The Golden Age of Audio...is Now

I agree there are exceptions of course. The way I see it much less concern about sound quality and much more about will it play on all your devices.

 

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You bring up an excellent point about the pace of tech change. We don't necessarily cherish first gen transistor gear today either, but '60s tube designs, well, that's the end of a 30 year development and all anyone's really done since then is made minor refinements. It was a mature tech at the time of its classic era.

 

One thing I think is a good sign. I have noticed there are and have been many good reissues. A lot coming in October. I know many don't like them but I have been happy with most if not all that I have been getting. I had a few and MD took them back no questions asked.

 

On the LP side, there are so many great reissues it is hard to keep up. On the digital side, there is much bad mastering but also many great hirez recordings of current bands like Alison Krauss and Union Station and the Tom Petty and Mark Knopfler recordings are not too bad. If you are into modern pop life is more difficult. But even there you have things like the Weezer catalog being reissued on MFSL and Beck has some great sounding albums out.

 

It may be true for the state of the art. But the mass consumer market is another story.

 

How so?

 

And in ten or fifteen years, Bill Callahan and Will Oldham will be regarded like Tom Waits is today.

 

Bose Wave Radio, MP3 players, Beats by Dre...

 

But we also have good sounding Beats Solo, Sony hirez players, and audioengine speakers!

 

The high level of irrationality and shamanism, the propensity of certain buyers to re-enact Michel Chasles, the willingness of many vendors to accomodate those people, and the general low level of technical knowledge and in some cases the actual pride in ignorance of same, are at a level today never matched in history, or at least not matched in history since the invention of electricity. These all point to today being somewhat of a low point.

There have been very few innovations in analog electronics that would pertain to audio since the 1980s. There are no fundamentally new circuits or devices. There have been legitimate efforts to apply these better, and there are some good solid state units out there that work very well at prices reasonably commensurate with their build cost. That has improved since the 80s. With regard to tube equipment, the availability of good tubes and good transformers is not as good as it was, not at all. The same people who spend idiotic sums for NOS tubes are at least not claiming that aging and storage have improved them. It never does, but it certainly can degrade them.

Certain components, capacitors, resistors, etc, are better than ever but environmental extremism and MBA-fuelled cost cutting have made some worse. And RoHS is still the 400 pound gorilla quietly sleeping in the closet. We have no idea what most of this stuff is going to do in 20 or 30 years. Especially considering most of it used no clean fluxes still on all those boards.

The survival of serious audio depends on a core of customers (as opposed to consumers) who know what the good stuff is and will only buy the good stuff and not the fake stuff. That core has to have the money for First World suppliers of reasonable size to want to support them and be willing to spend it.

When today's service oriented bubble of affluence bursts, we will have other things to worry about than audio, but will this activity of ours continue into the future after that? I don't know. Some avocations of the past have survived well and some others are not even remembered by the people that were there. Ask me in 2036, if we're still around.

 

I'm not sure I can agree here Burt. As evidence I would point new technology such as MLSSA-based speaker design, DTCD-based cable design at Shunyata, digital circuit design, programmable (ground floor up) FPGA chips, and software innovations such as Gordon Rankin's Streamlength code enabling USB audio. Also, many consider the current vacuum tubes such as the KT120 to be among the best sounding and most reliable ever.

I'm also uncertain on the MBA comment as very few people in the high end audio actually have an MBA although there are some exceptions.

Perhaps the biggest refutation of your argument though is the emergence of the "ultra-luxury" market in high end which is thriving.

 

Not to mention the Audioengine wireless DAC. 24/96 capabillity without keeping my computer near the stereo equipment.

 

I think we are in a golden age of music. There is lots of great stuff that is being made and that we can access. My issue is that much of it is over compressed and sounds like crap. It is a shame but I have almost given up on trying to hear new rock bands because it inevitably will sound bad on a good system.

 

There is no doubt that the recording quality has not kept up in places but I still believe we are in a Golden Age overall.

 

Notice I said "analog". On the digital side we have seen huge improvement.

I agree that theory of speaker design has made huge improvements also now such that building quite good small box speakers-so long as one accepts the inherent bass response limits on small speakers-has become much more consistent and drivers tend to be characterized much better making a good design much more straightforward. I am very impressed by some of the speakers out there, all the same I am still listening to Altec 604s at home myself.

The "ultra-luxury" market is exactly the best example because much of this stuff is more about packaging than substance.

My understanding is that the KT120 is essentially an EL156-a 1950s Siemens or Telefunken tube-with standard octal basing. For the record I think some of the new tubes in production today are pretty good, but we are reliant on a supply chain coming from countries with previous spotty records or in which sudden changes could cause all kinds of problems. But that is also true of a lot of mainstream products.

 

Very explainable imo. The record companies convinced the majority, me included, that CDs sounded better. We dumped our vinyl. We replaced them with CDs and then kept buying better versions of CDs trying to get them to sound better, when all along we already had some pretty good formats prior to the CD. Then when we discovered we had it pretty okay prior to CDs, the industry already passed us by and in most cases stopped producing audiophile quality music because who cared? Was sad to see so many beautiful recording studios disappear, and they continue to close to this day.

So, I blame a few people at the record companies back in the day for the demise of the recording studio, per se, and all of us who kind of drank the koolaid. The younger generation don't care about high end audio, and as long as younger people are buying Crossley turntables, if one can call them that, then I remain unconvinced younger people are buying vinyl because they sound better. I do think the vinyl revival will bring a measured effort to bring about some better quality recordings, but most of the means to create said better recordings have been torn down.

 

I don't think the playback format changes explain what I'm talking about, in fact to me they're part of the mystery. I mean, there are ways in which CD always was inherently better than vinyl from the start: lower noise, wider dynamic range, lower distortion.

(As both digital playback and digital recording improved, those things have also improved: now with higher bit rate recordings we can portray on recordings even wider dynamic range. I love vinyl, but to my ears there's plenty of digital music that sounds just as good as analog music, better in some ways.)

But even as the industry and consumers these formats that allowed the greatest dynamic range, and lowest noise and distortion that had ever been possible, the sound of pop recording itself became dominated by extremely compressed sound with less dynamic range in the source material and compressed to the extent that it the waveform almost becomes squared off and distorted, with the widespread use of added distortion from hardware or plug in exciters and distressors.

I think there's some truth in what you say that the boom in home studio recording has put the quality of recording often in the hands of amateurs and semi-pros, and that has resulted in a overabundance of copycat sound recordings and the use of plug-ins that automatically deliver that kind of distortion and compression that sounds "modern." (Though mostly I think it's listeners and the marketplace that want that sound -- if someone came along today and released a record with which dynamic range, light compression, etc. it would sound old fashioned and would struggle for airplay and to compete for the pop audience's ear.) But it's more a matter of choice than means. Yeah, there might not be as many great old live rooms around, but there's as much access (and maybe more) to great mikes, preamps, and the like as there ever was.

I also think it's true that some of the pop music genres of the last 30 years -- like hip-hop and EDM for example -- because they're made from purely electronic material (turntable cutting and scratching, or drum machines and samples in the former, synth in the later) don't request of the listener a concern for "fidelity" in the old sense of lifelike reproduction of sounds in space. (I often wonder what would have happened if someone had recorded say the Furious Five in concert, and hip hop had developed on record by people trying to capture the live sound of early hip hop performance, which was never captured on record.)

I think the vinyl revival, for most of it's participants, is not about fidelity at all. If anything the appeal to at least some portion of the vinyl revival market -- the hipster retro buyer -- is a kind of lo-fi appeal: something that sounds exaggeratedly warm, boomy in the bass, with the mechanical noise of playback being audible (in a recent trip to Austin, for example, the number of set ups I saw with SL1200's with Concorde scratching carts, cheap DJ mixers and mediocre headphones, was quite an eye opener). And it certainly hasn't had an impact on the recording and mastering of most music.

Like I said, to me the format thing is part of the mystery, not the explanation.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with your column. In fact I've argued similar points on various "aw man everything sucks" threads here for a while. Just looking at the audiophile's choices in sub-$1,000 and $500 speakers can make your head spin. The fact that I can get shockingly good sound from my ubiquitous smartphone by plugging in a carefully-chosen $100 pair of 'phones is a miracle in itself.

Recently I was thumbing through an old copy of 'Fi Magazine' from the late-90s that I've held onto and had to marvel at the serious LACK of choices for the vinyl enthusiast. Now, everything from real-world entry level to unreal-world high end is represented. Not just in vinyl, but everything.

As much as I hate the term, 'trickle down' is very much a real thing when it comes to technology. The Radio Shack catalogs from the 70s and 80s are amazing to look at now. For a fraction of the cost of a 'serious' mid-fi system of that era (adjusted for inflation) I can now cobble together something that would absolutely destroy it in terms of sound quality. I love vintage, but I can't argue with fact. We are enjoying an embarrassment of riches when it comes to audio (but everyone still seems so damn upset).

dan c

 

We aren't exactly experiencing a golden age of recording. At least for rock and the types of music most people listen to. Which is a shame. Cause studio gear has gotten better just like how consumer gear has gotten better. There still are some very good recordings being made. But you have to look to genres like classical and some jazz and a few other genres where sound quality still matters more than being loud or punchy.

It's a shame because we could be experiencing a golden age of recording. We have the technology. We have the knowledge. We have the musicians. We have the talent.

I enjoy classical and jazz and various "odd" music. I'm able to find some modern music and recordings that I enjoy that are well recorded. But the choices are few.

It is a golden age overall. I'm very much enjoying the embarrassment of riches I've got access to in headphone gear and personal audio.

 

At least we have some very good hirez recordings out now.

 

But what is the market share of the good sounding products? Do the majority of consumers care about good sounds?

 

I always thought that digital was a step down, so the Golden Age tapered off c. 1985 or so.

 

It's a good question...but in 1963 or '73 was the market share of "good sound" vs "bad sound" any different? And are today's "bad sounding" products any better than yesterdays? No data on the first score, but I think on the latter score, yes. I grew up in the '60s and early '70s with a suitcase style turntable based stereo set up and small portable transistor radios -- sort of the boom boxes and personal players of the day. Today's equivalents, like those Bowers and Wilkins Zeppelins and iPods, even playing compressed files, sound better than yesterday's "bad sounding" gear, in my opinion -- much lower noise and distortion, more linear frequency response.

 

Definitely better today. A person who truelly enjoys listening to music will always hear if the sound is okay, good, great or lacking. The rise of headphone sales, headphone amps. anything related to BT connectivity at home show that people are willing to pay for very good sound if they can afford it and time allows to use it enough to justify spending the cash. The WAF is much easier to go green with a compact and stylish product; best somehow conneceted around the HD TV.
Again I have to mention those ZERO 1's. avantgarde-audio usually builds boombastic ridiculousely oversized horn speaker systems costing a ot more than the ZERO 1 but this is a stylish no fuss product, easy to use fitting into a modern loft - so they sell a lot of these to those who got the funds to spend 12 grand on a stereo but were not interested in the usual big altars with cables and speakers eating up costly living space. These speakers are still big, but since the do not neeed cables and a lot of other gear next to them they can rest in the living room like sculptures. The DO look great, too. Once people HAR what is possible today in terms of music reproduction they get interested but most people never get in contact with the true HiFi stuff. It takes a lot of learning, research and dedication to get a great sounding set of gear dialed in. a task most people refuse to even think about. Action speaks louder than words 1
You see that people are willing to spend a lot on Tv Surround systems - Prove to them that a great 2 way set-up can sound even better they might start to think about getting better front speakers and one of those amps with HT pass through. In 5 to 10 years High Quality playback is a must in a lot of homes, who don't care too much about that now.

I also think we have a great choice in music be it old or new. Reggae finally is getting better tha ever after a long draught with modern roots and One drop artist - a true Reggae revival is on it's way. Jazz, classical music, Blues rock IF you search for good stuff you can find it and a lot of that sounds good or even great !