In Praise of A Well-Chosen Indulgence

I've been watching how-to-record-your-music videos recently and ran across the wonderfully over-the-top Spectre Sound Studios. In this one he talks briefly about debt and how it should be avoided. Turns out he owns his house, studio, and car. How? Because, in his words, he bought what he needed, not what he wanted.

Spectre Sound was saying: don't spend £1,000 on the fancy gear when £200 will get you something that will do the job well enough that the audience won't notice the difference.

Most companies do this. Most companies buy the least-cost, lowest spec-for-what-they-think-is-needed kit. Sometimes they get away with it, and sometimes they lose thousands of hours a week from laptops that take ten minutes to boot up and shut down, and are unusable for an hour when doing weekly updates (ask me how I know). The company doesn't care that their staff feel that they aren't worth decent kit. That's what economic-value-optimisation makes us feel like. Not important enough for the Good Stuff.

In order, there's

a) doing without

b) buying the least-cost, lowest-spec

c) buying nice so you don't buy twice

d) indulgence (buying something that's a little better than "nice" because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy)

e) wasting money buying specs or stuff you are never going to use. 

For example, bread:

a) is not buying any bread because, well, who needs bread? you're not going to die if you don't have it b) is Tesco White Sliced c) is a sourdough from a supermarket d) is a loaf from Paul or some other such brand e) is any loaf from Whole Foods or an "artisan" baker with their own shop in Notting Hill or Greenwich

The base-line for judging indulgence or waste is not "go without". Nor is it Tesco White Sliced, which barely qualifies as bread. The baseline is the cheapest "buy nice" option. It's deviation either way from "Buy Nice" that needs to be justified. We should justify buying low-quality-and-cheap as well as higher-quality-and-more-expensive.

Buying what you want, without wasting money, just makes you feel like, in the words of the ad, you're worth it.

(Now you ask, I buy whatever shampoo is on sale, but not the diluted cheap own-brand stuff.)

This is why I have always had the suspicion that people who buy what they want rather than what they need are a little more fun and little richer and softer in texture. (Assuming they aren't being stupid with the "wants".) By adopting a very narrow definition of "need" - as in "you're not going to die if you don't go on holiday / only drink tap water / never eat chocolate" - one can lead a very miserable life.

Until April 2020, my indulgence was membership at a fancy gym in Soho: there are gyms that cost more, but most cost less. A lot less. But I enjoyed and appreciated it. I joined my local The Gym in April this year. I don't dislike it, but I don't feel a little thrill walking through the door either. It's functional, and that's it. The local fancy gym charges not far short of what I was paying for my previous gym and is over-priced for what it provides. "Need" rules in this case.

I may be missing a well-chosen indulgence.

Holland Park Japanese Garden

 

One fine sunny day in early November, Sis and I wandered round Holland Park. I hadn't been to Holland Park since one of the summer evening concerts back maybe in the Oughties. It's still there and it's much as I remembered it. I hadn't visited the Japanese garden before and was glad we did.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part Three

Welcome to the "small rooms" owners' club.

Once again, pro sound treatment methods (bass traps, reflectors, absorbers and soundproofing) are essential for studios and can be useful for "larger rooms". No-one is saying otherwise.

But one-metre deep bass traps are not feasible in a small room. Nor is six-inch absorption padding all round the walls. Isn't the room small enough already? Nor are serious soundproofing measures, which also require thick lumps of absorbent materials. And have you noticed that the rooms in treatment videos belong to people who don't read, have no art or decoration, and store their CD's and records in another room? No wonder they need absorbers and diffusers. Real rooms have bookcases, shelving, pictures on the wall, and other stuff. Some of that helps. What else can we do?

If you are following the user manual for your speakers, you will be sitting about two-three metres from them. No matter what size your room is. Or what the speakers are. (Have you seen how close people sit to those Wilson towers?)

Contrary to some commentators' sniffy remarks, thick pile carpets and loose hanging curtains a distance from the wall do work: see this table of absorption coefficients. Curtains and carpets are pretty much third for absorption after foams and fibres, and then people.

Am I sure I'm not rationalising my unwillingness to spring for a dozen GiK acoustics panels for £700 or so, plus all that drilling and hanging? Well, that's why I write things like this: to make sure I've got my facts in a row. And I think I have.

There wouldn't be home hi-fi if the first thing you were told by your dealer was "we couldn't sell you any of this with a clear conscience until you've had your listening room re-built by an expert, otherwise you'll just come back and complain it sounds terrible". It has to be pretty good out of the box in nearly all circumstances.

We small-roomers are left with the simple things, which are more about the overall sound of the room than specific flaws.

Rugs for wooden floors

Curtains to the full width of the room so that the corners as well as the windows are covered

Shelves with books, record collections, even storage (as long as it's not a wall of boxes), for dispersion and absorption. Just don't line everything up neatly or you'll lose the dispersive effect

Symmetry: equal spacing between left and right speakers to their near walls, same distance from the front wall, both at ear height; books or records (aka 'damping') to the right wall means books or records ('damping') to the left wall in the same place.

All that work for that conclusion? Hey, I saved a lot of money on those acoustic panels.

So I'm upgrading the carpets and doing something about the (long story) curtains on the windows. The front wall is going to be a curtain with folds hanging from a tension bar. That will do for now. In time I may change the furniture around and get some more natural damping.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part Two

Room treatment is mostly about room modes and reflections. (Sound-proofing is taken to be out-of-scope since it needs building work.)

Room modes first. These are sound waves that bounce back and forth between the walls, or floor and ceiling, because the wavelengths fit the dimensions just right. This is where boomy bass comes from.

Small rooms are held to be a lost cause because they have many, many of these resonating frequencies. That may be true, but there's a VERY important qualification: those room modes only matter if any of them correspond to one of the 88 frequencies used in the music you are most likely listening to.

Yep. There are zillions of frequencies that could be used to make music, but almost all Western Music is made with 88 of them. Here's a list. You will notice the only ones that are whole numbers are the A's from 55Hz upwards. All the rest are given to five (5) decimal places, in a scheme called twelve-tone equal temperament (which is a music theory rabbit-hole all its own). Western musical instruments are mass-produced to reproduce those notes. The chances of your room having a resonant frequency corresponding to some random note like F# above low-C (say) are approximately zero.

And if you do, all you have to do is move the speakers either back or forward a couple of centimetres (front-to-back resonance), or closer or further apart a couple of centimetres (side-to-side resonance), and it will disappear. (This is called positional equalisation.) It will not to be replaced by one on another note because a) the difference in wavelengths between any of the 88 notes is more than a couple of centimetres, and b) the resonance is between the speaker and the back or side walls, not between the front and back walls, which would be a room resonance, and your speaker is not mounted in the walls. (And even if it was, the point remains the same!)

If you have a floor-firing subwoofer, you can't fix a room mode like that, because the way the sound waves come from the subwoofer mean the resonance will be from floor-to-ceiling. Should a piece of music contain a hefty belt of 73.4 Hz D or 36.7 Hz D, both of which will pass into my subwoofer, I get a resonance. However, only five-string double-basses and instruments with names starting 'octocontra' ever get down to 36.7 Hz, leaving me with exactly one note that can trigger that resonance, and that's still way down low even for a string-bass. And no, very few pieces of music are written to include octocontra-anythings, and most orchestras would either not perform them, or use the programme or sleeve notes to apologise for the missing instrument. The lower you cross over to your subwoofer, the fewer possibilities for resonance you have.

How about all those reflections? According to the Master Handbook of Acoustics

Our hearing mechanism integrates spatially separated sounds over short intervals, and under certain conditions tends to perceive them as coming from one location.... in an auditorium, the ear and brain have the ability to gather all reflections arriving within about 35ms after the direct sound, and combine...them to give the impression that the entire sound field is coming from the direction of the original source, even though reflections from other directions are involved...This is called the Precedence Effect, Hass effect, or law of the first wavefront.

In more familiar terms, the ear has a buffer about 35ms deep. At the speed of sound that's 12m. I am two metres from my speakers. Any sound along a path strictly less than 14 metres from speaker to ear will have its sound combined with the direct sound from the speakers. That's all the first reflections in my room. So in a "small room", first reflections do not appear as separate sound sources. Instead, those reflections give the sound a sense of spaciousness which is greater as the power of the reflections increases. Reflections have to be quite loud before they are perceived as echoes. (In my "small room", the first reflections are travelling something like 3m to reach me, so they are 4/9 (inverse square law) as powerful as the direct sound, which leads to a drop of 3dB in volume and whatever absorption I get at the wall. Every little helps.)

Reflections good - sometimes. Too many and too loud, and the sound image will lose sharpness or you will get echoes. Too few and too quiet and the sound will feel muffled and dull. The trick is to get the sound quality you like.

Those with "small rooms", read on.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part One

Steve Gutenberg says we should try room treatments. John Darko has those GiK boards all over the place. I'm starting to feel I'm not responding to the memo.

Except...

Acoustic treatment for studios is a real thing: studios need all the soundproofing their owner can afford, and a lot of plain old echo-deadening in the recording space. Performers don't like heavily damped studio acoustics, which is why some of them prefer to plug into the board and hear each other over headphones. Then they can perform together in a room that looks as if it was designed for humans.

Audio design for a concert-hall is a real thing. Soundproofing from outside noise, getting a decent quality of sound in all the seats, tuning it to be lively or dry, depending on the taste of the resident orchestra, or the kind of music that it will be played in it, all this is serious stuff. Consult someone with an acoustics degree. Something similar might be said for the listening rooms of millionaires, who can afford to have chunks of their houses re-built or re-furbished.

I can't, and I assume you can't either. I have a rectangular room that's 14L x 10w x 7.7H in feet, just over 1,000 cu ft. In the trade this is called a small room. The Master Handbook of Acoustics(*) dismisses any room of less that 1,500 cu ft as a lost cause. Others define "small" as anything smaller than a classroom.

Watch a few room treatment You Tube videos and you will wonder how on earth you are able to hear anything, let alone identify it as Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain. What with diffusion, room modes, reflections off the floor, the ceiling, the side walls, the back corners, runaway bass that needs to be trapped... it's a wonder you can hear the tuba.

Except...

Once the speakers and listening position are set up right...

...and you've got some carpet on that varnished pine floor...

...and you've accepted, like me, the inevitability of hauling the couch from the back of the room so that my head was the third point of a (nearly) equilateral triangle with the speakers (**)

...you can indeed hear the tuba. And everything else. And no obvious echoes or reflections.

How does this happen?

Read on.

(*) That's what it's called, and you get 10,000 Audiophile Points for reading it.

(**) Which is where speaker manufacturers say to sit. If you don't do this, and put your speakers at different heights and distances from the walls, and have books below them, then the orchestra may well wind up in the upper-right-hand corner of your room. So a friend told me, anyway.

Cold Re-Boot

I got a cold just over a week ago. Didn't have the runny nose or coughs, did have shortness of breath when climbing stairs and that feeling that walking to the corner shop might be a mission I would not come back from. It lasts about three-four days. It wasn't the supercold. It wasn't the Virus. It would have been worse if I'd been commuting and waking up at 05:15 in the incubation period.

So I went into the Big Smoke after that, the only things on my to-do list being a haircut at George The Barber and a suntan at the Covent Garden Tanning Shop. I've been going to both since the early 2000's. I had lunch in Balans, and I've been eating there since the early-2000's as well. I damn near fell asleep on the train into Waterloo, and didn't quite wake up for the rest of the day. After lunch I went to Green Park, where I sat and dozed a little for a while, and then headed back to Waterloo. At some point when I was underground the rain tipped down.

I spent a short while in Fopp, looking for some box sets to watch. (I know, I should be streaming from Amazon Prime.) During this, I realised that I'm simply not attracted to today's cultural products, in part because the SJW infestation and remember-our-audience-is-mostly-female slant in a lot of the stuff made in the last, oh, eight years or so? Maybe ten? It could be that this stuff will look in twenty years' time as horribly dated as Starsky and Hutch does now: "ah yes the SJW years" the historians will say "most of it is unwatchable propaganda now". It could be that this is the way it's going to be for a long time.

So what do I do? I become that guy who re-watches his DVD collection and listens to his CDs over and over? Also, I go back over the period I like and see what I missed: there's probably a reason why Heathers is still on sale now. Some of that stuff is too specifically freighted with memories and emotions: I would have to be very careful about watching Four Weddings and a Funeral or Truly, Madly, Deeply again, whereas I can put on Dogtown and Z-Boys almost any time.

My reading is all over the place and always has been. Who knows, I may even try to see if it's true that In Search of Lost Time is a book to re-read rather than read the first time. (So many of its fans say that.)

I've made some resolutions:

No more doomscrolling, at least before about lunch.

I'm going to use slightly lighter weights in the gym. What I'm doing now is leaving me tired for the rest of the day and much of the following day.

Diet. Yes. I should definitely do something about that. I may do a whole over-thinking post on it.

Read more maths - I should line up more maths blogs and visit the arXiv more often. I'm not talking about You Tube gee-whiz maths, but research-level stuff. I will not rest until I can explain in simple language what is an Adele (no, not the singer) ring.

Re-read (re-gaze-at) my art books. Lord knows I have enough.

Use the bus to get to the station. Why I haven't done this before. I'm not sure, maybe because I've always walked to the station. But with the Bus Checker app I be sure that they haven't cancelled the one I need.

So life goes on.

Editorial Policy

I've always regarded the posts on this blog as a way of working out my thoughts on whatever junk is wandering through my head at the time. Dogma, ideology and a fixed programme isn't my thing. Today's idea is tomorrow's history. Some things have remained the same throughout my life, but a lot changes, and not just the music I listen to, the pictures I look at and the novels and textbooks I read. I am never going to read much about chemistry, nor sociology, nor economics, and Greys' Anatomy will be forever a closed book to me (the book, sadly I saw about one series of the TV show).

Every now and then I will get caught in a rabbit-hole, which happened recently (see previous post). I made the mistake of re-reading about the Situationists, a group of philosophers / artists / intellectuals, whose reputation has always been a mystery to me. Those rabbit-holes can take up a lot of time and produce nothing especially conclusive or enlightening.

So I'm not so sure I want to have any old random junk going round my head anymore. When I was working it was more or less unavoidable, as work was one giant junk-heap in itself.

Some of the stuff I've written is not junk. Anything on music, some of the recovery-related things are the diary entries they are, but there is other stuff I wouldn't want to repeat.

At this point a lot of bloggers will announce they are going on holiday. I don't want to do that. Blogs never come back from holidays.

Writing a blog post about something has its own value. I can be a lot more unconsidered in a hand-written journal than a blog that strangers might read. Scribbling down my immediate thoughts and feelings can let them out, never to return, but not always, and I might go on thinking and feeling roughly the same about whatever-it-was. Whereas working up something suitable for third-party consumption forces me to review what I'm thinking, recognise the cliches, the contradictions, the obviously silly stuff and generally produce something that seems reasonable. That does change the way I think. That's the value.

But a trip down a rabbit-hole generally does not have a lot of value, which is why we call it a 'rabbit-hole'.

I'm going to try to hold myself back from the rabbit-holes - looking back, I haven't done too badly this year.

I'm also going to avoid reading the news, especially first thing in the morning. It's just doomscrolling ("the act of spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of negative news") and it is doing me no good.

I'll let you know how that works out.