Hi-Fi Alternatives: The More The Merrier

CD? Streaming? Vinyl? FM / AM Radio? Internet Radio? Lossy rips? Losless rips? Live? Which is best? Can CDs be replaced by streaming? Do real audiophiles collect vinyl? Apples, oranges, tangerines or bananas?

Radio and streaming are methods of data transport. CDs, vinyl and music files on hard drives are methods of data storage. Smart phones, CD players, streaming devices, DACs, amplifiers, loudspeakers, headphones and in-ears are ways of converting the data and delivering the sound to your ears. The streaming service and the radio station holds the storage media and the right to broadcast it. You pay them for access to that broadcast. Or put up with adverts in the case of radio. You own the CD, vinyl or music files and the equipment to transport, convert and deliver the data it holds. You get a perpetual right to listen to it. The other extreme is a live concert, where you own nothing and get a one-time right to listen to it. Streaming is somewhere between those two: you have a renewable right to access what the streaming company itself has a renewable right from the artists and record companies to make available.

A live concert is more than someone delivering sound to you. It's an event. You can see the performers. It may be a one-off, with a legendary figure on the stage. Streaming is just data delivery. The experience is how you are listening to the music: on the train, in front of your speakers, from a Sonos One as you fall asleep. Only a small part of that experience is down to the quality of the streaming service. Playing a CD is a more restricted experience than streaming, since you have to be in the room with the speakers or headphones. A part of that experience may be the higher quality of the sound from the CD transport and the DAC, than can be had from the streaming service. Vinyl is its own sound experience: literally a different sound from the CD of the same album, less dynamic range and a bunch of other compromises.

Each service has its own purpose. It's not either/or but both/and.

Live music is a win for the experience: you had to be there, and you were. Streaming gives you a replacement for radio and gets rid of the adverts, though the curation may not be as good. Streaming works in your house, your friend's house, on the train, in the car, wherever there is enough broadband or cellular. It's a definite addition to the technological mix. CD and vinyl is for when you want a specific experience of listening and the sense of ownership: you chose that CD / album, you paid for it, and you decided to keep it rather than bin it in embarrassment.

What makes sense to get depends on where you live and who you live with. Hi-fi gear takes up space and needs to be played around 60-70 dbA at point of listening - the volume of the human voice or my steel-string acoustic guitar. CDs take up space. This is fine for someone in their own house, but if you are sharing with your family or three other people in a large flat, you may want to go for streaming through your iDevice and a decent DAC into some head-fi, or noise-cancellers. How easily small feet can snag fat power cables: young children and £2,000 of Kef LS50 II's on stands are an accident waiting for an insurance company to decline. I have a small terraced house, and even speakers with only 85 db/watt-metre are way too loud with one watt going through them. Any more that 40 watts / channel is just silly. If I lived in a larger house a few yards from my neighbours, I could crank up the volume and an 80 watt / channel amp might be an idea. The WAF is a real thing: only single men can rejoice in stacks of blank boxes joined with gnarly cable, leading to a pair of speaker towers that look like some weird bird.

My core listening is CD. I already had a lot of CDs before streaming became worth having. I like certain eras of classical music that are not well-represented on Spotify, and might not be on Naxos. The same can be said for a number of EDM / House / Trance artists. Maybe if Spotify had every Bedrock and Digweed CD, I would think again. CDs are bought by browsing, which is something I will write about, that simply cannot be done online yet. While 320kps is perfectly acceptable, there's nothing quite like a CD for quality. And CDs will work even when Talk-Talk decides to not supply broadband.

Every now and then I buy a CD of some contemporary composer's music. If I picked their name and listened to something on Spotify, I would navigate away briskly. If I buy it, I have to put in some time listening to justify the expense. Kalevi Aho is never going to be on repeat, but I like what I bought of his more than I did a while ago. I would never have gone back to it if I had streamed a sample. I find, and you may differ, that the price of a CD gives me a little skin in the game of musical exploration.

I do not have an AM/FM tuner anymore, since all radio stations also stream. I have streaming because it offers what is in effect an advert-free range of radio stations: 80's, folk, jazz, classical, 60's, whatever. I can hear new releases, and I can use it on the train. (Spotify seems to cache an album, since it goes on playing even when I'm in the London Underground.) I can also play different music in different rooms over my Sonos gear. Sometimes I buy downloads from Amazon, but not the CD, and that's why I also rip my CDs (to AAC) so I have all 'my' music, that I've paid for, in one place. I have CDs because that is my preferred listening experience. Above all, it lets me play songs and artists that I used to have in my collection, still like to hear now and again, but are not part of how I listen now.

I have hi-fi speakers for the main room, Sonos Ones for the rooms where music is a background, and a Beam for the TV. I have Bose noise-cancellers I used to use in the office, Sony XM3 in-ears, and Sennheiser HD650 as head-fi. It's all about flexibility, the right technology for the circumstances. The more the merrier.

And sometime in 2023 when all this is over and I don't have to be in bed at 21:30, I will go to concerts again.

Editorial Policy

My posting has been erratic of late. If I was doing this seriously, that would matter, but I'm not, so it doesn't. Anyway, nobody reads blogs now, they listen to long rants in You Tube, interrupted by adverts (unless you use the Brave browser).

This is because I keep circling back to the same thing, and I've said my final word on it. I don't want to say any more about it.

I've been trying to find something else to talk about.

This blog has always been a diary, written knowing that other people might read it. That imposes a certain discipline on the way I say things. The language and sentiments are... allowed to mellow from time to time. As such, it gives me an opportunity to examine ideas I'm reading or things that I'm feeling. Or just plain rant. The conclusion is not so important, it is, as they say, all about the process. That is because I'm a philosopher, and philosophy is about examining ideas, rather than stating conclusions.

I write about the things I am doing, or discovering, because that helps clarify my thoughts and actions. I write about things that catch my attention. Too often that is politics. For a long time, I wrote far too much about the murky inner workings of my psyche, and as meaningless as that would be to others, it helped me. How often did I write something and soon afterwards think, well, that's nonsense. Jumping from one subject to another is not going to bring a consistent audience: what, after all, is this guy writing about?

Several things have been a big part of my life for a long time. Fiction, and later on, non-fiction. Listening to music, and playing it for personal satisfaction. Exercise. Photography. I've been sober for over a third of my life.

What can I bring to writing about any of that? There are enough hi-fi channels, music magazines and radio stations around, and some of those people do actually know what they are talking about. Some, but far from all. And even if they do believe in `burn-in', their views on other things might still be sensible. Book reviews, movie reviews... there are plenty by people who know what they are talking about and have inside knowledge of the industry and the people. Why review movies when, until recently, there was Roger Ebert? There are photography channels and magazines run by all sorts of talented hard-working people. What do I have?

I have read thousands of books, and seen seen thousands of movies, but forgotten most of them. That may be the clue: maybe I should talk about the ones I remember, not only what's in them, but why I remember them.

Well, maybe I can share the stuff I liked. Why I like it, why it felt important to me at the time. Some of the things I've learned as well.

That feels like a plan.

At Last! The Speaker Upgrade (KEF LS50)

First, sort out your speaker set-up.

Second, sort out the room, at least a bit. You may want to hold off on thousand-pound acoustic panels and bass-traps.

Third, get to know the sound of your new, improved music collection.

Fourth, work out what's missing or wrong with the new, improved sound. That will take a month or so.

Now you can think about upgrading.

UPGRADE THE SPEAKERS FIRST. (Says everyone.) Assuming your amp and sources are at least a decent mid-fi.

Look at what the professionals have in the background of their YT sets.

Almost all of them have had a pair of KEF LS50's on display at one time or another. Paul McGowan has a pair.

John Darko said that if you can get a pair of the originals (not the Meta) at a decent discount, that would be the deal of the year.

Guess what? Sevenoaks Hi-Fi are or were selling them at a 33% discount, with an effective 28-day trial period.

(Pauses to read debit card details over the phone.)

Two days later they arrived (and I still can't get anyone to look at double-glazing after a month).

I already know where to put them, so I swap out the B&W 686's.

Select Bruckner 5. Press play.

Holy ****.

The violins are on the left. The cellos are on the right. The horns are on the left and to the centre. There are instruments I hadn't heard before. I can play it louder without it being painful. And nobody in the orchestra gets up and wanders over to the corner of the room.

These things are so clear they even make sense, okay, almost makes sense, of Shoreline (7/4), which I swear was especially mixed to defeat the best stereo systems ever made. I could actually play that Broken Social Scene CD without wincing.

Bedrock's Signals became a shimmering, echoing delight.

I have Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony 1 playing now. Each instrument is distinct, each note has a beginning, a middle and an end. In that order.

The difference is about the same as the difference between a three year-old Ford Mondeo and a Jaguar XF.

Some things really are better than others.

**** The Lockdown - There, I've Said It

My inner ACoA thinks lockdown will be forever. Even though my rational self knows it won't be. I'm worried that by the time it does end, I won't care anymore and there won't be anything worth going back to. But mostly, I'm tired of the denial. I'm tired of telling myself that I have to treat lockdown as if it is normal, just a different normal.

Yeah. Well. Frak that.

This ain't a different normal.

Pretending otherwise would be outright denial.

I'm tired of trying to be nice about this nonsense and the traitors who push it.

Find some other damn way of protecting people over 70 or with chronic bad health, from a nasty virus, should their immune system over-react to it. If someone called a Chief Medical Officer can't do better than this, they should resign. Maybe replace them with a monkey throwing darts at a list of policies.

Ah, the heck with all that. It's not my problem.

You know what? I do not care about reasons. I care that I can't do the things that I enjoy doing. I need Foyles and the Curzon and Fopp and the National and the Tate(s) and London AA meetings and the parks and the restaurants and cafes and Jermyn Street and walking across the Thames and the South Bank and and and. I was hoping to add travelling around the UK this year. Go ahead, call me petty.

I had all the answers in a post on the 28th December. At least in terms of actions. What I didn't have was the answer in terms of attitude. Which is why I've been circling.

So here is my new attitude...

**** everyone who legislates lockdown. **** everyone who enables lockdown. **** everyone who enforces it.

MP's, Ministers, Police, so-called scientists, Chief Health Officers, Chief Scientists, compliant business owners, journalists, doctors, so-called-experts, pro-lockdown activists, the media agencies producing Project Fear propaganda, and everybody who would rather be safe than free.

**** everyone using this to push their dumb ideologies, pitch for funding, save money by closing offices, force social change, and otherwise make hay from a crisis.

**** all of them. When they die they are going to a new circle of hell, dug just for them.

So this is what being authentic and honest about my feelings is like.

Feels good.

Class Ain't About How Much You Get Paid, It's About Being An Employee At All

Thinking about class is skewed by the fact it is mostly conducted by academics (salaried State employees) and journalists (salaried private sector employees). They want to think of themselves as special people, and so define the Good Class in such a way as to include them. Or at least, they think the Good Class should be defined so as to include them.

But it never is, and never will.

The Upper Class were literally the people towards the top of the feudal hierarchy. Kings, Lords, Bishops, Dukes, Princes, Viscounts, Earls, and Barons. There aren't many of those people left now. They people get their money from granting privileges, usually to merchants who kick back some of the profits to the aristos. Mostly the Upper Class has been replaced by the State, but that doesn't make Ministers and senior civil servants aristocrats: it makes them people who need to be carefully watched, lest they decide to shut down businesses all over the country, and then tax us to pay for it. It would be better if those people - the elected riff-raff - did think of themselves as aristos, because then they would have to accept noblesse oblige.

The middle class emerged in the 1700's (or pick some other date you like). My reference example is a ship's Captain who might make two or three successful voyages to the Spice Islands (or some other such destination) and, on the proceeds of his share of the profits, could set himself up with a nice house in Greenwich and never go to sea again. The middle classes had enough money that they did not need to work again, and made that money through commercial ventures rather than the exercise of privilege. The Middle Class do not need privileges to be granted by aristocrats, or today, the State. They make their money in the open market. Today's middle class are all those CEO's with seven-figure payoffs and share options, hedge-fundies, millionaire entrepreneurs, and anyone else who could afford to stop working now and live off what they have already made (don't count looking after your stash as `working', though it is).

The Working Class work, usually for someone else, and if they don't, they run out of money and into poverty or the Unemployment Exchange (whatever they call it now). A lot of workers make decent money, especially emergency plumbers and IT consultants, while quite a few have enough money in the bank to tell their current employer to take a hike (aka "f**k you" money). If you pay income tax on Schedule D (Self-employed) or Schedule E (Wage Slave), you're Working Class, and I don't care if you make six figures as an NHS paediatric consultant.

Retired people keep their class in the last few years of working. Children inherit the class of their parents until they leave education, when they enter the working class and work their way back up.

And then there's the Underclass, which we can think of as the people who can't or don't want to play nice with the economy and society. Honourable exceptions for the people who deserve honourable exception.

Very little is sillier than someone who calls teachers 'professionals', as if associating teachers with snotty-nosed twenty-eight year old Chartered Accountants in some way raises their status, when snotty-nosed twenty-eight year old Chartered Accountants are employees like any other.

But Bordieu? Cultural capital, social capital, economic capital and all that jazz. For one thing, those terms have been grossly de-valued. Here's Amanda Spielman (who she?) "By [cultural capital], we simply mean the essential knowledge, those standard reference points, that we want all children to have". Nope, Amanda, that's called 'The Basics'.

Bordieu was onto two things: the first was that certain cushy jobs required a certain kind of education, and the holders of those cushy jobs tended to want to mix with each other, make sure their children got that education, and other people's children did not, and also that their children only mixed with children whose parents also held those kinds of cushy jobs.

The second was that many jobs were, in the 1960's, taking a serious hit to their social status: teachers, civil servants, doctors, and other State-employee roles that had been lower-paid but respected. Those people were making themselves feel better about their declining status by pretending that the music they listened to and the books they read, and in some cases, the people they associated with, had an equal-but-different role in determining their class. If they read Proust, they should be in a higher class than those who read Asterix de Gaulle. Bordieu researched this in the 1960's, played it back to them, Owl of Minerva style, in his 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, and they made it a best-seller and got him a job at the College de France in 1982.

I think the whole thing was a huge irony. Look at these deluded people, thinking it matters if they attend the Cinémathèque Française.

Bordieu was the son of the working class. He knew class was way more structural than the size of a paycheque.

Which puts journalists (well-paid lackeys of rich corporations) and academics (less-well-paid lackeys of Governments) in the same group (Schedule E taxpayers with little or no f**k-off money) in the same class as couriers, cooks, bus drivers and data bashers like me.

Personally, if I was a courier, cook, or bus driver, I would take exception at being grouped with academics and journalists, who toil not, though they do spin, and that is their sin.

Plan For Another Four Years of Lockdown. Here's Why...

I used to be a strategic planner. Micro-economic modelling of the company, economic forecasts, translating business policies into numbers, five-year projected P&L's, Balance Sheets and Cash Flows.

We would run at least three different sets of assumptions, which would later be called scenarios. These would be: Do Nothing; do this; do that. Do Nothing was the shocker: what would happen if we just sat on our butts. The answer was always some kind of wasting commercial illness. Scenario planning was a good technique: it made management think about the future and what they might or might not do.

All those scenarios were run against the same background, and we were hardly aware of it. There would be no wars, space invasions, plagues, civic uprisings, collapses of social order, no changes to the overall political, social and economic structure of the country, and no 'this changes everything' new technology. At least not that would involve our home markets.

Some things are just elephants that you have to wait to leave the room. Wars are an obvious example. Turns out that Government-imposed emergency public health measures are another. When something like that happens, there are no if's and maybe's and what else could we do's. There's only the freaking elephant in the room, and it is going to move when it wants to. The plans you make when there's an elephant in the room are not the plans you make when there isn't. Elephant-in-the-room plans are all short-term, because, well, the elephant never stays that long in the room?

Does it?

Typically, most businesses and people fall into a holding pattern: do as much as we can to keep what we can remember of pre-elephant life going, and wait for the elephant to leave. The short-term is a lousy planning horizon, when you don't know how short a term it is. That's how you put on weight, go soft, lose customers, delay maintenance, and don't upgrade.

What if the elephant never leaves the room? At least for another four years?

A never-ending series of erratic lockdowns. But they never repeal the laws. They never make it illegal. They never stop the Lockdown Committee meeting. Public Health professors never stop muttering about a possible lockdown this winter, and the press never stops reporting them. The mask signs are never taken down. Every now and then the Police stop a pensioner getting on a train. Each summer there is less point in going anywhere, because each summer less remains open.

But lockdowns can't last forever? Wouldn't society wither away? And anyway vaccines?

Not the point.

The point is that assuming the lockdowns go on forever forces you to think about what you would do if you weren't twiddling your thumbs waiting for Governments to grow a pair. You know what you're going to do if the restrictions ever end. You don't know what you're going to do if they don't.

The moment I thought of four more years, I knew that I would retire by Autumn 2021 (certain things assumed having happened), because I did not want to see my life vanish three-months-at-a-time. If I'm going to be locked in my house, I'd rather be reading, writing, playing music and watching movies. Bashing away pointlessly on a laptop? No thank you. I've had enough of that.

You will make other decisions. Yours may be tougher than mine, because you could be looking at four more years of home schooling. But suppose you were? Wouldn't you go back to your employer and say Sorry, but I have to give my children four hours uninterrupted a day, then I have to do an hour's lesson prep for tomorrow. You get about four hours tops. And I get full salary, because you won't be able to stop calling me when it's teaching time. Right now, you won't have that conversation because this is an emergency that will be over in three months. But you would if you knew it was going on for four more years.

Will lockdowns really go on for another four years or more? I don't know. I do know that this one is going on until Easter, and it will be followed by a period of lighter restrictions over summer, to be followed by another winter when old people will start dying again. Vaccines? Are developed six months after the latest super-spreader / super-killer variation of the original Virus, and we will need to be locked up for those six months. It's a flu virus, so it will always mutate. And every year there is another bunch of vulnerable old people.

What part of that sounds like a process with an end?

What Do Plumbers Have In Common With Girls?

You got their number from a web site.

They never answer the phone. But they might answer a text.

If they do answer, they might sound quite enthusiastic about what you have in mind.

You send them over a couple of photographs and your address.

Then....

(crickets)

They never call back.

It feels like stalking if you chase them.

They never say why they don't want to do what they sounded so enthusiastic about back then.

Yep.

Tradesmen.

And you thought I meant girls on dates.

I would rather spend my time on some BS work-related phone call than call a tradesman. I swear the moment they realise I live in a postcode that they know only has small houses, they lose interest. They are all after the three sixes:

Six-bedroom house

Six-day job

Six-grand payment

Gardeners seem okay. They stand to make a decent amount on any garden.

Carpenters, plumbers, handymen, gas fitters, roofers, and electricians are awful. They are always busy. They have families in terrible health that require a last-minute cancellation. I can tell they would rather be working on a nice detached house in Woking than my modest mid-terrace.

Calling tradesmen is an endless stream of rejection. Nothing is ever worth them returning the call with a quote.

I shave. I wash. My house is clean. It has electricity and running water and gas.

Tradesmen these days just don't want ordinary decent customers who want to pay them a fair price for a fair job. Now. They want glamour, big money, fancy postcodes. All so they can take impressive photographs for their social media.

Huh!