were working on. I learned that there are several families with multiple members and relatives at the company. One extremely interesting aspect was seeing driver diaphragms created from carbon nanotubes impregnated on an impossibly thin, feather-light driver film, light enough to float in the air. Talk about a low-mass, fast-response material!  One of the advantages of using carbon nanotube technology is that the material is non-ferrous, meaning it’s safe for use in an MRI machine. Audeze has been working with the UCLA SEMEL Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior to develop headphones that will provide noise reduction as well as the ability to listen to music while enduring an MRI. Having had several MRIs myself, I really hope this makes it to market soon.

Sankar holding up the ultra-thin and lightweight conductive film with carbon nanotubes embedded inside the film used in their CRBN headphones. It is probably the thinnest film in a production headphone or microphone.

To demonstrate how lightweight the carbon nanotube-embedded film is, Sankar watches as the film floats in the air.

Sankar showing the CRBN electrostatic diaphragm assembly.

Patricia “Feny” Quintero measuring drivers for quality control.

Milca Santana holding a laser-etched driver.

Santana holding a completed driver for testing.

Custom-built machine (a modified 3D printer) for assembling Maxwell headphones.

Christian Quintero testing etched driver film. And yes, Patricia "Feny" Quintero is his sister!

Hanh Thong Nguyen performing preliminary driver matching.

At each step of manufacturing at Audeze were quality control stations where each driver was tested, over and over. It really amazed me that Audeze can produces the amount of product it does. In fact, Audeze is one of the largest producers of flexible printed circuit boards (PCBs) in the country. Also, rather than using acid etching, a toxic process, to make the circuit traces for their PCBs, Audeze has patented an entirely different approach, using high-powered specialty lasers to etch the films, thus ensuring drivers with an extremely high degree of consistency. Every driver, from the lowest- to the highest-priced, is made using this process. (Every Audeze driver goes through the same quality control process, but the ones designed for their lower-cost headphones are sent overseas for assembly into finished products.) The more expensive Audeze lines are completely built in the US.

Jose Perez, team lead for PCB etching, with Sankar.

Driver parts waiting for assembly. 

Maria Matilde Koerber performing final visual quality control checks. 

Sankar in front of the vacuum deposition chamber, showing an example of 0.5-micron copper deposited onto a 1.6-micron film.

If you want to use a vacuum chamber, plan on supplying some specialized gases for it.

On display were scores of gorgeous wooden frames, head-frame assemblies, cables, rivets, earpads, and other parts. The new Manny Marroquin-inspired MM-500 planar magnetic headphones that I’m currently reviewing were built right here in the USA. They are quite simply fantastic headphones. Personally, I think they should be heard by every audiophile and studio engineer.

I was also able to listen to their top-of-the-line CRBN electrostatic headphones, using a variety of amps in their listening room, and they are among the best headphones I’ve ever heard, a view shared by many other reviewers. Sankar asked if I’d be interested in trying them for a week, along with the new, inexpensive ($399) Topping EHA5 Electrostatic Headphone Amplifier. Audeze had just purchased an EHA5 for testing, in fact, the first one sold in the US from China. If there is an issue with electrostatic headphones it’s often the expensive and bulky amplifier needed to power them.

A box of gleaming golden goodness: wood rings for the LCD headphones. Manufactured in Oxnard, CA, they are ready for assembly.

This was one of the listening stations set up for the CRBN headphones, with an iPad using Qobuz, a Woo Audio ES8 headphone amp/preamp, and a Denafrips Terminator II DAC.

If Topping’s unit turns out to be good, it could be a game changer for folks wishing to try that technology. The incredibly quick response of electrostatic diaphragms is a huge reason for electrostatic headphones’ devoted following, along with their light weight, which makes them a pleasure to wear for extended periods. The downside of course, are the large, expensive, and often heavy amplifiers needed to power them (for example, the HIFIMAN Jade II amplifier weighs 14.3 lbs.). And this is where it gets interesting. Due to the CRBN’s nanotube driver construction, the headphones can operate using a 200-volt power supply instead of the industry-standard 580 volts, thus opening the possibility of an entirely new generation of portable electrostatic headphones and amplifiers with Audeze leading the charge, high voltage pun intended. To date, Audeze hasn’t been able to find anyone interested in creating a new amplifier with the lower-voltage option, but hopefully it will happen.

Wonder where Audeze headphones get burned in? Right here. They are subjected to another round of quality control after burn in, to ensure they meet specs.

Audeze products ready for shipping.

I think everyone who is serious about their audio gear should have the opportunity to visit the manufacturer. It’s enlightening to see how many different and often unique parts are required for what might seem at first glance to be a not-too-complex final product. The chain of events required to design, prototype, source, create, test, assemble, test again, and make sure the fit and finish are perfect is incredibly complicated. There is a great deal of custom-built and specialized “invented here” tools, templates, jigs and fixtures and other hardware and processes required to manufacture a product that we might be quite blasé about, not realizing how many hardworking people, with supply chains all around the planet contributing, allow a product to emerge. To create and innovate new approaches also means figuring out how to turn an idea into an assembly line-ready creation. Watching the Audeze staff handcrafting and manufacturing every component was inspiring and humbling, especially knowing that their creations would soon be in use all over the globe.

For more information about Audeze, please visit https://www.audeze.com.

Audeze
3412 S. Susan St.
Santa Ana, California 92704
714-581-8010
support@audeze.com

Header image: Sankar Thiagasamudram pointing out a detail on a pair of MM-100 planar magnetic headphones, featuring a brushed aluminum body and magnesium grille. All images courtesy of the author.

Many years ago, when I was just 19, I started taking guitar lessons from a great friend of mine, to whom I am eternally grateful for his influence and input into the joy I have been able to derive from listening to music, as well as from my humble attempts at playing. I remember asking him on one occasion: what it was that he liked most about a particular piece? As you may imagine, as a guitar player and guitar teacher, his response was that he really enjoyed the guitar parts, the rhythm and lead solo parts.

What was perhaps more interesting and less obvious was what he also told me: he never really listened to the lyrics and keyboard parts. Initially I thought that made perfectly good sense, as I realized guitar was where his primarily focus laid. To be able to teach the parts both he and his students desired to learn, the most significant aspects of the music, for him, would then gain the greatest attention and the rest would be attenuated by the brain, consciously and likely also subconsciously after teaching for so many years.

In some ways I thought this was both masterfully brilliant, but also a little bit of a shame. On the one hand it was an enviable skill that could help you to drill down into a piece of music and pull it apart – a deconstructive mindset that could literally help you hear into the music. I was and in fact remain greatly impressed by this ability, not to mention the speed at which he could pick out the guitar parts in a recording.

It was also a loss in some ways, as the beauty of some meaningful lyrics could be lost in the ether. Some musicians compose their song with the bass line first (Sheryl Crow and Sting, as examples) others with a catchy melody or a rhythm part they have worked out, or even perhaps they might even start with a cool solo idea and work back from there. Significantly though, for most songwriters, the lyrics convey a story and set of emotions which for some listeners define the song’s real meaning.

I know that for myself, I really love instrumental music for its freedom from any predefined and prescriptive meaning. I love the places music without words can take you to in your own imagination. Perhaps lyrics can actually make a song more mundane. The potential for an abstracted and personalised form like instrumental music triggers for me an interpolative process that is freeing and creative. I am often in awe of musicians who can take you along with them on those projected journeys, as they have harnessed the ability to tell a story without words. The ability to add your own colors to a visualization of a piece of music is somehow very sympathetic to how our brains like to be creatively interpolative and expand outwards; to grow. On the other hand, when the lyrics to a song combine to match up, that too can be extra special.

Evelyn Glennie (more about her below). Courtesy of Philip Rathmer (and Brigitte).

This is not to say that lyrics prevent your imagination from working, but rather to make the observation that how we listen is perhaps most often subjected to a process that is by nature a selective one. After all, we like to hear what we prefer to hear. Whether it’s commendation or genuine praise for good work, right through to playing our favorite music, we develop preferences for these things. I once heard from a famous bass guitar player that we most often play 20 percent of our music collection about 80 percent of the time. So, again, we have selectivity right from the get go.

No wonder it’s challenging breaking into the music industry as a new artist. According to those figures, we would rather listen to what we already know and love. Triggering familiarity with selection bias is another reinforcement process that strengthens our lasting emotional bonds.

The trouble with being so selective is that we may miss out on other things. In part, these are the sentiments of Steven Wilson’s mostly-instrumental track Regret#9 from the album Hand. Cannot. Erase, when discussing the success of his career as an engineer and producer at the expense of other things in life. Check out Guthrie Govan’s emotive solo at 6:21:

We can choose how we hear a piece of music, actively and passively at the same time to varying degrees. We can be technically analytical and perhaps more emotionally disengaged, or we can be emotionally open and ignore the technical aspects of a song or piece of music, or of course experience a blend between the two. I often find that the first time I listen to a new piece of music or watch a film, it seems longer than subsequent repeats as I am both less analytical and more familiar on the second listen or viewing. For me, letting the technicality go and passively enjoying the wash of music is truly a sublime thing. It’s like taking in a stunning glowing sunset without having to set up, analyse the light conditions and photograph it. This pleasure can be easily lost with an overly critical disposition. The cool thing is that we can put our focus where we choose, albeit maybe at the expense of something else.

Perhaps it is not so much that less is more, but rather that how we focus can give us more appreciation for what we listen to. A streamlining of our listening. Consider the examples of blind musicians Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. Or Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf. Then consider the limitations of Django Reinhardt, who played all his guitar solos with just the index and middle fingers of his left hand and used his two injured fingers only to play chords.

Evelyn’s example is one I want to highlight. Why? Because she listens to music with her whole body and not her ears. I’m not suggesting that any of us may achieve her abilities by simply taking our shoes off and feeling the vibrations in our feet, (although, have you tried it?), but can we broaden the ways in which we enjoy music? Surely, those of us with varying hearing abilities can try to tap into this holistic idea of experiencing music. “Listen” with all of your bones, not just the hammer, anvil and stirrup of the ear. After all, it’s much easier to hear than it is to be a genuinely good listener. Feel the sound pressure dynamics on your skin. Remove all distractions and perhaps listen with a more open mind to different genres.

Here is Evelyn’s excellent TED talk, entitled “How to Truly Listen”:

You’ll never get a trouser-flapping experience or visceral punch from headphones. On the other hand, they do have their place for delivering a cerebral and emotionally-engaging private experience. They may have the ability to nourish your mind and soul, but will never – literally – resonate with your body the way that, say, listening to a live band will, while sharing the experience of the band members as they work so hard in performing for an audience.

Even without such an extreme comparison, notice in this video below the observable effect that music has on water. Just imagine how your body is responding when listening to a well-set-up stereo system.

Amazing Water and Sound Experiment #2:

Amazing Resonance Experiment!

We should do all we can to deepen our appreciation for music, and we can achieve that by consciously shifting our focus, and having more awareness of how music impacts our bodies. It can result in greater satisfaction, and in continually developing our skills as discerning listeners.

Header image: Evelyn Glennie, courtesy of Andy McCreeth.

Copper has an exchange program with FIDELITY magazine (and others), where we share articles, including this one, between publications.

Simply unbreakable: the High End 2023 broke all records – both in terms of visitor numbers and exhibitors. Our authors were in the halls of the Munich M.O.C. on all days of the fair and have recorded their impressions for you. Part One: all about analog.

How’s analog music playback doing? If you take the High End 2023 as a benchmark, you can only conclude: better than ever. 41 years after the introduction of the CD and 15 years after the launch of Spotify, record players could be seen as far as the eye could see. And they were used as reference signal sources to push the not infrequently six-figure-priced amplifiers and loudspeakers of the exhibitors who had come from all over the world to their performance limits. It felt like vinyl was rotating in every other room, and that much can be said: it was a good thing. Vinyl has come back to stay.

 

The Trends of High End 2023

After perusing four exhibition halls and two atriums, including adjacent aisles, trends emerge. The Stabi R turntable from the Slovenian manufacturer Kuzma, for example, can claim the title of “Work Device of the Year.” The key to its success is that the monolithic turntable is not only compact and robust, it also allows a wide variety of tonearms to be mounted without any problems.

 

Trend Number 2: Curves

One RIAA for all – those days are over. Anyone who builds a serious phono stage today offers a choice of several equalization curves. The topic is complex, historically exciting and by no means uncontroversial. With new equalizers such as the elaborate equipment miracle GM-Phono V.3 from the Italian manufacturer Faber’s Power or the Gold Note PH-5, which is very affordable despite touchscreen operating comfort, even laymen can make up their own minds whether their old discs sound better with equalization to Decca or Columbia.

Trend Number 3: The Digitization Of The Turntable

No longer a real novelty this year, the news is more that people have become accustomed to the Bluetooth antenna or RJ45 jack on a turntable. Every manufacturer whose product range starts in the low to mid three-digit price range has at least one such device on offer. In the interest of accessibility and connectivity, definitely a good decision.

 

Trend Number 4: Tonearms With Air-Bearings

Once an exotic technology, rare and expensive, this time I noticed two other suppliers besides the established Danish analog specialist Bergmann that are making this technology available to a wider audience: Pre-Audio from Poland and Holbo from Slovenia. Both manufacturers also have an air bearing for the turntable in their program, but at Pre-Audio it is only found in the top model GL-1102AN. Holbo has only one turntable in the program, but it is completely air-bearing and was introduced this year in a visually slightly updated version.

 

Also with air, but otherwise in every respect a league of its own: the new air-bearing rotary tonearm (!) Air Force 10 from TechDAS. The Japanese manufacturer presented the enormously elaborate design, in which an air bearing for the horizontal movement is combined with a ceramic ball bearing for the vertical, to the public for the first time in Munich. Sales are scheduled to start at the end of 2023.

 

Lots Of Premieres

In general, numerous new tonearms had their premiere at the HIGH END 2023. At Brinkmann, the new long version of the “small” 10.0 tonearm was on display, simply called the 12.0 in keeping with the manufacturer’s naming convention. Jürgen Reichmann proudly showed samples of the first tonearm for a brand new turntable from the British manufacturer Musical Fidelity, which had previously specialized in electronics. The sales director himself contributed his analog expertise to the design and raved about the sonic properties of the steel arm tube.

 

Zavfino from the U.S. got support from Germany: Helmut Thiele, who recently caused a sensation with a tangentially scanning rotary tonearm, designed an optically simple, classic gimbal tonearm exclusively for the Americans. A newcomer, on the other hand, is Supatrac from the United Kingdom. The Blackbird tonearm is (so far) the only product from the London-based manufacturer. It features a clever bearing design that explicitly uses the tensile force acting on the pickup to stabilize it and thus aims to achieve excellent pickup capability.

 

Luxman and Ortofon

And then two really big names had new tonearms ready: Luxman and Ortofon. The Danish cartridge specialist presented the successors of the proven TA-110 and TA-210 duo named AS-212R (9 inch) and AS-309R (12 inch). The new ones are built entirely in-house and are given the suffix “Reference” as a sign of the very highest sonic standards. Accordingly, they were also presented: mounted on a noble TechDAS drive, with the in-house top MC Diamond in the removable headshell. Luxman teamed up with Japanese specialist SAEC, and the result of the cooperation is a custom-made tonearm complement to the PD-191A turntable, which is also new, called LTA-710 – an elegant ten-incher with a steel blade bearing.

 

For those who want to get the most out of their records and can afford the pleasure, the HIGH END 2023 had some goodies in store. First and foremost, the ne plus ultra drive GMT One System from Wilson Benesch. I can still remember its first presentation four years ago. Now the turntable with the highly complex “Omega Drive” drive, for the development of which even state subsidies flowed and university professors were involved, and the matching tone arm are finally ready.

Clock Connection On A Turntable?

Monster drive, the second: The Esoteric Grandioso T1 is to my knowledge the first drive with clock input. Here, too, we are not content with common drive systems. The in-house development is called “MagneDrive System” and can best be described as a friction drive without friction wheel. The 19-kilogram platter is rotated by an inductive and thus contactless drive spindle.

 

Monster drive, the third: Thorens has a Reference again. The fact that a classic Reference from 1979 looks almost dainty next to the new one is due to development partner Seismion, a German company specializing in decoupling highly sensitive laboratory equipment. For Thorens’ top model, they designed a fully integrated decoupling solution, the efficiency of which was visually demonstrated at the trade show via an app display. A nice reference to the past, because even the Ur-Reference was designed as a measuring drive and hung weighted with lead shot on four large conical springs.

 

Monster Drive, The Fourth

Oswald’s Mill Audio introduced the little brother K5 of the ingenious big K3, which was already teased last year. In the only slightly plainer aluminum housing from the workshop of New Zealander Richard Krebs, a scaled-down version of the direct drive from the big brother is at work here. The developer credibly assured that the synchronization values reach the limits of what can be measured. The matching tonearm is an exclusively custom-made design by Frank Schröder. The Berliner, known for his original technical solutions, had already designed the iconic Tragwerk arm for the K3.

 

There was no shortage of other analog high-end gems. Mat Weisfeld, the son of company founder Harry Weisfeld, personally presented the new large direct-drive turntable with the only appropriate name Titan. Nagra had the brand new HD Phono phono preamplifier on hand – with, of course, the option to choose between several equalization curves. Dartzeel CEO Hervé Delétraz enthusiastically described the fulfillment of a long-held dream: the development of a proprietary phono cartridge.

Easy Going

The award for the most casual presentation goes to analog veteran Arthur Khoubesserian. The Brit (Pink Triangle, Funk Firm) demonstrated about vintage Philips speakers, active boxes with motion feedback, an Ebay find, “900 euros including subwoofer,” he reported proudly. The subject of his demonstrations: isolating the playback process from unwanted external influences. The name of the project, which includes a plate mat, decoupling feet and a decoupling plate for the headshell: Isolation Bubble. The headshell plate is called Houdini, by the way.

 

At Rega, the focus was on the extremes. For analog beginners, the British full-range manufacturer has put together a small analog system called Rega System One, consisting of the Planar 1 turntable with Carbon cartridge, the io integrated amplifier and the Kyte compact speakers. The package price of 1299 euros even includes three Stereometer speaker cables. At the other end of the spectrum is the new Naia turntable top model. Feeling like it’s made of only the absolutely necessary amount of carbon, ceramic, and aluminum, the turntable is a direct variation on the non-series-production extreme-turner Naiad, which pushed Rega’s lightweight philosophy to the extreme limits a few years ago.

Vinyl Mainstream

There is so much that is new from Pro-Ject that only the outstanding projects outside the vinyl mainstream will be touched upon here: a turntable full of funny ideas for the 50th anniversary of the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side Of The Moon, including a backlit rainbow and a light beam serving as a power switch; a homage to the Japanese cult brand Micro Seiki called RPM 12, a very faithful direct drive with three tonearm bases; an unusually luxurious by Pro-Ject standards, “Signature 12.2” named large turntable with a likewise new, elaborate tonearm. This turntable would have fit just as well into the portfolio of the noble sister brand EAT – although they have already moved on and entered a new market segment with an impressive range of individually available tonearms.

 

Hand Crafted at the High End 2023

There were also exciting analog innovations that flew under the radar. At the vintage-loving Koreans of Silbatone, as usual, no one talked about the electronics that made the massive, nearly 100-year-old Kino horns sound so stunning. But in fact they had a new version of the SQ-100R phono equalizer in use (RIAA only!), which is now equipped with silver transducers from Silvercore in Leipzig.

 

In the same room, the South Korean opera singer Dong-Bum Kim (“Analogtechnik”), who lives in Zwickau, exhibited his superbly crafted pickups in the style of Neumann’s legendary DST pickups. In several excellently-sounding rooms, for example at Living Voice, Oswalds Mill Audio or Silbatone, the MC transformers by Consolidated Audio from Berlin, which have in the meantime also received international attention, were to be found. Those who found the demonstration room of high-end veteran Heiner Basil Martion could even experience there the prototype of an extremely elaborate Consolidated Audio phono equalizer built with the finest tubes and hand-wound transformers.

 

The Smart Bellini

Keyword Germany: Clearaudio took time out again this year and presented itself at an in-house exhibition. Transrotor had the Bellini turntable at the start, a mid-range rotary with TMD bearing, which – yes, this is indeed a novelty, and an enormously practical one at that – is now also available with an acrylic cover. With hinges! And Munich’s only high-end turntable and tonearm manufacturer Willibald Bauer? The maker of the dps turntable welcomed visitors away from the hustle and bustle in the quiet of his store in the southwest of the city.

 

And then there were the analog accessories. There was a vinyl smoother from Taiwan by the manufacturer Tien Audio to discover, which, in addition to the obligatory heating, relies on vacuum instead of a lay-on weight – so that the record is smoothed more gently. And the turntable manufacturer AMG had new phono cables with them. How thoroughly this topic is taken care of there is shown by the remark at the end of my visit to the AMG booth: They are simply not satisfied with the tonearm plugs available on the market. They will soon be designing their own.

 

www.highendsociety.de

The stated retail price of the reviewed device is valid as of the time of the review and is subject to change.

All images courtesy of FIDELITY.

Quirky yet raucous, the music of Resurrectionists is precisely what the doctor ordered if a prescription of heavy doses of punk-meets-alt-rock is what you're after.

Still, Resurrectionists hail from the Midwest – Milwaukee, Wisconsin specifically. So, if you thought you'd make it through the band's latest studio effort, Now That We Are All Ghosts, without healthy doses of Americana sprinkled throughout, that’s not what you’ll hear.

But that doesn't mean Joe Cannon and his band of maybe not-so-merry men are going full-on folk on us. And it doesn't mean they’re reinventing the wheel, either. If you've dug into what Resurrectionists have done before, you'll be right at home with Now That We Are All Ghosts. Sure, there are shiny and new touches peppered in, but what I like best is the familiar feeling this record gives me.

Resurrectionists, Now That We Are All Ghosts, album cover.

I say that knowing there are plenty of musical moments where Now That We Are All Ghosts took me into territories unknown. Moreover, there are sounds here that make the band's soundscape pretty damn striking, to be honest. And so, I suppose the best way to describe Now That We Are All Ghosts is that there’s a duality between the fresh and the familiar, in all the best ways possible.

In support of Now That We Are All Ghosts, Resurrectionists’ guitarist, banjoist and vocalist Joe Cannon beamed in with Copper to dig into the band's history, the writing and recording of their latest record, his thoughts on the ever-present “cringe factor,” and what's next as he moves ahead.

Andrew Daly: What can you tell me about Now That We Are All Ghosts?

Joe Cannon: It's great! You should listen to it! No, but seriously, I have a tough time with questions like this because the music we're playing is both a product of decades of listening, writing, and playing on my own and with lots of other people, and a reflection of a particular moment in time. It's really hard to disentangle the two.

AD: How did Resurrectionists form?

JC: I've played music for a very long time in a stupid variety of idioms. But it's all been influenced by a “punk” approach to writing and performing, which I'd define as a suspicion of rules, expected structures, and obvious gestures.

In this sense, my ideal punk bands are probably The Ex and Cheer-Accident, though the latter band would never call themselves punk. This band came out of those instincts, set to a desire to dive into my love of old weird American music because my true punk idol is Dock Boggs.

AD: How have you progressed? And what is your current approach to composing?

JC: We had a significant lineup change since the last record, swapping out a pedal steel player for a magnificent weirdo [Gian Pogliano] who plays alternatively atmospheric and noisy 12-string guitar and Mellotron.

Compositionally it has become more collaborative than our earlier incarnation. I bring less fully-formed ideas to the band than I used to, and occasionally we write as a group from scratch. I've had a long and productively contentious relationship with Resurrectionists' bassist Jeff [Brueggeman], who is both a stellar arranger and a delightfully cantankerous man.

We played in a band together before Resurrectionists named WORK. I half-jokingly say I'm the songwriter, and he's the bandleader. There's frequently a push-pull between my odd amateurish songwriting ideas and his sense for arrangement. I am frequently forced to grudgingly admit that his hassling takes my half-formed ideas and brings them to the ground.

A representative exchange: “Hey Joe, you're playing it wrong.” “Hey Jeff, I wrote it.” “Yeah, I know, but you're playing it wrong.” This contentious ferment has only increased as we've gotten tighter as writing and arranging partners.

Joe Cannon. Courtesy of TW Hansen.

AD: Are you more comfortable in the studio or live, and why?

JC: Live. For me, recording is always something I'm happy to have done. Live is where it's at for me. Other band members are more enthusiastic about recording, such as Jeff, who recorded and mixed this whole dang album.

AD: Some have said rock is dead. Where do you stand?

JC: In the words of a close friend and bandmate (a different band, an art-punk beast named Delicious Monsters), “rock and roll will never die.” When a guy who is a band named Gorilla Knifefight offers us wisdom like that, we all ought to listen.

AD: What are a few things you know now that would have been helpful in the band's earliest days?

JC: Not as much in the earliest days of this band because we're relatively young, and everyone in Resurrectionists has played in many other groups, but what I would tell my younger self is, one, calm the f*ck down, and two, be more grateful when people go out of their way for you, and be better about noticing when they do.

AD: What are some of the hardest things about making new music for a low-attention-span world?

JC: This is a tough question because it's asking two separate things: one, how do we deal with the way music is now distributed and consumed compared to the past? And two, how do we deal with the way this affects how we now experience music?

The first question is mainly a practical matter – for example, the dominance of streaming platforms makes it really difficult to work at album length anymore because things are skewed towards shorter, more frequent releases as opposed to waiting for a full set of 30 to 45 minutes of music to come together.

The second question is trickier – it's really easy to bemoan how no one has attention to anything anymore, but I don't think that's the real issue. The real issue is that all of us are constantly barraged by businesses, artists, musicians, politicians, etc., demanding our attention.

It's not that we lack an attention span; it's that we can't possibly pay attention to all of the things that are always screaming at us to pay attention to them. I can't complain about that guy when I am that guy. I have albums from friends whose music I adore, sitting unopened in front of my turntable for months. But then, when I finally dive in, I can be captivated for hours.

It's more like we live in a world where the same people are both extremely flighty and capable of deep and sustained concentration. The difficulty is figuring out how to cut through the relentless barrage of things vying for our attention to get someone to stop for a minute and listen to something.

AD: How has your overall approach evolved from your younger years? Do you have any cringe factor when listening to older work?

JC: Interestingly, one of the songs on this record is a reimagining of a song written for a solo project of mine in 1999 called The Intelligibles (“Let Me Talk You Through This One”) and another (“Break and Enter Part Two”) was written around 2004 or 2005 for another solo project.

I have actually become a bit bolder than I used to be about revisiting (and reusing) things from my past. When I listen to things I wrote 20 to 30 years ago, I alternately marvel at ideas that I don't think would occur to me now and recoil at decisions I can't believe I made.

For example, I once described one of the songs my old college band wrote as “an awesome song and a crappy one locked in a battle for supremacy, making for a song that in the end can best be described as ‘way too damn long.’”

Then there are subtler things, like how the original title of “Let Me Talk You Through This One” was “Let Me Talk You Through This One, Lover.” For some reason, that seems really arch and silly to me now, so I dropped the “Lover” bit.

AD: What's next? 

JC: As I mentioned, we're trying to figure out the best way to release new music, since the album format (and album length) is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. We have a good eight or nine new songs in the works that haven't been recorded yet, five of which are in the current live set.

We're considering recording them in three to five-song groups and then asking friends of ours who are talented artists or writers to pair them with an artwork or piece of writing instead of working with the traditional media. It's a work-in-progress idea, and I'm not sure what it's going to look like yet.

Header image courtesy of TW Hansen.

According to reliable sources, bassist Ron Carter has well over 2,000 recording credits. On the majority of those he’s a sideman for other people’s albums, but it’s still a staggering sign of esteem that hundreds of the top musicians in jazz pick up the phone and call him whenever they need a bass player. At 86, he’s still going strong. He may get to 3,000 albums yet.

Born in Michigan on the outskirts of Detroit in 1937, Carter started on cello but switched to bass in high school. (He still plays cello and occasionally uses it in the studio.) After a degree from the Eastman School of Music in 1959, he went on to earn a master’s at the Manhattan School of Music. His intellectual curiosity drew him to the highly dissonant Third-Stream jazz movement as it was being developed by Chico Hamilton, Eric Dolphy, and Don Ellis, all of whom Carter played with in his 20s. His early years in New York also allowed him to sit in on shows with Thelonious Monk and Cannonball Adderley.

It's difficult to come up with a major name from the past 60 years of jazz that is not somehow linked with Carter’s. As a sideman, he has worked with McCoy Tyner, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, and even Roberta Flack. He’s been a member of the Miles Davis Quintet and the New York Jazz Quartet. He’s a composer, too. All his solo albums include his own compositions, and Carter has also written and arranged several film scores.

Beyond composing and playing, Carter’s career proves how important teaching is to his work in music. For many years he was the artistic director of UCLA’s Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Studies (renamed for Herbie Hancock in 2019), and he taught for 18 years at City College in New York. The master classes he’s given around the world are legendary.

Enjoy these eight great tracks by Ron Carter.

1. Track: “Half a Row”
   Album: Uptown Conversation
   Label: Embryo
   Year: 1970

Carter started working with pianist Herbie Hancock in the 1960s, when they both became members of the second iteration of Miles Davis’ renowned quintet. Uptown Conversation is a duet album by these two visionary musicians who shared a passion for pushing jazz past its known borders.

The experimental jazz scene in the 1960s and 1970s took joy in the intellectual side of the genre. “Half a Row” is a case in point. The title refers to serialism or 12-tone music, usually associated with classical composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez. This style used the 12 distinct pitches (each a semitone from the next) present within an octave in a set order called a “row.” Thus, “Half a Row” is built from a series of only six pitches.

2. Track: “Rufus”
   Album: All Blues
   Label: CTI

Year: 1974 

Named after the famous Miles Davis tune, All Blues is a quartet project led by Carter, with Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, Roland Hanna on piano, and Billy Cobham on drums. Although Davis’ tune “All Blues” is included, most of the tracks are originals by Carter, including “Rufus.”

At the opening of this tune, Carter’s plucked bass doubles and answers the saxophone line for one chorus before a moment of counterpoint and then a switch to walking bass under the piano solo.

3. Track: “Doom”
   Album: 1 + 3
   Label: JVC
   Year: 1978

Drummer Tony Williams and pianists Herbie Hancock and Hank Jones join Carter for 1 + 3, a show recorded live at the Denen Coliseum in Tokyo. The two pianists do not appear together on any of the album’s four long tracks. Jones plays the first two and Hancock the last two.

“Doom” is a Carter composition with Hancock on call. It sounds like 9/8 time (three sets of three beats in each bar), with a gentle syncopation giving it a swirling effect. Carter’s first solo starting around 1:00 shows his delicate touch and his use of high-speed plucking techniques to create textural effects during a slow-moving melody. Williams’ complex brushwork integrates perfectly with Carter’s musical canvas.

4. Track: “Round Midnight”
   Album: Parfait
   Label: Milestone
   Year: 1982

With his background in cello, it makes sense that Carter was one of the first jazz bassists to pioneer the use of piccolo bass. While piccolo looks the same as regular bass – it can be either acoustic upright or electric – the tuning one octave up is made possible mainly by thinner strings. The advantage to the bass player of keeping the original size is that he can play using the techniques he’s used to while having an instrument more suitable to melodic solos.

The quartet on the album Parfait consists of Carter, pianist Ted Lo, bassist Leon Maleson, and drummer Wilby Fletcher. On this recording of Thelonious Monk and Cootie Williams’ “Round Midnight,” the tightness of the piccolo bass strings is emphasized by the piano very quietly doubling the melody at an even higher register, giving a three-dimensional sense to the sound.

5. Track: “Telepathy”
   Album: Live at the Village West
   Label: Concord Jazz
   Year: 1984

Carter made two live duet recordings with guitarist Jim Hall; Live at the Village West is the second one. (Hall died in 2013.) With no back-up players, there’s an exciting intimacy about these recordings of two great jazz minds exploring each other’s ideas.

The track list is a mix of standards, lesser-known tunes, and one Carter original. “Bag’s Groove,” by vibraphonist Milt Jackson, is a soft-spoken bebop number that Carter and Hall approach with appealing off-handedness.

6. Track: “Mr. Bow-Tie”
   Album: Mr. Bow-Tie
   Label: Blue Note
   Year: 1995

A bow-tie has long been part of Carter’s signature look. He is the Mr. Bow-Tie referred to in the album (and track) title. Appropriately enough, he wrote most of the music on this album, originally released in Japan and then transferred to Blue Note.

On the title tune, the piano of Gonzalo Rubalcaba and percussion of Steve Kroon give a slight Latin flavor to a Carter melody reminiscent of much older standards by composers like Hoagy Carmichael. But soon the hummable air shatters into a waterfall of improvised sixteenth notes. As for Carter on bass, he stays in the background, providing a deceptively complex supporting line.

7. Track: “Obrigado”
   Album: Jazz & Bossa
   Label: Blue Note
   Year: 2008 

One of many reasons Carter is in such demand is his limitless ability to move from one jazz sub-genre to another. On Jazz & Bossa, as part of a septet of musicians, Carter jumps head-first into that Brazilian style. The album is even more impressive given that about half of the tracks were composed by Carter, a step beyond just being able to play in the bossa nova style. It helps that he surrounded himself with masters, including percussionist Rolando Morales-Matos and guitarist Guilherme Monteiro.

Carter’s original contributions include “Obrigado,” a cool yet peppy melody driven by a syncopated rhythmic idea shared between the bass and guitar.

8. Track: “Day Dream”
   Album: Remember Love
   Label: High Note
   Year: 2018

Remember Love is a duo album with Houston Person, who played tenor sax and produced. It is their sixth album together. As is true on Carter’s collaborations with Jim Hall, it’s just the two musicians, feeding off each other’s creativity and laying their souls bare.

The strongest moments on this fine recording are the mellow takes on older tunes. “Day Dream” by Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington is a good example. They give it a smoky, sultry nightclub vibe.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Laura Manchinu (aka La Manchù).

The passage of time can be rough on a composer. Consider Tomaso Albinoni (1671 – 1751), whose name is most often associated with a moving Adagio that he did not write. (It’s by 20^th-century Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto, possibly working from a fragment by the composer.) But the real Albinoni did write some beautiful music that deserves to be known, as a few recent recordings remind us. There are even some movements marked “Adagio.”

Not a lot is known about Albinoni – ironically, much of what we do know is thanks to the biography by that successful faker, Giazotto – except that he was born, raised, and educated in Venice, came from a wealthy family, and had patrons commissioning his operas and instrumental works all over Italy. His music, in the late-Baroque style verging on pre-classicism, has a serene sound with a solid architectural foundation. It’s no wonder that computer-generated MIDI recordings of his works keep showing up on Spotify, presented as if they’re on real instruments. Listener beware! Happily, there are also some actual instrumentalists that still play his music.

Albinoni was not particularly an innovator, but his skills were finely honed and he had a good understanding of the fashionable music his patrons wanted. Trio sonatas were all the rage in the mid-18^th century, so of course Albinoni wrote some of those. One exciting thing about a composer who has been reduced to a single, spurious Adagio is that the field is wide open for ambitious musicians. For example, until 2022, no one had ever made a period-instrument recording of Albinoni’s 12 Sonate a tre (Trio Sonatas), Op. 3.

L’armonica della Cetra, under the direction of violinist Matteo Saccà, has filled that gap in a two-disc release from Da Vinci Classics. Like most late-Baroque trio sonatas, Albinoni’s require more than three players. Two violinists carry the melodic lines, and the basso continuo section – considered the third voice – consist of up to three instruments: cello, theorbo (an extremely long bass lute with sympathetic strings), and either harpsichord or portative (small, wooden) organ.

The Op. 3 sonatas, Albinoni’s second collection in this genre, were published in 1701, when the composer was 30. They blend elements of the two main types of trio sonata: chamber sonata (for secular use) and church sonata (for use during worship services). Albinoni designated most of the movements with the names of courtly dance types as one would find in a chamber sonata, such as allemanda, corrente, sarabanda, and giga. Yet he also adds Italian tempo markings, typical of the church trios. The presence of organ is also more common in church than chamber sonatas.

The organ is used in the opening movement of Sonata No. 7, marked Preludio, Largo. Saccà and fellow violinist Rossella Pugliano pull at their suspended and resolved dissonances with great emotional effect, decorating their long notes with delicate flourishes.

https://open.spotify.com/track/1YopGio7wAqBxwWz9YxLWX?si=6d8b5c9c43d14c7d

While late-Baroque dance suites were not usually meant to be danced to – listeners just enjoyed the rhythms and structures of the familiar types of tunes – it is widely believed in the historical-performance scene that they should be played as if they could accompany dancers. In other words, the rhythm needs to be consistent and not waylaid by too many expressive liberties. L’armonic della Cetra acknowledges this essential guidance, making it hard not to click your heels smartly and curtsy/bow during the Corrente movement in Sonata No. 5. Engineer Giuseppe Famularo also deserves credit for sculpting compellingly three-dimensional sound.

https://open.spotify.com/track/3gOfAmxoKBvWMEFOMCFTdq?si=989dab4f31d9402a

Another recent Albinoni recording focuses on sonatas for a single violin plus continuo. Albinoni: Late Violin Sonatas, released by Brilliant Classics, features violinist Federico Guglielmo as leader of the ensemble L’Arte dell’Arco (The Art of the Bow). Of the composer’s three published sets of violin sonatas, Op. 6 is the best known and most recorded. For that reason, Guglielmo did not include it in this two-disc set, focusing instead on the two little-known sets from later in Albinoni’s life.

Most are church sonatas, in the “post-Corellian style,” as Guglielmo puts it, each with two pairs of fast-slow movements with Italian tempo markings. (The three-movement violin sonata, like those of Mozart, was not yet in vogue.) The most striking thing about these recordings is Guglielmo’s intense sound, reminiscent of Andrew Manze when he used to do a lot of early-Baroque music with his trio Romanesca. It’s unusual to hear that timbre applied to late-Baroque music, but it is riveting. The shaking, shimmering effects on the harpsichord by Roberto Loreggian help give this rendition an earlier-period sound.

Besides celebrating the new endeavors on behalf of Albinoni, it’s always good to be reminded of classic albums. Originally released over 50 years ago, I Solisti Veneti’s recording on Erato of Albinoni’s Six Oboe Concertos, Op. 9, is newly available on streaming platforms. This outstanding Baroque string orchestra, conducted by Claudio Scimone, hosts oboist Pierre Pierlot in a fine performance of these pieces.

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Yme2o2MvgRIjFOraH1Rpl?si=8ef2093e56a64429

These are Baroque concerto grossos, not solo concertos in the genre’s definition starting in the Classical period. In the opening Allegro of Op. 9, No. 3, in F major, you will hear two oboes (Jacques Chambon joins Pierlot) working in close coordination, a style favored at the time. The role of the orchestra (in this case, strings and continuo) is to provide a textural contrast to the soloists, responding to them.

Of course, Albinoni was perfectly capable of writing his own Adagio movements. In these concertos, they tend toward simple arpeggios in the orchestra supporting long, heartfelt melodic lines for the soloist(s), as you can hear in the second movement of Op. 9, No. 2. (The concerto overall is in G minor, but – as was typical through the early 19^th century – the slow movement is in the relative major key, B flat.)

https://open.spotify.com/track/6j80CNoDVTQLPyfM1uSKSb?si=5a48d663e2114de6

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy hearing the “Albinoni” Adagio once in a while. But it’s also good to have more actual Albinoni to listen to. He deserves that much respect.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.