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Copper Issue 13
August 15, 2016
Table of Contents
Opening Salvo: Welcome to the lucky thirteenth edition of Copper! ............................. 1
Incoming Letters: Noise And Listening ................................................................................ 3
My Turn: Diving into Opera, and Surfacing with Joy (Part I) ............................................ 7
Quibbles and Bits: Conversion Conversation .................................................................... 13
The Audio Cynic: Letting Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story .................................... 16
Music, Audio, and Other Illnesses: The Mystery Of The Making .................................... 18
Too Much Tchaikovsky: Flutes ............................................................................................. 22
Behind the Glass: Disney In Denver ................................................................................... 25
Vintage Whine: Stan White: An Overlooked Visionary/Part 2 ........................................ 28
Music to My Ears: Jerry Garcia ............................................................................................. 36
Featured: Points Of Pickup .................................................................................................. 39
Featured: How I Spent My Summer Vacation ................................................................... 43
In My Room: Over the top! ................................................................................................... 59
Photo Feature: Vine and Window ........................................................................................ 62
Welcome to the lucky thirteenth edition of
Copper!
By Bill Leebens | Copper Issue 13
As is probably clear by now, we’ve decided to shake things up a bit. Our new format is
designed to be more readable and more manageable. It will also allow readers to post
comments directly after articles…and we’ll see how that goes. Kindly recall that “you suck!”
doesn’t contribute to stimulating, productive discourse…and I will be watching.
We’re pleased to present the first part of an incredible piece by Jason Victor Serinus, Opera
101 for those of us whose exposure to opera has never gotten beyond the thundersheets of the
Decca Ring cycle. I shamefacedly admit to being part of that group, which is why we asked
Jason to write for us.
Jason’s knowledge of opera is matched by his enthusiasm, and I hope that after you watch and
listen to the numerous clips he’s selected, you’ll share some of that enthusiasm. Opera is a
fascinating and often beautiful medium, and doesn’t have to be intimidating.
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Something else new in this issue: a contest! Read The Audio Cynic—ALL of it, not just the last
paragraph!—and send us your idea of something that is unquestionably, uniquely NEW in
audio. The winner will receive a PS Audio LANRover! US MSRP $599. Entries will be judged
by Paul McGowan and me, all decisions are final so shut your piehole; if you don’t mention this
thing on your tax return it’s on you, not us; operators are NOT waiting on your call; and yadda
yadda.
Send your suggestions to Letters.
Below you’ll see a picture taken during my recent trip to San Francisco, because to me it
exemplifies this issue: a bridge from the past to the future. I hope you’ll stay with us as Copper
continues to grow and improve!
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Noise And Listening
By Various | Copper Issue 13
I was very pleased to read the article on noise and how it plays a part in our listening
experience. In short, auditory masking, is a state in which one sound stimulus, the maskee, is
rendered less audible by the presence of another sound stimulus, the masker. As in your
article, most discuss this masking effect on the human auditory system when the masker and
the maskee occur in a concurrent time frame which is called simultaneous masking. The
masker or the noise or unwanted signal, has time parameters such as duration, intensity,
frequency spectrum. Interestingly, the maskee, may have the same parameters as the masker,
but can also have its own set of parameters.
Also, the maskee may not exist within the same time domain and the masker and either be
occurring before the masker begins, or after the masker ends; these two independent events
are called backward and forward masking, respectfully. In addition, the duration, frequency
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spectra and the time of onset/offset(inter stimulus interval) can change the auditory
experience.
Simply stated, noise effects, (the unwanted condition) can create totally different listening
experiences depending on the temporal and spectral relationship between the masker and the
maskee. Usually, in the simultaneous masking conditions the masking effect across the
duration of the masker results shows a rather uniform amount of masking for the maskee.
However, in both the backward and forward masking paradigms, the masking effect is very
different and is dependent on the amount of time between the occurrence of the maskee and
the masker or the inter stimulus interval.
All this masking takes place not only in the peripheral but in the central auditory system,
especially since the backward and forward masking situations take place within time domains
that exist way beyond that of a signal remaining in the peripheral neural auditory mechanism.
This discussion can become even more complex if we entertain the masking effects that occur
within the inner ear which would clarify why some maskers have a greater or lesser effect on
an auditory signal.
All of the above is based on data collected in a signal detection mystique and does not play a
part in understanding how things sound to us from a music appreciating POV. But it does help
us understand why something can sound different as a function of a change in acoustic
parameters.
After all of this, we still need to sit down in a comfortable setting and enjoy what we call music.
Laurence Rosenblatt
John Hartford
That video of John Hartford made my day! Thanks,
Mike Mandell
Minor Quibbles
First, a minor quibble with Richard Murison’s column on the Cocktail Party Effect.
It IS possible to recover a signal from below noise, even if the signal has the same frequency as
the noise: just average the noise. The feature available is on all modern DSOs and spectrum
analysers.
Second, an even more-minor quibble for Bill Leebens: don’t forget to double proof-read the big
type, to avoid “Coctail” in the above, and the incorrect spelling of Tchaikovsky in a prev issue,
to name but two.
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Greg Borrowman
Cover Quibbles
Once again I must comment on your cover in Issue 12. That may be the first time I’ve seen
mermaids standing on their tails, typically they are seated or swimming. Although the one on
the right could be seated, hard to tell. Also, is that a nude beach, other than Our Hero and
Nipper?
)
Seriously, a big welcome to Jim Smith. I have his book but would still be interested in his
comments on his ACK favorites.
And FOWG #2 (Bill Leebens being #1), interesting article about John Hartford. But why on
earth not post a link of HIM performing?
Regards,
M3 lover
Pull Back The Covers
I would like to read about the systems the writers have. Why they like those systems or the
components in those systems. And what component will they most likely upgrade next.
Thanks,
Paul Kirby
Happy For Jim Smith
Hi, just finished Issue 12. A very good read. I was happy to see Jim Smith on board, he can
teach us a lot. I like Bill’s history of audio companies. And the turntable guy, excellent addition.
For those not mentioned, please don’t feel left out. I am carefully reading, and rereading
Richard’s digital column, some of it is beyond me, but I am learning. And I enjoyed every other
column.
Issue 12’s “In My Room” could have used at least one picture of media storage and a complete
list of components. One thing I didn’t understand was the need to have the power amps in the
main racks. I would have thought amps on stands behind the speakers, running balanced
cables from preamp to amps under the floor would have been more cost effective, and if run
through 3in pvc set in the concrete would have a, allowed a cable change very easily. Maybe
that could be addressed?
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While I may have chosen different equipment, I am pretty sure the sound is excellent, the room
spectacular. “Anonymous” is a very lucky audiophile.
Copper for me, is a must read.
Thank you,
Jeff Roadwrench
Send Copper a letter!
Click here
6
Diving into Opera, and Surfacing with Joy
(Part I)
By Jason Victor Serinus | Copper Issue 13
Perhaps I am one of those increasingly rare birds who never had to learn to love opera. When I
was all of 11, my father brought home a deluxe, faux leather-bound 3-LP RCA Victor tribute
album to the iconic Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso (1873-1921). When he lowered the ridiculously
heavy arm of our Garrard turntable onto the deeply moving sextet from Donizetti’s opera, Lucia
di Lammermoor, and Caruso, Galli-Curci, et. al. began to sing, I exclaimed over the six voices
projected by our Bozak loudspeakers, “Daddy, I’ve heard that before!”
“Yeah, you broke it when you were 2,” was my father’s reply.
From that day forth, I spent many an afternoon playing those three Caruso LPs over and over.
Verily, opera, and specifically the acoustic recordings of Caruso, Galli-Curci, and Tetrazzini
singing 19th and early 20th century opera of the suffering Italian sort, was in my blood from the
time I was weaned. As I became a teenager, I may have spiced my listening with Elvis Presley,
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the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and finally Donovan, but I always returned to
Caruso.
Nor was I alone in my love of Caruso. My father, who was born and raised on Broome Street,
on New York City’s Lower East Side, told me that the day Caruso died, people all over his
immigrant neighborhood, in both the Jewish and Italian ghettos, brought their wind-up
phonographs to their windows and played Caruso records for hours on end. Everywhere you
went, all you could hear was the sound of Caruso singing his heart out.
My father also told me that when Caruso sang at the Met (New York’s Metropolitan Opera), he
often tended to look up, toward the people in the balconies. All the lower income immigrant
standees at the backs of the upper tiers felt that Caruso was singing, not to the rich patrons in
the orchestra and boxes below, but rather to them. They loved him all the more for it, and
considered him one of their own. In my own way, I did too.
But that was a century ago. For Americans raised on rock ‘n roll, country, pop, hip-hop and the
like, the postures, vocal production, and overall conceit of opera may seem strange. Indeed, the
carefully trained voices of opera singers are miles apart from the straight tones of pop and jazz
artists.
But if operatic vocal production and convention may seem strange to some, imagine how
someone from another culture might feel upon discovering, for the first time, a rock guitarist
gyrating like crazy and making all kinds of mean faces while strumming and plucking strings
and occasionally turning a knob or pushing a pedal. Heavy metal, hip-hop, and the like all have
their own performing conventions that are no more natural than high sopranos projecting high
E-flats throughout the house. I don’t want to make a big case out of this, but in what way are
some of the accents that we’ve come to take for granted from pop singers any more
“unnatural” than the carefully enunciated takes on language common to operatic vocalism?
Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect that most younger readers, or those who do not come from
backgrounds steeped in classical music, will immediately take to opera. It is, after all, seen by
many Americans – the audience I’m writing for – as a “foreign” art form, in which people in
sometimes ridiculous costumes pretend to be kings and queens, heroes and heroines, or
various permutations of maidens in distress and the saviors thereof. It is also true that singers
sometimes awkwardly move about the stage, flailing their arms and braying like overstuffed
bulls on their way to the slaughterhouse. So many of the plots are antiquated, and far too many
scenarios ridiculous.
Then again, such a stereotypical description of opera is wildly outdated. A large number of
modern productions of older operas attempt to update the scenarios in some way, often by
transporting the setting to the 20th and even 21st century. They also tend to favor singers who
can act as well as they sing, and look convincing in their roles. Sometimes those updates work,
and sometimes they’re unconvincing or preposterous. Nonetheless, it sure makes things juicy
when a woman whom a 19th century opera originally consigned to live out her days in a convent
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instead sings her final aria (song) while turning tricks on a street corner amidst a smattering of
empty syringes.
Cultural Relevance
Another prevalent misunderstanding is that all operas are either in Italian, German, French,
Russian, Spanish, or some other “foreign” language, and address the events of earlier periods.
We now have a large catalogue of contemporary operas in English (and other languages), many
of which directly speak to the most pressing issues of our time.
Thanks to recent revivals that have restored music and dialogue that was previously cut, the
Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (1934)
is now accepted as one of the first great American operas to deal with quintessentially
American subjects. Two decades later, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah
Susannah (1955) addressed stultifying intolerance. (Benjamin Britten broached the same
subject in Britain with Peter Grimes (1945)).
Gian-Carlo Menotti’s opera, The Consul (1955),
addresses issues that arise when would-be immigrants trying to flee oppressive regimes and
run into bureaucratic red tape.
Closer to the present day, America’s John Adams is especially known for his politically-themed
operas, among which are Nixon in China (1987),
The Death of Kinghoffer (1991),
and Doctor Atomic (2005).
Other topical English-language operas include Anthony Davis’ The Life and Times of Malcolm X
(1986),
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole (2011),
which follows the comic-tragic rise and fall of model Anna Nicole Smith, and an opera that first
made it to New York City this spring, Daniel Schnyder’s Charlie Parker’s Yardbird [see this
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article and this one as well].
Jake Heggie, who has become one of America’s most successful opera composers, first made
his mark with Dead Man Walking.
The opera, which by some accounts is the most frequently performed American opera today,
addresses the death penalty in the most heart-wrenching, compassion-inspiring manner
imaginable. Audiences are generally reduced to tears at good performances of the work.
Another of Heggie’s large scale operas, Moby-Dick (2010), was a huge success. I was so moved
at its San Francisco Opera premiere that I attended a second time during the run, and remain
convinced of the opera’s greatness.
In the past three months, I’ve reviewed two new politically relevant operas by Americans, both
of which lend themselves to fairly intimate chamber settings: the two-act version of Jake
Heggie’s Out of Darkness (2016), which deals with the Holocaust – its second act specifically
addresses the Nazi oppression of homosexuals – and Gregory Spears’ Fellow Travelers (2015?),
which addresses the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy Era in which untold thousands of
homosexuals discovered their governmental careers and lives wrecked by McCarthy’s anti-gay
witch hunt.
What is Opera?
But perhaps I get ahead of myself. Let’s take a giant step backwards, and do a little Opera 101.
Opera is an art form that melds both sung and instrumental music with text (libretto) in a
manner that is hopefully both dramatic and theatrically compelling. Merriam-Webster calls it
“a drama set to music and made up of vocal pieces with orchestral accompaniment and
orchestral overtures and interludes.” The Cambridge Dictionary, in turn, calls it “a formal play
in which all or most of the words are sung, or this type of play generally.”
The definition of opera gets really dicey when you try to distinguish opera from musical theater
of the American sort. It’s equally challenging to differentiate European and American operetta
(light opera) from full-fledged operas that include spoken as well as sung dialogue (recitative).
When Bizet’s ever-popular opera, Carmen, is performed complete, it includes spoken dialogue.
Ditto for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).
The choice of venue also figures strongly in categorization. George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy
and Bess, for example, is considered musical theater in some circles because it premiered on
Broadway rather than in an opera house. But when you take into consideration that it had no
choice but to premiere on Broadway because its all-Black cast (then called “all-Negro cast”)
was not allowed to perform in an opera house, and then examine its overall structure in
unabridged form, its identity as an opera becomes clearer. Is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney
Todd musical theater, or is it in fact an opera that got its start in a musical theater context?
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Grooving on Opera
Appreciating opera takes some effort. While it’s certainly possible to play excerpts of melodic,
18th and 19th century arias in the background and be touched by their beauty, listening to a
complete opera requires far more concentration. Especially if the opera is in a language you do
not understand, and the libretto (story) is well thought out and complex, it can be extremely
challenging to figure out why people are either singing their hearts out or laughing it up
without following the libretto in print or as projected in live performance and video. As for the
longer operas of Richard Wagner, or operas that are not strictly tonal, listening without
following the words closely is more often than not an invitation to frustration, if not to outright
futility and abandonment.
Even before I attended opera, my appreciation for opera and art song grew exponentially as I
began to listen to and acquire multiple recordings of the same arias I encountered on that
seminal Caruso reissue album. For the first time, I discovered that the accompaniment matters.
In fact, in some cases, e.g. Wagner and Strauss, the orchestral accompaniment is as or even
more crucial to the musical message as the vocal line.
I also discovered, through listening to recordings and attending live performance, that people
performed the same arias very differently. Not only were their voices different, but they also
sang at different tempos, and made different interpretive choices as to what words and notes
they would emphasize, when to linger or speed up, etc.. Some of these choices, of course, were
dictated by conductors or technical limitations, including the length of a 78 record and union
rules about overtime. But just as many were determined by the individual temperaments of the
singers.
What finally opened opera and art song wide for me was discovering how each voice resonated
differently within my being. Some singers made beautiful sounds but left me emotionally
uninvolved. Others, including singers who were technically imperfect, touched me so deeply
that I went to sleep with their voices in my head, and heard them when I awoke.
For years – decades in fact – I spent hour after hour comparing voices and interpretations on
my own. It was only in 1999, when I was first offered the opportunity to write a CD review, that
I realized that I had spent a decent part of my teenage and adult years developing my critical
listening skills by comparing recodings.
Certainly, it is not necessary to do what I did in order to love opera. Indeed, many people who
have season subscriptions to opera companies, and have been attending opera for decades,
have never spent time comparing interpretations. They are content with letting the beauty of
the music wash over them.
For people with a taste for discovery and adventure, however, listening to the same classic
Italian aria performed by sopranos Emmy Destinn, Rosa Ponselle, Claudio Muzio, Maria Callas,
Renata Tebaldi, Mirella Freni, Leontyne Price, and Anja Harteros – or, to turn to tenors, Enrico
Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, Jussi Björling, Giuseppe di Stefano, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido
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Domingo, Piotr Beczała, Josef Calleja, and Jonas Kaufmann – is to discover an oft-astonishing
range of musical and emotional expression. The more deeply you explore, the more the
emotional and spiritual vistas of opera can open to you.
Throughout this introduction to opera, I link to performances on YouTube. In doing so, I in no
way wish to suggest that the sonically compressed files found on YouTube can convey the huge
range of color and emotional that singers devote their lives to. Rather, these carefully chosen
links will give you a taste of what great singing sounds like. If you’re moved by what you hear,
please check out the singers who speak to you via CD, LP, or hi-res downloads.
End, part I
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Conversion Conversation
By Richard Murison | Copper Issue 13
Today’s DACs, with a few very rare (and expensive) exceptions, all use a process called Sigma
Delta Modulation (SDM, sometimes also written DSM) to generate their output signal. A
simplistic way to look at SDM DACs is to visualize them as up-converting (or ‘upsampling’)
their output to a massively high frequency – sometimes 64, 128 or 256 times 44.1kHz, but often
higher than that – and taking advantage of the ability to use a more benign analog filter at the
output. In fact the bit depth is also reduced (usually to 1–3 bits) in order to simplify the
process of digital-to-analog conversion at ultra-high bit rates. That is a bit of an oversimplification, but for the purposes of the point I am trying to make today, it is good enough.
Doing such high-order up-conversion utilizes a great deal of processing power, and the
provision of that processing power adds cost. Additionally, the manufacturers of the most
commonly used DAC chipsets give away very little about their internal architectures, and don’t
disclose the most significant details behind their approaches. Many DAC manufacturers are
therefore quite coy about how their product functions, and this coyness is often expressed
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through cavalier usage of the terms ‘upsampling’ and ‘oversampling’. Many of those
manufacturers employ DAC chipsets with prodigious on-chip DSP capability (such as the wellknown and widely used ESS Sabre 9018), and then fail to make full use of it in their
implementations.
Let’s consider a hypothetical example. We’ll take a 44.1kHz audio stream that our DAC chip
needs to upsample by a factor of 64 to 2.88MHz, before passing it through its SDM. The best
way to do this would be using a no-holds-barred high-performance Sample Rate Converter
(SRC). However, there are some quite simple alternatives, the simplest of which would be to
just repeat each of the original 44.1kHz samples 64 times until the next sample comes along (a
process sometimes called a zero-order hold). What this does is to encode the “stairstep”
representation of digital audio we often have in mind, in fine detail. (Personally, I would refer
to this as oversampling rather than upsampling, but marketing types don’t tend to listen to
engineers!)
If we are going to use this approach, though, it comes with consequences. As mentioned, it
results in the accurate recreation of the stairstep waveform at the output of the DAC. The
effect of this stairstep is to add additional distortion frequencies to the analog output
waveform. Fortunately, these distortions will all be at frequencies above 22.05kHz, where no
original audio data was encoded in the first place. The analog output filter will therefore
require a brick-wall response to strip them out, which means that it is not so ‘benign’ any more.
So, instead of our DAC applying a zero-order hold to the incoming 44.1kHz waveform, suppose
it uses a high quality Sample Rate Conversion (SRC) algorithm to properly upsample it. Such
algorithms incorporate digital filters to filter out the alias signals which are encoded above the
Nyquist frequency of the incoming audio stream. The result is a clean signal that we can pass
into the SDM, and which will be precisely regenerated, without any stairstep, at the DAC’s
output. A good upsampling algorithm will exhibit essentially no ultrasonic residue, so we no
longer need an aggressive, sonically worrisome, analog brick-wall filter.
Let’s take another look at these two scenarios. The first needed an aggressive analog brickwall filter at the output, but the other in effect had the same brick-wall filter implemented
digitally at an intermediate processing stage. If the two sound at all different, it can only be
because the two filters sound different. Is this possible? In fact, yes it is. An analog filter has
sonic characteristics that derive from both its design, and from the sonic characteristics of the
components from which it is constructed. The digital equivalent – if properly implemented –
only has sonic consequences arising from its design. There is a further point, which is that
digital filters can be designed to have certain characteristics which their analog counterparts
cannot, but I’m not going into that here. The bottom line is that, if properly designed, a
diligent DAC designer ought to be able to achieve better sound with this ‘upsampling’ approach
than with the previously discussed ‘oversampling’ approach (again, I must emphasize this is
MY usage of those terminologies, which is not necessarily everybody else’s).
Using the ‘upsampling’ approach I have just described, it should make little difference whether
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you send your music to the DAC at its native sample rate, or if you choose to upsample it first
using your playback software’s built-in upsampler. However, that assumes that the upsampling
algorithm used by the DAC is at least as good as the one used by your software. There is no
guarantee that this will be so, but to be fair, most half-decent modern DACs do employ
sophisticated upsamplers. If your playback software gives you a choice of upsampling
algorithms then you can sometimes get to hear this for yourself. A few years back, specialist
algorithms such as Izotope were very popular for this purpose.
The bottom line here is that if your DAC is any good, you should expect it to sound better (or at
least as good) with your music sent to it at its native sample rate than with it upsampled by
your playback software – even if you are using Izotope or something similar. If it doesn’t, the
difference is probably down to whose upsampling implementation is better. For some time now
it has seemed to me that a good measure of a quality DAC is that it sounds better – or at least
as good – with no upsampling applied by the playback software. (FWIW, This is how I use my
own PS Audio DirectStream DAC.)
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Letting Facts Get in the Way of a Good
Story
By Bill Leebens | Copper Issue 13
If the internet is good for nothing else, it’s great at destroying a good story by providing factual
evidence to the contrary. The flip side is that by widely and instantaneously distributing
falsehoods, it’s also excellent at spreading nonsense.
Jim Smith discussed the latter in issue #12, in his discussion of things we KNOW are true… but
just ain’t so (“The ACK Attack and Uncommon Knowledge” ). In this column, I want to look at
the former, in a very specific case.
Most of us are hugely patronizing and unremittingly arrogant when it comes to viewing the
past. “Oh, look at how much smarter we are now,” we think. A classic example of a tsk-tskproducing comment is one we’ve all heard a million times: In 1899, the US Commissioner of
Patents, Charles H. Duell, was alleged to have said, “everything that can be invented has been
16
invented.”
Only one problem: he never said it. The quote appears to have originated in the humor
magazine Punch in 1899, where the statement was made as a joke. Imagine a flippant quote
from The Onion turning up in 2133, being taken seriously by historians: that’s about the same.
“So, Leebs,” you may ask, “what’s your point?”
My point is that it’s often easy to adopt the attitude of that quote, or of Ecclesiastes: “There is
nothing new under the sun.” And the reason it’s easy to adopt that attitude, especially in
mature technical fields like audio, is that there seem to be few fundamental breakthroughs.
The advances we see are primarily rehashes of old findings, adapted to new technology or
simplified for automated mass production.
In other words: ho-hum.
Diligent readers of Vintage Whine know that the moving coil loudspeaker dates back a century
with Jensen, and that needles tracing grooves go back 140 years to Edison. Amplifiers? Also
nearly a century old. Microphones? Basically the phonograph, in reverse, and just about every
technology imaginable has been utilized—I’ve even read of using a small sample of radioactive
material, whose emissions through air would be modulated by soundwaves, and would thus
able to produce an output signal. Voila”! A mic!
So what is there in audio these days that’s really new? Diamond-dome drivers? Advances in
materials science applied to Edgar Villchur’s 1958 patent. Plasma speakers? Siegfried Klein
wrote about ionic drivers in the early ‘50’s, and the singing arc was known in the 19th century.
What about digital audio? Binary representation of data goes back to the 19th century, and
PCM goes back to 1937, with Reeves in the UK. Class D amplification? Pretty much every type
of circuit and power supply that you can think of were explored by the end of World War II, if
not earlier.
Certainly, not everything that can be invented, has been invented. And yet: try to come up with
something in audio that is truly new, and not just an advance in materials science, or a
repackaging of old ideas.
Let me hear from you: what is there in audio that is really, really NEW?
Best answer gets a free PS Audio LANRover USB Transporter, MSRP $599 US. Paul
McGowan and I will judge the responses, and our decision will be final, no whining allowed. If
you win and the prize shows up on Audiogon, we will hunt you down and kill you. (Seriously. I
am so not kidding.)
Tell us what you think! Give it a shot! Send us an email here.
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The Mystery Of The Making
By Dan Schwartz | Copper Issue 13
I never think about how mysterious the process of contemporary record making is, or was, to
the people who buy those records. Which, when you think about it, is really naïve — since I
devour stories about the making of records I love like a good meal.
In the early days of recording with Bill Bottrell, his studio, Toad Hall, was new, and we
experimented with the spaces. There are some outtakes from the early weeks of Triage (David
Baerwald’s bleak and angry rant about America in the era of grunge was released in 1992, and
seems startlingly prescient today–Ed.) that were recorded with the band in the large room, and
the board, the control desk, in the little room. Other than the acoustic treatments, that’s the
traditional set-up. By later in the album, the situation was reversed, and that’s pretty much the
way it stayed. Even when I recorded Indian music in there, the larger room was still used as
the control room.
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Toad Hall
Toad Hall was initially a bank, in the very early part of the 20th century. It was part of 3
reasonably identical spaces. Bill leased two of them and started what modifications there were.
I first saw it, I suppose, early in the spring of 1991. It was still just coming together. My
sometimes-roommate George Newburn was the acoustic consultant — he took me out there
with an instinct that Bill and I would get along. I was surprised to see my good friend Robert
Newman (who had been the Motels first drummer and whom I met when we played in Terry
Reid’s band) was way up on a scaffold doing a faux-finish to a concrete beam, painting it to look
like wood. I remember my visit there, that Madonna had just been in (and that George was
mildly and humorously obsessed with the lipstick stains on her Styrofoam coffee cup). I vaguely
recall that Bill and I talked about Neil Young, and were more-or-less in agreement that he was
all that was left.
Meantime, Baerwald was calling constantly, talking politics, usually late at night, and I finally
encouraged him to put down on paper what he was talking about. The next morning, my phone
rang at 6 AM; he said, “I’ve got your left-wing rant written”, and he read me “The Got-NoShotgun Hydrahead Octopus Blues”.
A couple months later two things happened: Baerwald was really leaning on me to produce his
album, and George told me that he had found out that Bill was producing Michael Jackson.
Well, I’m no dummy — I knew A&M Records weren’t going to trust me with $300,000, and I
knew they WOULD trust Bill if he was producing Michael. So I called him, and very soon after,
he, Baerwald and I were having drinks in Pasadena. (OK, they were drinking).
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The next night we all got together with Brian MacLeod and Gregg Arreguin, and did our first
recording. Then Bill was busy recording Michael, and Baerwald and I did a little development,
When we reconvened in Toad Hall, we did a couple days with Kavi Alexander’s mics and
drummer David Beebe, and then a few weeks with David Kemper on drums and pianist Nicky
Hopkins for a day. And when we finally started the album in earnest about 4 months after our
initial recording, the cast had settled: Bill’s tenant, Kevin Gilbert, MacLeod and Arreguin— and
the studio was reversed, the big room was now the control room and the small room had
become the drum room. There might have been a handful of studios set up that way, or Bill
may have been the first. I visited Mark Howard at Teatro, Dan Lanois’ place in Oxnard 15 years
ago, and by then they were set-up that way.
It was extremely dead sounding in the drum room, no reflections, and so the prevailing
ambiance became dead drums, live everything else. The only real treatments in the live room
consisted of acoustic fiberglass behind half-a-dozen long drapes, and a bass trap above a floorto-almost-ceiling bookshelf in the back of the room. The console was a mid-70s Neve, and the
tape machine a Studer A800.
But the real innovation came in the form of the collective musicians’ monitoring, the
headphone system. For one thing, it was powerful, a 400-watt-per-side Bryston amp. But
mainly, it didn’t allow for what came to be called a “More Me” control — it was 2 channels, a
stereo send, and that was it. We all heard the same thing: if I wanted more me, everybody got
more me. (That encouraged us to be pretty circumspect when asking for more of ourselves). I
can’t adequately describe what this did for us — in all my years of playing, this was the first
time that I had an experience of playing a record AS I was making the record.
Maybe I should explain myself: in working up that point, I had been used to using headphone
systems that separated, rather than unified, the players. Everybody had a feed, usually one of 3
or 4 headphone sends — or sub-mixes — from the recording desk. That’s what everybody had,
and it only got worse with years, finally enabling us to literally create our own mix. On a 2006
session with Jim Keltner and a half-dozen other players, Jim took off his phones and whispered
to me, “What are you listening to?” Surreptitiously, we collaborated in hearing the same things.
This is probably among the many innovations that came with multi-track recording that led us
down the garden path and away from really making MUSIC. My pal Terry Manning usually
recorded with no headphones at all. It’s hard to imagine, as gloriously “primitive” as the REDD
desks were, that the Beatles had multiple headphone signals.
In later years, I found myself so reliant on Bill’s system that even when we used a different
studio, when he really didn’t want to engineer, I would sometimes needle him until we had a
reasonable facsimile of his great set-up, if he hadn’t done it yet. He once referred to his
headphone system as his real innovation.
Finally, there were usually enough open mics, a Neumann U47 with a very wide field of pickup,
and a couple Neumann KM-54 or Schoeps small-diaphragm tube mics, to give us all a sense of
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being in the room — even through standard-issue AKG 240s.
As the record went on, things became more and more tense between David and I, culminating
in us arguing in the “drum room”, away from prying mics, in which he said that I “took the lid
off his anger” by encouraging him to write about what he was always talking about. I replied
that I didn’t have to believe him to believe it was right for him to say what the album was
saying.
Of course, after 25 years, it’s obvious that everything that he, and we, said on that album was
utterly true.
Next issue: thoughts on Triage.
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Flutes
By Lawrence Schenbeck | Copper Issue 13
It’s not that complicated.
Lauren Bacall said it best, in To Have and Have Not: “You know how to whistle, don’t you,
Steve? You just put your lips together . . . and blow.”
Which may be why the flute is the oldest musical instrument known to humanity. Flutes going
back 40,000 years or so have been unearthed in Germany. They were carved from smallish
animal bones, hollowed out and given fingerholes. Players simply blew across an opening at
either end of the bone. Such “edge-blown aerophones,” common to many cultures, evolved in
two varieties: side-blown or transverse (like the Western concert flute but also the Chinese dizi
and Indian bansuri) and end-blown (like the Arabic ney and Japanese shakuhachi). Don’t
confuse end-blown flutes with fipple flutes like the recorder and pennywhistle. They are
constructed from tubes plugged at one end except for a hole you blow into. That fipple directs
your breath across a built edge, making it harder not to produce an acceptable sound. You still
have to put your lips together, but only to cover the fipple hole.
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Why have flutes survived all these years?
For one thing, they’re easy to play. What’s more, they sound simple. My beloved CU orchestral
master Abe Chavez once told me, regarding a flutist we both knew, “Larry, she’s just like her
instrument: no overtones.” (I took his words to heart.)
Flutes have limited dynamic range. Their low notes don’t project well, although really high
flute notes can drown out everyone else on stage. What flutes do have is that pure, folk-like
sound, plus jaw-dropping facility in rapid passagework. A good flutist can tear through a whole
bunch of notes faster and cleaner than any trumpet, trombone, bassoon, or marimba. Listen to
recorder-player extraordinaire Kathryn Montoya ripping up some “divisions” on John Come
Kiss Me Now:
(Ensemble Galilei, From Whence We Came, Sono Luminus DSL 92194)
You can do a lot with a flute. No sound better sums up a shepherd’s idle afternoon, a deep
forest hidden in shadow, or fairies flitting through a Shakespeare comedy. A few Romantic and
Modern composers have expanded their horizons further. Listen to the pastoral, yet somehow
eery effect that four flutes—four!—can produce in Mahler’s Fourth:
That sort of creative scoring was more the exception than the rule in the 19th and early 20th
centuries. The Romantic era, ever more dedicated to heroic, singular gestures, pretty much
sidelined the flute as a virtuoso solo instrument, turning instead to violins and pianos, which
offered wider pitch and dynamic ranges, also more impressive timbral flexibility.
But flutists are a hardy bunch. They keep playing, keep improving flute technology and
technique, keep pestering composers to write them something. Nowadays we are awash in
excellent recordings of the flute repertoire. In fact, thanks to a rare alignment of the stars—BIS
Records’ founding producer Robert von Bahr and the very talented Sharon Bezaly—you can
more or less one-stop shop right here. (If you want downloads, you’ll be directed to von Bahr’s
worthy eclassical.com. So, two stops.)
Bezaly’s dominance of the high-res flute landscape would be scandalous if she weren’t so good.
Seriously, if The Times (UK) called you “God’s gift to the flute,” wouldn’t you include that in
your bio? In her case, it’s not hyperbole.
Bezaly’s most recent release (BIS-1849) consists entirely of two concertos, one of which is a
transcription of the Khachaturian Violin Concerto. Your response to that will depend pretty
much on whether you like the original, and many people do. I found the other work, Einojuhani
Rautavaara’s Flute Concerto Op. 69, “Dances with the Winds,” more engaging. Bezaly gives us
two versions, which is one version more than most music lovers will need. (Apparently flutists
asked Rautavaara to provide a three-flute version instead of his original four-flute scoring, so
he did.) They’re virtually identical. And no, three flutists are not needed. Just one Bezaly.
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If you’re only getting started with flute literature, it might be better to go with Great Works for
Flute and Orchestra (BIS-1679). It includes three main courses: an orchestrated version of
Poulenc’s Sonata for Flute and Piano plus concertos by Carl Reinecke and Carl Nielsen. Like
his Clarinet Concerto, Nielsen’s 1926 Flute Concerto is a central work of the 20th-century solo
repertoire. Nielsen dramatizes the proceedings by setting the “pastoral moods” and “mild
character” of the flute against cruder, more aggressive actions by other instruments. It’s very
effective; Bezaly stays in character, but her energy and alertness make it clear that this
particular forest sprite is no pushover.
Also in the album: Cécile Chaminade’s lovely Concertino (1902). Trust me, if you’ve ever hung
around flutists, you’ve heard this one. It’s a student exam piece, commissioned by the Paris
Conservatoire’s great flute teacher Paul Taffanel. Chaminade, incidentally, was one of the few
women in her time fully respected as a composer.
My other favorite work here is the Poulenc Sonata. We can thank James Galway for the
orchestrated accompaniment: he asked composer Lennox Berkeley, who knew Poulenc well, to
try his hand at re-scoring the “entirely pianistic” original piano part. Berkeley’s restless
imagination led him to solutions that sound in no way keyboard-ish. Best of all, Poulenc’s wit
and melodic gifts survive, clothed now in gorgeous new colors:
Interested in the original? Get Champs Hill Records’ recent Francis Poulenc: Complete
Chamber Works, which includes an exquisite rendition of the Flute Sonata by Daniel
Pailthorpe, Co-Principal Flute of the BBC SO.
Ready to go further? I like Bezaly’s 2006 Bridge Across the Pyrenees (BIS-SACD-1559), with
music by Joaquín Rodrigo, Jacques Ibert, and François Borne, accompanied by conductor John
Neschling and the São Paulo SO. Further still? Try Nordic Spell (BIS-1499), concertos by three
Scandinavian composers, or Bezaly’s all-Mozart album (BIS-1539). It is entirely possible that
Mozart was not fond of the flute, but you wouldn’t know that from hearing what’s on this
album.
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Disney In Denver
By Duncan Taylor | Copper Issue 13
If you grew up in Florida as I did, you know all about Disney. Having lived there for 17 years, I
find I use “Disney” as a synonym for certain kinds of excellence. I’m not talking about the
cheesy princess stuff, or something about imagination. I’m talking about the Disney approach
to production: high dollar, high engineering and high levels of excellence.
It’s not really the same for Californians; California has a lot more going on than just
Disneyland. In Florida, you can consider the entire mid- section of the state to be Disney
“world,” as countless businesses and jobs revolve around the all-encompassing brand.
Denver is home to an 18-year-old band whose rotating members routinely qualify as the best in
the region, and whose overall approach smacks of Disney to me. The Motet is the hottest band
to be in, if you play guitar, keys, bass, drums or horns. As they’re a true funk band, having
funk-style on your resume helps— but being asked to play with The Motet is a commendation
on your ability, not funkiness. These are simply the best players in town.
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(As an aside, I don’t know if it’s specific to Colorado, or if funk is really making a comeback…
but I know of more good local funk bands than I have fingers to count.)
The Motet is Denver’s Disney band. The production level at every one of their shows is
staggering, and honestly, I don’t even know where to start in describing this outfit.
Fronted and created by renowned drummer Dave Watts, the band has toured constantly since
its inception, and has so far released seven albums. Two weeks ago, they headlined a show at
Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater that I will not soon forget. Medeski, Martin and Wood
opened for the funk band, and I had forgotten all about MMW by the middle of the first Motet
tune. They are that good.
So I was flabbergasted and honored when the band rang us up to record in my live studio,
never thinking the polished, highly produced troupe would try to run the gauntlet of live-track
recording, mixing down to a 2-track mix on the spot.
I’ve previously mentioned some difficulties in this recording technique, especially with big
bands with lots of inputs. Imagine my challenge with the best of the best showing up with
seven players and a host of engineers, roadies and friends of the band in tow.
With a big band and lots of sound energy in the mix, one of the hardest things to accomplish as
an engineer is “cleanliness” of sound — getting space around the instruments and allowing real
power to shine through.
As the band warmed up in sound check, I found myself reaching for every technique I could to
pare out the extraneous aspects of each sound. A classic engineering technique for band music
— rock, pop or whatever — is to take an EQ cut out of the bass and mid-bass regions of nonbass instruments. I like a good parallel equalizer for this, and my trusty digital mixer was up to
the task.
That part proved easy, as it always is for experienced players who have taken time to perfect
the sound of their rigs. Take the bass player, Garrett Sayers: many bass players had come
through my studio before Garrett, but the output from his rig just had this professional, dare I
say it – “Disney” level of tonal balance. I seem to find that the better a band is, and the more
money behind them, the more I experience this type of polish on the output of an amp or pedal
board.
I digress. The hardest thing I ran into when recording The Motet was management of the
monitor system, specifically to the singer. In some ways the recording experience was very
smooth, but in the end it proved to be one of the toughest and rockiest sessions we can
remember.
The problem had to do with the band’s caliber and reputation. With such a notable group
coming to record, several of my coworkers brought nicer microphones for me to use with the
recording. One of these was the Shure SM7 vocal mic, which is well-known and widely used in
26
many studios. It’s also reviled and hated by me and a large group of engineers, for both its
unnatural sound and the fact that it is one of the more power-hungry mics you’ll find.
This particular mic must have been well-used and not well-cared-for, because the tiny signal
coming from it was too small even with 40db of gain in their mic preamps. But because it’s a
well-known, oft-used microphone, the band and their sound engineer preferred that we use it.
I tried doubling up on mic preamps and got too much noise. Eventually, I routed the vocal
signal through a dynamic enhancer with gain, the dbx 118. It’s a vintage device that I love
dearly, and in this case I used it to keep the vocals nested on top of the soundscape.
With the dbx, I couldn’t use the normal routing for monitoring the vocals. I had to deliver a full
monitor mix to the singer, instead of a custom mix routed to the other players. His voice was
nested on top of the sound and I could clearly hear his vocals above the mix, but in the midst of
all of that sound energy, he must have still had trouble hearing himself.
After the session I was very happy with the resulting instrumental sound, but immediately
knew we’d have to clear the vocal tracks with the band. And I wasn’t feeling very lucky.
Dave Watts and the band were very gracious about it, and in general were fine with the
outcome. The singer, unfortunately, did request that we remove one of the videos from
YouTube. That just gives you a glimpse into the complexity of live-tracking a big, Disney-level
band like this.
Take a look below, crank it up and feel for the singer as I make him try to fit a square peg into
a round hole. Hats off to the group for bringing exactly the intensity I witnessed at Red Rocks
into our small newspaper’s random live video recording studio. Though I do think Walt’s
Imagineers could have done better. Ha!
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Stan White: An Overlooked Visionary/Part
2
By Bill Leebens | Copper Issue 13
A fundamental principle of scientific enquiry was stated most famously by Carl Sagan:
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” And no, he wasn’t talking about the O.J.
Simpson trial.
In writing pieces about dead folks, based largely upon material from third- and fourth-party
sources, I am constantly aware of the possibility of being horribly, horribly wrong. I liken it to
what is generally called “the fossil record”: as an aspiring paleontologist at age 6, I learned one
set of suppositions and conclusions about the prehistoric world, based upon what had been dug
up, up to that point in time. Half a century later, we’ve dug up creatures and evidence that
have caused most of our understanding of prehistory to be discarded, and then rebuilt…likely
to be discarded again.
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Oh, well—so it goes. No one ever said history was a business for cowards.
My point is that I want to get things right, and that’s particularly difficult when little
information is available. Which brings me back to my subject, Stan White. My interest was
piqued by tiny ads in Audio magazine for Stan’s “Shot Glass” speakers, 40 years ago. I
subsequently discovered that Stan had a long history in hi-fi, and as it turned out, he was active
in it for several decades after those ads ran.
Since last issue, I’ve learned a great deal more about Stan and his work. Part came from plain
old research, including bleary-eyed reading of Stan’s numerous patents; much more came from
Stan’s longtime friend and agent in Germany, Hermann Ruwwe (Vielen Dank, Hermann!).
Let’s backtrack a little, filled in with additional info:
Stanley Fay White was born in Minnesota, ca. 1920, grew up in St. Paul. After serving as a
meteorologist in the Air Force during World War II, he studied physics at Rensselaer
Polytechnic in New York state, with additional studies at the University of Chicago. After the
war he devoted himself to the design of electronics and speakers designed to faithfully
reproduce music.
Why?
In a 1975 interview with High Fidelity Trade News (and who knew that such a mag ever
existed?), White said that the invention and use of the atomic bomb greatly influenced his
worldview: “When I saw how the work of physicists was being harnessed by the military, I
decided to apply my mind to creating alternative and peaceful ways of getting energy from the
atom.”
The products that appeared beginning in the early ‘50’s, gave evidence of an active and wideranging intellect, unafraid to explore new ground …occasionally coupled with the over-the-top
exuberance (a far nicer word than hype)often seen in that era (think tailfins, push-up bras,
Technicolor, 3-D). There also seemed to be a bit of an obsession with celebrities, from music
and the movies.
White’s US patent # 2,866,513, filed November 24, 1952, simply headed “Apparatus for
Generating Sound”, details the design and construction of variable-flare horns for
loudspeakers, primarily back-loaded horns which could be curled within a cabinet behind a
driver. This was “the Miracle of Multi-Flare!”, as White’s gosh-wow ads of the period put it.
Even within the hoopla there was evidence of a real physical and philosophical basis. Under the
heading, “Breaking the audio sound barrier through the Miracle of Multi-Flare!”, the text
read: “A New Conception of High Fidelity…Sound is a three dimensional audio vibration
occurring along a time axis (a fourth dimension ). Through THE MIRACLE OF MULTI-FLARE
[he just couldn’t help himself] , you can hear…for the first time…sounds reproduced as they
originally occurred in their proper time sequence.”
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Keep in mind that this is 20 years before time-alignment of loudspeaker drivers and linear
phase response were thought to be important—much less, mentioned in a mainstream ad. Stan
White brand speakers so equipped were listed between $69.50-$1500—certainly not
inexpensive in the early to mid-‘50’s, and equivalent to $625-$13,500 today.
Years later, White was still proud of his accomplishments during this period, although there
were hints of both hyperbole and resignation in this email written to me in 2003: “I described
room capacitance as a factor in a patent filed in 1952 [mentioned above—Ed.]. This is why my
tiny Le Petite could generate 20 Hz in a corner of a reasonable sized room. Sound obeys its
own laws, not the laws some say it should have. Ignorance can be a terrible thing to deal with.
Creativity is not a blessing—it is a curse.”
Room-loading by loudspeakers is a topic generally thought of in conjunction with Paul Klipsch
or Roy Allison—but White was clearly aware of the phenomenon, and utilized it in his mono
loudspeaker designs.
The November, 1953 issue of Audio featured an article by White describing his Powrtron (sic)
amplifier. A vacuum tube amp (of course), Powrtron was notable in that it featured a version of
the Van Scoyoc phase inverter, was designed to have linear power response invariant of load,
and included a plug-in electronic crossover that could be used with two amp sections on the
same chassis. Again, this was forward-thinking stuff for the times: Marantz’s Model 3
electronic crossover didn’t appear until 1957.
The Powrtron was offered as a commercial product in 10- and 20-watt versions, without or with
the crossover, respectively. The Audio article can be read here:
http://www.audiofaidate.org/it/articoli/Powtron.pdf
White had two notable associations within the world of music-recording: with Duke Ellington,
and with Bill Putnam. Ellington requires no introduction, and owned electronics and speakers
from White. A 1954 ad shows Ellington and White at the Chicago Audio Fair under the heading,
“Why I bought a Stan White Speaker”. The hipsterish text reads, “Stan White Speakers are the
most! We use them exclusively in all our reproduction work.” Putnam opened Universal
Recording in Chicago after the war, and it was an early independent (non-label-affiliated)
recording studio, on the leading edge of technological advances: Putnam and Les Paul are
jointly credited with having invented multitrack recording. White amps in speakers were in use
at Universal when Ellington and his band recorded half of the Ellington ’55 album there.
(Putnam later moved to LA and founded United Recording, backed by Frank Sinatra and Bing
Crosby. He also founded the equipment brands Universal Audio and UREI).
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If you are a reader of fine print, you may have noticed “A Division of Eddie Bracken
Enterprises” at the bottom of the above ad. White’s interest in Hollywood was nearly his
undoing: introduced to Eddie Bracken (a vaudevillian turned comic film actor best known for
roles in several Preston Sturges films, Bracken went on to have a lengthy Broadway career— I
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even saw him in Hello, Dolly in 1978, while on my honeymoon), White found a hi-fi fan whom
he felt could both bankroll him and introduce him to Hollywood stars and give his business a
boost.
Stan ruefully recalled the association in a staccato 2003 email: “No one ever made money with
Bracken. He put $5000 in, and then shortly afterwards wrote a check for cash (the $5000), and
blew it at the track. He ‘loaned’ his daughter’s inlaws $100,000 and then went bankrupt for
$6,000,000, almost destroying the inlaws’ business…Over his career he conned over
$25,000,000 from friends and acquaintances. Had five kids. Wife lived like a church mouse
most of her life. Generosity was not a word in his vocabulary. Psychotic as hell.”
They always say that a bad business-partner is worse than a bad spouse, but the Bracken
association did at least result in a bizarre ad featuring Charlton Heston and his wife stiltedly
endorsing Stan White speakers. Whether that was a blessing or a curse, who knows?
The May, 1956 issue of Audio featured another article by White, describing “Beta-Tron”, a
system utilizing motional feedback from a second coil on the tweeter to the amp to reduce
distortion, again using the Powrtron amp with its electronic crossover. The system was offered
as a commercial system, but apparently didn’t achieve success. The next commercial system
I’m aware of that featured such a second coil/feedback set-up was the Infinity Servo-Statik of
1968, followed by more mainstream applications from Philips in the 1970’s. White’s system was
unusual in that it was utilized on the tweeter, where the others used it on the woofer, for lower
IM and Doppler distortion. Why White used it on the tweeter is a bit of a mystery (“that doesn’t
make any sense to me at all,” said Infinity founder and Servo-Statik designer Arnie Nudell,
when I described White’s servo-tweeter to him). The article can be read here (scroll down to
page 28).
During 1956-‘57, White received a pair of patents (#2,923,783, “Electro-Acoustical
Transducer”and #3,046,362, “Speaker”)pertaining to the construction and configuration of
speaker drivers. One describes layered cone-construction using multiple materials up to ½” in
thickness, the goal being the creation of a driver which would truly behave as a piston. The
other describes drivers driven by voice coils at their periphery—the goal of which was unclear.
White did build a speaker with a thick-coned 15” woofer with its voice coil at the outer edge,
but it’s unclear if it ever reached production. For that matter, exactly what “production” meant
for the Stan White brand is unclear.
All told, White received seven patents in the US and one in Germany, all pertaining to
loudspeaker design and/or construction, and they contain a number of unique ideas and
features. They also tended to break new ground; his patents are referenced in patents held by
AKG, B&W, Bose, Fostex, Goodmans, Harman, JBL, JL Audio, Paradigm, Pioneer, Polk, and
Sony. Pretty impressive for a little guy, working alone.
After the late ‘50’s, there a number of lost years in the life and career of Stan White—at least,
as far as me being able to detail his activities. White’s associate Hermann Ruwwe mentions
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simply, “Stan worked for Rectilinear, Avid, GE, and a number of other companies,” so
presumably there was consulting work or stints as an employee.
As mentioned ‘way back at our beginning, I first encountered Stan White by way of tiny
classified ads for his “Shot Glass” speakers in Audio magazine around 1975. It appears to have
been a period of renewed creativity, as two more patents were granted in 1976 (#3,961,378,
“Cone Construction for Loudspeaker”, and #3,997,023, “Loudspeaker with Improved
Surround”)which detailed the salient features of his “glasscone” drivers.
To clarify: the cones were not like Mom’s Pyrex baking dish; they were composed of plastics
reinforced by glass fibres or micro-spheres. The patents very precisely define the construction
and geometry of the ribbed, mostly-flat cone and the parabolic surround.
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34
White continued to refine the drivers and his “Shot Glass” systems for the rest of his life, as
well as developing some unique theories on the nature of matter, from the particle level to the
cosmic. In the US speakers and the occasional Powrtron-based amp were sold under the White
Sound brand; limited numbers of glasscone-based speakers are still made today in Germany by
Ruwwe Audio.
As in the ‘50’s, White’s product blurbs were a combination of the factual and the audacious. A
late-‘70’s brochure for the Shot Glass speakers says that “…our cone moves like a chunk,
rather than flapping like a bed sheet…” and that the center cap “ …like the keystone of an
arch cements the cone structure into a granitelike mass that is indestructible….”
Echoing his earlier statements about bass from small speakers, White wrote about his ‘70’s
experiences at Chicago CES: “Four of my Shot Glass speakers in a 20 ft. square alignment put
out 20 Hz. in McCormick Place. People thought I was Cerwin-Vega! [ the providers of speakers
for the Sensurround theater systems of the ‘70’s]”
In the 1975 High Fidelity Trade News article, White discussed theories about atomic structure
and a process by which synthetic diamonds could be made “big enough to make telescope
lenses”. Even in emails to me in the early 2000’s, Stan mentioned “his process”, never making
it clear if it had ever been put to practice. Regarding diamond circuit chips he wrote, “In my
process, diamond is laid down in layers with circuits on them. The wafer can be a half inch
square, vertically connected. The shortened distance increases speed.
“Silicon circuits are made by diffusion,” he wrote. “This means that if the chip gets hot, the
diffusion continues and the circuits short. My diamond units are deposited: no diffusion, life
very long. Diamond never melts—at 4000 degrees it turns to gas…a small unit will handle gobs
of power. I like them.”
The communications I received from the then-octogenarian Stan White were an often-puzzling
mix of insights and anxiety, riddled with sad tales of abuse and lost opportunities. As with “his
process” of diamond production, I couldn’t always tell what was theory, and what had actually
occurred. He produced a book on “new physics” which I found interesting but largely
incomprehensible; I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to judge the work. I’m still not. He was
clearly a very bright guy with some interesting ideas who had a number of accomplishments, as
well as a number of disappointments.
Hermann Ruwwe wrote to me, “Stan passed away Dec. 14, 2006, he died peacefully in his
sleep. He was one of a kind, old school, no gimmicks, an American hero in the audio field.”
I’m sorry Stan wasn’t better known in his homeland. A visionary and a dreamer, he clearly had
a lot to offer.
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Jerry Garcia
By WL Woodward | Copper Issue 13
If you were born on August 9, 1995, you’re turning 21 today. You have earned the right to go
out and get fractured with all the same friends you’ve been hammering with for years. But
tonight, dagnabit, you can puke anywhere and pull the birthday card.
If you died on August 9 1995, you might be Jerry Garcia.
When Jerry was 4 he was holding a piece of firewood for his older brother wielding an axe.
Older bro cut off little Jerry’s right hand middle finger. My favorite part of that story is the
brother later suggested Jerry play the banjo. I was an older brother, and did my best to torture
the minions below me. But that took a particularly weird absence of concern.
In 1972 I graduated high school purely by the grace of a hot young biology teacher, Ms. Sharis.
From her perspective I had skipped a large number of classes and avoided or worse ruined
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required lab sessions. From my perspective I had friends in that class who needed help rolling
joints. Public service. The problem was I had already been accepted to a state college based on
some haphazard criteria like ACT’s SAT’s, and a few good years in school. But I had to
graduate high school. Colleges are really sticky about that.
The last day of school and I know my one problem was talking this young woman, who had
been completely clear all semester she knew my name and didn’t like it, into at least giving me
a passing grade. And of course she knew exactly why I was standing in her classroom that June
afternoon.
Ms. Sharis had a distracting clothing style, with tight sweaters and pumps with black hose. It
was like taking biology from Katherine Ross. You’d think I’d have spent more time going to that
class, but I had that whole public service thing going on. Now my immediate future required an
ability to convince this woman I was worthy of grace or at least pity without staring at her
chest.
I have no idea how I got out of that one. I really don’t. I could make something up but honestly
it’s a blank. Anyway that fall I was a freshman at UConn, living in a dorm with a hundred other
idiots who were pledged to destroy the world, starting with their roommate. On my floor was a
guy who also needed help rolling joints, and had an amazing record collection. His
predominant passion was the Grateful Dead.
There is a wonderful state that happens when you discover something after it has been around
for a while. Like Catholicism. Wait, that’s not right. Like hearing a recording of Benny
Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert as a teen in 1968, or finding an author like a Bradbury
or a Vonnegut after they’ve written most of their stories. That 1956 Ford Victoria at the church
car show.
In 1972 Jerry and the Grateful Dead had already released some of their best work. Live Dead,
Aoxomoxoa, Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty. I ran down that rabbit hole and had a ball.
And I couldn’t keep up. A live album Europe’ 72 with the cream of their live performances in
that era was followed the next year with Wake of the Flood. That album was so highly
anticipated by DeadHeaddom I bought it instead of hot dogs on a whim. I brought it home and
left on some errand, probably to shoplift hot dogs. Album still in the wrapper. When I got back
my roommate and his girlfriend were bustin it out in his bed with Wake playing on the
turntable. With some embarrassment my roommate shouts out “Dude, sorry to break that out,
but this album is amazing! It’s our second time through!” His girlfriend made no move to put
her clothes on. Those were the days.
Jerry was more than the Dead. He did learn to play banjo, and I wish there were videos of him
playing because he was a beautiful player of three fingered banjo without a middle finger. He
took up pedal steel and started New Riders of the Purple Sage with John ‘Marmaduke’ Dawson
and David Nelson, dragging along Dead guys Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart. That band broke into
a genre of country/folk/rock that blew up with the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jimmy
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Buffet, Jackson Browne, Commander Cody, Little Feat. In that same period Jerry hooked up
with David Grisman, mandolinist extraordinaire, and formed Old and In the Way, a straight
ahead bluegrass band with guys like Vassar Clements on fiddle (John Hartford filled in during
rehearsals) and Peter Rowan on guitar. At press their debut album in 1975 is still the top
selling bluegrass album.
So one minute you’re listening to the psychedelic weirdness of Aoxomoxoa, then Casey Jones,
and little surprises like Garcia playing pedal steel on Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s Teach Your
Children. That’s right. Put that piece of shit song in your head (sorry, it’ll be over in a minute)
and dig on that pedal solo. Yep, Jerry. Then he’s got a hit bluegrass album. All of that while he’s
doing all those great Dead albums of the 70’s and early 80’s. The guy never stopped. That was
the key to Jerry Garcia. He was ambitious in only one way, and that was to be better every day
at whatever music he was working on.
Of course, our respect and love for Garcia certainly had a generational thing going on, where
we overlooked and forgave his substance habits. It was the 60’s, then the 70’s, 80’s. We
thirsted for his freedom and drank from his talent. Many believed drugs could be how to follow.
As the decades ticked our generation realized the folly of THAT shit. Damn. Can’t hold a job
down and we ain’t all Jerry Garcia. By the 80’s everyone had moved on. But we still listened
and never forgot his beauty that had nothing to do with his personal bullshit.
Eventually Jerry’s musical powers became indirectly proportional to his happy intake. Way too
early. Certainly an object lesson. But like all people larger than their skin there are many
layers to those lessons. Like the wife who asks her husband if the dress makes her butt look
big, you choose your take-away. Mine is the joy I’ve gotten with his songs, his solos, and his
incredible crinkling smile you could almost hear.
So thank you Ms. Sharis. Thank you for sending me forward.
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Points Of Pickup
By Haden Boardman | Copper Issue 13
The point of contact between the cartridge’s generator system and the actual moving vinyl
record is of course the stylus, mounted on to the cantilever. The stylus has to cope with the
enormous forces thrust upon it, and stay tracking the groove. Just like every other part of a
record playing system, it will impart its own mechanical vibrations and resonances upon the
sound vibrations passing through it. Keeping the stylus mass small helps reduce record wear
and increase fidelity.
It is not just the size, but the shape and the finish which matter. All styli are amazing works of
art; the skill in making and mounting the most basic shapes is immense, and some of the more
complex profiles are mind boggling.
A simple ‘spherical’ tip is somewhat frowned upon in High End circles, but if small enough and
well polished, they are perfectly valid stylus types. The natural progression from a ‘spherical’
tip, is to carefully polish two sides, and make it more elliptical; usually to a ratio of 1:1.5. Lower
priced ‘ellipses’ may well have a lower ratio; more expensive, a higher ratio. Even more
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expensive and more difficult to manufacture are the ‘line contact’; the diamond is now
machined to form very sharp edges, much finer than either the spherical or elliptical types.
Different manufacturers give all these quite fancy names, but the premise remains the same, a
very small contact area with the vinyl record. The most famous development of this type is
worth mentioning, this was by a chap called ‘Shibata’ in Japan, it was developed to extend
playback bandwidth enough resolve the 45 KHz signal required on Quadraphonic CD 4 four
channel discrete records. This wide bandwidth cannot harm stereophonic replay, either.
The last type of stylus profile was developed by the famous Dutch firm of Van den Hul: Under
analysis, they concluded the best stylus profile to replay records with was one very similar to
the record cutter itself, with refinements so it didn’t damage your precious records on play
back. There are of course variants, and competitors such as Fritz Gyger, Paratrace, MicroLine,
etc.
A ‘spherical’ stylus type has minimum contact with the groove. The more you progress through
elliptical and fine line through to Shibata, the stylus sits very snug in the records groove, with
the whole edge of the stylus in contact with the record groove wall.
As mentioned earlier, the stylus is mounted on to the cantilever, which transmits all of the
vibrations/musical information in to the main body of the cartridge. The cantilever needs to be
ultra rigid, and ultra light, most commonly it is a thin-wall metal tube, but sapphire, carbon,
and other exotic materials have been used. Mounting the stylus tip is no easy thing. More
budget designs simply ‘glue’ the tip in place, whereas more expensive types use ‘clasps’ not
dissimilar to those used on a diamond wedding ring. Somewhere in between, the end of the
cantilever tube is formed in to a ‘flat’ and the stylus tip pierced through. It is obvious alignment
is critical – and with all these microscopic procedures you can begin to appreciate why some
styli and cartridges cost as much as they do!
Cartridge generators, the parts that turn the mechanical energy in to an electrical signal, are
no less complicated and varied. The four main types of generator system are crystal (which are
not really hifi – I am wasting no time on these) moving magnet, moving coil, and moving iron.
Moving magnet, or MM, is possibly the most common type. At one end of the cantilever is the
stylus, at the other a tiny tiny magnet(s). The vibrations wiggle the magnet in front of (usually)
four small coils. These four coils can be a ‘reasonable’ size and are reasonably sensitive,
producing a fairly healthy output in millivolts (usually quoted between 3 and 7 mv). The coils
are wired in a ‘sum and difference’ arrangement, which translate the up and down and side to
side movements in to distinct left and right audio channels. For more information, check out
Alan Blumlein’s classic 1930s patent and text on stereophonic sound. MM cartridges tend to be
quite light and compact, and are what is classed as high compliant cartridges. They suit lower
to medium mass arms.
Moving coil ( MC) switch this around: the magnet is fixed, and the coil is attached to the end of
the cantilever. The coils need to be microscopically tiny; to remain low mass enough to track a
record correctly, may be only 25 turns of wire used per winding. Different armature designs
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vary from a cross shaped device (like an ‘X’), to winding directly in the cantilever. In most MC
cartridges a fairly substantial (heavy!) magnet is fitted. This gives the advantage over a MM
cartridge of saturating the coils with magnetic flux, which makes for a very linear response.
MC of course have their problems. Those coils need connecting to the back of the cartridge
pins with micro fine wire (usually a continuation of the coil itself) and those tiny tiny coils are
only capable of generating very very tiny outputs in micro volts, some as low as 100 uV. This
places demands on the amplifier chain, and requires nothing but the finest arm cables to
connect it. Moving coils weight quite a bit too. The heavier the magnet, the more linear the
performance – but the higher the mass. The smaller the coil, the more linear the performance,
but the lower the output. High output moving coils exist: they literally have much larger coils,
compromise exists here.
Easier for the electronics to be more linear, but a slightly less linear cartridge. Ortofon
patented the stereo moving coil cartridge back in 1961. It, again, was pretty much identical to
Blumlein! But through the 1960s and 1970s, you either paid Ortofon to use their patent, didn’t
bother, or came up with something else. Audio Technica came up with something else: their
cartridges are based on a record cutter in reverse. With just two coils ‘on top’ of the cantilever.
The current en vogue Neumann DST uses a similar system too, but with the coils virtually ‘sat
on top’ of the stylus- certainly gets around some cantilever problems! But post-1983, when
Ortofon’s patent run out, it was a free for all. And most manufacturers use a generator system
pretty similar to this classic design.
London DECCA produced the most successful moving iron pick-ups. Again, there isn’t much of
a cantilever, in fact there isn’t one! A ‘T’ shaped armature has the stylus at its base, and the
iron inductors are placed within a set of coils above and below the iron inductor (a magnet sits
on top of the entire structure). In a conventional stylus a cantilever has a critical ‘pivot point’
between the stylus and the generating system – some manufactures go for a very short
cantilever, others a long one. The DECCA has none. There can be no doubt the powerful sound
this gives. But it is very unkind to record, and record wear is somewhat enhanced compared to
more standard methods.
There are of course variants on these themes. B&O moving micro cross (in recent years revived
by Soundsmith), Technics HPC, Grado, plus some outright oddities: STAX electrostatic (more
electrets!) ribbon, strain-gauge, optical….
As you can see, there are very many variables in cartridge design. Is a MM cart with a line
contact stylus better than a moving coil with a spherical tip? Answers on a post card, although
yours truly has always been more of a ‘coil fan! It must also be remember the smaller the stylus
tip, the smaller it moves in the groove, and the smaller its output. The lower the output, the
better your electronics better be!
The most important thing to consider is arm compatibility. A high mass cartridge (low
compliance) needs a high mass arm; otherwise it will distort and mistrack. A low mass, high
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compliance cartridge will likely be ‘bottomed out’ by an arm too high mass. Sadly even
manufacturers get this wrong. And with all these variables, you can see why! Once you have
the right arm, its vital to align it with the record groove correctly. Not just the tracking error,
but also the vertical tracking angle, or VTA. A spherical stylus is quite unfussy about this in
comparison to a Shibata, which is critical. Failure to set this right will mean a very expensive
Shibata will mistrack, and sound much worse than styli a quarter of its price.
Whoever said record players are easy?
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How I Spent My Summer Vacation
By Bill Leebens | Copper Issue 13
I freely admit that I am a nerd. Aside from music and audio, I omnivorously absorb
architecture, antiquarian books, cars, and all manner of mechanical devices. When traveling
alone, I have no problem indulging and pursuing those interests. Traveling to San Francisco
recently with my long-suffering Significant Other on an allegedly romantic vacation, I was still
able to carve out a fair amount of time to indulge my interests, and yet managed to keep her
happy. Mostly.
I think.
South of the city, we visited the Burwells, father and son. They build retro-nuevo speakers with
amazing cabinetry, solid wood horns and vintage Altec and JBL drivers. Not your standard
audiophile fare, but a type of speaker I came to appreciate at old recording studios in
Memphis, where Altec monitors were generally paired with McIntosh tube amps.The Burwell’s
speakers were very nice indeed— lively, dynamic, and surprisingly unobtrusive.
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One of the Burwell speakers, in all its woody glory.
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A bunch of old Altec horns and brand new solid wood ones.
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Vintage JBL and Altec drivers.
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A pair of very early Altec-Lansing 515 woofers.
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Overhead view of the Burwells’ beautiful solid wood midrange horn.
http://www.burwellspeakers.com/
Heading closer to the city, we visited my old friend Cookie Marenco at OTR Studios, the base of
operations for Blue Coast Records and her download empire. Given Cookie’s earthy persona,
her studio’s homey vibe comes as no surprise. I’ve been to a lot of studios, and OTR is of the
make-the-musicians-comfortable variety, rather than the space shuttle/clean-room/ isolation
booth feel of some studios.
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Cookie’s mixing console at Blue Coast
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Buddha, Lava Lamp, and a gold record–the perfect studio feng shui!
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Cookie Marenco
On a side-trip for breakfast, Cookie pointed out the road that (eventually) leads to Neil Young’s
ranch. “But he’s not there anymore,” said Cookie. “He lost it in the divorce.”
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Neil Young’s old ranch is waaaaay down that road.
That’ll teach you to fool around with actresses, Neil.
Sunday in the city, meandering down Van Ness, I spied a group of incredible vintage cars in a
showroom. Long-suffering SO indulgently circled the block—not easy in that part of SF—and
we parked to take a look. The showroom carried no signage, and I still have no idea what the
company is. Through the showroom windows we saw a treasure-trove of great old cars:
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Type 57 Bugatti. We’re not worthy.
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Grosser Mercedes, like Der Fuehrer used to love.
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A swoopy, Pebble Beach-winning 1938 Talbot-Lago T150-C.
I’m sure that the value of all the cars combined was well into eight figures. Sheesh.
SO suggested a visit to the Cable Car Museum, which not only has an interesting variety of
historical displays, but acts as the hub for the cable system. The cable car system was devised,
not surprisingly, by a maker of wire ropes and cables. It is ingenious, if Rube Goldberg-esque
in its complexity.
I once confused cable cars with trolleys, but they’re not the same at all. Trolley Cars generally
have an overhead electric line which connects to the car by way of an antennae-like feeder arm
which conveys the juice to electric driving motors. Cable cars have a remote power plant with
engines or motors (in SF, originally steam engines–now each line has a 500 HP GE electric
motor) which drive giant pulleys called sheaves. The sheaves transmit force to a cable 1 ¼” in
diameter which runs underground, routed by a series of pulleys, guides, and idlers. The cars
are propelled by a plier-like “grip”, operated by the motorman, which actually increases or
lessens the grip on the driven cable, which pulls the cable car along.
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There are four separate lines in the SF cable system; all four are driven from the powerhouse
at the Cable Car Museum. The longest line is nearly four miles long; the shortest, just under
two miles. Think about the network of pulleys, guides and idlers required to route and change
direction of a moving cable under the city streets—it’s amazing. The technology may seem
somewhat antiquated—and it is—but it works. The cable is lubricated with pine tar, which you
can smell while riding the cable cars. What do they use for brakes, going down those steep
hills? Blocks of pine, pressed against the wheels. You can smell them burning when the going
is tough.
Two of the four cable lines, with their 500 HP motors driving 8 1/2′ sheaves.
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I wasted a lot of hours on one of these, back in high school….
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Amazing stuff.
http://www.cablecarmuseum.org/
Finally, down at Fisherman’s Wharf there is an arcade rather grandly entitled Musee
Mecanique, which features mechanical games and devices from the penny arcade eras. Much
of it was familiar stuff for me; one piece which was very familiar indeed was an old Gottlieb
Sing Along, a pinball machine I spent many hours mastering during my high school years. Even
mechanical devices can generate emotional attachments!
http://museemecaniquesf.com/
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Over the top!
By Mike Calloway | Copper Issue 13
The system is in my great Room which has sloped ceiling from 8 to 23 ft. and is 18×25 ft. with
an open floor plan to the entry and dining room. In effect, the listening area is 18′ wide x 32′
long and 43′ long.
I have 2 dedicated 15 amp power lines for the AV system.
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Main speakers: Magnaplanar MG 20.1 with upgraded internal crossover Caps (Jantzen Silver
& Duelund Caps) and biamped with 2 Bryston 10B Xovers.
Crossover setup: 1 Bryston 10B Sub and 1 Bryston 10B. Plus My passive hi-pass crossover
before the high frequency amp. The input is wired in parallel to the crossovers, so the MG20’s
run full range in the bass, while the high frequencies are sent through my passive Xover. I
don’t use the HF out on the Bryston 10B because it doesn’t sound as good as the passive Xover.
Subwoofers: Set up as a stereo pair in the corners. Custom built and designed by Advanced
sound in Knoxville, TN. They have 4 ported 10 inch sub speakers per channel in each
enclosure. They weigh about 400 pounds each!
Amplifiers: MG20 Hi freq Amp = Upgraded Sonic Frontiers Power 2 tube amp using KT 120
power tubes. (approx 160 watts/ch)
MG20 bass panels Amp = Alta Vista Audio / Counterpoint SA20 completely rebuilt with
Transistor output.
Subwoofers Amp= McCormack Audio DNA225
Preamp: Sonic Frontiers SFL-2 with upgraded Caps, resistors, tubes and tube sockets.
LP System: VPI Classic Signature turntable, 3D arm, and the VPI Synchronous Drive unit.
Video: Panasonic TV, Magnaplanar MG3’s on the rear channels, and Magnaplanar MG12’s
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connected in mono for movies for the center channel.
Cables: Straight Wire Virtuoso on the HF amp and Kimber Kable 12 CT on the bass panel amp.
The RCA cables are made by me and use 99.99 % silver wire braided similar to Kimber Kable
wire.
Directstream DAC, PW CD transport, 5 power bases, 2 P-10 Power Plants, and the Nuwave
Phono Converter. I use AC5 power cables on the tube amp and the preamp, with an AC12 into
the PP10 used for the front amps.
It is a bit over the top!
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Vine and Window
By Paul McGowan | Copper Issue 13
Terri and I were vacationing in France a few years ago and had stopped at a roadside vineyard
for lunch. I spied this great art of old vines creeping up the side of the building, offset by the
window.
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