TBR: You recently posted a story where you described tweaking your system in a way that made it more transparent, only to realize the next day that you’d sacrificed something else that was more important than the transparency and changed your system back to the way it was before.
I’ve had some similar experiences myself with records, where I got enamored with how transparent the record was, only to realize later that I’d been overlooking some important flaws.
Can you talk more about this?
TP: Transparency is an important aspect to sound, and is similar in many ways to detail in a recording. The more transparent, the more detailed, although they are obviously related but not the same thing. I discussed the problem of listening for details and transparency when I compared the Classic Records reissue of The Who by Numbers with a good early import pressing.
“With Doug Sax mastering from the real tape, you get a Rock Solid Bottom End like you will not believe. Talk about punchy, well-defined and deep, man, this record has BASS that you sure don’t hear too often on rock records.
And it’s not just bass that separates the Men from the Boys, or the Real Thing from the Classic Reissue for that matter. It’s WEIGHT, fullness, the part of the frequency range from the lower midrange to the upper bass, that area that spans roughly 150 to 600 cycles. It’s what makes Daltry’s voice sound full and rich, not thin and modern. It’s what makes the drums solid and fat the way Glyn Johns intended. The good copies of Who’s Next and Quadrophenia have plenty of muscle in this area, and so do the imports we played.
But not the Classic. Oh no, so much of what gives Who By Numbers its Classic Rock sound has been equalized right out of the Heavy Vinyl reissue by Chris Bellman at BG’s mastering house. Some have said the originals are warmer but not as detailed. I would have to agree, but that misses the point entirely: take out the warmth — the fullness that makes the original pressings sound so right — and you of course hear more detail, as the detail region is no longer masked by all the stuff going on below it. Want to hear detail? Disconnect your woofers — you’ll hear plenty of detail all right!
Keep that in mind when they tell you at the store that the record you brought in is at fault, not their expensive and therefore “correct” equipment. I’ve been in enough of these places to know better. To mangle another old saying, if you know your records, their excuses should fall on deaf ears.”
TP: This last paragraph is a swipe at audio salons, the kind that rarely have systems with much bass, or good bass, and are always making excuses for that fact. Bass is very hard to get right, maybe the hardest, since so much of it has to do with the room dimensions, something that most audiophiles cannot do much about. I definitely spent more time with room treatments trying to fix the bass than I did trying to fix other aspects of the sound.
I’ve been meaning to write about my favorite Test Records for years now. There has been only one we relied on for many years, Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular, and we only used one song from it, The Song of the Volga Boatmen. Allow me to quote myself at length:
“It’s by far the most difficult track we know of to get to sound right.
There are about twenty places in the music that we use as tests, and the right setting is the one that gets the most of them to sound their best. With every change some of the twenty will sound better and some will sound worse. Recognizing when the sound is the biggest, clearest, and most balanced from top to bottom is a skill that has taken me twenty years to acquire.
It’s a lot harder than it looks. The longer you have been in audio the more complicated it seems, which may be counterintuitive but comports well with our day-to-day experience very well.
All our room treatments and tweaks must pass The Bob and Ray Test as well. It’s the one record we have relied on more than any other over the course of the last year or two.
Presenting as it does a huge studio full of brass players, no record we know of is more dynamic or more natural sounding — when the system is working right. When it’s not working right the first thirty seconds is all it takes to show you the trouble you are in.
If you don’t have a record like that in your collection, you need to find one. It will be invaluable in the long run.
One of the key tests on Bob and Ray that keeps us on the straight and narrow is the duet between the trombone and the trumpet about half way through The Song of the Volga Boatman. I have never heard a small speaker reproduce a trombone properly, and when tweaking the system, when the trombone has more of the heft and solidity of the real instrument, that is a tweak we want to pursue. The trumpet interweaving with it in the right rear corner of the studio tests the transients and high frequency harmonics in the same section. With any change to the stereo, both of those instruments are going to sound different. For a change to be positive they must both sound better.”
TP: Here is where the story gets better. We moved into a new studio, and I had to tweak the setup and room and everything connected to those things, and of course I went to my go-to test disc, Bob and Ray. Spent a few days with it over the course of a few weeks. With a bigger room the sound on Bob and Ray was the best we had ever heard.
“We initially thought the room was doing everything right, because our Go To setup disc, Bob and Ray, sounded super spacious and clear, bigger and more lively than we’d ever heard it. That’s what a 12 foot high ceiling can do for a large group of musicians playing live in a huge studio, in 1959, on an All Tube Chain Living Stereo recording. The sound just soared.
But Cat Stevens wasn’t sounding right, and if Cat Stevens isn’t sounding right, we knew we had a Very Big Problem. Some stereos play some kinds of records well and others not so well. Our stereo has to play every kind of record well because we sell every kind of record there is.
I am not even sure why I started using Tea for the Tillerman to test the new setup, but as I say, it was a total bust. Veiled, distant, vague, hard, sour, harsh, gritty — parts of the song would be wrong with each new change I made in the room, electricity, speaker placement, etc. After many, many hours over many weeks, at some point I stumbled upon the area of the song we were playing, ‘But I Might Die Tonight’, that was the hardest to get right: the midrange. I could write for days about what to listen for in the song, but for now let me just point the reader to one of the most difficult parts to reproduce correctly.
At about 50 seconds into the track, Cat repeats the first verse:
I don’t want to work away
Doing just what they all say
Work hard boy and you’ll find
One day you’ll have a job like mine, job like mine, a job like mine
Only this time he now has a multi-tracked harmony vocal singing along with him, his own of course, and he himself is also singing the lead part louder and more passionately. Getting the regular vocal, call it the “lower part,” to be in balance with the multi-tracked backing vocal, call it the “higher part,” turned out to be the key to getting the bottom, middle and top of the midrange right.
When that part was right, I moved on to other aspects of the sound:
When doing this kind of critical listening we play our records very loud. Live Performance level loud. As loud as Cat could sing, that’s how loud it should be when he is singing his loudest toward the end of the song for the final “But I might die tonight!” If he is going to sing loudly, I want my stereo to be able to reproduce him singing as loud as he is actually singing on the record. No compression. No distortion. All the energy. That’s what I want to hear.
The last fifteen seconds or so of the song has the pianist (Cat himself) banging out some heavy chords on the piano. If you have your levels right it should sound like there is a real piano at the back of the room and that someone is really banging on it. It’s a powerful coda to the song.
Tonal balance, energy, dynamics, freedom from compression, a solid piano, these were all the things I wanted to work on at the same time over the course of those two minutes until all of them sounded as good as they could with none sounding wrong.”
TP: Notice there is no mention of detail or transparency anywhere in our discussion of what we were listening for. It’s nice to have, but everything else comes first, and putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, is a recipe for disaster.
I had just done exactly that with Bob and Ray. I had been seduced by the huge studio space, so deep, wide and tall, and since the tonality seemed correct, I thought I was good to go. How wrong I was, and it took Cat Stevens to show me the error of my ways.
Two quick stories:
More than twenty years ago I went to a customer’s house to hear his expensive system, $40k in Audio Research amps, Vandersteen 5 speakers, dedicated room. The speakers were pulled way out, almost at the midpoint of the room, closer to the listener than they were to the back wall. He put on Traction in the Rain, a song I have played 200 times or more. Also a good one for testing, which is how I came to play it 200 times. The stage was wall to wall, but horseshoe shaped, a big U, with David Crosby back by the wall and everything else placed along the U.
A neat trick, but as wrong as wrong can be. I asked a question that went a little something like this: “Do you really think the engineer — Stephen Barncard — would put the guy whose name is on the album, who wrote all the songs and is the only one singing — David Crosby — that far back in the mix as if he is a background singer, not the lead? This is absurd!”
His answer: “I like it. It’s cool. Really creates a space. Everything is so clear. I can “see’ Crosby back there just fine.” And on and on like that.
(I had done the same thing myself years ago, although to a much lesser degree. Steve Hoffman had just mastered one of the Nat King Cole albums, and he come over to hear it on my big Whisper system. He told me I had the speakers too far out from the wall. It put Nat too far back in the mix, with the orchestra to the sides louder than it should be. He was right. I put the speakers back closer to the wall and yes, some of the cool soundstaging and depth effects were not as impressive, but Nat sure sounded better, and since his name is on the album jacket, I realized that fooling around with the mix was not something I should be doing no matter how much I might have liked it.)
Another time I was at a friend’s house and we were playing Katy Lied, another album I have played 500 or more times and become obsessed with from time to time, especially around the time I was doing some of the early shootouts for it. Those often went on for days. (Things were a lot harder then. I needed more revolutionary improvement in audio to come along.)
Right away, since I knew the album so well, I could hear that his speakers were too far apart. The middle was vague. Lots of space. Transparent. Open. All that audiophile stuff that get some people so excited. But the voice was neither present nor solid. Just as Malcolm Gladwell recounts in his Blink book with experts knowing something is wrong in the blink of an eye, I knew immediately that the sound was wrong.
I offered my advice that the speakers should be closer together. The owner said no and I dropped it. I know from long experience that it is the rare audiophile who is not married to his equipment and his setup, and getting audiophiles to make changes requires much more tact and patience than I could ever begin to muster. My standard approach is “let me out of here, ” so I made an excuse and left shortly thereafter.
The kicker: many months later my longtime friend Robert Pincus, who had been with us for the demonstration, called to tell me I had been right. They pulled the speakers into the center and the sound got better.
Now, I am old enough and confidant enough in my abilities not to take anything more than passing pleasure from this story. I don’t need to be right. Enough customers agree with us about the records we sell to have provided me with a good living for more than thirty years and a comfortable retirement coming soon to boot. We have always said that even a decent system is enough to show you how much better our records sound than any others you may have heard, and this has turned out to be true. The better the system, the better our records will sound, but how much time and money anyone in this hobby spends on their playback is up to them. As you may have read, the only person who gets the benefit of all the testing and tweaking of a system is its owner. It sure isn’t me. Of course, there is the likelihood that an increase in sales would result from a better sounding system, but that is not something I can be concerned with as there is no way of actually verifying the improvement.
It has been my experience that most of the audiophiles I have met have little in the way of critical listening skills. I know I didn’t until about twenty years ago. Hot Stamper shootouts taught me everything I know. They give me the skills to evaluate records and to test and tweak my stereo.
And even after twenty years of doing this kind of work full time, I still got it wrong. I got my room wrong because I only listened to one record. I needed Cat Stevens to show me the error of my ways, and thank God he was up to the task. (Thank goodness I had a killer copy of the Tillerman. As you and I have discussed, if you don’t have good test records, if you have a collection of wacky audiophile pressings, you are really up a creek.)
One final note about tweaking and Hot Stamper shootouts. These paragraphs from the blog should give the reader a clear path forward.
“If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.
Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John beats the hell out of on Norwegian Wood just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.
The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.
Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right and do it enough it has the power to change everything you will ever achieve in audio.
Tweaking your system should proceed along the same lines. Using the above process, get to know some specific attributes of a recording inside and out. Then and only then is it time to tweak, when your system is at its best and the blood is pumping through your ears. If your experience is anything like ours, the results you achieve using this approach will be much more reliable over the long term.
We still end up undoing many initially promising tweaks the next day, usually when some record we know well doesn’t sound the way it should. But you learn nothing unless you try, so we keep at it, and so should you. Some of the spaghetti will stick to the wall eventually, and when it does it produces one of the best highs in all of audio.
Of course it’s always a good idea to confirm whatever changes you’ve made with other records you know well. In audio, as in life, it’s easy to be wrong.
This hobby is supposed to be fun. If you’ve been in it for any length of time you know that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But if you enjoy doing it at least some of the time, and you devote the proper resources to it — time and money — you will no doubt derive much more pleasure from it, especially if you use our approach.
It works for us and there’s no reason it can’t work for you.”