Farewell John Tavener

More well known to audiophiles on his Technics adverts than his contemporary Classical compositions that barely goes louder than 60 decibels, sometimes I wonder if the music industry had done enough to made John Tavener more well known to the music buying public? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Unless if you are praised / commended during your stint in a military / defense outfit modeled after the United States Marine Corp’s Force Recon by your ability to hear a sleeping person snoring softly 100 feet away from you in a non-electrifired village somewhere in the poor parts of the globe whose average ambient noise at night barely rises above 30 decibels sound pressure level – chances are, you may criticize most of contemporary British Classical music composer John Tavener’s Eastern Christian Orthodox themed liturgical works as “too quiet” . I mean as an audiophile, I find some of his 1990s era recordings released on CD easily swamped by the ambient noise of your home audio system with a signal-to-noise ratio rated at around 90 decibels. Thus his now (in) famous to the audiophile world the Technics SU-A107 Integrated Amplifier advert from around 1999 – as in the advert for Technics’ SU range of Variable Gain Control Amplifier slated to be quiet enough for the 144 dB signal-to-noise ratio capable next generation of ultra-high resolution 24-Bit 192-KHz sampling rate digital recordings.  

Even though John Tavener played his Songs of Angels during the funeral of the late Princess Diana back in 1997, it was that “notorious” reworked Candle in the Wind by Elton John that would forever be remembered of the much beloved Princess Diana’s passing. Born in January 28, 1944, he wasn’t like one of those Vienese wünderkinders who’s Classical music composition prowess made them popular at a relatively young age. Even though only a few remembered this little factoid, it was The Beatles who thrusted Tavener into wider popularity back in 1968 after the Fab Four confessed their admiration of the contemporary British Classical Music composer during an interview back then. And by the way, John Tavener also won a Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. Sadly, he passed away back in November 12, 2013 aged 69. Even if I’ve only discovered John Tavener’s music during the middle of the 1990s when I got seriously into high fidelity audio, his loss would surely be missed by both the recently curious and long-time hardcore fans alike.  

Natural Materials: Better Sound Quality For Hi-Fi Interconnects And Speaker Cables?

Despite the wide availability and low cost of petroleum sourced synthetic materials, are natural materials provides better sound quality when used in speaker cables and interconnects?

By: Ringo Bones 

Maybe there’s something to this using natural materials in hi-fi speaker cables and interconnects that could result in sound quality despite the alleged hype surrounding the practice. Believe it or not, around the middle of the 1920s when the first commercially produced electrical music recordings became widely available, audio power amplifiers that use the PX-25 vacuum tube has wiring that’s more likely than not insulated using cloth or gutta-percha – as in a tough plastic substance from the latex of several Malaysian trees of the sapodilla family resembling rubber but containing more resin and used during the early days of electrification as a electrical wiring insulation in household electrical wiring and in dentistry. But does using natural materials often sourced from plants instead of crude oil / petroleum – truly result in better sound quality in audiophile applications? Or is it just a marketing ploy for a period-correct zero feedback single-ended triode vacuum tube hi-fi audio amplifiers that were originally designed around the middle of the 1920s? 

Millennium cables and accessories and the Yamamura / Churchill hi-fi products, designed by Be Yamamura in Italy and manufactured in Japan has been admired for their exceptional sound quality in comparison to comparable mainstream hi-fi products that use crude oil / petroleum sourced synthetics in their insulation. The Millennium line is distinguished by its use – when possible – of such natural materials as lacquer, linen, paper, silk and cloth for insulation and shielding instead of the more commonly used petroleum / crude oil sourced synthetic materials. 

One of Mr. Yamamura’s design goals is to eliminate the effects of stray capacitance from his cables. For that he uses a proprietary material called Trigard – a paper impregnated with the purest form of carbon Yamamura could find, which turned out to be charcoal manufactured from coconut shells. The wire itself is made of ultrapure copper. During the second half of the 19^th Century, coconut shell charcoal produced in the Philippines was admired by artisans in the region as a matt-black pigment used in paining. Even Dr. Jose Rizal at the time was searching for other more useful applications of coconut shell sourced charcoal.

Yamamura’s Millennium line also includes Ciabatta (which means “slipper” in Italian) mains boxes; passive line conditioners that make extensive use of Trigard to shield the plug / jack interface from RFI (radio frequency interference) and to absorb stray capacitance. Each Ciabatta mains box contains four AC jacks which can be configured for analog or digital sources. Does it also come with gutta-percha insulated audiophile AC chords that block mains-born RFI? 

Do All Digital Interconnect Cables Sound The Same?

Despite the axiom of “bits is bits”, does various brands and makes of digital interconnect cables have their own “distinctive” sound when subjected to empirical listening tests?

By: Ringo Bones 

Even though “civilians” might balk at us audiophiles for what we have known first hand since being fortunate enough to afford our very own two-box CD player / DAC combo that we can toy around with various makes and models of digital interconnect cables, each of our very own empirical testing experiences had revealed that digital interconnect cables don’t sound the same – at least to most of us hardened audiophiles. Compared to vinyl LP playback cartridges of old, the differences between various make s and models – and especially price ranges – of various digital interconnect cables may be subtle, but nonetheless, a difference between them do exist. But why is it so, after all, digital ones and zeroes as in bits is bits, right? 

If only digital telecommunications engineering were as simple as bits is bits in actual practice, but its not. Let’s start at the digital data read optic assembly of a typical CD / DVD or universal digital disc player when it reads a typical CD or other digital audio playback disc, in truth the optical assembly doesn’t output a digital data signal that can readily be deciphered by the player’s digital to analog converter – or the outboard DAC – as streams of ones and zeroes. In reality, it is composed of a rather roughly square wave shaped but actually complex radio-frequency analog waveform that had to be deciphered into digital code that would later be converted into an analog music signal. The fidelity of this RF signal is very dependent not just on the transport and its support, but also – in the case of two box player/outboard DAC systems – the shielding and electrical characteristics of the digital interconnect cable in use. 

During the 1990s, I was fortunate enough to buy second hand bargain samples of Kimber’s Illuminati D-30 digital interconnect cable which I readily compared head-to-head with the cable, I was using on my system back then (even now!) the Monster Cable Interlink Datalink 100. In short, the sound of the two is quite different from each other – the Illuminati DV-30 is rhythmically fast yet tonally threadbare when auditioned in my Audio Alchemy based two box CD rig. While the Monster Cable is tonally full yet somewhat plodding in the rhythm and pace department compared to the Illuminati at almost twice the price. 

Sadly, the only digital interconnect cable that allows me to have my cake and eat it two as a perfect blend of both Kimber Illuminati DV-30 and the Monster Cable Interlink Datalink 100’s strengths was the XLO Limited Edition The Digital Interconnect which I managed to borrow from a well-off fellow audiophile. But with the 0.5 meter RCA terminated set at 750 US dollars when new, it was too rich for my blood. Fortunately a few days ago, my audio-buddy lent it to me in a more or less permanent basis cause he was “too busy” to listen to his hi-fi rig for more than three weekends a month. 

Though Stereophile magazine reviewer Jonathan Scull was spot on – journalism wise – in praising it when he reviewed the XLO Limited Edition The Digital Interconnect back in the August 1998 issue of Stereophile magazine. Cable guru Roger Skoff’s iconic late 1990s creation just can’t be beat that uses proprietary Teflon AF insulation – a licensed product for special military and aerospace applications that sells for more than 7,000 US dollars per kilogram – virtually as expensive as pure gold. 

In real world telecommunications engineering terms, the impact of different cables on the transmission of digital data might seem minimal in practice but they can be quite audible. The digital data representing the music signal need not be directly corrupted in a manner that would have a typical personal computer program to crash, for example, because the analogy between personal computer operating system data integrity and transmission rates only holds so far for digital audio. 

For example, differences in the construction of a digital audio cable will affect both screening and characteristic impedance which, in turn, influence both the interference and the “shape” of the recovered data waveform, respectively. In all this respects, it is important to appreciate that digital data will eventually be converted into analog signals and that any modification – in the form of jitter – or RF noise interference will have an impact on the player’s analog circuitry and the music that flows. Remember, data integrity of the operating system’s ones and zeros may be everything to a typical personal computer, but in digital audio – especially the jitter infested Redbook spec 16-Bit 44.1-KHz sampled digital audio – data integrity of the bitstream is just the beginning. 

Audiophilia Geographica And The British Sound

Even though hi-fi is a rather global phenomena do folks around the world set-up their hi-fi rigs for best sound quality quite distinctively different from one another? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Speak of hi-fi enthusiasts as a global community and the term British Sound seems to loom large, but what is it? Does it have something to do with hi-fi guru Malcolm Steward and is obsession with the synergistic relationship between Linn and Naim hi-fi gear back in the 1980s with Thomas Dolby’s Flat Earth philosophy? Even though other nationalities do tend to optimize the sound quality of their hi-fi rigs endemic to their various regions and nation-states and yet all of this seems to revolve around the term “British Sound” – is this just mere “media hype” cobbled up by Madison Avenue ad men? 

Peculiar as it may seem to the uninitiated, there does appear to be a “British Sound”. The term might have come about because the British had been making hi-fi kit for longer and in greater variety than other “competing” nations. And musical imports – in the form of musicians – also play a part on the evolution of what is now known as the British Sound. Or a more likely reason is that the British have a certain size and construction of what constitutes as the average listening room – medium sized in world terms, wooden floored with plaster on brick wall construction. Either way, British hi-fi enthusiasts seems to prefer a more upbeat sound – i.e. pace, rhythm and timing - to nations outside of Europe.

Basing on my fortunate experience visiting various hi-fi shows all over the world, American hi-fi enthusiasts seem to go for firepower above all thus explaining their love of muscle amps with telephone number price tags. While the Japanese prefer a silky relaxed balanced – just like the sound of entry level Audio Note kit. The French prefer a bright, detailed sound that can be quite captivating to first-time prospective audiophiles while Germans prefer a relatively mid-forward sound that could sound very realistic when playing a recording of a horn ensemble. 

Remembering Ray Dolby – Father of Tape Noise Reduction

Though his iconic invention made him a very wealthy man, could the world of hi-fi and music be very different today if Ray Dolby hasn’t bequeathed his invention to the public for almost nothing? 

By: Ringo Bones   

Sadly, Ray Dolby passed away Friday, September 13, 2013 aged 80. Forever remembered after the iconic noise reduction system that bears his name, the music and hi-fi world would probably not exist as we know it today without his inventive solution in tackling the perennial problem of magnetic recording tape hiss.

Ever since the US Armed Forces introduced working samples of World War II era German analog open-reel tape recordings and their associated tape recording and playback equipment near the end of the 1940s in various trade expos, many American audio engineers suddenly got an epiphany that tape hiss or noise is not going to be an easy problem to solve. This is so because tape noise results mainly from the lack of homogeneity of the magnetic coating. Even with existing technology – then and now – the ferrous particles can never be distributed absolutely uniformly throughout the coating and the resulting aggregations of these particles create discrete magnetic fields which – during replay – manifests itself as noise e.m.f. or tape hiss at the playback head and thus amplified along with the desired audio signal. 

Luckily, a then young electronics engineer named Ray Dolby managed to formulate – i.e. engineered - a very cost effective solution that became a noise reduction system that is named after him. Thanks to Ray Dolby, the lowly cassette tape that was primarily created by Philips as an office dictation medium was raised to high fidelity status and became a very cost effective analog tape based music recording medium since the latter half of the 1970s and even displacing vinyl LP in popularity as a domestic hi-fi playback medium during the 1980s. 

In 1967, Henry Kloss heard about Ray Dolby’s noise reduction system – i.e. the Dolby A which was intended for professional studio recording noise reduction applications during the Rock N’ Roll era. It was Kloss who pushed for a consumer version of the Dolby A noise reduction system which is now known as the Dolby B, which Kloss originally saw as a boon to home/domestic open-reel tape users. Somewhat later, Kloss linked the Dolby B noise reduction system with a previously unsuccessful Du Pont product – the chromium dioxide tape. And thanks to the magical midwifery at which Henry Kloss excels, made the Philips cassette tape a runaway commercial success and Ray Dolby a very wealthy man, though Ray Dolby’s almost philanthropic like gesture of never asking for much for the royalties of his iconic noise reduction had only served to popularize his noise reduction system to the masses. 

Thanks to his financial success, Ray Dolby also paved the way for various inventions and inventors to make domestic high fidelity a much more affordable hobby. Using the same Peter Scheiber patents of the old quadraphonic sound systems that expired with barely a whimper back in 1975, Dolby Laboratories managed to create Dolby Pro Logic – a surround sound system that made possible those relatively affordable surround sound capable home cinemas during the early 1980s that also made low-cost mediums like the VHS or Betamax video cassette tapes – and even cassette tapes – capable of life-like surround sound reproduction when used with a designated Dolby Pro Logic decoding box. 

Unbeknown to most of us, Ray Dolby first cut his teeth in the field of radio astronomy. In fact, his Dolby Noise Reduction System came from his earlier work in trying to extract very weak cosmic radio signals from background radiation noise mainly caused by our very own radio telecommunications traffic.