Thoughts After A Visit To The Tate Modern

I went to the Tate Modern recently. I had to book, but I don't mind. It stops me changing my mind when I wake up and the weather is c**p (again).

It's a very different collection of exhibits from the last time I went, in the Before Times. A few of those exhibits were accompanied by some socially-significant rhetoric, but mostly it originated from the artists. (*cough* Joseph Beuys *cough*)

But now, it seemed to me, everything has to relate to one of a well-known handful of Good Causes. Pollution; climate change; all the complaints of feminism; war; poverty; immigration; capitalism and its related -isms, such as consumerism; Britain leaving the EU...

Just one example, a 1952 photograph by Mitch Epstein, taken in West Virginia.

And here's the blurb that goes with it.

I will spare you a line-by-line review. I wrote one, but it's more painful to read than it is to write. Its implication is that the photograph is valuable as a work of art because the photographer addresses Good Causes in the right way.

I demur.

To ask the timeless question: what is art? Anything can be, because of or despite its creator's intentions. One condition is that a work of art should be self-contained. It can refer to other cultural items, as with Claude’s 1648 Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca

and the viewer's appreciation of it can be enhanced by knowing the references. I have no idea who Isaac and Rebecca were, and why they might be in that landscape, but I can look at Claude's painting for quite a while. The landscape alone holds my attention.

My appreciation of the painting as art does not and should not depend on the references.

Epstein's photograph is, for all its technical skill, not an image I find engaging. Knowing that it had one social message for him, and that the curator has linked it to others, may make me look a little longer to see if I agree, but I've moved on in a couple of minutes.

Claude's intention was to produce a decorative and absorbing landscape, and he threw in the marriage group to give it a sense of scale, and because maybe it would mean something to the client who commissioned it. Epstein's intention was to produce what amounts to low-key agit-prop, and if the picture was captivating, then so much the better.

Claude is an artist, Epstein is a journalist. And to re-affirm: journalists can produce art, but despite their intentions, not because of them.

The difference between museum blurbs and those of auction-house catalogs is striking. If you've never read a contemporary art auction catalog from Christie's or Southeby's, it's quite the revelation. A major work for sale is put into the context of the rest of the artist's output; the circumstances of its creation are set out; any cultural references in the work are tactfully noted, as if jogging the purchaser's memory; it may be compared and contrasted to work by other artists; and, of course, its provenance and exhibition history are carefully noted. Those guys know how to sell a painting.

If I'm going to spend money on it, I want to know that the painting is genuine, and what is its story. And I need to like it as an image. Because my interest is the image, not the interpretation, I do not care about the artist's views on this week's social issues, or his or her morals. I care about the quality of the work.

The "Good Causes" approach puts the artist's opinions and moral character front and centre: artists with the 'wrong' opinions, or an unfortunate period of their lives associated with the wrong causes, don't get shown. The quality of their work is not judged on its ability to hold and entrance the eye, but on the "issues" it "addresses".

If you really cared about pollution, you would put the money towards cleaning it up or preventing it, not buying an art-work that tells you what you already believe. If the Tate really believed it, maybe it could donate some of its vast riches to cleaning up some pollution, and leave a blank space on the wall with the blurb "We spent your taxes on preventing this beach getting dirty again, instead of buying a photograph of it when it was dirty, and leaving it dirty."

Though, if we put up the documentation of the work clearing and protecting the beach, wouldn't that be a performance piece?

Sounds like a win-win to me.

The Search For Headphones 2: Entry-Level Strikes Back

A pair of Meze Empyrean will cost around £2,800. The Sennheiser HD800S cost around £1,400.

Audiophiles. They must be bonkers.

Here's a thought that came at me from left-field. My new speakers cost three and a half times the old ones - even allowing for the sale price on the LS50's and an additional subwoofer. The amp+CD transport cost about the same multiple of the original amp + cd player + Dragonfly Black for streaming.

The HD650 cost about £400 when I bought them. That's more than I paid for the amplifier I was using.

Applying the 3.5 rule, I get £1,400. Applying the "more than I paid for the amplifier" rule, I get around £2,000, since that's what an H120 costs (but that includes DACs which the previous amp didn't. Take the cost of a comparable DAC out, and we're back to about £1,400). Apply the "pay more than the amplifier" rule and... no, I just can't justify it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the HD650 started sounding much better. Especially after I replaced the ear pads, which had been getting a little soft. That made a real difference to the sense of space in the sound. These are just fine, I told myself, what do I want to change for?

(A couple of weeks later)

I went through this exact process with the amplifier + CD player + external DAC combination, before getting something way outside of anything I'd been looking at before. I would listen to the Marantz and telling myself that it was just fine and didn't need changing. (It is just fine, but it did.) The HD650 are darn good headphones, but they weren't quite the sound I was looking for. Those things are intense. Seriously.

I realised I wanted something more... open, relaxed, something along those lines.

I watched a few more YT reviews.

And went back to Audio Sanctuary in New Malden, with a new list to try.

Meze 99 Classics. Hifiman Sundara. Audeze LC-1.

Yep. All "entry-level hi-fi".

I can't hear anything over about 11kHz. I have "entry-level" ears. Years of 60dB-70dB noise from trains, tubes, traffic, offices and passing aircraft will take its toll.

The Meze 99's are comfortable, have nice tight bass, and are easy to drive, but there was something...

The Audeze LC-1 sounded okay. At these price levels "okay" doesn't cut it. I didn't like the fit over my ears. Put to one side.

The Hifiman Sundara fit just fine. And had a clear, wide sound. The bass wasn't quite as snappy as the Meze 99's. But they had something.

Acid test. A Bruckner symphony.

No contest. The Meze were probably not even designed to handle orchestral music.

The Sundara's did just fine.

We have a winner. At £299.

I'd say the Sundara's are closer to the monitor-like sound and clarity of my LS50's. The HD650 are darker: clear, good definition and detailed, sure, but as I said, also intense. I have the Sundara on now, and I'm thinking, "yep, this is the sound I want".

Turns out I didn't want better (and even if I did, I could justify the expense), I wanted different.

The Sad Story of a Three-Times Faulty Pro-Ject T1 Turntable

I am assured that Pro-Ject make excellent turntables.

Lots of hi-fi stores seem to agree, since some stock little else.

I bought a white T1 from Sevenoaks Hi-Fi recently as a present for Sis, who has shelves of inherited vinyl and no deck.

Drove it half-way round the M25 to Sis' place. Installed it.

Was the drive spindle supposed to wobble like that?

(How was I supposed to know? It could be a design feature.)

Called Sevenoaks Hi-Fi on the day and asked them. They said they would ask Pro-Ject's UK distributor.

Nobody gets back to anybody for a couple of weeks.

The drive belt fell off when Sis tried to play a 45. That's not supposed to happen.

Drive half-way round the M25 to collect it for return to Sevenoaks. Who send it to Pro-Ject's UK distributor.

Who tighten the screws on the motor mount.

And return it to Sevenoaks Hi-Fi a couple of weeks later.

The spindle is still wobbling. In fact, it's worse.

Because one of the screws is in a soft patch of wood (or some other such flaw) and vibrations of any kind loosen it.

Back to the distributor.

A week or so later it comes back. The spindle was secure.

They had shifted the motor round and re-secured it in new screw holes. (I know because I called the distributor and spoke an incredibly helpful member of staff.)

Drove it half-way round the M25 to Sis' place. Installed it.

The belt fell off when we tried to play it at 45.

Called Sevenoaks immediately and said "That's enough. I want my money back".

Drove it half-way round the M25 to return it and get my money back.

Like Sis said: why didn't the distributor just say Send it back and we'll send you a new one in the first place?

I don't think it would have made a difference. I think there are design flaws.

The screws securing the drive unit to the plattern are small. Way too small.

The drive spindle has a wide lip top and bottom of the 33 rpm section. The belt is not going to fall out of it. The lip on the 45 rpm section is way too narrow.

Finally, each unit is not tested before delivery. The parts might be, but the assembled unit is not. Otherwise they would have found the loose motor mount before the unit was even shipped.

Which is why Sis does not want another Pro-Ject. (Personally I hope she takes a liking to a Technics DJ deck....)

Music Streaming By iPad

Am I the only person who wonders why anyone would pay hi-fi prices for a streaming device when there are iPads?

More to the point, when there are spare iPads, or even a recent generation iPod, or an iOS 12 or later iPhone left over from an upgrade. I re-purposed an old 16GB Air after I upgraded to a later model with more storage. My only mini-gripe is speed of app loading. The response once loaded is just fine.

Music does not need state-of-art kit - video does. My music files (AAC or MP3, granted) are on a removable HDD, attached to a ten-year-old ASUS netbook running Windows 7 on a Celeron chip and connected by WiFi. The Stratospherix Music Streamer finds the HDD as a regular Windows drive, and scans the directories to create a catalogue with album art on the iPad. A rescan of my 1,000+ CDs takes about ten minutes at most.

Connect the iPad to your amplifier as follows:

Apple Camera Adapter with power pass-through. There's one for Lightning ports and one for USB-C ports. Connect the Lightning / USB-C pigtail to the iPad, and the cable from the transformer to the pass-through port. This will provide power without draining batteries. Connect to an external DAC or amplifier digital input using a USB-A to USB-(whatever the other end is) cable. If you don't have an external DAC or a super-integrated amplifier, you can use a Dragonfly or some other USB DAC, and connect its output to an analogue input on the amp.

Download whatever streaming or music apps you need onto the iPad - those apps are free, subscriptions for content may apply. I have the Sonos (don't judge me) app, Qobuz, and Stratospherix Music Streamer (that has a minimal cost). An iPad can handle Naxos and other services that don't play nice with Sonos and other streaming-controller-apps (from e.g. KEF or Naim). It can also be a Roon controller. Of course it can: it's a computer.

The path is digital all the way from the music server to the DAC, wherever that may be.

There are discussions about whether the hi-fi people can build a digital link between their wi-fi card / LAN port to their DAC which is audibly better than Apple's link in the iPad. I will leave that argument to more techie heads than mine.

Two things.

It has to be Apple, because Android re-samples everything to 16/48 (or near offer). Apple pretty much passes the digits through, so if you get 24/192 or whatever in through the wireless, that's what will go out of the Lightning / USB port.

And, this only works if you have an older iPad, a superceded iPhone with iOS12+, or a recent iPod, hanging around.

Otherwise cost becomes a factor. iPads are £400 or so, and those Camera Adapters are £40-80. If you don't have a DAC, a Dragonfly Black is around £100. iPods are less than £200 and have the same functionality but a smaller screen. (I started streaming using an iPod. Didn't notice a difference moving between the two.) Whereas the Bluesound Node is £399 at Richer Sounds, everyone says it's wonderful, and it has its own DAC so it plays nice with an analogue-only amplifier. And you do get 500 Audiophile Points if you have Bluesound Node. (I think there's a penalty for using Apple gear.)

Hence the qualification of my question: when there are spare iPads.

Low-Fi, Hi-Fi Defined

It's low-fi if the recording is a test of your kit. As in I never heard the guitar part before.

It's entry-level hi-fi if you say That's really good, much better than what I had before.

It's hi-fi if your kit is a test of the recording. As in Jeez, that mix is a mess.

John Darko is the only reviewer who really talks about this. Sometimes the production just does not warrant a highly-accurate, clear, analytical set-up. All that does is make you hear every bit of scratchy playing, poor balance and messy microphone placement in the studio. Not to mention the faults in the recording deck, and the mixing engineer's tin ear.

Every time I've started doubting a piece of my kit, I put on a different piece of music, and there is everything I thought was missing before: the soundstage, the tight bass, the instrumental separation, the details. It was missing one the earlier music because it wasn't in the recording in the first place. If you doubt this, play some jazz from the late 1950's, preferably recorded by Rudy van Gelder. It's all there in the recording and mastering. Then play Seether, which is a terrific noise, but it's mixed for headphones and low-fi kit.

This raises an interesting question. Shouldn't we have different kit for different types of music? Distortion-heavy rock is not well-served by highly-analytical gear, but baroque and jazz is. It's not going to work for speaker-fi and amps, because the only people with more than one of those at any given time are reviewers. The rest of us pays the money and lives with the consequences. Choose the gear to suit what you spend most of your time listening to. I don't listen to a lot of distortion-heavy rock music.

When I do, it might be nice to have a pair of headphones to soften the harshness of the distortion. Which is maybe why some people have multiple headphones.

Crate-Digging in Soho (Kind of)

Recently, I went to Reckless Records and Sister Ray on Berwick Street, and Sounds of the Universe on Broadwick Street.

Why? When streaming?

Because the streamers have yet to reproduce the experience of flipping through records / CDs in crates and boxes. In the same way that Amazon has yet to recreate the experience of looking at bookshelves of books in a given genre in alphabetical order of author. That is how people discover new stuff, because of the sheer chance of juxtaposition.

I picked up some very cheap experiments, a 2-CD set of 1960's Bossa Nova and a Steely Dan compilation CD.

Nobody had any flamenco.

This is a serious oversight in Britain's, and it seems, English-speaking music stores.

Anyway.

There are, I discovered, swathes of music I'm not even going near.

Reggae and its relatives. I was a Bob Marley fan back in the day. I even had a Burning Spear album. Not much more. I still have Catch A Fire in my collection. Don't feel any pull or curiosity about it now.

Beat music. There's a whole little world dedicated to beat-girl singers from around the world. 1960's boy bands I've never heard of. I'm going to pass on that. I have one Marianne Faithful album of her French hits, and that's enough.

Soul. Not the new stuff, the 1970's / 80's stuff. I may have had more of that than I think in my vinyl buying, but I felt no pull towards it. No curiosity about all those Northern Soul tracks, even if I did recognise some of the names. I'll leave those to serious crate-diggers.

Heavy metal and related genres. Will someone please explain the attraction of heavy metal? Actually, no, I wouldn't understand the explanation.

Punk. While I recognise the achievement of the Sex Pistols, I wouldn't want to listen to a whole album of it.

Obscure American and British bands who only made one album and that costs £85 second-hand. (There are YT channels about this kind of stuff, run by men who look exactly like you would imagine they would look like, if you had to think about it.)

Rap. I have a post somewhere about a number of rap tracks I can stand to hear more than once. A young colleague told me those were old old skool bands (Wu Tang Clan? I guess so) but then the best stuff was from that era.

Mainstream Chart bands. You know the ones. You recognise all the names, but I can't go beyond the hit single(s).

So what do I listen to?

Jazz up to about 1965 or so, plus all of Miles' output

Church vocal music from Gregorian chant to Poulenc's motets

Baroque, Galant, Classical, some Romantics, and some early 20th-century

Minimalism

Girl and guitar bands (from Jefferson Airplane to Halestorm)

Post-rock

EDM, electronica, and jazz-oriented hip-hop (but nothing that begins with thump-thump-thump)

Miscellaneous bands and singers from 1960 to the present (Electribe 101, One Dove, Joni Mitchell, Haywoode, Laura Nyro, Bert Jansch, John Martyn....)

Flamenco

What surprises me is that it seems to me absolutely natural that anyone who listens to, say, Leonin's pieces for church singers would also listen to Steely Dan, and that being able to sit still for the Bartok String Quartets also means sitting still for John Digweed's Structures. I'm hearing something in common between all this music, that I don't hear in the genres I pass by without even a moment's hesitation.

Nearly all the stuff I like is cleanly recorded, distortion and sheer volume is not part of the soundscape. It is instrumental and ranges from deceptively simple (Steve Reich) to absurdly complicated (J S Bach), so there's plenty to keep the brain going. Fluid rhythm is important - not a beat or a four-on-the-floor thump - and interesting sound textures help. That elusive touch of the blues, and the sense of an edge.

So I will leave you with a band you should know if you've never heard them before. Electribe 101 with the legendary Billie Ray Martin on vocals.

There are a handful more places to go looking, and I'll be doing those in the coming weeks.

Because random.

Only the physical world can do it well.

Buy Nice or Buy Twice

... or why you shouldn't spend your money on four mid-priced watches, but save for one premium one.

I've heard buying advice like this occasionally.

The idea is that, by buying something that's right up against, or even slightly below, what you really need, you may well wind up buying the same thing but with better specs and a higher price within a year or so.

This motto works well computers. Sure you can live with the minimum spec of the new Mac Air, but why not sling in some extra RAM and the next internal storage up? Just in case you suddenly want to start editing 1080p footage from a Go-Pro or something. The extra money gives you headroom and options. Maybe you use them, maybe you don't. At least you won't have to buy another one with the RAM and storage when you do decide to edit video. Gamers will have the same considerations over graphics cards, frame rates and other such.

In general, get the better tool in the price range. You don't have to get a hand-made German chef knife - that's silly - but that cheap Chinese junk on Amazon (is there anything except cheap Chinese junk on Amazon?) won't give you the lifetime or satisfaction of a Sabatier or a Global. Ever noticed that most of the professional builders you've seen have De Walt power tools? It's not because De Walt are the cheapest.

Or as the guys at my local Dulux Pro shop say: don't get the dog paint(*), get the Trade Paint.

Does this advice work for cars? If you need a small car with stellar fuel economy, upgrading to a BMW sports car is not meeting your goals. However, there may be a trade-off between one mini and another, and maybe getting the larger storage capacity and a little extra heft in the engine might be useful, even if it does do 5 mpg less. I would never buy a new car, or spend much more than £8,000 on a recent second-hand one. Given how I use cars, it's not worth it. If I drove long distances on a weekly basis, then I could make a case for a 2-litre recent model of something well-made. Some people like to buy new cars: different strokes for different folks.

At the other end of the scale, this is really bad advice for buying art. Buying art, you buy what you can live with and afford. There isn't a step up from buying a Calder mobile, or a small Sergeant watercolour, despite anything the gallerist might say. You buy nice or you don't buy at all.

Somewhere in between is the boy-toy stuff: cameras, hi-fi, watches, and for all I know, fishing rods.

I am never going to spend £6,000 (or even £1,000) on a watch. I don't trust myself not to lose it, or wreck it. You know how that goes: the cheap beater lasts for ever and is glued to your wrist, the expensive item falls off your wrist every chance you give it and a few it made for itself. But every now and then I get a yen for a style of watch, which I can get at the "affordable" price ranges. I'm not collecting, and I'm not looking for an heirloom. I want something that looks different from what I have already. The collectors are right: "affordable" <> "collectable". Also, the idea of collecting expensive watches is a marketing ploy by the luxury companies.

I'm not sure about spending £2,000 on headphones. Spend that on an amplifier, and you could be in for a treat. I'm not convinced that the potential to make similar improvements in headphones is there. Nor am I convinced that I would hear it, given the condition of my ears after all these years. I did hear different styles of sound on a test session recently, but not improvements within the same style of sound.

How about furniture? That stuff is expensive. A really nice wingback armchair can be £1,000+. Assemble a less fancy one from IKEA for about £250. I can't justify that kind of money to myself. Other people could, and I bet they live in bigger houses and do a fair amount of entertaining. But, buy too cheap, and furniture will fall apart in double-quick time, and will need replacing at least once, while the better piece would still have been going strong.

The same consideration applies to shoes and clothes. Shoes from a Northampton cobbler will last five times as long as high-street fashion stuff.

Buy nice or buy twice. Sure. As long as you are buying for a purpose and 'nice' is affordable (even if you have to cut out drinking for the rest of the month).



(*) Dulux' retail mascot is a long-haired Old English Sheepdog, now nicknamed 'Dulux dogs'. Dulux Trade paint is why professionals do a way better job than you do.