That Audiophile Sound

Listen or read enough audiophile reviews and you will notice something missing.

Classical music.

In the non-technical sense of the phrase. With a small 'c'.

Neither Bruckner nor Corelli, nor Beamish nor Cage; not a mention of Debussy, Handel, Palestrina or John Taverner; not one wag of the stick from von Karajan, Simon Rattle, or Joanne Falletta. As for finding that a piece of gear reveals even more of Solti's Ring Cycle? Not going to happen.

This may be because a lot of them don't listen classical music. A lot of people don't. Even though Tidal and Spotify has all sorts of it.

It may also be because big orchestras just don't provide that audiophile sound, and one of the things the audiophile guys want is, well, that audiophile sound.

Audiophile-sounding music is made by a small number of people whose instruments can be individually recorded, recorded in a reasonably dry studio through very good mics and with top-notch digital transfer to the final media. It will be carefully constructed to have easily-separated parts that can be placed on a stereo soundstage with precision. Jazz from any era except big-band; any music made on a Mac (dance, ambient, rap, electronica etc); most classical music before about 1780, and period performances of anything up to about 1830; plainchant, but not four-part masses by Palestrina and others of that ilk; contemporary classical music, especially the minimalists and their disciples; and some pop, rock and soul.

That kind of music creates a well-defined soundstage, has lots of details that good gear can pick out, and also has a narrower dynamic range than Wagner at his best. There is enough going on to be interesting and engaging, but not more than you can handle at once.

Whereas I defy anyone to tell the difference between Shostakovich's 12th on CD or Naxos 192kps streaming. There's so much sheer volume of sound the idea of 'details' is just silly. You're not supposed to be able to pick out the horns from the oboes and the violins: it's supposed to be one glorious uplifting <>sound. It was written to sound good in concert halls that were not designed by acoustics engineers. Rather like chart music today is mixed to sound good on headphones via a mobile phone.

Orchestral music does not provide the same opportunity for talking about, or even identifying in the first place, the very subtle differences between one bit of hi-fi kit and another. Those would simply get lost in the horns. There are even piano-cello pieces that are so thumpy and loud that they would browbeat any piece of kit into sounding like a boombox.

If you don't believe me, reflect on the fact that nobody has ever tested hi-fi using Canadian post-rockers Broken Social Scene. Get the eponymous Broken Social Scene album. Any track will do, but Shoreline (7/4) is worth hearing because it is the only piece of music in 7/4 that swings. Play it over whatever set-up you like, it is never going to sound tight, spacious, and well-defined. It sounds messier on CD through speakers than it does on AAC over headphones for heaven's sake.

What I think I'm suggesting is that a) audiophiles listen to a certain kind of music for the same reason that people with racing cars like to drive on closed circuits: it brings out the best in their equipment; b) a lot of orchestral music simply is not recorded well enough to benefit from higher-end gear; and maybe c) a system that plays orchestral music well may not bring out the best in a Nils Frahm piece.

And it may mean that the Solti recording with the Chicago Symphony of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, which is an audiophile dream, is a rebuke to a lot of lazily-recorded or badly sound-designed (and sound-design is part of composing) orchestral music. (Edit 5/1/21: Hans Beekhuysen lists some hefty orchestral music amongst his test tracks. So he's one.)

My Brief Roon Trial

It's a terrific piece of software. You get 14 days free trial and then they zap you for the full $119.88 (if I read right).

I tested it with an MP3 file of Annabel Lamb's Backwards Through The Looking Glass, which is unjustly not available on CD. Even Spotify knows not of her. You Tube does, and the track you need to hear is lined up for you



Notice the fierce attack of the piano, the echo around the drums. Every note and drum stroke is clear, isolated, percussive. And that echo makes the whole thing sound slightly spooky. And that's over my Mac Air speakers via You Tube. You can only imagine what the original vinyl sounded like. Or what the rips I found on the internet sound like.

So with huge anticipation, I played it through Roon onto my Sonos Connect and out through the amp.

It was like a veil had been put over the whole thing. The attack wasn't there. The echo was not as clear. Roon told me it had chopped off the last 8 bits to get a 16-bit signal to send to the Sonos Connect.

So I played it through File Explorer on my iPod Touch and out through a Jitterbug and black Dragonfly into the amp.

Oh yes. That's it. That's how I remember it.

It is tempting to conclude this only proves that the Sonos DAC is not as good as the black Dragonfly, and perhaps that the Mac Air isn't as good a source as a more recent Pod Touch(?!). Those things may or may not be true. It doesn't matter. Because it shows that with my current set-up Roon doesn't play as nice as my current file-streaming method.

And Roon had to fit in to my current set-up. Not start me off buying new DACs and other gear.

Everything else about Roon is as advertised. It wailed through my 1,000 directory collection in less than ten minutes. It found album art all over the place. It had some interesting things to say about some of the discs and artists. It found every device in my house in the blink of an eye. (But then so does Windows Explorer on my Windows Machine, and my Air finds all my Sonos speakers and presents them in the menu of the loudspeaker). It found Air Play and Sonos, though it didn't find my iDevices.

If I want to know about the artist and album, there's a little thing called... oh, what is it?.... Wikipedia. If I want lyrics, those are available on a dozen sites. If I want my AAC rips cataloged I use Apple Music. Because I've downloaded a lot of commuter music my AACs are a superset of my CDs, so that Music "Library" is the entire collection.

I prefer to listen to CDs when I can. Streaming services are useful for background music, or checking out an artist or composer. At those prices Roon needs to be a daily driver, and it won't be for me.

Finally, Roon is a resource hog. I watched it ease its way up to 1GB of RAM, and it prefers to be the exclusive user of whatever machine it is running on.

Medium Format is about the Square

I made a remark about "seeing in medium-format" recently. I took it to mean that, of course, I needed a medium-format camera to get the shots I was really seeing. (Because the cure for photography problems is mo' gear, of course.) Since medium-format cameras are more expensive than a fully-kitted out Macbook Pro, I wondered about second-hand ones. Those were mostly film, or as expensive as settling for a 512GB SSD card instead of the full 1TB. Plus there's the whole thing where medium-format cameras can be used as dumb-bells if you can't get to the gym, and need a trolley to carry them around.

OK. Slight exaggeration.

For some reason I looked at the entry in Wikipedia on medium-format cameras. it told me that most of them were 6cm x 6cm, and some later ones were 6cm x 4.5 cm. Wait, what? Square? Like Instagram?

I hauled out my Panasonic DMZ-40TY-H4562 or whatever silly name it has, and clicked through the menus. Aspect Ratio: 3:2 (35mm), 4:3 (HDTV), 16:9 (widescreen), 1:1 (square). Whoa. The sun was out. I nipped into the park and took some photographs.

So here's a piece of fence in 16:9

and again in 4:3

and again in 3:2 

and this is what it should look like.....

Doesn't that feel more solid? The wider formats just go on about how much fence there is, but somehow, to my eyes, the square format gives a better sense of how the fence relates to the ground and open sky as well. There's no open sky in the 16:9.

The next one is just plain perfect. Ordinary, but perfect.

If that had been a 35mm shot I would have made a 'meh' and moved on. But that bank of gorse is so much more impressive when you can't see lots of open ground to the right. Here's a 16:9

and here's what it should look like

The photograph is about the water and the stream. We only need to see one post-war semi to understand that this is in a suburb somewhere. The top picture gives us too much detail we don't need.

Medium-format, yes. But it was about the Square, not the film or sensor size. 

Bye-bye Evernote and Dropbox

I got Dropbox and Evernote because I read about them on Rands in Repose. That was a long time ago in Internet Years. Something like (looks up account on Evernote) 8th October 2010. (Stone me guv'nor, 10 years.)

Now I use iCloud instead of Dropbox and Apple Notes instead of Evernote. Why?

Bloat.

About a year ago I looked at what was using my RAM. I have 4GB in my early 2015 Mac Air (blimey guv, I've had that for five years) so this is something I need to do, even though OS X handles memory way better than Windows 7 as disfigured by an FTSE 100 company.

Fire up Activity Monitor, look at the Memory tab, but order by the Process Name column, not the Memory column. This is because apps are now split into a number of processes. For instance, my Brave Browser with one tab open has one main process, two Helper processes, a GPU process, and six Renderer processes going. The main process is 240MB, and all the others take 504MB. That browser is taking 0.75GB of memory.

(I just closed Brave and opened Firefox at my Amazon Wish List. Main process 401MB, supporting processes 337MB, so still 0.7GB of memory. Re-opening Brave on my Wish List gets me 135MB in the main process and 270MB of supporting processes. Which is better. I bet if I open You Tube it bloats out bigly.)

When I did that exercise for Dropbox, it was using over 0.5GB of RAM. Just to sync some files in a Cloud. WTF? Since the iCloud process was already running - because Apple - this was a ridiculous use of resources. It took a few minutes to put the files I wanted backing in the iCloud in the iCloud drive directory, and then I could shut down Dropbox. I even uninstalled it on all my machines.

Evernote updated itself a couple of weeks ago. One of those OMG-they-have-so-changed-everything-WTF-did-they-do-that? changes. Every time Evernote does a major change its users lose control over more and more things. This one changed the fonts and graphicalised everything - like Office 2016 did and Apple Notes is. The feel of how the type appears on the screen in response to the keyboard is different. It was when I navigated to a large note which choked the viewer I began to think something was wrong. Yep, Evernote, which used to be whip-cracking smart and fast, now had a Renderer process that took around 400MB. The whole lot took up around 0.7GB, and Evernote has never been great at memory management.

Notes is running in less than 84MB, and even Pages takes only 153MB. How the **** does it need a 400MB renderer process to do what Apple does in 84MB? Makes me wonder what other dumb things they did.

Export all my Evernote Notebooks. Load them into Apple Notes. Close Evernote. I had cancelled my Premium membership a few months previously. I haven't uninstalled it, and I still have an account I can access via a browser. Moving to Apple Notes is one-way: it only lets you export to pdf files. Because Apple.

I blame SSDs. I see this at work, where people who don't have problematical unknown programs like SAS Base (oh, wait) are getting Windows 10 machines with SSDs and 8GB of RAM. Half of that is taken by Windows and security bloatware - McAfee and Tanium Endpoint plus all the supporting Windows services - so users are still trying to run their real programs in under 4GB. Everyone with one of those machines is agog at how fast they are - what do they have at home? - but that speed comes from the SSD, not efficient and effective use of the RAM. The fast disk swapping SSDs allow seems to make people lazy about RAM use and program bloat - who cares how big it is, it'll swap real fast on an SSD, and the clock speed will cover up the lousy coding.

So deeper into the Apple eco-system I go. Because third-party suppliers got lazy with their coding.

Why You Should Print (Some of) Your Photographs

All the photography websites say print your photographs, usually while holding up an A3 or larger print that has been through the colour-correction wringer in Lightroom or something similar. Mine were all A4 from a Canon MG7500, which was also the scanner for the film prints. Those are the ones with what looks like some fancy colour tweaking. Nope, just film, age, and the MG7500.

I'm not a professional photographer, and nor am I the kind of hobbyist who would join a local photography club. I like taking photographs, from time to time, but I like looking at views which would make good photographs even more. A lot of the views I like just can't be captured on an iPhone, or what I suspect is the ⅔ inch sensor of my Panasonic. 35mm with a 50mm lens captures what I see pretty well, but what really does it is medium-format. My eyes see in medium-format. That's expensive eyes. The latest Fujifilm X-S10 seemed to get close, but even that costs £1,300 with the 18-55mm lens.

Why print your photgraphs? It makes you look at what you have done. That is when you realise that there's something about that quirky shot of the Stage Door. There is - it's full of rectangles. I didn't rate it much when I first took it.

Today a print is a commitment to the image: in the past, when we got 4x6's of everything (unless you were a real pro and got contacts, but those weren't actually cheaper than 4x6's) the commitment was to an enlargement. Now as much as printer ink costs - the printers are practically free - photographic enlargements cost way more. You thought very carefully about enlarging and framing. Now an A4 print really is not that expensive. An A3 colour-corrected one is not cheap, because it's twice as much ink and a decent A3 printer is at least £500 or so. And weighs a ton, and takes up a lot of space. A4 prints can be put in a folder with transparent sleeves, and a very pleasant sensation it is to pick it up and leaf through it from time to time. If there's a weak choice, it quickly becomes apparent, and it's dead easy to replace it with a better one.

I was not looking for those stand-out, once-in-90-days, shots that the professionals show you on their websites, Instagrams and You Tube channels. They are not showing the hundreds of meh shots they took to get the stand-outs.

I was looking for photographs that looked good, and/or that meant something to me. The one of the Thames Police boat is not an outstanding photograph, but it reminds me of the couple of years I spent working for the Riverbus project and spending a lot of time on the river and with the Thames Watermen who drove the boats. The one of the two groups of people standing on the dockside under a bright blue sky is partly about the day I drove round half the Algarve, and partly about what it says about the community that lives there.

That's all I had to do. I'm an amateur who can take a decent picture now and again. There's more enjoyment from looking at those on paper than there is on a screen.

Printing your photographs helps you recognise what you've done that has produced an image that pleases you for one reason or another. And that makes you appreciate your own ability.

Photographs I'm Printing (34)

(Olympus OM-10)

Taken around 07:15 at Embankment Station during the week, back in the early 1990's. In 2019, there would have been a person in the frame all the time.

 

Photographs I'm Printing (33)

(Sony-Eriksson cameraphone)

Cameraphone. Look at the detail on that water. It's a railway bridge (duh!) near Utrecht. Cannot remember the name of the town it's near.