Issue 196

The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society (LAOCAS) is one of the largest audio clubs in the country. Its membership spans the greater Los Angeles and Orange County areas, the San Fernando Valley and the beaches of Orange County, with a wide and varied membership.

One of the hallmarks of the LAOCAS is paying visits to manufacturers and retailers. In fact, they take pride in having their events open to anyone, regardless of membership status. This plays into their educational outreach mission. One aspect that they conducted especially well during the pandemic was a series of Zoom sessions, once again open to the public.

This year I’ve been to three of their events. The first was a visit to AudioQuest in Irvine, California; the second was a trip to The Source Audio Video Design Group in Torrance, to audition MonAcoustic loudspeakers, and the third was a return visit to Sunny Components in Covina during the summer. All three events were great fun, and educational to boot.

The January AudioQuest visit included a tour of the factory, warehouse, and facilities. AudioQuest’s Garth Powell explained the goals and the discoveries they made in their attempts to improve AC power delivery via their line of line conditioners. Bryan Long showed the group the step-by-step process of building the company’s Niagara line of conditioners. As is often the case in LAOCAS events, the society held a raffle and the author purchased tickets, but only to come up short. William Low, AudioQuest’s founder and CEO, graciously offered some old stripped insulation as a consolation prize.

AudioQuest founder Bill Low.

Power cables on a high-current testing rig.

The guts of a Niagara power conditioner. 

The May visit to Source Audio was a blast, with room after room filled with amazing equipment. You name the brand, it was there, it seemed, from large home theater suites, to a room full of high-end personal audio, headphones, earphones, amplifiers, DACs, and more. One size didn’t fit all, and they had a multiplicity of rooms to demonstrate various systems and gear. We were gathered to hear speakers from MonAcoustic, which stands for More Natural Acoustics. Hailing from South Korea, their range of speakers was an interesting departure from the expected. Once again, the author didn’t score a winning ticket at the raffle. He was given a CD as an “I feel so sorry for the poor Copper journalist” consolation prize. It was the deluxe edition soundtrack to the movie Whiplash, ironically perfect for the stop and go traffic on the 405 for the drive home to Anaheim.

Young Bun of audio/video retailer Novawear with the MonAcoustic SuperMon Mini and PlatiMon Virtual Coaxial One speakers.

Audio and food go together at these events. Here are audiophiles Thomas "Hi-Fi Tom" Roy, Maritte Green, and Larry Green at Source Audio Video.

Clint Hales and his daughter Kristine McDougle check out some gear at Source Audio Video. Kristine noted, “It was a special day for me to be with him as he walked through the memory lane of his business of 40 years with Stereo Hi-Fi Center. He started it in 1960 and was the last man standing when he closed to retire. At 89, we are grateful to have him!”

I was pretty beat as I headed to my third LAOCAS outing to Sunny Components, to be honest, having just returned the day before from a trip to Arcata for a celebration of life ceremony for my friend Helmut Remiorz, who passed away a year ago June from ALS. But seeing Sunil “Sunny” and Theresa Merchant of Sunny Components, and enjoying some fresh tacos, seemed the perfect way to recover from the previous week. There was a bit of a mix-up: the invitation said 2:00 p.m., but that’s when the presentations begin, not when the tacos were served, which was from 1 to 2 p.m. A group of us who arrived at 2:00 weighed a crucial decision. Skip lunch and attend all the presentations, or have a mind-altering and delicious lunch of fresh tacos with a libation of choice? We reckoned that we wouldn’t be able to pay attention to the presentations if we were hungry and dreaming about carne asada. Sorry, but stomachs first, speakers and power conditioners later. We made a pact to arrive by noon the next time.

Sunil and Theresa Merchant are wonderful hosts. They paid out of their own pocket for some of the raffle prizes (which included a Technics turntable), covered the delicious food and drink, and made everyone feel at home. Why do they do this? Goodwill. They actually don’t count many of the LAOCAS members as their customers, so it’s not about the sales, it’s about building community.

Sunil Merchant holding a beautifully restored mint condition piece of audio history from Audio Research: the legendary SP-3 preamplifer.

Jason McDermott, Walter Schofield of Nexus Audio Technologies, and executive VP of hospitality Chris Ishida were all smiles.

It was a treat to see members of the AudioQuest team, as well as Stenheim loudspeakers, demonstrating gear, answering questions, and enjoying themselves. And yes, once again the author’s investment (OK, now an ongoing donation, according to his wife) in raffle tickets came up short. Feeling sorry for myself, I scored a couple of fine consolation Japanese jazz CD reissues, as Zesto Audio’s Carolyn Counas spotted me crying into my Corona Coronita and felt sorry for me.

It was a blast, but to be honest, listening tests in environments like those are difficult for me. I’m not sure about you, but I can barely make sense of what I’m hearing in those situations. And in order to properly audition headphones, I need a night where I know I need sleep, have projects due, and decide the best way to get to sleep is to audition some Audeze MM-500 headphones with the superb EarMen Angel headphone amp/DAC, way past my bedtime. I’ve listened to every version of “Mr. Bojangles” available on Qobuz, while on other occasions it’s been John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery,” and on one particularly torturous night, listening to Frank Doris singing the entire Sesame Street playlist. Oh, the things we do for love.

I always have a wonderful time with the LAOCAS and want to thank them for letting a hard-bitten audio journalist into their midst. Even if I had to pretend the tacos were delicious and have a cold drink on a 100-degree day. I think the best part of events like this, and I encourage readers to find audio clubs in their area, isn’t to listen to yacht rock again and again, but to learn about new music and new gear, and hell, meet fellow obsessives enjoying themselves. It’s worth the effort.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t take the ability to spend time with people we like for granted, and I for one was grateful to AudioQuest, Source Audio Video Design Group, and Sunny Components for hosting these society visits. Don’t sit at home; join an audio club near you today!

Here are more photos from the LAOCAS events.

AudioQuest

Carolyn Counnas and Alex Chavez were the smiling team that talked the innocent author into buying yet another doomed attempt at winning a raffle.

Cable assemblies in progress.

A listening room at AudioQuest.

A parts storage area.

Kristen Haughley of AudioQuest showing off the raffle items at the event.

 Bryan Long holds up what he claims is the wire to rule them all.

Raw cable awaits the assembly process.

 A plethora of mini-jack connectors!

Capacitors being burned in on a test rig.

Source Audio Video Design Group

George Counas of Zesto Audio, and audio enthusiast Dr. Larry Plon. 

Larry Stimach of LAOCAS addresses the crowd.

Maritte Green and Thomas Fogel tempt the speaker grill gods.

William Strickland of Source Audio Video with a Sony ES-DMP-Z1 digital music player, and Sony SA-Z1 desktop powered speaker system.

Sunny Components

Everyone is all smiles after delicious tacos, including Bob Levi (LAOCAS), Carolyn Counas, Sunil Merchant, and Mike Wechsberg (LAOCAS past president).

Kristen Haughley, Theresa Merchant, and Maritte Green. They represented 3/5ths of the women in attendance. Not enough!

Garth Powell, senior director of engineering at AudioQuest, gives a presentation about the company's lineup.

A panoramic view of Garth addressing the faithful. I call this photo "Sermon from the Conditioned and Filtered Power Supply Mount.”

Ying Kit Lee of review website The Audiophile World makes a point of showing off his Audeze T-shirt.

Kristen Haughley and Harris, photo by Ying Kit Lee. Note the always-cool T-shirt provided by Cardas.

Header image: the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society visit AudioQuest. All photos by Harris Fogel except where noted.

Keith Richards, Chuck Berry and…Mike Kagan?

Yeah…I know. I can hear it now.

Who is Mike Kagan? A legendary American (or British) wizard, unknown to most of the world except to a few of us who look to him for all kinds of inspiration?

Well, in truth, Mike Kagan is just a long-time neighbor of mine who is just three years older than me, but has had a profound effect on my rock music (and guitar playing) history.

In 1965, when I was 13, Mike was 16 and the first person to own the Monkees' debut album, the first person to tell me about the Who, and to play the Who’s debut album, My Generation for me. He took me to my first rock concert (the Animals) in the summer of 1966 in Central Park and the one who also took me to the legendary Murray the K Easter week concert series called “Music in the Fifth Dimension” at the RKO theater in New York City on Easter Sunday 1967.

The opening acts that day (this was truly a rock revue with many acts playing only two songs) were The Cream (yes, that is what they were called then), who played “I Feel Free” and “NSU,” and The Who who played “I Can’t Explain” and “My Generation.”

The headliners at this show (there were 63 shows total, nine shows a day for seven days) were Wilson Pickett plus Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels.

The special guest this matinee performance was the Young Rascals, who had a current smash chart hit that week, “Groovin.”

So Mike exposed me to all this good stuff but he also showed me my first actual guitar lick. Yes, this preceded the Paul Butterfield Blues band and Mike Bloomfield by about a year, and it took the following year to actually understand that what he showed me could fit in a musical phrase, but this particular guitar lead pattern was to become the foundation of most of the guitar solos that I have recorded.

Mike was not a particularly good guitar player but he heard, learned and was able to show me this set of notes with a pattern that has become my stock in trade.

The guitar lick was from the intro to a song written by Chuck Berry called “Down The Road Apiece” that Mike played for me on side two of the first Rolling Stones album that I bought, The Rolling Stones, Now!

The guitar lick was perfectly copied by Keith Richards from Berry’s original version.

In one fell swoop I got Keith, Chuck and…Mike Kagan.

Keith Richards is a great player, not because of his speed or amazing technique but because of his feel. Great guitar players know exactly what I mean. Keith’s style was built from Chuck’s style, maybe even better (certainly more consistent over time) than Chuck.

Chuck, however, created it and it has stood the test of time.

George Harrison did a great imitation of Chuck Berry on the Beatles' version of Chuck’s “Roll Over Beethoven.”

Chuck…well, what can one really say.

His two-note style is about as rock and roll as it gets, and it got me.

It is the guitar foundation of so much rock history.

It is the foundation of my guitar playing.

His style has to be studied for its insane simplicity and pure, unadulterated drive.

Chuck Berry. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

The Rolling Stones were built on this foundation.

The Beatles were built on this foundation

Led Zeppelin was built on this foundation.

And the only guitar lick Mike Kagan learned was Chuck’s, which he passed down to me.

Chuck gave us all the beating heart of guitar-based rock and roll.

Perhaps John Lennon said it best: “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry!'”

Header image: Keith Richards, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/SolarScott.

This article was first published in Issue 58.

There was never a more promising time than the late 17^th century to be a musician in France. King Louis XIV, after all, loved music and dance as much as he loved life, and he did all he could – and more than the royal coffers could afford – to support the careers of performing artists. Lucky for harpsichordist and composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729), she started life with a connection to the Sun King’s court, thanks to the harpsichords her father built.

She was educated at court, married an organist, and spent her whole life composing and playing music, revered as a virtuoso by her male colleagues. Yes, that was as rare for a woman at that time as you’d think, even in Paris.

Because harpsichord was her primary instrument, it’s no surprise that her earliest published works (in an era when only a small percentage of compositions were ever immortalized through publication) were her First Book of Pieces for Harpsichord in 1687. You can hear all of them on a new 50-track collection by Francesco Lanfranco, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre: Complete Harpsichord Works on Brilliant Classics. It’s an outstanding recording.

Typical of the early Baroque in general, these pieces are suites of short movements inspired by dances. And typical of the French Baroque in particular, the movements are often not named after the dance rhythms that inspired them, but are given names of the composer’s friends and patrons. We may never know who “Cannaris” was, but Lanfranco offers a satisfyingly wild spin through the movement named for him/her in the D minor suite:

Lanfranco is just as impressive at the other end of the emotional spectrum, with this mournful yet stately Sarabande from the A minor suite:

The first and third suites from that early collection were also recorded by French harpsichordist Marie van Rhijn on an album for the Evidence label called L’Inconstante. Here she plays the Chaconne that gives the album its name. Notice the difference in touch between Rhijn and Lanfranco. Rhijn’s ornamentation is overwhelming, obscuring the rhythmic and harmonic motion. Her playing does not sound grounded.

One of the things that sets Jacquet de la Guerre’s early works apart from her later pieces for solo harpsichord is the presence of a prelude movement to open each one. It’s our good fortune that she bothered with the preludes for a while, since they’re some of her most intricate and compelling compositions. Here’s one from another recent album, Suites pour le clavecin, Livres 1 et 2 (OnClassical). This video captures a brilliant performance by soloist Elisabetta Guglielmin, who wanders breathlessly along the prelude’s surprising turns like she’s finding her way through a magical forest:

The majority of movements, however, follow dance rhythms. Guglielmin’s playing of this Gavotte from the A minor sonata shows keen attention to historically informed practice: While it is notated and structured in strict duple time and four-bar phrases, Guglielmin keeps the phrasing supple, not square.

A harpsichordist at the turn into the 18^th century would not have spent most of her time playing solo, but as continuo – the chordal accompaniment for melodic solo instruments. In Paris at the time, the most common melodic instrument for such pieces was the violin. E voi-là, Pan Classics has re-released a recording (previously on the Verso label) called Jacquet de La Guerre: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1-6. Lina Tur Bonet is the violinist, with Kenneth Weiss on harpsichord, and Patxi Montero rounding out the continuo on viola da gamba.

Hang onto your hat when you listen to this lickety-split presto from Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor. (Four of the seven movements in this sonata are marked “Presto,” so the players must be truly knackered when they’re done!) Bonet is playing a Baroque violin with enough skill to take advantage of the scraping, echoey sound natural to that instrument, letting it help her shape the quick phrases so they burble and sparkle.

Violin Sonata No. 3 in F Major: III. Adagio

Until recently, scholars thought these violin sonatas were written just before their publication in 1707. But then manuscripts of some of them were found in the collection of Sébastien de Brossard – a theorist and composer and a good friend of Jacquet de la Guerre – dating back to around 1695, which shows they were composed earlier.

The members of the British ensemble The Bach Players are now experts on this after rooting around in Brossard’s library. Their new album, Chamber Music from the Brossard Collection (Coviello Classics), contains several complete and partial pieces by Jacquet de la Guerre – just the sort of thing a composer might hand to her pal to see what he thinks of her works in progress.

These tracks aren’t on YouTube, but you can hear them on Spotify, including this yearning rendition of the Trio Sonata for Two Flutes and Continuo in G Minor. A couple of interesting choices to note: 1) The Bach Players have substituted violins for the solo flutes. No one in Jacquet de la Guerre’s time would have blinked at that; you used whatever instruments and musicians you had available to get the job done. 2) This multi-movement sonata has been recorded as a single track with takes barely a breath between movements. Many experts in performance practice believe works like this would have been performed with one section flowing immediately into the next.

Just for fun and interest, here’s a video of three members of the Bach Players performing a Jacquet de la Guerre sonata live on period instruments in an appropriately Baroque setting. Notice how short that violin bow is! Especially in slow movements, the player has to learn to draw it over the strings at a much slower speed than she would a modern bow, or she’ll run out of real estate.

This article was first published in Issue 78.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

Optimizing the bass response of an audio system is well worth the effort, as most audiophiles will attest to. It requires an initial investment of a little time and effort, but will yield countless hours of enhanced audio satisfaction and hi-fi pleasure.

It has been noted that the bass frequencies in a reproduced piece of music can constitute approximately 30 percent of the overall audible spectrum. Now, if I was driving down the road at a moderate speed, taking the bends comfortably and making good progress and my passenger leaned over and yanked on the steering wheel for just one per cent of the journey, that would be enough to drive me crazy. If they did that 30 percent of the time, I know I wouldn’t be thinking sweet thoughts about them and I would be seriously doubting the likelihood of safely arriving at my destination.

This may be an extreme analogy, but one that makes the point obvious. Sometimes the control of your vehicle is taken from you in ways that are less perceivable, but have a compound effect: examples could be wrong tire pressures, or incorrect wheel balancing or alignment. They may not hinder your driving pleasure to the point that you just don’t want to bother with the trip, but, once these issues have been remedied, you never want to go back to driving the less-well-maintained Jaguar.

Managing our bass in our hi-fi systems can be similar. We may have a great “vehicle” – our speakers – but without tuning our bass we are likely missing out on the smooth pleasure cruise.

I have been as guilty of this as anyone. In my attempts to improve my system’s bass I started researching what some of the professionals were saying on the matter. In one interview with Andrew Jones, eminent speaker designer for ELAC and previously Pioneer and others, he related a concept that appealed to me. He was saying that to obtain a properly immersive sonic experience with enough bass produced using full-range floorstanding speakers, you would need a minimum of seven of them to get the desired effect. This was very interesting to me because at the time, I was already running a quadraphonic floorstanding tower system with a single 8-inch bass driver in each speaker cabinet. Would I need more towers?

It seemed like I was on the right track, but as much as I would have loved to populate the room with more speakers, there was no way I could accommodate seven or more in my room and get away with it. However, according to Jones this was what would be required to eradicate any nulls in the room’s bass response. But I already had plenty of bass drivers in my setup. What to do?

Given that the room itself can account for about 50 percent of the system’s sonic behavior, since it has areas of bass cancellation and reinforcement and influences the reflected and absorbed sound so much, then it seems to make practical sense to take active steps to claw back more control of our audio once we have set it free to roam around the room.

Additionally, sometimes the shortcomings of our hi-fi systems are hard to notice at first, but once they have been remedied, there’s no going back. To name one important example, let’s talk about dealing with the dips in our in-room bass-frequency response.

I was semi-resigned to the fact that I could EQ my speakers with a suitably gradual ramped bass slope and make do with that. After all, the bass was sufficiently loud enough and even complimentary to the resultant sounds in my music. Surely then, I didn’t need a subwoofer, right?

However, I should tell you that I have some absolutely excellent friends, and one of them, in a typically self-deprecating manner, gifted me a new subwoofer as what he called “a belated wedding present.” What a guy! Thank you, Laurence.

I then came to appreciate the many considerations and benefits from using a dedicated subwoofer, or multiple subs. In fact, studies have shown that using multiple subwoofers can be more beneficial than using just one, but many if not most of us don’t have the room and/or budget.

 

Placement options for a four-subwoofer setup. From the GIK Acoustics website.

One, the sub has been specifically designed from the ground up to handle only bass frequencies, with good bass extension and without struggling to do so. Two, the subwoofer typically has a built-in power amplifier that is optimized to the driver. Three, a subwoofer can be placed very specifically in the room. Four, it has dedicated controls for gain (volume) crossover frequency and phase. Five, in a home theatre system it specifically reproduces the LFE (low-frequency effects) channel, which can result in a cleaner overall sound. But most of all, a dedicated subwoofer can provide an omnipresent and enveloping low-frequency effect, and when properly dialed in, can magically disappear in its support of a more realistic soundstage. For those who don’t think they need a subwoofer in their stereo audio system, consider the fact that with certain speakers and rooms it may in fact revolutionize an already good-sounding system into something awesome.

When you think about the bass amplifiers used in a recording of a band you enjoy listening to, or if you’ve seen them live, likely the bass player was either using a cabinet with a 15- or 18-inch speaker, or multiple 10-, 12-, and 15-inch drivers. That’s a lot of moving air. And live, the bass guitar is also run through the PA system. That’s really a lot of moving air. Then we have the drummer’s kick drum and tom toms and maybe low frequencies from the synth players. Many if not most speakers just simply do not reproduce the bass frequencies at anywhere near 20 Hz, generally considered the lowest frequency of human hearing. Orchestral music also has a lot of low-frequency content.

In the same way that the musicians and engineers who created the music have controlled what bass you hear on a recording, you too can control the bass response in your room. With a good quality subwoofer or multiple subs, you can use the controls they are equipped with and take back control of the steering wheel in your musical journey.

In a coming issue, we’ll give tips on setting up and placing subwoofers in the effort to maximize your listening pleasure. You may be surprised at how simple it can be to get greatly improved results without spending much time or money. Becoming submissive to the merits of bass management can be empowering.

Header image: The REL T/9i, subwoofer royalty!

This article was first published in Issue 137.

This cartoon was first published in Issue 146.

This cartoon was first published in Issue 110.

 

Just don't touch any of my records, thinks dad! From Audio magazine, March 1955.

 

When the Admiral speaks, they listen!

They went all out on props for this photo shoot. From Audio magazine, January 1963.

Left behind by an alien spaceship. How to Use Test Probes, published 1954.

This article was first published in Issue 108.

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

It’s hard to imagine the record player world without Thorens – and yet that name almost disappeared from the microcosm that revolves around the black gold.

 Founded in 1883 by Hermann Thorens (1856 – 1943) in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland, the manufacturer is older than the record itself. Initially, the company manufactured phonographs based on Edison’s principle of operation, as well as music boxes. Soon, however, the company switched to horn gramophones.

In 1927, the family business was transformed into a stock corporation, and a period of innovation followed in the form of the first electrically-driven record players and magnetic pickups. Conventional as well as pioneering tangential tone arms were developed, as were music cabinets and radio sets. At times, Thorens also tried its hand at non-specialist products – the spectrum ranged from harmonicas, lighters and razors to film cameras and typewriters.

The introduction of the legendary TD 124 turntable in 1957 put Thorens in the global spotlight – from this point on, the manufacturer was one of the big names in the industry. Other successful models followed – simplified versions of the TD 124 as well as sometimes enormously elaborate, fully-automatic record changers. However, the TD 150 deserves a special place in the history of record player manufacturing – a relatively inconspicuous turntable that, with its sub-chassis suspended on conical springs, is perhaps the most influential Thorens model ever.

After a short-lived merger with Paillard SA, the two companies split again in 1966 and Thorens re-established itself in Lahr – a site previously jointly operated with EMT to match production capacity to demand.

After various diversification attempts in the 1970s around receivers, cassette decks and speakers did not show the desired success, Thorens marked the year 1979 with the Reference – a 90 kg-heavy, limited to 100 pieces demonstration of power from a turntable – clear that they were fully focused on vinyl.

This also worked quite splendidly for a while – until the CD entered the stage. There was still no doubt about the quality of Thorens turntables, but the manufacturer could not remain profitable in the rapidly shrinking market. A series of restructuring measures followed, as did further attempts to expand the portfolio to include electronics and loudspeakers, but to no avail – in 2000, Thorens had to file for bankruptcy.

However, this was by no means the end of the story: Swiss businessman Heinz Rohrer acquired the rights to the name, and soon, newly-developed turntables appeared under the famous name – including the 900 Series models with sub-chassis adjustable by air chamber. In the absence of a successor, Heinz Rohrer handed over the recovering company in 2018 to Gunter Kürten, who had previously made a name for himself at Elac. Re-founded in Bergisch Gladbach on May 1, 2018, Thorens today returns to its original values and offers a modernized version of the legendary TD 124 as well as completely new models with the [company's] familiar virtues.

We wish them all the best for their 140th!

Copper has an exchange program with selected magazines, where we share articles, including this one, between publications. This one's from PMA Magazine: the Power of Music and Audio.

Your audio system was supposed to sound fabulous. After all, you did all the “right things.” You read the reviews. You got advice from your friends who are more seasoned in this hobby than you are. You got recommendations from various audio forums. You even auditioned the components before you bought them.

Yet here you are, sitting in front of your audio system, feeling unmoved by the music. You find the sound quality merely meh. Maybe it wasn’t like that when you first got it, but now you find yourself spending much less time with it. You invested so much – time, energy, money, resources – in building your system but the return-on-investment turned out to be poor. What went wrong?

Perhaps it’s because the speakers aren’t as good as what the reviewers and your friends made them out to be. Or the amp’s specs aren’t an ideal match with your speakers or preamp. Or you didn’t pay enough attention to the source, or the cable connections, which may be loose or badly oxidized. Or your room needs acoustic treatment, a factor that can be as important as the sound of the components themselves. Or the speakers aren’t positioned properly in relation to the walls and the listening spot, which is where my bet would be in most cases where the sound seems unfocused or unbalanced. Or, you just didn’t spend enough money on your setup.

These can all be important factors when it comes to your enjoyment of an audio system. But there’s another factor that matters much more, and it has nothing to do with how much money you spend, what audio components you choose or how you install them. You can’t even see or touch it. That’s because it’s a phenomenon happening purely inside your head.

Courtesy of Gilles Laferriere/PMA.

Before I became serious about audio, for years I was happy just listening to music through average-sounding equipment. It didn’t seem to matter. My listening approach was…uncomplicated. My current, much pricier audio system, which I carefully built over more than 10 years, delivers sound quality that would have blown away anything I ever owned during that earlier period. And yet, I can’t say I had fewer ecstatic music-listening moments then than I have now. I often wondered why that was, and how I was able to enjoy music as much as I did in mediocre sound, when my long-held belief has been that the better the playback, the greater my enjoyment of the music because of it.

To explain this discrepancy, I considered a few possibilities over the years, until I settled on this admittedly bizarre-sounding answer: our enjoyment of music depends less on the quality of the sound and more on the quality of our thinking. In fact, the word “thinking” is a bit of a misnomer here, because what I actually mean by “thinking” has less to do with what our brain does than what it shouldn’t do, which is to overthink.

See, the accepted wisdom is that the sound quality of an audio system is theoretically at its peak when it isn’t doing anything, or, more specifically, when it’s adding no distortion or noise to the music signal. Likewise, when listening to music, the quality of our thinking is at its peak when it’s adding no distortion or noise – doing no harm – to the music. That’s because listening to music is much less a task – say, such as trying to solve a math problem – than it is a state of mind.

On average, our mind receives 70,000 thoughts a day, mostly negative. In self-preservation, our mind is more likely to gravitate to thoughts that make us feel worried, tense, or dissatisfied, rather than carefree, relaxed, or content. This poses a crippling problem for us audio enthusiasts who want to listen to our music attentively, without disruption. And it’s why I try not to let my thinking overwhelm my listening.

Out of all the thoughts we most frequently have, three are most detrimental to serious listening. They start with A, D, and E respectively.

A______

D______

E______

The letters form the acronym “ADE,” a German word for “goodbye,” and part of the art of listening is about saying goodbye to the negative thoughts that disrupt our connection to the music, and ultimately lessen our listening enjoyment. I promise that if you can cope with these thoughts, your ability to enjoy your audio system and your favorite recordings will take a quantum leap forward. Component upgrades, room treatments, careful speaker placements… they’re all important, but they can’t come close to the profound impact that listening to music with a clean mind can have on you. With this technique, you can have the most fabulous listening experiences even if you don’t have the most fabulous audio system.

Intrigued? Part Two will appear in the next issue.

Header image courtesy of Anne Nygård/Unsplash.

What’s an audio professional’s biggest fear? Losing their hearing. After all, we depend on it to make sonic evaluations, whether we’re an audiophile, equipment reviewer, front-of-house engineer, component designer or anyone else who relies on their ears to make a living.

According to the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, more than 15 percent of adults age 18 or older report some trouble hearing, and the problem gets more acute with age: about one in three people in the US between 65 and 74 has hearing loss, and nearly half of those older than 75 have difficulty hearing.

Much talk in the high-end audio world is made about having a sonic reference, whether it’s “the absolute sound” of live unamplified music in real space, as Harry Pearson once framed it, or using Steely Dan’s Aja album for setting up a live concert sound system. Well, for each of us, our references are our ears. (I’ll use “ears” here to encompass the ears and brain.)

What happens when you lose that reference?

Here’s one man’s story.

Mine.

Well into my 40s, I knew my hearing was good, even though I had attended some painfully loud rock concerts (when the MC5 played at Stony Brook University on July 3, 1970, I counted 18 Marshall amplifier heads on stage). I’ve also played on some ungodly-loud stages – the sound man for our new wave band the Lines was nicknamed “Decibel Don.” But I could hear the 15.7 kHz whine of the flyback transformer of our old Sony CRT TV from across the room. In fact, I never gave my hearing a second thought, other than noticing some slight ringing in my ears under certain circumstances, but only if I really paid attention.

Fast forward to the 2005 AES Convention in New York. A friend and I were on the exhibit floor and noticed a truck parked on the show floor from an organization that was sponsoring free hearing tests. “I don’t need one; my hearing’s fine,” I told my friend. “C’mon, let’s take the test just for fun,” he replied. 

When the audiologist handed me the results I smiled and said, “perfect, right?” She didn’t smile back. “You have some mild hearing loss. I’d be very careful not to do anything to cause further damage.” The results of the test noted that I had some moderate high-frequency loss (in the 3 kHz – 6 kHz range) in my left ear and mild loss in my right ear, and some mild loss of speech intelligibility in my left ear (in the 500 Hz – 3 kHz region) I had just turned 50 and, knock on wood, was in pretty good physical shape, so I had never given the slightest thought to the fact that my hearing might be getting worse. I was rattled but soon shrugged it off.

A few years after that AES convention I went to another audiologist. She said I was borderline for hearing aids but recommended I get them. My audiogram showed the classic notch loss that can happen as people age. I didn’t feel like I needed them, but for the past few years my wife had been complaining that at times I hadn’t been listening to her. (I know, that’s going to prompt some of the oldest jokes in the book.) I thought, well, if I literally haven’t been hearing what my wife has been saying, and if she’s been thinking that I’m not paying attention to her, well, that’s a problem on multiple fronts. I went back to the audiologist, winced as I paid $4,500 for hearing aids, put them on and went home. But everything sounded tinny and unnatural, and when I talked, I could hear this weird amplification of my voice that sounded like it was coming from inside my head. The audiologist assured me I’d get used to it.

I drove home unhappy, although I did notice that I could hear things like the turn signal in my car much more clearly. When I got home I thought I’d walk my dog to clear my head, and I noticed the clattering of my dog’s nails on the floor, the creak of the door opening, and the birds singing all around me. OK, maybe I just needed to give this some time. 

After I walked the dog I took a deep breath and did what I had been apprehensive about doing: fired up the audio system, put on a record, and sat down to listen.

I wanted to cry. It sounded horrible. Flat, compressed, lifeless, with no depth or detail. Soundstage? Imaging? Forget it! You know that depressed feeling you get when you feel like your life has spiraled out of control and everything is crashing down on you? That was me.

I consoled myself with the fact that my system sounded pretty great without wearing the hearing aids. Also, that I had a few years prior passed a number of double-blind tests at the Harman listening lab in Northridge, California, and had tested as one of the two best listeners in a Sound & Vision magazine blind test of various MP3 encoding rates.

I tried wearing the hearing aids regularly as the audiologist had advised, but became willfully lazy about it. I wound up wearing them only on occasion – when watching certain TV shows (and yes, TV sound is getting worse, but that’s a subject for another article), going to restaurants and social occasions, and when my wife got home from work. Eventually I got really lax, but did find the hearing aids to be useful now and then.

About five or so years ago I went to another audiologist (my previous one had moved), who tested me and said I was borderline for needing hearing aids. I asked her, “then why did my last audiologist say I needed them?” “Does she sell hearing aids?” she replied. “Yes.” “Well, we don’t. There’s your reason!” The cynic in me was not feeling happy and peppy and bursting with love just then.

I also asked her whether exposure to loud music had damaged my hearing and she said no, what she saw in the audiogram was classic age-related hearing loss. This was a small but not insignificant consolation. At least I hadn’t done damage by being foolish in my youth and not wearing hearing protection. And I was relieved that I didn’t “need” hearing aids after all.

But a couple of months ago, one of the hearing aids broke. I went to another audiologist; someone I had befriended when she took care of my mother’s hearing needs during her last years. She tested me and this time the news was unequivocal. I needed hearing aids. Seems like in the last few years my hearing acuity has taken a plunge. Literally. The audiograms for both of my ears look like an inclined plane, with an almost straight decline across the frequency range. 

I mentioned to my new audiologist that I thought my last hearing aids had stunk, and told her I was an audio professional and that I’d probably be more demanding than a typical customer in auditioning and settling on a new pair. I spent a good amount of time comparing models – not as much time as Jay Jay French did in his article, Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’, (Issue 178) but I listened quite a bit to a number of models. I noticed that the sound quality of all of them was way better than the older ones, and told the audiologist that the technology seemed to have improved immensely. She said it had.

I settled on one particular set, but as with my previous pair, hated them once I got home. I should note here that it’s pretty much impossible to make a snap judgment in the audiologist’s office after a few minutes of listening – you really have to live with them for a while. Although their resolution was astounding, and I could hear the birds in the trees with remarkable 3-D spaciousness, everything sounded fake and artificial and the “voice in your head” effect while talking was severe. Turns out the audiologist had put solid domes (earpieces) in. I went back to her office and she installed semi-open domes and the improvement was dramatic. But when I went to play my acoustic guitar, I heard a weird “chorus” effect on the higher strings. Yet when I turned the hearing aids off, the guitar now sounded dull, without sparkle. This would not do.

She then suggested I try a different brand, a Widex Moment behind-the-ear model. “A lot of musicians I work with tell me they like these,” she said. They were $800 more but was I going to screw around with my hearing? The sound was warmer, and much more natural – but not as detailed. Sound familiar? Yep, it was like choosing between a more-detailed but brighter speaker and one that had less resolution but offered a better tonal balance. The irony was not lost on me. And when I played my acoustic guitar it sounded fine.

Then I listened to my high-end audio system and it sounded really good. And they significantly improved speech intelligibility. "What?" wouldn't be the most-used word in my vocabulary anymore. I decided to keep the Widex hearing aids.

Widex Moment 330 behind-the-ear hearing aids with recharging station.

But now I have to face the facts:

There's no dancing around it any longer. My hearing is compromised.

The good news: I’m thrilled with the audio quality of my hearing aids, and they clearly operate at a much higher level of A-to-D and D-to-A processing than my old clunkers. They sound clear and it's easier to hear people talking. (I tried reaching Widex to get some technical details, but as of press time no one has responded.)

Best of all, I can listen to my audio system with them and it’s an enjoyable experience. Here’s why: they have a phone app that can adjust their volume and EQ, and if I turn the hearing aids almost all the way down, they add a bit of upper-midrange and treble that’s missing when I turn them off. And they do this without screwing up the sound of the rest of the frequency spectrum. I’ve experimented with listening to other audio systems, live music, band rehearsals, and other situations, and I’ve been thrilled with everything except listening to streaming audio, which for whatever reason sounds like crap. Honestly, my new hearing aids are far beyond what I expected. Though I will say that listening to my system is enjoyable without them.

The sobering news: I have to accept the reality that I can no longer review audio equipment on a professional level. Although I have decades of experience in listening to thousands of components and speakers, I no longer have a true sonic reference point. I can’t in good conscience do definitive reviews about audio gear anymore. I’m not terribly crushed by this last statement – I stopped writing audio equipment reviews more than 10 years ago, but it was because I wanted to, not because I had to.

Which leads to another question: if you’re an audio professional and you can hear more accurately, in terms of frequency response, with hearing aids than without, are you better off wearing them on the job? For example, if you’re a mixing engineer, should you wear them when doing a mix rather than try to mentally “fill in” the attenuated frequency response? Or are you better off not wearing them because over time your brain has adjusted to reality as you hear it, and you’re able to consciously or otherwise compensate, and because wearing hearing aids is adding a layer of degradation to the sound, like listening to a second-generation copy of a master tape?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but when I go to the AES convention in New York this October, finding them out will be a priority. I'm curious if anyone knows the percentage of audio industry people who have hearing loss. Especially since, frankly, not everyone might want to be upfront about it, or even realize they have hearing loss. It's not like we're airline pilots who have to get their vision certified on a regular basis or they can't fly.

So, I have to deal with a new reality.

We all do as we get older, each in our own way.

I'll play the hand I’ve been dealt, and I’m not about to fold.

And every time I might want to complain, I’ll think of Beethoven.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/James Musallam.

In Part One of this interview (Issue 195), Steve and John Seetoo discussed Steve’s beginnings in the mastering world, his mentors, and some of his favorite projects. The interview concludes here.

John Seetoo: You’re almost as well known for your online forum as for your mastering work. How did that community develop?

Steve Hoffman: (laughs) There was a forum that my old company DCC Classics began, basically to answer questions about our releases.  That had 700 to 800 hardcore audiophile members. They would ask the questions and they’d get relayed over to me, and I’d answer and they’d type them on there. When that company went belly up and morphed into Audio Fidelity, there was one fan of mine on the forum who said, “Let me create something for you, and we’ll just move everything over there.” I said, “Nobody is going to be interested in this.” And he said, “Trust me.” So he developed my forum. It had nothing to do with me. It was just a fan site. And on day one, we had 500 members, and on day four, we had 5,000 members!  And it grew and grew and grew, and it’s been 12 years now. We get millions of hits a week. And everybody knows about it.

It has its upside, but it also has its downside. When someone on there says something like, “I don’t like the new remastering of Sgt. Pepper,” and it’s picked up on the internet?  Only because it has my name on top, it’ll read: “Steve Hoffman doesn’t like it” – nothing to do with me, just some guy on my forum. (laughs) So it’s a mixed blessing, but it’s really enabled me to reach out and keep in contact with all of the crazy music lovers out there. Not just audiophiles, but record collectors.

JS: Your fan base, like anything else.

SH: (jokingly) I’m like the God of Sound! – not really!

JS: You’re known to have a fondness for tube electronics and vintage gear. Can you explain the attraction of those? For example, unlike the majority of your peers in the mastering field, you tend to shy away from compressors and prefer to add tube saturation and distortion from analog tube-powered EQs. Why is that, and how are you able to control level disparities without compressors and still get the results you have become renowned for?

SH: You are probably the best interviewer I’ve ever had! I can’t believe it!

JS: Well, thank you!

SH: I’ve been yakking about this stuff since the '80s, and this is the best one ever! Here’s the deal: it happened one day, in 1992. And I remember the day – I was working on this jazz album, and I had my giant solid-state amplifier and my JBL monitors, and what happened was, my fellow engineer, Kevin Gray, had a small pair of McIntosh vacuum tube amplifiers that he had purchased at UCLA Hearing Center. When they went solid-state, they put them in a pile and sold them off for a hundred bucks. And I had seen photographs of the old vacuum tube amps, so I was very curious.

So he loaned me his, and I was playing this one song over and over again on my big solid-state amp, and then decided, “let me just hook in these little small amps; they couldn’t possibly sound any better.” So I hooked them right in, left everything else the same, and oh my god! The musicians! They were right there in the room with me! Nothing else had changed. Just these little old amps with the vacuum tubes in them. And they resurrected the dead! I was so shocked. I just couldn’t believe it. I had these giant amps, and then all of a sudden I had these teeny amps that I could hold one in each of my hands, and it slayed the sound of anything else I’d ever heard. I was shocked. So I asked him, “What’s the magic?” And he said, “vacuum tubes.”

So, in the 1990s, I was a real convert. So I’ve been using vacuum tubes in my work ever since, and it’s really helped; especially it helps on the 1970s – you know, in the old days, in the 1950s and early 1960s, all of the old recording studios used vacuum tubes. When that went away in the late 1960s, the recordings started to become drier; less complex and more flat. So when I add a layer of vacuum tubes in there it sort of brings those old records back to life. So I’m a convert, and I’ll tell the world. Yeah, they run hotter, but the payoff is worth it, completely. That was more than you bargained for with that story, eh?

JS: No, no, that was great! I know people who would agree with you 1,000 percent on that topic. And a lot of them read Copper.

SH: And I know a lot of people who also think I’m totally full of sh*t too! (laughs) But they haven’t heard it. They have to really compare. And none of them ever do. They armchair (quarterback) it; they read the measurements, they read the specs, and think, “that couldn’t possibly sound any better!”

JS: I’ve interviewed Alan Parsons in the past and he loves digital because of the horror stories he had to undergo editing multitrack tape with razor blades just to remove a single note or beat on records like The Dark Side of the Moon. As you have handled remasters of so many iconic records from music history, are there any instances where the original tapes had deteriorated to the point where an out of the box salvage solution was required? I have read in other interviews that you try to avoid digital audio workstations.

SH: You’ve done your homework. Yeah, I’ve done all kinds of crazy things. I’ve never really found an unsalvageable analog tape. I found some that were damaged from operator error when they were rewound, or they snapped the tape or a piece was missing…what I usually do is I get the analog safety, so whatever that little piece is, I just edit it in, right onto the tape. I mean, it’s useless anyway, so you might as well repair it for everybody else.

JS: You physically edit it in?

SH: Absolutely.

JS: You don’t edit it on a digital transfer?

SH: No. Well….once in a great while. When you just have to. But other than that, I like to keep it in analog until the very last moment. There’s my oft-told story of the seven years we waited for the [Jethro Tull] Aqualung master tapes to come from Ian Anderson. And he finally found them in his garage underneath his salmon farm tank! (laughs)

He called me one night – it was the middle of the night, I could hear him on my answering machine (with Scottish brogue:), “Hey this is Ian!” I’m going, “Who’s Ian?” Then I remember – that’s Ian Anderson! I’m scrambling for the phone, and he goes, “Eh? You want tapes? I found ‘em!” (laughs) It’s like seven years later, we’ve been waiting for the analog master tapes for Aqualung.

So he sent them to us in this package, it just arrived at my front door, handwritten package…and everything was fine, except for a giant tape stretch of about two feet where the tape was just unusable during the title song – (hums opening guitar riff) you know that song, “Aqualung,” right?

So we hear the song and the vocal goes, (voice mimicking a record slowing down): “feeling like a deeaaaddd ddduuucccckkk….” (laughs). Oh sh*t. Seven years we waited for this. Seven years. So what are we going to do?

Well, we yak and yak and yak, and I go, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to call up the label here in town. They still have their safety copy. And I bet, with a little finagling, it’s going to mask pretty well.” So we got their little safety out, we edited that little part in, we mastered it, we put it back on the safety, which they were not supposed to have anyway, because they had lost the rights, and everything was fine. Only I can hear it, but no one else has ever mentioned it or called to complain about it.

It’s just one of those things. So, we saved that (project from) having to be repaired without a (whispers): digital audio workstation. It was all analog. It’s fun to do that, you know? I’m an expert editor, not to toot my own horn, but like Alan Parsons, I learned [how to] splice tape with a razor blade. So if you can do it that way, there’s really no reason to have to do it any other way.

Steve Hoffman.

JS: It’s one of those invisible edits that everyone reading this is now going to look for! There are a number of famous edits, like the guitar harmonics at the beginning of “Roundabout” by Yes.

SH: Or, if you really want to ruin your day, any modern version of “She Loves You” by the Beatles – there’s like eight edits in there! So clearly, it’s like,“oh my god, how could I have not been hearing this as a kid?” So I pulled out my old, worn record of “She Loves You.” I could not hear anything, and that’s when I realized that the echo on there was smearing every sign of the editing!  So even back then, they had their own little ways to go about that.

My biggest problem with old tapes is that the (adhesive) paste on the back of the splices dries up over the years and falls off, so every edit that was ever made, and every splice has – died. So we have to repair each one, which is mind-bogglingly time consuming, and – I let my other guys do that, and I just hang around and eat hamburgers. And when that’s all done, we’re ready to go, usually.

JS: It’s a skill that needs to be passed on to the next generation of engineers.

SH: (laughs), Yeah, but it’s not – sadly. And the record companies – they know that. They are now in the process of transferring everything to digital. Transferring their analog tapes all to hi-res. Only problem is, we don’t know what they’re using as their analog source. So, it’s like, they keep offering that to us, and we keep saying, “Look, you’ve already mastered this onto hi-res. We do our own mastering.”

JS: You’ve worked on everything from Bing Crosby, to Johnny Cash, to Coltrane and Miles, to classic rock and Metallica. Do you have any special approaches for mastering different genres of music? For example, do you prepare different protocols to master country music differently than you would for jazz or rock and roll?

SH: Really good question. If there’s a solo instrument, for example – John Coltrane’s saxophone or Creedence – John Fogerty’s vocal – if there’s one instrument that’s supposed to sound lifelike, I work on that instantly. If I can get John Coltrane’s sax to sound like he’s right in the room, I let everything else fall where it may.

One example that I like to explain to people is a lot of these great Creedence Clearwater Revival songs were recorded quite warmly. Not much high end, and the drums sound kind of “thuddy” on them. Most mastering engineers, they hear the sound of the drums and they want to hear the cymbals more, so they turn up the treble when they’re mastering. And that’s all well and good until John Fogerty starts singing and then he sounds like an electronic, I don’t know – amplifier. Not a human being – because his treble is jacked up so much, and he’s already trebly to begin with! So what I do is I make sure that he sounds like a human man, and everything else I ignore, and that drives a lot of other people crazy.

Look, you’ve just bought a Bruce Springsteen album. You didn’t buy the Springsteen drummer album. This is HIS album. You want him to sound like a human being. The drums on “Born to Run” are never going to sound good, no matter what you do, so just give it up. Make sure he sounds like he’s standing there, and then – stop. Don’t do anything else. And that’s how I look at it, no matter what it is – jazz, classical…as long as it sounds like you are there, I’m happy. And if it’s electronic music, then I just want it to sound – pleasing. To me. I mean, pleasing to me. (laughs) I don’t care about anybody else! If it sounds pleasing to me, chances are a lot of audiophiles are going to like it, you know, and a lot of other people.

JS: OK, final question. What’s the best thing that ever happened to you during a mastering project?—whether working with an artist, a particular album, or whatever you’d like to tell us about.

SH: The best thing? Wow, that’s a tough one. You know, I like it when the artist calls me up and, if they’re still alive of course, says, “wow, that’s sounds really great, man.” That I really like a lot. But then the artist goes, “..well, I have some ideas…I’m not really loud enough in this…”

My most personally-satisfying mastering experiences were with the late, great Ray Charles. We worked together for many years, and he was THE guy. He sat there with us and we worked on all of his old catalog, and that was quite rewarding – to be the only guy outside of his circle to sit there and work on “Georgia On My Mind” and “Hit The Road Jack”…so working with Ray, that was really wonderful.

Also, I got to work with Sammy Davis Jr. before he died. You know, they’re so appreciative that someone of a younger generation likes their music, it’s just touching.

I just hope the trend in recording goes back to natural-sounding music – now I sound like an old guy when I say stuff like that! (laughs). But you know, it’s not all about earbuds. These young kids today – they should actually have their own stereos, like we used to in high school and college, so that they can really enjoy the music that they like, but it would make it a lot more enjoyable for them, and it would pass the torch onto other music lovers, who could also become audiophiles.

This article was first published in Issue 37.

 The Agnew Analog Reference Instrument Type 8001 is a unique electrochemical synthesizer, generating strange sounds through chemical reactions occurring in the built-in reactor cell.

The reactions occur by passing an electrical current through various electrolyte solutions. These can range from simple household items, such as vinegar, lemon juice, salt water, dry martini (stirred, not shaken) and various fizzy drinks, to more complex solutions, to satisfy the investigative chemical engineer in search of danger and excitement.

The reactor cell acts as a miniature galvanic bath, with a selection of different electrode materials offering a wide range of sounds.

The generated electrical signals are then amplified by means of vacuum tube electronics, which include inductor filters and feedback loops to further spice thing up.

The output stage is a powerful vacuum tube line driver, which can drive a 600-ohm line or any higher impedance load, balanced or unbalanced, at high signal levels. It can directly drive power amplifiers, and PA and recording systems, or even be connected directly to a guitar amplifier.

It uses two NOS General Electric 6201 double triodes, an NOS Sylvania 0A2 gas voltage regulator and a precision current regulator circuit, along with custom inductors, top-quality components, and a custom wound output transformer.

The circuit is wired point to point (no printed circuit boards), housed inside a sturdy military-grade folded aluminum enclosure, machined and powder-coated. The reactor cell parts were machined from various special alloys, using our 1954 Hardinge HLV precision toolroom lathe.

The concept was first developed by J. I. Agnew around 12 years ago, but it wasn’t until an order was placed by a harsh noise musician from Slovenia that it was resurrected and further refined into its final form as the Type 8001.

This is an extremely versatile instrument, offering a very wide range of sounds, a limited selection of which can be heard here:

This video demonstrates the Type 8001 alone, directly connected to an A/D converter, with no processing or additional effects. Only a single electrode/electrolyte combination was used for the recording.

Other combinations will produce different sounds.

Government agencies wishing to purchase thousands of these for large-scale deployment, please contact us. Everything we do is handcrafted, so you’ll probably have to wait a while, but at least by then nobody will be able to prove if it was the Type 8001 or not, that made the pandemic go away!

This article originally appeared on the Agnew Analog Reference Instruments blog and is used by permission.

Most of us squander far too much of our time engaged in “self-talk.” Our minds are continually preoccupied with “what if” scenarios and how to resolve them, even though these scenarios seldom materialize. From an evolutionary perspective, predetermined responses to potential threats is an effective survival strategy, but it also keeps our minds trapped in the temporal plane of existence.

A koan is a Zen Buddhist tool designed to help the devotee transcend the temporal plane. It usually takes the form of a question. For example, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The mind doggedly seeks an answer, but there is none. That’s the point, to tie the logical mind into such a knot that it short-circuits the endless flow of self-talk. Once the mind is in a state of “non-thinking,” it is free to experience bliss.

Pondering the sound of one hand clapping has never led me to bliss. Neither has contemplating whether or not a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if there is no one around to hear it. Koans frustrate me like child-proof containers.

Music is my koan. It wipes out self-talk like bleach washes away stains. It can carry me from the mundane to a state of transcendental bliss faster than Owsley’s elixir. Twenty minutes in that state is as refreshing as a good night’s sleep.

But it’s not sleeping, as my wife once assumed. She would see me motionless in my recliner for most of a symphony and believe I was dozing. One day, she decided to walk across the listening room. As soon as she blocked the sound of one speaker, I addressed her, eyes still closed, “Hi sweetie.” She was startled. I was meditating, not comatose.

If music is my koan, then my music system is my guru. I want to hear it as clearly and unambiguously as possible. Finding the right guru has been a long search.

Like most audiophiles, my first few systems consisted of off-the-shelf components that did some things well, and other things not so well. Over the years, I traded up to more expensive equipment that did other things well, but then I would miss some of the things at which my old systems excelled.

So I started scrutinizing components. It didn’t take long to determine that electronic components which offered a neutral response, and distortion and noise below audible levels, sounded similar. By definition, they should. (The only qualifier is that they must have sufficient power to drive the load.)

That wasn’t the case with loudspeakers. At the dozen or so Consumer Electronics Shows I attended in Las Vegas, I found that most loudspeakers sounded radically different from one another – even if their manufacturers professed similar design objectives.

Surprisingly, the most expensive speakers were seldom my favorites. As they rarely won “Best Sound of Show” awards, others must have felt likewise. Audiophiles choose what elements of reproduced sound are most important to them, and prefer a system which caters to those preferences. The choice of best loudspeaker, like best restaurant or movie, is dependent on the sensibilities of the beholder. 

My sensibilities must be idiosyncratic. I never found a speaker system at the CES that did everything I sought. Like the systems I’d owned in the past, they usually did some things really well, and other things not so well, regardless of their price. In the next room, those strengths and weaknesses might be reversed.

When I realized this, a light went off. Why not build a custom speaker system catering to my particular sensibilities?

I attended the next CES with a single-minded purpose, to discover my personal preferences. As I auditioned various systems, I wrote pages of notes. When I reviewed them in the evening, these patterns emerged:

– 3-way/3-driver systems sounded cleaner to me than systems using more (or fewer) drivers.
– High-efficiency systems seemed more resolving at low volumes, better at holding a note’s decay to its natural conclusion, and more dynamic than less-efficient systems.
– Wide cabinets appeared to offer superior midrange dynamics.
– The smoothest high frequencies emanated from ribbon tweeters.
– Big bass-reflex bins utilizing large, low-excursion woofers best reproduced effortless, natural-sounding bass.
– Except for those with paper cones, highly-resolving midrange drivers soon became fatiguing.

The loveliest midrange frequencies emanated from a system that had no midrange driver at all. No, it wasn’t a 2-way system. It came from a single, full range paper driver designed to cover the entire frequency spectrum. This driver turned coarse at high frequencies (where it broke up) and produced no real bass, but the midrange resolution and imaging were enchanting. I was able to buy a matched pair from the exhibitor.

The most effortless deep bass I heard filled the room of a European exhibitor. His system employed 15-inch Italian woofers in large, bass reflex cabinets. He was kind enough to provide the information I needed to source a pair.

The smoothest high frequencies came from the Dutch-made, ribbon tweeters utilized in an expensive American system. The manufacturer made a pair available to me.

Once I had the drivers, it was time to acquire the cabinets. I’d planned to construct them myself, but with a stroke of luck, I came across a pair of 7-cubic-foot bass bins originating from a recording studio. They weigh over 200 lbs. each and are much better built than my limited carpentry skills and equipment would allow. All I had to do was tailor the ports and internal damping to my Italian drivers.

The ports were easy, there are formulas for that.

The internal damping took several months. Too much and the sound was lifeless. Too little and the bass sounded like it was coming from a bathroom. I tried foam, shredded cotton, wool felt, and various types of fiberglass damping material. The most natural bass resulted from employing 2-inch Owens Corning 705 high-density fiberglass. This is the yellow stuff often found behind ovens and fridges (nasty to work with; wear gloves and a respirator). I covered all four interior surfaces of the bin, and placed a large piece across the diagonal to discourage standing waves.

The midrange boxes are re-purposed EPI 100 loudspeaker cabinets. I removed the drivers, covered the baffle with MDF, and laid them face down. Then I cut a hole in what was the top to accommodate my 8-inch midrange driver. There is a similar hole in the other end (backside). The cabinets are stuffed with increasing-density damping material like a transmission line. That way, the back waves have no opportunity to reflect back into the lightweight cone to cause distortion. 

The heavy ribbon tweeter is simply set on top of the midrange driver and braced. Being a line source, it has controlled vertical dispersion. This design keeps high frequencies from bouncing off the ceiling and floor.

Diffraction causes sound waves to re-radiate from cabinet edges and splash off nearby surfaces. It makes drivers sound muddy. The custom-cut plexiglass baffles in the photo extends the baffle size and drops the diffraction frequencies to a point below where they are most audible.  The foam trim mitigates the remaining diffraction.

The wide baffles also direct the sound energy towards the listener for superior dynamics. A light bulb mounted against a white wall (rather than hung in the middle of the room) directs light in the same way.  

Once the drivers and cabinets were sorted out, the next challenge was the crossover. I studied passive crossover networks for months and built several, but was never satisfied with the results. That could have been due to my lack of expertise and experience, or, as an electronics engineer friend suggested, the inherent limitations of passive-crossover design.

At his urging, I purchased an active digital crossover. It splits each stereo channel into three signals: bass, midrange and highs. After processing, these signals are fed into six amplifiers, one for each driver (four 60-watt amps in the top amp, two 200-watt bass amps in the bottom). This way, there is nothing between the amps and the drivers except the speaker cables. It allows the amps to do their best work. Complicated passive crossovers can suck the life out of amplifiers and dull the sound.

Because active crossovers are capable of steep slopes, there is little intermodulation distortion between the drivers, and they can be crossed-over closer to the edge of their bandwidths without hitting their breakup or resonance modes.

Another benefit of a digital crossover is how easily crossover frequencies and slopes can be manipulated. I set mine “by the book” initially, then tweaked until I got the sound that most pleased me.

My crossover unit includes digital equalization (EQ). I use it to compensate for room modes and disparate speaker placement. Without such equalization, the most accurate speakers in the world will sound colored in most domestic rooms. For example, in a recent issue of an audio mag, the in-room frequency response of a well-reviewed pair of $100,000-plus loudspeakers showed a 15 dB variation in bass response. Making accurate assessments of any audio product with such a handicap is like testing a sports car in a hockey rink.

EQ can also compensate for poor recordings. Some of my favorite recordings from the 1960s were mastered with too much mid-bass, a midrange peak for “presence,” and treble frequencies accompanied by lots of distortion. On a highly resolving system, they are unlistenable. Applying some EQ can make those oldies bearable.

I talked about acoustics in my previous article (in Issue 195). Fortunately, the fireplace between my speakers provides the diffraction that acoustician Anthony Grimani recommends. The remaining walls feature homemade acoustic panels which absorb midrange and high frequencies much like the air in a large symphony hall. In acoustic terms, they make my room much larger.

My goal was to re-create (in-home) a sound that most closely approximates the experience of a concert hall. I failed miserably. No one will ever mistake the sound in my little room for the glorious sound of a symphony hall. The laws of physics preclude it. But I got closer than any other system I’ve heard in an equivalently sized space.

B. Jan Montana's completed audio system.

A few internationally well-known audio engineers and manufacturers have also auditioned my system. These were their responses:

“I was impressed with Jan’s system when I visited his home. It was very well balanced, clean, and had excellent imaging. He played a choral piece that was particularly impressive. He did a great job on his system!”

“One of the best dynamic loudspeaker systems I’ve heard. The imaging is startling.”

“This is among the lowest-distortion systems I’ve listened to, I’ll bet it’s under 1 percent all the way to the lowest notes.”

“This system sounds like live music. The bass is as realistic as I’ve ever heard in-home.”

“I have no idea how you get such analogue sound from a completely digital/solid-state system.”

It’s one thing for an amateur to wing his way through the world of acoustics and speaker building for home use. It's another to have those efforts applauded by esteemed professionals. I’m grateful to all those who helped in print, in videos, or in person.  

This article was first published in Issue 33.

Along with many mainstream audio publications and websites, Copper – in fact, more than most – has actively acknowledged and supported the revival in open-reel tape. Its contributors have dug deep into rare transports, undertaken interviews with producers of the period, dissected microphone quality, and examined other issues. What begs further investigation, especially when the format’s observers are bold enough to mention it in the same breath as the vinyl or cassette revivals, is the fundamental difference: open-reel tape is, for all intents and purposes, dead to domestic consumers. For that, read, “audiophiles of normal means.”

Let me back up a bit because I am as guilty as any reel-to-reel devotee in touting the format’s merits, and for home use – not just analogue-oriented studios. I have become a tape obsessive, acquiring eight decks and over 2,200 commercial pre-recorded tapes in three years. (Yes, two thousand, two hundred.) At the same time, however, I have consistently stressed that open-reel tape can never return on a commercially viable level, as have LPs or cassettes, because, unlike those formats, it is not supported by affordable hardware nor pre-recorded media. We’ll get to the current offerings of both shortly, but bear with me.

Where the formats diverge, then, is simple availability-cum-accessibility, especially for those who prefer new hardware and media over second-hand. Any veteran will tell you that a format succeeds or fails strictly according to the scale of the support of the music labels, and that applies, too, after the format has passed its commercial peak, e.g. CD may be on the decline, but go to your preferred store or site and check out this season’s costly CD box sets.

LPs and cassettes were never truly dead because at no point after CD arrived were LPs totally out of production, nor were cartridges, tonearms and turntables. Name any date post-1983 and you could still buy a brand-new record deck and fresh LPs, while the second-hand markets for both remain massive. Cassettes may have been less well-served since the 1990s, but you can still buy new machines as of 2021, the tapes are making a comeback, and I don’t recall a time when blank cassettes were unavailable.

Open-reel? To the best of my knowledge, Otari was the last major manufacturer of reel-to-reel machines, and it ceased production of them over a decade ago. While eBay and other online sources are full of used decks, most are over 20 years old, beaten to sh*t, most are in need of impossible-to-find spares and – as if you need proof of renewed interest – offered at ever-escalating prices.

That in itself is a testimony to strength of the reel-to-reel renaissance. A Sony TC-377 or an Akai GX-4000D which would have been easy to find for under $100 three years ago will set you back $500 for a mint example in 2021. Technics RS-1500s are rapidly exceeding the $2,000 mark. There are no fully-serviced decks on the market which say “Studer” for under $1,000. As for the big Studer 800 Series decks, the most loved of all, five figures is the norm. And I don’t even bother looking for a Crown tape deck anymore, long my holy grail machine.

As for the new decks, some of which remain apocryphal so far, the primary example is the very-much-genuine Ballfinger from Germany. While you can configure it any way you like – and its target clients are mainly professionals, or the sort of consumer prepared to pay $450 for a single reel-to-reel recording – the cost of entry is above €15,000. The Thorens playback-only version of the Ballfinger announced at the last Munich High End Show (pre-COVID-19) will sell for €12,000. And it’s 2-track only, which tells you what tapes it expects to be fed.

What to Play?

Which brings us to the current pre-recorded tape situation, and which begs the question: why would anyone even investigate a return to reel-to-reel? The obvious answer is sound quality, but here I will reserve opinion on an underground cult which argues that copying an LP to tape results in a better-sounding recording. Let’s not go there. Home or live recording are separate issues, and not the reasons I got into open-reel tape. For me, it’s all about playback.

That means pre-recorded tapes – both new and old, and I care only about the latter. For everyone else, the suppliers are those bold enough to produce both brand-new or reissued recordings, priced at the top of the scale. Blessedly, in a recent issue of The Absolute Sound (October 2021, Issue 320), Jonathan Valin manfully, nay, heroically compiled the most comprehensive list I have seen yet of currently-available pre-recorded open-reel tapes.

His list included The Tape Project, Foné, STS, Hemiola, Chasing the Dragon, and many others, which I dutifully counted for you, reaching around 600 titles. With precious few exceptions, the tapes are 1) 15 ips, 1/2-track recordings on 10-inch spools, for maximum fidelity, and 2) sell for anything between $250 – $700 each. Think about the latter figure: that’ll buy you four Mobile Fidelity One-Step LPs if you need context.

At the risk of getting skinned alive, I have to point out that around half the titles JV listed are only of interest to people who are pre-disposed toward stilted performances reminiscent of 1980s audiophile LPs, mainly by musicians of whom you’ve never heard. Sorry to be so negative, but for $500, I want nothing less than Ohio Express – at least I know what I am getting. Fortunately, the other half of the available tapes, e.g. titles from The Tape Project, are well-known releases from star musicians. It’s obvious, though, that buying current pre-recorded tapes is as restrictive in financial terms as is buying a new machine. And as sonically superb as these tapes are, the repertoire remains severely limited.

On the Road to eBay

Before regaling you with tales of how I got a copy of Casino Royale on reel-to-reel tape, and why I have over 30 tapes of Hawaiian music, some personal history. Long before I attended kindergarten, I was au fait with open-reel because my father was a tape enthusiast in the 1950s. He was never what we would call an audiophile and was unimpressed when his son committed himself to hi-fi separates at the age of 16. His schtick in the previous decade was swapping tapes with English enthusiasts, much as there once were pen pals.

As I understand it, LPs were way out of reach to the average impoverished Englishman in the 1950s, as post-war rationing continued in Great Britain until mid-1954. Imports were taxed prohibitively to protect local manufacturing, and the country survived on exports. According to one source, 95% of all the sports cars produced in England – Triumphs, MGs, Austin-Healeys, Sunbeam Alpines, Jaguars, etc., etc. – went to the USA.

What my father swapped were big band recordings (he was a Glenn Miller fanatic) and I inherited his massive mono Voice of Music 700 Series recorder when he lost interest. I used it to record radio programs in the 1960s – live Rolling Stones, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, etc. – but the tapes are long gone. I next used open-reel tape a few times to record live gigs in a wine bar where I worked in Canterbury, but found cassettes much easier in a crowded cellar with no safe space for a big tape deck.

After a long hiatus, some 40 years, my rediscovery of open-reel tape was inspired by the late Tim de Paravicini. Because Tim was globally-renowned for his tape deck servicing and/or hot-rodding skills, his list of clients contained two Beatles, Abbey Road Studios, at least one member of Pink Floyd, Bob Ludwig, and too many others to list.

This celebrity status in turn gave him access to tapes about which most of us can only dream. Thus, when I happened upon his room at the Tokyo High End Show in 2017 and he was playing a tape of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I assumed that he was playing a copy off a master tape. It sounded too good to be true.

What he held up when I asked was the box of the bog-standard, 7-1/2 ips Capitol commercial pre-recorded open-reel release from circa-1970, with the blue-edge carton. I was stunned. I knew that his Denon DH-710 was a spectacular machine, and the real reason I was in the room was to hear his stacked pairs of Falcon Acoustics BBC LS3/5A speakers, but this was too unlike any of the 30-plus copies I have of that album, on every format aside from 8-track. I was absolutely gutted, wondering how I would be able to acquire a copy.

When I returned back to the UK, to my delight, I actually had a mint copy. I set up my ReVox G36, coincidentally hot-rodded by Tim, I stacked two pairs of LS3/5As and thus reproduced precisely what I had heard in Tokyo. From that exact moment onward, pre-recorded tapes became my audio raison d’être, overtaking everything else. My obsession was swiftly augmented by the few tapes I found alongside Sgt. Pepper: Aretha’s Gold and Roy Orbison’s Greatest Hits. In every instance, I was staggered by what I heard, of tapes that hadn’t been touched in decades. Sorry, Mikey, but they slaughtered the best vinyl alternatives.

I honestly cannot recall a single occurrence in my 53 years as an audiophile which so overcame my hi-fi sensibilities. At that point, I had three G36s in need of service, a couple of tape decks in storage, and maybe 10 pre-recorded tapes. I wasn’t interested in home-recorded tapes, whether copies of LPs or CDs, or even high-quality FM radio broadcasts. It was the overwhelming realization that the pre-recorded tapes from both the early specialists like Audio Fidelity, Command, Bel Canto and Everest, and the best of the major labels, especially RCA, Capitol and Columbia, delivered sound so audibly superior to LP in every way.

In Part Two, KK describes the hunt for tape decks and – crucially – decent tapes.

Header image: Solomon Kessler in 1957 with his Voice of Music tape recorder, home-built mixer and Columbia record player.

This article was first published in Issue 146.

“The sky is both over and under the water?” Gary thought as he stared into the puddle. “What sense does that make?" Street scene in Long Island, New York, August 2023.

So many concertos, so little time.

When I decided to devote two whole TMT columns to Violin Concertos After Beethoven, my aim seemed clear: sort through a pile of recent recordings, find the best and/or most provocative, and report on them. I would not, could not attempt a comprehensive survey, but I might at least explore ways in which violin concertos have evolved, deconstructed, or simply left the building over the last hundred years.

And yet I was besieged with bouts of remorse every time I remembered another Great Concerto I was leaving out of my non-survey. No Barber. No Bernstein. No Stravinsky. And nothing Anne-Sophie Mutter had wrung out of Witold Lutosławski. My list of shamefully neglected masterworks grew longer and longer. The last straw came when I saw Mark Lehman’s review of British Violin Concertos (Naxos 8.57391) in TAS. Then I stumbled upon a website devoted to same, with none of the Naxos contributors (Patterson, Leighton, Jacob) even mentioned. There was Elgar, but not Britten or Vaughan Williams. Or Thomas Adès, for peat’s sake (actually not a heartbreaking omission). This helped me get over myself.

So, what follows are a few not-quite-random thoughts, not-quite-randomly updated from 2018, when these remarks first appeared in Copper. We’ll begin with lesser-known music, then move on to the completely unknown, glancing occasionally at Part 1’s original chew toy: abstract formalism vs. narrative or programmatic themes. I needn’t say much about Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or Bruch. But we will start with recognizable music.

For instance: lately I’ve been struck by just how ubiquitous the music of Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) has become. He wrote in a lush late-Romantic style that nearly everyone enjoys. And he gave us not one but two violin concertos. Listen to the opening of Concerto No. 1 (1916):

Gorgeous, right? Plenty of rhythmic vitality, plus color: delicate, quicksilver swarmings from various instruments. Then, a lyrical yet breathtaking entrance by the soloist. Szymanowski seems to have been inspired partly by his friend Tadeusz Miciński’s poem “May Night”:

 Donkeys in crowns settle on the grass –
Fireflies kiss the wild rose –
While death flickers over the pond
And plays its wanton song.

Brings to mind A Midsummer Night’s Dream, except for the bit about death (Divinely Decadent, that). We should bear in mind that this was composed during the upheavals of World War I, which found Szymanowski relatively isolated. But he had already had transformative experiences: sexual awakenings in the Mediterranean and North Africa, performances heard elsewhere of Pelléas et Mélisande, The Firebird, and Petrushka. He met Stravinsky in London and initiated a friendly correspondence. Later, he read extensively: Greek tragedy; histories of Islam, ancient Rome, and early Christendom; Plato, Da Vinci, Persian poets. All this helped him break with German Romanticism, which led to a period of enormous creativity, which led to Violin Concerto No. 1, Symphony No. 3 (inspired by Jalāl ad-Dīn ar-Rūmī) and many songs and chamber works. In short, he became Szymanowski.

Here’s another taste:

Perhaps you’ll be reminded of Debussy, Scriabin, and Richard Strauss, plus a dash of Orientalism. Quite a mix! Although you can break it down into rondo form, this music comes off more as a continuous, freely ordered fantasy. Narrative, definitely narrative.

Szymanowski’s second violin concerto was the last major work he completed. Its one-movement structure is not unlike that of No. 1, but the folk influence of the Tatra Mountains—where Szymanowski had a villa—is obvious:

We have been listening to a new recording of the two concertos plus another, by Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876–1909) from Tasmin Little and the BBC SO conducted by Edward Gardner (Chandos CHSA 5185). Fine performances, sterling hi-res sound. Highly recommended. (Gardner has also recorded the Szymanowski symphonies in hi-res for Chandos.)

Szymanowski is big these days, so I wasn’t surprised to find another new recording of Concerto No. 1 in my review pile. It’s a very good one too, from Anne Akiko Meyers and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Kristjan Järvi (Avie AV2385). As good as her Szymanowski is, though, the real treasure here is a Fantasia by great Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, which Meyers commissioned in 2014. She wrote about her experience at length for Gramophone, so I’ll quote from that:

In December [2014], I flew to Helsinki to meet Rautavaara and perform the work for him. . . . [His] apartment was flooded with a special light that only seems to exist at the edge of the earth, overlooking the sea. . . . After I played Fantasia, he looked at me and repeatedly said, “I wrote such beautiful music!” We all laughed and agreed. . . . I was amazed that he made no changes to any notes or dynamics. Everything was in place just the way he wrote it. Fantasia is transcendent and has the feeling of an elegy with a very personal reflective mood. . . . I thank him from the bottom of my heart for writing a masterpiece that makes me cry every time I listen to it.

Why not try it yourself? There’s a SoundCloud track at the bottom of her Gramophone piece with the whole Fantasia on it. Very nice recording, incidentally, done at London’s Air Studios, with exceptionally good liner notes by Jim Svejda. (A YouTube follow-the-score version is also available.)

 Time for more challenging terrain. This next concerto is called Under City Skin, for violin, strings, and “surround sound” (more precisely, a mixture of musique concrète and synthesized materials). You may have trouble figuring out which is which. Was that a bird, or violin harmonics? A Mercedes-Benz revving up, or a tone generator? We begin by following a pair of high heels through a Hitchcock soundscape:

If you listen with few expectations, it grows on you; the surround sound helps. This ambitious, interesting work by Rolf Wallin is featured on an SACD from BIS (2242) along with Eivind Buene’s Miniatures and Violin Concerto. You’ll recognize the music of that concerto’s third movement:

Right out of the Berg concerto! Really quite evocative in this new, post-modern context. I liked it, although not as much as Wallin’s piece.

As I mentioned above, Mark Lehman likes Naxos’s British Violin Concertos. So do I. Violinist Clare Howick pulls together three relatively conservative works by Paul Patterson (b.1947), Kenneth Leighton (1929–1988), and Gordon Jacob (1895–1984). Tuneful, lively, and sturdy, all of them. Here’s a bit of the Patterson:

But let’s end this segment with some kale-laced quinoa: 21st Century Violin Concertos from Harriet Mackenzie and the ESO conducted by Kenneth Woods (Nimbus Alliance NI6295). Includes music by Patterson (Allusions for two solo violins and strings), Deborah Pritchard (b. 1977), David Matthews (b. 1943), Robert Fokkens (b. 1975), and Emily Doolittle (b. 1972). The album’s unified only by Mackenzie’s involvement with these composers, so you may find it uneven. I liked Pritchard’s Wall of Water (2014), inspired by paintings of Maggie Hambling. There’s a promotional video on YouTube, but it doesn’t give you a very good idea of how the music unfolds. Check out Mackenzie’s complete performance with the Aldeburgh Festival Orchestra:

You can purchase only the tracks you wish here, on the Chandos website. On the fence? Try Doolittle’s short, lovely falling still, its narrative focused on rain and birdsong.

Since 2018, a number of excellent violin-and-orchestra albums have come out. I’m especially fond of two: the first is Paris from Hilary Hahn, featuring works by Chausson and Prokofiev plus more Rautavaara in the form of two short Serenades. They are beautiful, and quite likely the very last music he composed. 

Second comes a new recording of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, using Ancient Instruments (i.e., from the early 20th century) as employed by the not-at-all-ancient violinist Isabelle Faust with conductor François-Xavier Roth. Bracing, energetic, characterful performances. This is now my favorite recording, bumping that by Patricia Kopatchinskaja—who does have enormous fun with this work—out of first place. Watch Faust and Roth tear into the finale of the Stravinsky:

Did you check out the bassoonist in that video? He’s certainly having fun.

The album’s cover art: Nature morte au violon et feuille de musique (1914) by Juan Gris, roughly contemporaneous with Stravinsky and his own brand of musical Cubism. Well done, everyone!

This article was first published in Issue 56.

Fat Possum Records, the small label that the band Sunflower Bean records for, refers to the threesome as “veterans of the Brooklyn DIY scene.” DIY. That’s Brooklynese for indie. Cute. (Full disclosure: I’ve lived in Brooklyn for over a decade, but not the cool neighborhoods that get to coin record industry terms.)

Whatever you call them, Sunflower Bean has some real and varied rock chops, a thing heartening to hear in this age when any kind of musical chops – let alone a sense of popular music history — seem increasingly rare. The lead singer, Julia Cumming, is also the bass player. Nick Kivlen sings back-up and plays guitar (and let’s get it out of the way: yes, he’s a dead ringer for Bob Dylan circa 1965). Jacob Faber is the drummer. They got started in 2013, when they were all in their late teens. Their youth hasn’t kept them from being serious musicians, a statement that’s true for many of the greats. These three have potential for sure.

And if my word doesn’t pass for street cred, the fact that they’re opening for The Pixies on tour this summer should do it.

As with many indie musicians, Sunflower Bean’s sound morphs from one sub-genre to another in an original blend. That’s not something to be ashamed of, according to a quote from Cumming on their Bandcamp page: “You’re allowed to obsess over Black Sabbath as well as The Cure.”

Heavy metal and punk do make frequent appearances in Sunflower Bean’s music, but so do British Invasion rock and roll as well as dreampop (alternative neo-psychedelia from the late ʼ80s, with the best-known practitioners being My Bloody Valentine).

That dreamy, off-kilter feel was present even in Sunflower Bean’s earliest work, as was the variety of styles. “Bread” is one of the band’s 2013 tracks marked on Bandcamp as “recorded in Christian Billard’s home studio,” which sure sounds indie to me. Simple, arpeggio-based melodies start the song, over synth and ethereal high-hat cymbals; vocal phrases swirl around each other. But without warning, the rhythm is shored up into a march-like, drum-driven duple around the 1:40 mark:

“Bread” was rereleased in 2014 as part of the EP Show Me Your Seven Secrets. Another older track on that collection was “2013” (which was released yet again on 2016’s Human Ceremony, the band’s most recent album). The opening riff is reminiscent of the original psychedelia movement: cue the colored oil slide projections and the bellbottoms. Unfortunately, the lyrics are punk-approved indecipherable.

And yet another facet of the band shows them sweet and melodic. The opening blast of “Shine a Light,” from the 2016 EP From the Basement, could be Queen circa 1978. But it’s just a musical representation of the light, apparently, since the song is unusually gentle, a sweet triple-time tune featuring Kivlen on both vocals (Cumming does backup a third above) and shimmery guitar patterns that sound almost like steel guitar until he increases the distortion. So, these guys don’t shy away from a touch of country! Their cover of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” has a similar vibe, this time sung primarily by Cumming.

There couldn’t be greater contrast between those tracks and “Tame Impala,” another song on From the Basement. One of their hardest head-banging tunes, it shows off Cumming’ bass playing with a relentless riff. And between her screeching voice and Kivlen’s robotic delivery of the words, you’ve got two of the classic punk approaches to singing, accompanied by enough crazy energy in the instruments to make Black Flag proud:

Sunflower Bean’s latest album (and their first full-length commercial venture) is Human Ceremony (2016). It’s a get-to-know-us endeavor that showcases all their skills, not to mention their distinctive worldview. Here’s “Creation Myth”:

Cumming demonstrates her vocal range with that mountainside of a melody. It took me the first five times to understand the one line of the chorus, “All in six days, Paradise on Earth”; diction is never Cumming’ strength, but that’s long been a badge of honor among songwriters trying to be mysterious or deep. Still, the construction of the song is intelligent, even if it seems haphazard at first listening. When Kivlen doubles Cumming’s vocals at the lower octave, it grounds the melody, forming the perfect earthward path to a ripping, raging heavy-metal guitar solo, like the continental plates cracking apart.

If “Creation Myth” has more than a touch of Radiohead’s perpetual motion drive, “Easier Said” shows influence from Blondie and the Cranberries, and not only because of how the platinum-haired Cumming is featured in the video. (It’s worth noting that Cumming has called this one her favorite song on the album.) Her singing has that slight detachment, as if she either does not understand the English she’s singing, doesn’t want you to know what she’s thinking, or is new to our planet. It’s an accepted means of singing for female leads, ever since the great Deborah Harry slid her way over a “Heart of Glass.”

Speaking of visiting other planets, Human Ceremony ends with “Space Exploration Disaster.” It’s a cross between the Rolling Stones’ “2000 Miles from Home” and the old Conan O’Brien shtick “In the year 2000.” With impressive layered textures from Kivlen’s guitar, it’s a showpiece for the rhythm section.

There’s also some subtle wit in the concept of this song. Just as O’Brien’s feature continued after the new millennium had begun, making it no longer a prediction of the future but a parody, the verses of “Space Exploration Disaster” hang on the line “In the year 2015…,” soothsaying about the very year the song was written as if it were a generation in the future.

Which makes me wonder, how firmly are those Sunflowers’ tongues planted in their cheeks, not just in this song, but in all of them?

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Raph_PH.

This article was first published in Issue 39.