How I Became A Steampunk Audiophile

Posted by Mike Walsh

9/20/16 11:32 AM

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am not entirely sure how it happened — but somehow in the last few years, I lost my connection with music. It could have been any number of things: throwing out my CD covers after I had ripped their insides, discarding playlists whilst moving between computers, a brief but horrific dalliance with iTunes Match or surfing the banal infinitudes of Spotify. Whatever the reason, the result was unequivocal — I had stopped listening to music, and had started consuming it.

 

I was not always so bothered by the idea of trading quality for convenience. When I wrote my first book, ‘Futuretainment’ in 2007, the iPhone had just arrived. In the euphoria of downloadable content, physical media was suddenly passé. Naturally, there were compromises. Space and bandwidth were not what they are today, so compression was inevitable, although not entirely unwelcome. No one had ears good enough to hear those lost frequencies, or so the experts told us.

 

The assault on music continued.

 

Consumers asked themselves, why buy an album when you could just buy a track? For that matter, why pay for music at all when you just as easily grab a torrent or steal your friend’s entire music collection from their hard drive? Audiophiles with their obsession for pure fidelity and precious metal cables never seemed more ridiculous. Who were they to stand in the way of digital revolution?

 

Nearly a decade on, I’m much more circumspect.

 

For one, I’m not sure that the new digital experience of music is better than the analogue one it replaced. I’m not specifically talking about quality either.

 

Think about your own experience. How do you generally listen to music? Is it a conscious act or a background task? In the near future, will you select a particular seminal album to enjoy from an artist that moves you, or will you just identify your emotional state, and an algorithm will assemble personalized muzak to soothe your mood? Or worse, will your wearable technologies make that determination for you, based on your biometric readings? That might be an appealing idea for the Singularity set, but consider what you might be giving up. After all, music was never intended as mere sonic wallpaper.

 

Most of the greatest works of classical music, for example, were never written for mass consumption, let alone recorded playback. They were composed for live listening — whether in a small chamber room, or an opera theatre. Ironically, contemporary dance music is not so dissimilar. Some of the world’s most successful electronic music producers don’t create tracks specifically for iPhones or home stereos — they master their music for the massive sound systems and bass factories of super clubs. Music, in any form, is meant to be an experience. Not a semblance.

 

Hearing music the way it was intended was, until fairly recently, a hugely expensive and complicated task. Not only was audiophile equipment priced out of reach of mere mortals, you were also limited by the fact that your source media was recorded at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and a bit depth of 16 bits per sample.

 

The 44.1kHz/16 bit standard originated in the 1970s, based on the perceived limits of human hearing and the recording equipment at that time. Things have moved on. Look around today, and you will find websites like HDtracks selling music at 192kHz/24bit — a resolution known as ‘studio master quality’, because it is a fidelity close to the original recording.

 

There is considerable argument about whether or not humans can really notice the difference between compressed and uncompressed music. However the only thing you can reliably say about humans, in my experience, is that they like to argue. So I decided to go and find out for myself.

 

As I started to research high resolution music I discovered an entire subculture of portable audiophiles, who identified their obsession as ‘head-fi’. Some of their kit was outrageously steampunk — military grade spec music players strapped to portable headphone amplifiers with rubber bands, custom silver or exotic metal interconnects, and a complex arcana of compression free audio formats. These were the anti-iPods. Form sacrificed for function. Perfection expressed in confusion. But there was also a kind of magic in this high end home-brew hi-fi, that reminded me of the very early days of the Internet when being online meant accessing bulletin boards with acoustic couplers and dialling programs.

 

Of course, high end personal audio is nothing new. In the high density cities of Tokyo and Hong Kong, large hi-fi systems are not only too big for most apartments, they are incompatible with good neighbourly relations. Visit stores like Yodobashi above Tokyo’s Akihabara station or the Wanchai Computer Center, and you will find whole sections dedicated to tiny amplifiers and ultra expensive headphones — perfect for the private experience of music.

 

One of the most popular high resolution music player brands at present is Astell & Kern, a product manufactured by iRiver — who made the world’s first MP3 player, the Rio, in 2000. Sony, perhaps sensing Apple’s lack of strategy around HD music, is also trying to breathe life into the category by releasing devices that play DSD, a format based on its Super Audio CD standard that never quite took off in physical form.

 

Over the last few years, my head-fi hobby has grown into more of a troubling obsession.

At home I now listen to music on oversize Audeze LCD–3 headphones paired with an ALO Audio Pan Am — an improbable, pocket sized amplifier with glowing vacuum tubes and an isolated power supply to avoid line distortion. And then, for something more travel friendly, I carry around handmade Japanese FitEar ToGo 334 in-ear monitors driven by a fully balanced, headphone amplifier, strapped with rubber bands to an Astell & Kern source. I say travel friendly, but in truth that dense cube of electronics and hermetic wiring is enough to provoke considerable curiosity with most airport security officials.

 

Why bother? For starters, you need to forget Spotify, your smartphone and everything you thought you knew about music in the 21st century. Plug in to a portable audiophile rig, and the outside world steps away.

 

During a Cello Suite by J.S Bach, you are not only involved by the music but the measured breathing of the cellist and the sticky grip sounds of resin clinging to the bow. The deep silences that mark the opening moments of Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ are not just islands of quiet, but an inky black void that contains its own subtle noise — rather than a low resolution digital interpretation of absence. Even Lenny Kravitz singing ‘Are you Going To Go My Way?’ is transformed into something raw and intimate. Suddenly I could visualise in my mind’s eye exactly how the band was arranged in the recording studio, and could hear all the strange distortions of Lenny’s idiosyncratic analogue equipment.

 

Sooner or later, HD music will be mainstream. Apple will figure out their play, especially now that they own a headphone company. Spotify will follow the lead of Tidal and Deezer and start supporting uncompressed streaming as faster broadband becomes a reality. And sadly, you won’t need a distinctive steampunk setup because even your standard Android smartphone will include better quality DAC processors and sufficient storage.

 

Being an early adopter is a perilous path, but here’s what I learnt from my brief hiatus from consuming music rather than listening to it. If you lose perspective of what music is really capable of — it’s not the artists that suffer, but rather you, the listener.

 

Music may have been one of the first industries to be disrupted, but some things cast asunder by the digital age are actually worth putting back together again.

Topics: People

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