That Audiophile Soundstage

If you've got your speakers, room and listening position set up, the speakers should disappear. The music should be coming from the space between the speakers, which should seem to be sitting on their stands, or shelves, doing nothing.

You should also be able to close your eyes and point to where the instruments are located. Bass there. Voice there. Guitar there. If it's a piano solo, the bass notes should be on one side and the high notes on the other.

So goes the audiophile line.

Go to a live performance by a string quartet and you won't get this separated soundstage. The players will be sitting fairly close together, from the left: violin, viola (or second violin), cello, and bass on the right. They need to be able to see and hear each other, not have to wave across a wide stage. The result is a near-mono experience: the sound is experienced as one thing, it does not need to be assembled from this on the left and that on the right.

A lot of recorded string quartets sound like that: each instrument can be picked out easily, but try the pointing game, and they are all around the centre of the stage.

An orchestra is a nearly-stereo experience live and on recording: low notes - horns, basses, cellos - to the right (facing the orchestra), high notes (violins, bells) to the left, woodwind, trumpets and flutes in the middle above the violas. Orchestral recordings veer to the left a lot. Listening live, you do find your eyes moving to the source of a sound, especially if it is a brief solo passage.

Those speakers at a club or a live gig are mono. That way everyone hears the same thing. If it was stereo, only a handful of people would hear it all, and most would be getting one side or the other. At Sadlers Wells flamenco performances, it used to take me a few minutes to train my ears and eyes to allocate the sound to the instruments.

And the whole point of medieval choirs is that you cannot tell one singer from the next, let alone where they are standing. The sound should seem to come from heaven itself, in one blended voice that can sing different notes at once. People who sing that music tell me they cannot pick out the individual lines either.

In the 1960's stereo was sometimes done by putting some instruments on one side and the others on the other side. Maybe the drums and voice appeared in the middle. Early stereo recordings mostly come from the speakers, not the space between. It's not a good sound, to my ears.

The way audiophiles talk about their soundstage, you'd think that every mix took the trouble to place the instruments apart, distinct and to use the full width of the stereo. But a lot of records do not do that. Miles Davis' 1980 albums have all the sound grouped towards the middle of the stage. I wondered why for a while, then realised that Miles wanted it to sound good to anyone in the room no matter where they were. He wanted to make music people would party to, not sit on their own in the sweet spot, venerating. Jazz has always been party / club music.

Famously, mono is supposed to feel like it is coming from the middle of your head over headphones. Sit in the sweet spot of a stereo, and the music seems to come from a band about six inches wide. It's like there's a third speaker in the middle. Stand further back and that mono-band gets wider. The instruments are distinguishable, not smeared, but not stereo-separated. It sounds like you're hearing the music through the door of the club.

The audiophile soundstage is an artefact of two-channel audio and a particular way of mixing the sound to space it out. That's why it does not work outside of a sweet spot, and why, when a piece is mixed for the sweet spot, as often as not, we wind up listening to it on headphones, where we don't have to worry about our exact placing in the room.

Why Am I Taking Photographs I Don't Care About?

Recently I said that my photography was c**p and I could not see anything anymore. I put up a photograph of a flyover stairway to prove it. Sis, who knows about this stuff, said it was an okay photograph, and that she had similar feelings, but more about why am I taking photos like these?

Which is about motive. Why am I taking these photographs?

It's common for big-name photographers, especially towards the end of their careers, to take reels of film that they never develop, let alone print or exhibit. It's as if the act of photography had become some sort of obsession, and not in a good way.

Most people take photographs to have something to remember the event and the people. At weddings, that is often done by a pro. At most other occasions it's done by one the group, and consists of the rest of the group smiling and mugging for the camera. Not my life, but neither am I knocking it.

Professionals take photographs of the client's cooking equipment because money, and because they know the tricks of the food photography trade. (Few of which the rest of us would want to know about. Here's a starter: none of the food is ever hot.)

Some professionals take photographs on spec to sell to us, the general public. Or in the case of photo-journalists, or sports photographers, to sell to newspapers. Then there are a very small number of fine artists who take photographs of carefully-staged images. Cindy Sherman. Gregory Crewdson. Add your favourite.

Leaving a small number of amateur art photographers. Why on earth do we do it?

There's the satisfaction of seeing and recording the image, of knowing we have the eye. But that's a small part of it.

It is, I think, about finding and recording the moments of magic, transcendence, mystery, majesty, artistry, beauty, humour, and otherwise notable-somethings in our lives. An assertion and a re-assurance that our lives are not one endless sequences of drudge and mundane blah. Even if we have to travel for hours overnight to find those moments at daybreak on a hill-top.

That's why there's such an interplay between where we live our lives, how we are feeling, and the photographs we take, or even our belief that there are any photographs worth taking. When it works, it's a dream, but when it slumps, it's a tangle of factors and emotions that just won't fall out of its own accord.

Why am I taking these photographs? I don't want to. You know, I'm sure there was something happening recently that has a bearing on this, but I can't remember what it was... so I have to get out of a pair of ruts: one in my own head, and one the way I spend my time. Neither of those is as easy as it sounds, especially when it's too damn hot.

Amateurs. They can so indulge their feelings.

Middle-Class Straight Edge

Straight-edge was a movement that started in the 1980s in the punk / hardcore scene as a reaction to the excessive use of drink, pills, and other intoxicants at the time. They adopted a fairly simple creed: don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs. Not screwing around was optional. As ever, some of the cause-parasites (vegans, animal rights, chastity) hooked onto it. It wasn't popular with feminists or left-wingers: any movement consisting mostly of white teenage males won't be. By the end of the 1990's it had more or less wound up.

But you can't keep a good idea down. Straight-edge was about avoiding the things that screwed up your head and life. For teenagers, that's mostly booze, drugs, and cigarettes. Now take the principle and apply it to the life of a middle-class man in the early years of his career. What screws up his life?

Booze, drugs and cigarettes sure don't help. Plus our young man can save a lot by not buying that stuff, and also by avoiding what passes as the life-style that goes with them. Saving is Good, hookers 'n blow are Bad.

The next one is: avoid anything that lets the State into your private life. The way to keep social workers, unemployment bureaucrats, Family Court and Child Services out of your life is, yep, you guessed: stay employed, pay enough taxes to stay under the radar, stay single, and don't have children.

The next one is: avoid crazies, users, losers and abusers. Oddly, I think it's got easier for the middle-classes to do that in the last few decades. Moving to universities across the country, and then again to jobs across the country, takes a brutal toll on the unfiltered bunch of people we knew from school and the old neighbourhood. By the time our middle-class young man is set up with his degree and job in GloboCorp, he's left most of the old bad influences behind, and making friends after the late-twenties... we know how that goes

The next one is: avoid buying anything with debt, except the house you're going to live in. This will pretty much mean you don't buy s**t you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you don't like.

The next one is: learn how to get what you need from the gatekeepers (official or self-appointed). Learn how the gatekeepers think, what rules they have to follow, what BS they are obliged to believe by their profession, what the magic words are to get what you need, how to behave. Learn Game, which after all, is about dealing with gatekeepers.

A lot of middle-class people live bits of this from time to time. What makes Straight Edge is consistency and follow-through. No exceptions for That Special Person, or Because It Was Christmas (or whenever). Consistency makes the believer.

On and Off Treadmills

As best as I can figure out from a diary-search, my life started to close in on itself in 2017. I was 63, after all. All the fun kids at work had moved on, and being replaced by Snowflakes. I couldn't hack the full hour session at the gym, and was doing about forty minutes instead. No holidays. Girls were pretty much a thing of the past. I was not learning new things that were work-related. I was three years past the normal retirement age at work, had almost three more years to go before I could claim my State Pension, my savings weren't great, and though my financial advisor kept telling me I was okay, and much better off than a lot of people, what he didn't mention was that 'most people' are terminally screwed come retirement. Every month I stayed at work was another month's money saved, and another month I didn't have to live on a pension. I kept that up for another four years, until I could keep it up no more.

That's a long time to be in treadmill mode. The job was okay, the people were okay, I was in the City, the commute was manageable, but regular readers will remember I spent a while bitching and moaning noting dispassionately how going to bed at 09:30 to wake up at 05:15 does not leave one with much of a life. Plus no-one was making or showing movies I wanted to watch, which is why I got an Apple TV and a MUBI subscription. And I was going round and round in a figure-eight, not travelling and not `going anywhere'. Every now and then I'd go to an early evening Meeting in Soho, and I even got a commitment so I had to turn up every week. When I came out at 19:00, Soho was rammed. Nowhere to have a coffee or a light snack. Not like 2010.

One on level, I hardly noticed Lockdown. Except for the lack of commuting, the money I wasn't saving, and the whole silly working from home stuff. In fact, life was probably better, since I wasn't going into that horrible office.

The definition of treadmill is doing what you're doing so you can do what you're doing, and not getting anywhere doing it. I was doing what I was doing to bank the paycheque, and once I had done that, I'd done what I was doing for the month. Except not spending any money because I had to bank it.

(That will be your life as you approach retirement: putting as much cash as possible into bonds or savings so you can pay for a new roof when the old one starts to give, but the insurers won't replace it.)

No, parents, you're not on a treadmill, not while you're raising your children. You're not on a treadmill if you have friends you like being with, holidays you enjoy going on, activities you like doing. You're not on a treadmill if you just love love love the office gossip and the shenanigans after work, and all the gossip on your social media apps. Nope, you're having some kind of fun.

It takes a while to get out of the habits of the treadmill. Work seems like a decade ago, but it's only eleven weeks. Which don't count as real weeks, because lockdown and other BS. I thought it would help if I had some plans and objectives to work on, but that turned out not to do the trick.

The Interwebz is gung-ho for the idea of volunteering, part-time jobs, getting involved with your community, and otherwise replacing paid work with unpaid work. Because that's what you retired for, right? Or we could travel... wait, no, we can't. The advice is as asinine as the advice to I used to hear when I was out of work in the Nineties. But hey, if you want to volunteer, please go right ahead.

So the next phase is getting off the treadmill. Which means not working up schedules about how my days and weeks should be - I tried that and it didn't feel right.

Things I Suddenly Got Bored With

I rolled out of bed at 7:05 a couple of mornings ago, saw the sky was blue and the sun was bright, and put my walking shoes on for a quick stroll round my local park. Before the cloudy periods set in for the rest of the day.

Settling down to breakfast and starting to flick through the Daily Telegraph's app, I suddenly felt utterly bored by:

The Virus, or rather, the utterly bonkers policies that Governments across the world have taken towards it. It's a bad case of the flu caused by an enhanced function virus that escaped from an American-financed lab in Wuhan, China. It is going to infect every single person on the planet, and leave everyone alive, unless they have pre-existing conditions or is old and frail. Being infected by the Virus is being treated as if it is the Mark of the Devil. It isn't. Wake me up when the BS is over.

Woke. This is partly the creation of academics and Vicitim groups talking up the need for their grants and services (cf Stonewall). It's a money grab. Or else it's a lot of emotionally-disturbed people and their useful Betas posturing.

Dumb Managements Taking Woke Seriously. Take names. Sell short or divest if you can't.

Objecting to Snowflakes. A lot of the objections to Snowflakes can sound like "I was beaten every day at school and it didn't do me any harm". A lot of the time, the Snowflakes have a point. Sometimes they don't, as when they push Woke causes.

Slavery. See under Woke.

Carbon-free energy. It's posturing when it isn't an excuse for a Sin Tax. But sure, let's do more with less energy, and have a lot of different sources so that we can never be held hostage by one group of suppliers again. It might also stop the endless Oil Wars.

Women Most Affected. For those who don't know this one, it's in headlines like "Women more likely to suffer from oranges" wherein it turns out that in 2020, 2,019 women had an allergic reaction to oranges, and only 1,950 men did.

Feminism: aka Privileged White Women Need More Privilege

Feminism: aka Men Are Horrible

The Fall of America. It's a tragedy, but it's happened. America is now where South Africa was about twenty years ago, and look at where South Africa is now, because that's where America will be in about ten years' time.

The EU. No further comment needed.

Whining About The BBC. Once upon a time it was full of eccentrics and techie wonks and was the pride of the country. Now it's full of untalented hacks and is a national disgrace. If we shut them down tomorrow, they would only wonder what took us so long.

Making Social Media Important. It isn't. It's all posturing and fake. No girl is as happy as she sounds on Facebook, as hot as she looks on Instagram or as funny as she sounds on Twitter.

Artist / Gallery / Museum Virtue Signals. Really? Gee. Never happened before.

Global Warming / Global Cooling / Climate Change. Yeah. Whatever.

Sugary / Salty foods. Where is the interfering Nanny state when you really need it? (Looking at its Party donations.)

There's way too many people making way too much money off this stuff. These are problems that won't be solved in anyone's lifetime. Which means they are damn good earners.

<i>Basta!</i>

The Search For Headphones

My current head-fi is a pair of Sennheiser HD650s I bought in 2014. Before that I had a pair of HD580's. There's a 2019 edition of the HD650's available for £550 on Amazon, I paid less for mine. A LOT of reviewers will say that, as far as they are concerned, the HD650 are the best pair of headphones they have heard, not only at the price point, but at all. Mixing engineers like them, audiophiles like them, ordinary listeners like them. I like them, but they lack a certain... something that might not exist.

The 2019 edition of my HD650's cost as much as my KEF LS50 speakers (on sale). Headphones can cost less than £50 and the pro reviewers are very enthusiastic about the Meze Empyrean, £2,800 at Audio Sanctuary. There are more expensive sets.

Look at a headphone review channel on YT and you will notice those guys have a LOT of headphones. Read some of the comments on the boards and it becomes obvious that some people just like buying headphones. I think there are 'Headphonies' like there are 'Watchies' - people who buy headphones. Instead of, you know, holidays or armfuls of CDs. Oh, and both Watchies and Headphonies are slightly deranged. No doubt.

My theory is that watches just don't deliver, on repeated use and viewing, a big enough belt of feel-good hormones to produce satisfaction. Not like a Monet. Or a Ford Mustang. Or listening to a next-level hi-fi. Hence a continuing need to trade, swap or purchase something different.

I look at those reviewers' racks of headphones, see the same symptom, and suspect a similar cause. Maybe the differences between audiophile headphones might be even more subtle than that between speakers. I wasn't going to rely on reviews.

So I went to Audio Sanctuary in New Malden (five minutes from the station, hidden in a square off the High Street) and explained my conundrum. I wanted the next step up from HD650's. They found me a pair of Denon AH-D7200, Audeze LCD-2, Focal Celstee, and the Sennheiser HD800S (slightly out of my budget, but I did ask). The Focals were an instant NO. Someone else might like them, but I didn't. The Audeze were exactly as 'warm' and with exactly the effect on my neck of the extra weight as everyone said. If they could just shave a couple of hundred grams off, and ease the bass back a little... which brings me to the Denon. If you stole my Sennys and left the Denons, I would not complain. Nice sound. Better build quality that the, let's face it, plastic Sennys. However, with none of these did I think: ah, so this is what modern headphones sound like!.

Until I got to the HD800S. Vanishingly light on the head. Slightly light on bass. But everything else was there. I could tell the second clarinet was sitting too close to the oboe in a recording of Bruckner 3 (slight hyperbole, but not a lot). Better control of the loud and quiet bits. But on Miles Davis' Cellar Door Sessions, the bass did feel light even compared to the HD650s, and everything else sounded pretty much the same. It wasn't WOW!, but it was noticeable.

So many headphones. So little difference.

Some of this is the nature of my search. I was looking for a 'neutral' sound, or anything that made me go WOW! Pretty much by definition, there's really only one way to do 'neutral', and once the engineers have figured that out, they can spend the rest of their days figuring out how to cut the costs. Or figuring out just how much more expensive it is to get that last little improvement, and can they produce anything better at a price people will be willing to pay?

Sennheiser aim for 'neutral': it's what they do. Many of the other companies spend money on the look of the headphone, with polished woods, deep leather ear-pads and so on, and that creates a luxury feel that some people will pay a premium for. Sennheiser prefer the, uh, functional look, it keeps the costs down, which gives them a price-for-quality advantage that's hard to beat.

If I listened to headphones a lot, and if a lot of that was nineteenth-century Romantic symphonies and concertos, or opera (shudder!) from any period, I might take the plunge on the HD800S. But I don't. I listen to EDM, jazz, rock and pop, and most music composed before Beethoven. Any pair of audiophile 'neutral' headphones over about £450 or so will make a good show of that.

(And if I'm going to pay that kind of money for a pair of headphones, I'm bringing the Hegel into the store.)

Things About Getting Older: Learning and Technology

There's a very good Alux post about the changes that happen as we grow older. A fair amount of the time it's spot-on. I'm going to riff on some of the points in a couple of posts.

First up is the technology thing in items 9 and 13. We oldies are less inclined to want to learn new things and to keep up with the new technology. The commentary makes it clear that included in 'new technology' is social media.

Social media is two things. First, it's an online version of old stuff in the analogue realm. Blogs can be personal diaries (like this one), or op-ed journalism, or scrapbooks. Instagram can be a scrapbook, a photo album, a portfolio, or a shop window. Twitter is where some people say things that in the past stayed in the room, the pub, the restaurant or the quiet corner of some club or meeting room. Amazon is mail-order done right (until it was swamped by Chinese junk). Facebook is playground gossip time, or else it's a billboard for bands and businesses. WhatsApp is a group messaging service, and extends the older idea of newsletters sent to small numbers of like-minded people or fans of something obscure. Linked-In is a big CV repository and those didn't used to exist. All the others are variations of the Big Seven.

Second, it's a bunch of opportunities to a) screw up our lives, careers and reputations, b) to create a career- or ego-enhancing but ultimately fake public image of ourselves, c) make money by sponsoring goods and services, d) publicise our work, e) err... that's it.

Now, we oldies are a) too darn cautious to screw up in public, b) our careers are pretty much topped out, and our egos take a beating every time we look in the mirror (unless we have severe delusions about what attractive looks like), c) only young or famous people can sell stuff and we're neither, and d) most of us have jobs or are retired or have an established customer base. We just don't need social media. There are exceptions, and you will be surprised at how well we use it when we know what we're using it for.

Now let's talk about technology. I can remember the first computer technology I decided I would let pass. It was Flash (ask your grandfather). Flash was for graphics, and I am a writer. Writers, remember, would be quite happy with a 286 running WordPerfect 4.2 (ask your grandfather). Writing is a pretty darn low-tech occupation.

And I'm really an engineer who turned to the philosophy of science and mathematics, and then had to get a day job so I didn't have to sleep in homeless shelters. To engineers, technology is a tool. Not an end in itself. It's nerds who treat it as an end in itself.

I don't dig ditches, because I don't have a farm I need to dig ditches on. So I don't need to know about back-hoes and diggers.

A lot of retail computer technology is for graphics and video production. There is a LOT to learn in those programs. I don't do that stuff, so it's no fault that I don't know shortcuts for plug-ins in Lightroom. I am not spending time and money on photography-related stuff while my eye is AWOL.

I get that by remaining a text-typer, I am not taking advantage of the new things I could do. Sticking to one's last when a music editing programme cost thousands of pounds and needed a specialist to edit tape is sensible. But when it's so cheap, don't I want to dabble? Maybe it's not about the technology but the new channels of communication. Should I be exploring those possibilities?

That's a fair question. My first thought is, that a few years ago, I might have given it a whirl. But now, a lot of YT channels are basically small TV production companies. The production standards are going up by the year. And the people posting recordings from their iPhones look like... people posting recordings from their iPhones.

However, I could be excusifying to support a bad case of denial.

I did keep up with PC technology, but the last Windows version I could handle to the roots was Windows 2000. After that it just got too complicated. I used to cut code, but code-cutting now is mostly about finding the appropriate library for what you want to do (optionally cussing because it hasn't be ported to your Python version) and making sense of the parameters of the functions in the library. This applies to Microsoft C++ / C# / VBA, and even to a hefty chunk of Python these days. To think there was a time when people sniffed at VBA as a 'glue' language. They're all glue languages now. As for writing Power Shell scripts? No. I just... No.

It's not because I can't. Of course I can. It's that it's not my day job, I won't re-use the knowledge, and it's quicker to hack it manually. If it was my day job, I would put in the effort of learning Power Shell. I've had the pleasure of learning computer languages. Several times over.

That's the real issue. Other than writing, I don't do anything else frequently or well enough to justify the investment of time to learn whatever the technologies are.

I have been learning a lot about hi-fi and acoustics over the last year. I think that counts. It's new to me.

After years at the keyboard and commuting, I do need to be learning / polishing up some things. Cooking. Home DIY. Painting and decorating. New to me.

So yes, to the Millennials at Alux, we oldies do learn new stuff, just not the new stuff you're learning.