Pro Gear

Posted on 22 July, 2015 by odo

hearing the electronics

There’s no place in the home for professional audio gear. How could one stoop so low? It’s true. Much of the pro gear on the market is steered towards cheap and loud. It’s built to take the abuses of travel, packing and unpacking, loading and unloading, dropping and jostling by careless and harried roadies. It’s designed for force, not finesse; quantity, not quality. A few percent harmonic distortion at hearing-loss levels doesn’t matter. After all, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll. Still, that’s only one side of pro equipment—the DJ-rock-band-road-tour-blast’m-out-of-their-seats side. The other side of professional audio gear is cloaked in recording studios. Neither type of pro equipment tries to compete with home audio, neither consumer nor audiophile grade, and from this point of view, pro audio is a non-contender.

But it’s been suggested by those who know and are serious about quality sound recording that one shouldn’t dismiss the pro approach, or the gear. Yes, pro audio for home use, even for diehard audiophiles.

Pro gear? Really? Heresy!

Consider this. The music you listen to is recorded, mixed, mastered, and sent through kilometers of wire and circuitry using pro equipment. Good pro equipment isn’t cheap, but then, compared to high-end audiophile stuff, it doesn’t contend in price either. Pro gear is designed for work. It’s designed for reliability. It’s designed for longevity, designed for transparency. Why? Because pros can’t futz around wasting time and money. They can’t bear fiddling with mods, endless upgrades and tweaks, nor endure breakdowns, nor bother with distortion ladened niche-market toys made to appeal to eyes and vanity. Pros, likewise, can’t suffer being under-informed, or guessing. They haven’t patience for fads or gimmicks. They ignore the misinformation spouted by the audiophile press. They want nothing added to the signal. They want electronics you can’t hear. Professionals seek performance, not promises; performance, not pretty boxes; performance, not pettifoggery.

I use a pro digital crossover, pro amps, mid-priced drivers, and ordinary wire. Why? Not to be subversive, but because I won’t squander my time or money fussing over hundredths of a dB here or there, while turning a deaf ear to shortcomings easily heard even without an A/B comparison. Pushing for the last barely discernible soupçon of whatever quality one is hoping for gets swamped when the gross differences between recordings are considered. I’m focused on the big picture, the major issues that otherwise get overlooked when one is mired in smidgens. Details are important, but only after the big factors are squared away. This is the attitude hailed by the pros. Pro equipment focusses on the job it’s supposed to do, and gets it done correctly. The good part of a pro-disciplined approached is that it’s not outrageously expensive. The better part, it’s based on solid science that’s plainly understandable. The best part, it produces clean, accurate sound.

Consider this. Good music deserves good playback. You deserve to hear the recording unembellished by erratic frequency responses and other added distortions. Good audio. . . Okay, enough preaching. Yet the choir has been subjected to a barrage of bafflegab. They’ve been misguided by marketing, mislead by charlatans, and diverted by the high priests of omission. Pro-audio may not be fully immune to these distractions, but because it runs outside the mainstream, it tends to have fewer hucksters interfering with the production of sensible sound equipment at soundly sensible prices.

Read part one of the Hearing series — [The Color of Sound] — also visit [Parallel Audio].

Addendum — A friend of mine put together a double blind listening test. The subject on trial was the audibility of an additional analog-digital-analog conversion cycle in the signal path, specifically by using an inexpensive ($300 shipped) pro audio digital equalizer. There were four listeners, twenty one trials. Each trial used a different recording played twice for 15 seconds. Each play was randomly selected for either A or B. No one listening or controlling the selection knew whether A or B had the equalizer in the signal path. Listeners had to decide if the two plays of each selection were the same or different. The results? Listeners gave correct answers 46 times out of 88 possible, 52.28% correct—no better than chance. All agreed the pro equalizer’s presence and the extra A/D/A conversion was undetectable, in other words, harmless and transparent. Similar tests have been done on a larger scale. Findings show it takes over a dozen A/D/A conversions to have a noticeable deterioration of sound quality. That is powerfully compelling support for the accuracy of digital audio. The unit under test cost 300 USD, shipped—hundreds (or thousands) less than some audiophiles spend on a standalone DAC that isn’t balanced, can’t EQ, can’t convert analog to digital, can’t do anything expect digital to analog conversion.

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Pop

Posted on 8 July, 2015 by odo

Consumerism offered the perfect counterbalance to riot and rebellion: it was the American way of harmlessly diverting youth’s disruptive energies.

And a perfect way to summarize Jon Savage’s book, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. But youth culture didn’t start exclusively in the US, as he notes in this thorough reconstruction of modern Western cultural history. Thorough as it is, there’s one missing link he fails to connect to his thesis. The recent boom in human population worldwide can be directly tied to the rise in a youth oriented, if not youth driven, society. He connects the industrial revolution to the extension of childhood, or the delay of adulthood, yet fails to add in the major force behind the elongated transition of adolescence. With any swelling of a population, there is a downwards shift in the average age. Given a higher percentage of adolescents and young adults, they are going to be more visible and vocal. This may not have been obvious in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. Later, come the baby-boom post World War II, it is incontestable. His omission, as large as it appears, is hardly a major fault, for in every other way Savage buries his proposal with articulated detail.

There’s another thread stitched throughout the book : As youth asserts its independence, commerce and the media capitalize on it. Together they instigate a self-perpetuating feedback loop that shapes pop culture. Teens rebel against the established norms to express their independence. They start a new style, pickup a new music, take a new drug. The human tendency for copycat behavior amplifies the trend. Social needs and group acceptance outweigh logic and sensibility. The media pick it up, whip it up, and fan the frenzy. Marketing latches on to sell new product contrived from the raging fad. And the fanatical behavior shifts to a higher orbital, attracting more attention to itself, gaining momentum, and driving consumption. Although, the pathetic irony of being “with it” is that by the time something has been picked up by marketing departments, it’s also already worn out and commonplace. It’s lost its edge, and barely rebellious. Make a note; once commerce begins selling you trendy thingies, it’s over. To be really cutting edge, you have to be out of step, otherwise you’re just another blatting sheep, and always behind the curve. The double irony is that being out in front of the pack is rarely being with it. Only a small fraction of new turns will ever catch on, leaving the real trailblazers looking more idiotic than ingenious.

The devastating effect of the World Wars on Europe was another factor fueling youth revolt. Reacting to the loss of life, severed relationships, and the disruption during WWI of an entire generation’s youth, turned those coming of age post war in the 1920s radically military adverse. They headed to sex, and drugs, and Jazz.* Again, memories are short. In less than 20 years, less than one generation later, Europe was in a repeat of military turmoil with WWII. After barely recovering from the first mass madness event, their world was one more time blackened by mutual destruction. It’s amazing how stubborn humans can be once they get something fixated in their collective heads.

The most alarming part of the book is the recounting of the Nazi war and propaganda machine. We have been barraged with reminders of the Holocaust, and for good reason, but the Nazi dynamo was bigger and more insidious than the genocide of a religious minority alone. Though Savage’s story is centered on youth culture, the most compelling message surfaces in the reminders of the fanatical, lockstep control the Nazis imposed on Germany. The loss of rational, higher level logical thought processes allowed oblivious group-think to take over a whole country. The bizarre dominance by a small number of weasels imposing their deluded ideas to impel an entire population to undertake egregiously detestable actions is unimaginable. Their impossibly twisted disregard for their own people, especially their youth, adds still more to the cognitive short circuit. The majority swallowed, with no questions, a psychotic mass death-wish for Jews as well as themselves. It happened twice in the same country within the span of a few decades. It could happen again—in any country.

Teenage is reading that’s marshmallow fluff from the youth culture perspective; and leaden gravitas from the war-consumerism-media establishment perspective. It shows us youth’s elusive springs of hope, and uncloaks the desiccation of those springs as each generation “grows up.”

Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, Jon Savage, Viking, 2007

* See [Bug Music].

Next : Part 2 of the Hearing series.

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