Before you read this, let me tell you a story about how a simple mod made the picture on my TV so much better. It made the colours brighter, all the shapes become more defined, a haziness vanished from the screen, the blacks get blacker and the contrast became more pronounced. The experience of watching was more absorbing, thrilling and involving.
Spoken like a true hi-fi reviewer. What's the mod?
I drew the curtains. Which in anyone's house will make all those things happen, if the TV screen is in a room with a window.
So not snake-oil then.
My speakers used to be above my height on bookshelves, about eight feet apart, and about six inches from the wall. Nothing around them. The sound was good, but could get overwhelming quickly on turning up the volume, and orchestral symphonies were often a bit of a mush. Also, sitting on the couch about ten feet away and half-way between the speakers, the sound would seem to come predominantly from the right-hand speaker, and on some recordings, more from a triangle between the speaker and the right-hand side wall (!), than from between the speakers. The left speaker never felt like it was involved in producing sound: it was just there. I would notice this especially after I had been writing for a while.
Then the venerable Paul McGowan of PS Audio said something that had me leaping off my sofa. If you really are going to put your speakers on a bookshelf, so they are near the back wall, put books around them to act as baffles.
Oh. Because I thought I shouldn't do that. But if Paul McGowan says so, and John Darko quotes him with respect, maybe I should give it a try. What can I lose?
So I put books round my speakers, and, um, well, the sound changed. It felt less harsh in the treble and more contained. Less bounce off the back wall I guess. But the music was still veering to the right.
Then I saw a video by Hans Beekhuysen in which he said that the speakers should be at ear height. So I stared at the shelves again and figured out how to do that. And I moved the speakers in so they had books on either side of them. Those changes made another difference. That mythical stereo sound stage between the speakers would appear now and again, only to wander away when I started concentrating. The sound was more contained and much less splashy, since the speakers were now surrounded by books to the side and shelves above them, cutting down a lot of leakage. I could play the music louder without getting confusion and harshness.
It's a small room, by the way. And there are French windows behind the couch, so the sound can bounce straight back off the glass. Yes, I know. One step at a time.
Saturday morning, I'm still noticing the sound veering to the right. By now a number of thoughts are occurring to me:
Maybe a lot of lower-cost orchestral recordings were not made with an ear to the stereo sound stage? (1)
Maybe it's my hearing? Who said my ears worked equally? (2)
Maybe the amplifier favours the right channel? (3)
Maybe working takes away the brain-cycles needed to process sound into a stereo picture? (4)
Maybe it's time to abandon Source Direct and use the balance and tone controls like a normal person? (5)
The tone controls on the Marantz PM6003 don't make a lot of difference: the bass doesn't suddenly boom, or the treble hiss, if you turn either up high. It's more like some of the weight goes out of the sound when turning that bass down, and some of the edge goes off the treble when turning that down. I skewed the balance WAY OVER TO THE LEFT.
At last. The sound stays where it should be, in the middle. It now feels like the left speaker is doing something.
Except, I then discovered from another Paul McGowan video, that the sound should not feel as if it is coming from the speakers. It should seem to be coming from somewhere in the middle, which is what the `sound stage' idea is all about. The speakers should be there, but the music should be elsewhere.
So I turned the balance back to neutral and sat in a chair to make an equilateral triangle with the speakers, shut my eyes and listened to the music. The orchestra was in the middle. The sound was coming from between the speakers, rather than from the speakers. As it should be.
But the moment I started working, the orchestra shuffled over to the right while I was looking at the screen. I looked up: there they were, and the right speaker was in the middle of the orchestra. Which is actually what I had been experiencing.
It's definitely me. I'd say it makes sense. The sound comes from the speakers and the brain translates it into music and makes it seem to be coming from the space between the speakers. That's a reasonable amount of processing: think about how hard you have to concentrate to hear where a sound is coming from when you have no visual cues. So when I take a whole load of processing capacity to write some of the things I do, it's maybe not surprising that my audio processing gets a little sloppy.
Hefting the balance to the left cancels out that `processing drift'. If I'm listening in full attention mode, which I would do more on headphones, then I would put the balance back to neutral.
Maybe a lot of the hi-fi stuff about speaker placement and room set-up is the same as drawing the curtains. Maybe the sound from the right speaker is bouncing off the table in front of it? Who knows? That's what the balance control is for. It works. Who cares if it's not the purest hi-fi practice? I have a decent stereo sound image and a tighter sound that I can crank up the volume on without it turning into mush.
Which is what I want.
(1) I think that is definitely true. I'm not convinced that sound design in classical music is as good as in pop/rock/dance, or even if they've heard of it. After all, if you're sitting at the back of the Festival Hall, you're really getting mono sound. In posh churches, the choir doesn't even face the audience, but sings across the aisle to each other.
(2) When I use headphones or in-ears, I don't notice a skew to the right. Just a wonderful all-over stereo sound-stage. So I think my ears are okay.
(3) You would think they tested for that.
(4) Possible, if not actually plausible.
(5) Because I fell for the whole real-audiophiles-use-Source-Direct thing. Which is a conceit that assumes all your kit is electrically and sonically transparent. And anyway, who says the source CD / music file was mixed properly? DJ's adjust the EQ to suit the mood (or at least they say they do). Using Source Direct is like trusting the chef to add the right amount of salt and seasoning. The chefs who can be trusted to do that make very expensive food. Eating what I can afford, I'll taste-and-add, thank you.
Thursday, 3 September 2020
Monday, 31 August 2020
Thursday, 27 August 2020
Why Musicians Aren't Audiophiles (h/t Adam Neely)
Musicians are mostly broke. Let's get this one out there. Audiophile gear costs serious money. When they do get some money...
Musicians spend money on musical instruments, and associated gear. Duh. Performance-grade instruments cost at least ten times as much as the ones your kids might use in school. There's no such thing as a cheap, good electric guitar. Plus these days musicians have to fork out for Macbooks and music software, recording gear, and headphones. Plus running costs: professional guitarists change strings on way more guitars way more often than I do.
Musicians listen for different things. Audiophiles want to hear the squeak of the third violin's chair during a quiet passage. I can understand that. Musicians talk about hearing flat-7-add-4 diminished chords like they can actually hear one in the music as it's playing. (I can hear major vs minor, and a major 7-th. I can hear that a chord has odd notes in it, but I can't tell that it's a Lydian 5th with an augmented 13th. Audiophiles have no idea if those are real chords or not.)
Musicians don't play in audiophile conditions. Small clubs have awful acoustics. The Royal Albert Hall is famed for its echo, and the Royal Festival Hall for an acoustic drier than the Sahara desert. Anyway the musicians are on stage and can't hear themselves. Orchestral musicians are deafened by the brass section. The guys in bands, well, there's a reason they look at each other's playing (and in flamenco, the dancers' moves), because there are a lot of cues from the movements another player makes, and those visuals help fill in the messy audio.
Musicians regard gear as tools. This is the big difference between pros and amateurs. A pro regards their gear as a tool with which to ply their trade, an amateur regards it as a good-in-its-own-right. (This is very noticeable in photography.) Musicians want to hear what other musicians are playing so they can steal ideas. They can do that with a Spotify account and a decent pair of noise-cancelling phones. Musicians want to create certain sounds and effects, at an affordable cost, with gear they can afford to insure to play in public.
Audiophiles draw from a narrower range of sources. Audiophiles play from ripped CDs (a lot), CDs (a little), vinyl (rarely), or stream from Tidal or Quboz - the high-end streaming services. They rarely mention the other services that feature newer artists: Beatport, Soundcloud, Soundclick, and Reverb Nation to name just a few I found on Google. Nor do they mention Naxos for classical music.
(I was inspired to think about this by Adam Neely, who has remarked on a couple of occasions that all the musicians he knows are NOT audiophiles.)
Musicians spend money on musical instruments, and associated gear. Duh. Performance-grade instruments cost at least ten times as much as the ones your kids might use in school. There's no such thing as a cheap, good electric guitar. Plus these days musicians have to fork out for Macbooks and music software, recording gear, and headphones. Plus running costs: professional guitarists change strings on way more guitars way more often than I do.
Musicians listen for different things. Audiophiles want to hear the squeak of the third violin's chair during a quiet passage. I can understand that. Musicians talk about hearing flat-7-add-4 diminished chords like they can actually hear one in the music as it's playing. (I can hear major vs minor, and a major 7-th. I can hear that a chord has odd notes in it, but I can't tell that it's a Lydian 5th with an augmented 13th. Audiophiles have no idea if those are real chords or not.)
Musicians don't play in audiophile conditions. Small clubs have awful acoustics. The Royal Albert Hall is famed for its echo, and the Royal Festival Hall for an acoustic drier than the Sahara desert. Anyway the musicians are on stage and can't hear themselves. Orchestral musicians are deafened by the brass section. The guys in bands, well, there's a reason they look at each other's playing (and in flamenco, the dancers' moves), because there are a lot of cues from the movements another player makes, and those visuals help fill in the messy audio.
Musicians regard gear as tools. This is the big difference between pros and amateurs. A pro regards their gear as a tool with which to ply their trade, an amateur regards it as a good-in-its-own-right. (This is very noticeable in photography.) Musicians want to hear what other musicians are playing so they can steal ideas. They can do that with a Spotify account and a decent pair of noise-cancelling phones. Musicians want to create certain sounds and effects, at an affordable cost, with gear they can afford to insure to play in public.
Audiophiles draw from a narrower range of sources. Audiophiles play from ripped CDs (a lot), CDs (a little), vinyl (rarely), or stream from Tidal or Quboz - the high-end streaming services. They rarely mention the other services that feature newer artists: Beatport, Soundcloud, Soundclick, and Reverb Nation to name just a few I found on Google. Nor do they mention Naxos for classical music.
(I was inspired to think about this by Adam Neely, who has remarked on a couple of occasions that all the musicians he knows are NOT audiophiles.)
Monday, 24 August 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (20)
(Panasonic DMC-TZ40)
This is a photographer's photograph. Or perhaps a painter's photograph.
Thursday, 20 August 2020
Why Some of Us Are Not Going Back To The Office
If I hear one more TV pundit, You Tube talking head, or blame-dodging politician say that I need to get back to work or get back to the office, I will know that they are actually ignorant twerps.
I have never stopped working. I've been at my laptop and work mobile since being sent home in March.
One reason I'm working at home is...
...the office is locked. I couldn't go back if I wanted to. Ask the Board Member for HR and Property (now that's what I call a conflicting remit) why he's hibernated the building. He keeps talking about new ways or working, which is code for we're going to unload half our estate of office space.
Another reasons I'm not going back to my old office because it's a ****-hole.
For those of you who don't work for FTSE 100 companies, which includes journalists and politicians...
Most large-company offices are open-plan. Always have been in my working life. The department heads had offices of their own, and of course the boss had the corner office, which had two windows. Now the boss is out in the open office along with the rest of us. If (s)he is there at all: most bosses are somewhere else in meetings or networking. In a large company with a national presence, the boss might be in another office in another town. In the old-style open plan offices, every employee had a seat, and maybe even a pedestal draw. Then the cost-cutters moved in.
The latest iteration of open-plan is best described as no-fixed-abode, so that you have no desk of your own. A lot of them assume that a proportion of the people based there will be on holiday, in another office, in a meeting room, working from home or off sick, and so have fewer seats than people. It's called the over-crowding ratio and the office I'm based in has an over-crowding ration of 1.6. It has a handful of small meeting rooms, and a couple of larger ones. Don't even think of having letters or parcels sent to you at such an office, since there is no internal mail and they don't like Amazon deliveries for the staff.
Because almost any working group has people scattered all over the country, everyone in the office spends a lot of time on the phone, and these days, on Microsoft Teams. It was easier to e-mail the person sitting next to you than find a moment they were free to talk to. The noise levels were high, except when some complete stranger sat amongst us to make phone calls, when we all shut up in case they were a stooge. The air-conditioning was barely sufficient, the place smelled of food between about 11:30 and 14:00, I and my neighbour could do an elbow-bump without moving our chairs, and if I pushed my chair back too vigorously, I would hit the chair behind me. Every other person had £259 Bose QC35's over their ears, which is not a good thing. It says the people around you are pointlessly noisy and are wrecking your concentration. The only thing we did in that office was use the telephones, the internet and the heating, in winter. That aside, there was no reason to go in.
In summary: modern offices suck. Big time.
Don't even talk about the commute.
I would gain nothing by going back, lose a lot of money, and lose a chunk of my quality of life.
Even if that was all not true, I still could not go to work in the office. Because the management have closed it in response to rulings handed down by the Government. Because, you know, reasons.
I have never stopped working. I've been at my laptop and work mobile since being sent home in March.
One reason I'm working at home is...
...the office is locked. I couldn't go back if I wanted to. Ask the Board Member for HR and Property (now that's what I call a conflicting remit) why he's hibernated the building. He keeps talking about new ways or working, which is code for we're going to unload half our estate of office space.
Another reasons I'm not going back to my old office because it's a ****-hole.
For those of you who don't work for FTSE 100 companies, which includes journalists and politicians...
Most large-company offices are open-plan. Always have been in my working life. The department heads had offices of their own, and of course the boss had the corner office, which had two windows. Now the boss is out in the open office along with the rest of us. If (s)he is there at all: most bosses are somewhere else in meetings or networking. In a large company with a national presence, the boss might be in another office in another town. In the old-style open plan offices, every employee had a seat, and maybe even a pedestal draw. Then the cost-cutters moved in.
The latest iteration of open-plan is best described as no-fixed-abode, so that you have no desk of your own. A lot of them assume that a proportion of the people based there will be on holiday, in another office, in a meeting room, working from home or off sick, and so have fewer seats than people. It's called the over-crowding ratio and the office I'm based in has an over-crowding ration of 1.6. It has a handful of small meeting rooms, and a couple of larger ones. Don't even think of having letters or parcels sent to you at such an office, since there is no internal mail and they don't like Amazon deliveries for the staff.
Because almost any working group has people scattered all over the country, everyone in the office spends a lot of time on the phone, and these days, on Microsoft Teams. It was easier to e-mail the person sitting next to you than find a moment they were free to talk to. The noise levels were high, except when some complete stranger sat amongst us to make phone calls, when we all shut up in case they were a stooge. The air-conditioning was barely sufficient, the place smelled of food between about 11:30 and 14:00, I and my neighbour could do an elbow-bump without moving our chairs, and if I pushed my chair back too vigorously, I would hit the chair behind me. Every other person had £259 Bose QC35's over their ears, which is not a good thing. It says the people around you are pointlessly noisy and are wrecking your concentration. The only thing we did in that office was use the telephones, the internet and the heating, in winter. That aside, there was no reason to go in.
In summary: modern offices suck. Big time.
Don't even talk about the commute.
I would gain nothing by going back, lose a lot of money, and lose a chunk of my quality of life.
Even if that was all not true, I still could not go to work in the office. Because the management have closed it in response to rulings handed down by the Government. Because, you know, reasons.
Monday, 17 August 2020
Thursday, 13 August 2020
Covidiots Both: Bonkers Boris and Crazy Chris Whitty
Here I sat recently on one of the hottest nights of this or any other year, and my real problem is a horribly itchy insect bite just below my right ankle. I want to scratch the hell of it, but of course I shouldn't.
(Leaves room)
OK. I just showered it with cold water for about six tracks of Heinrich Biber's Joyful Mysteries. It feels better. When it itches again, I will put my foot in a bowl of cold water.
Covidiocy is like that itch. It won't stop, it distracts me from doing anything else, and if I give way to it, I will wind up worse than before.
How exactly am I affected by Covidiocy?
Out of politeness, I have to wear a bandana when I go shopping or travel on public transport. Ear loops are not stylish and no amount of floral pattern on the mask can distract from that. Those blue not-really-surgical-scraps of plastic and paper are terminally ghastly.
My office has been locked, so I have to work at home, but that means I save a bunch of money not commuting or paying for over-priced sandwiches. The quality of my life improves in so many ways. However, if I pay attendance to my laptop for eight hours plus lunch, I can get to the end of the week and not have done things that would have benefited my life. Just as if I was working in the office. So I've decided to give myself an hour in the morning to do stuff that requires going out: like getting the nearside front wheel trim on my car replaced because it was broken and potentially dangerous. Doing that makes me feel like work is not getting in the way of my life.
(While it's not my choice to work from home, it's my home and work is intruding. When I get a choice, I will or won't set up a dedicated work space and adjust my attitude accordingly.)
So what's the problem?
The problem is that I'm locked in the world with a crazy person. A crazy person who is on record as setting out, in March 2020, to create an atmosphere of fear so that we would stay home. Who chose to call it a `lockdown', which is a term that comes from prison management, so we would think we were prisoners. Who still wants us to stay two metres away from each other and wear masks because we are all diseased. A crazy person who can lock us into our streets and houses on a whim. Who makes up inconsistent rules about what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
For the Regular People, it's like playing a game of Simon Says. They don't need the world to make sense, it's all part of the rich tapestry of life. If you can't take a joke, they will tell you, you shouldn't have joined.
But I'm an alcoholic from a dysfunctional family, so I can't handle crazy people, and I definitely can't handle gaslighters. I can't be around denial and lies. That's why this is affecting me.
(Leaves room)
OK. I just showered it with cold water for about six tracks of Heinrich Biber's Joyful Mysteries. It feels better. When it itches again, I will put my foot in a bowl of cold water.
Covidiocy is like that itch. It won't stop, it distracts me from doing anything else, and if I give way to it, I will wind up worse than before.
How exactly am I affected by Covidiocy?
Out of politeness, I have to wear a bandana when I go shopping or travel on public transport. Ear loops are not stylish and no amount of floral pattern on the mask can distract from that. Those blue not-really-surgical-scraps of plastic and paper are terminally ghastly.
My office has been locked, so I have to work at home, but that means I save a bunch of money not commuting or paying for over-priced sandwiches. The quality of my life improves in so many ways. However, if I pay attendance to my laptop for eight hours plus lunch, I can get to the end of the week and not have done things that would have benefited my life. Just as if I was working in the office. So I've decided to give myself an hour in the morning to do stuff that requires going out: like getting the nearside front wheel trim on my car replaced because it was broken and potentially dangerous. Doing that makes me feel like work is not getting in the way of my life.
(While it's not my choice to work from home, it's my home and work is intruding. When I get a choice, I will or won't set up a dedicated work space and adjust my attitude accordingly.)
So what's the problem?
The problem is that I'm locked in the world with a crazy person. A crazy person who is on record as setting out, in March 2020, to create an atmosphere of fear so that we would stay home. Who chose to call it a `lockdown', which is a term that comes from prison management, so we would think we were prisoners. Who still wants us to stay two metres away from each other and wear masks because we are all diseased. A crazy person who can lock us into our streets and houses on a whim. Who makes up inconsistent rules about what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
For the Regular People, it's like playing a game of Simon Says. They don't need the world to make sense, it's all part of the rich tapestry of life. If you can't take a joke, they will tell you, you shouldn't have joined.
But I'm an alcoholic from a dysfunctional family, so I can't handle crazy people, and I definitely can't handle gaslighters. I can't be around denial and lies. That's why this is affecting me.
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