For far too long, J. C. and I would work construction by day and make art by night. We would retire to our studios and paint. The next day at lunch we would share with each other how it went. I was always a little jealous because in addition to painting, J. C. would go and play his *very* vintage Telecaster in avant-garde downtown clubs like the Knitting Factory. I felt that just collecting records and playing them on my "hi-fi" did not honor the musical expression or demonstrate my gratitude for the glorious feelings that music provides. I longed to do more than listen to records and paint.
One night while eating dinner at a friend's house, I was distracted by the beauty of the singing coming from the living room. When I inquired about it, I was told "it is the radio". Later on, I discovered it was a Marantz Model 10 playing an all-Quad system. For days all I could think of was the beauty of that singing. I became determined to re-create that beauty in my home. I bought books on electronics and acoustics and began to try to understand why this singing had affected me so strongly.
The systems I heard demonstrated in the audio salons clearly did not have this effect. So I began to build my own. Soon I was spending all of my free time drawing schematics and soldering.
J. C. would watch me reading and drawing amp schematics at lunchtime and tell me I was going crazy. He would continue, "all anybody needs to enjoy great music is a great tape in their boom box ... forget all that audiophile stuff and spend your money on great tapes". Today, instead of doing construction, J. C. pays his bills designing high-end speakers and single-ended 845 amps.
After listening to Monk and John Zorn at my place, J. C. decided to build a triode amp and a pair of speakers to play his Sony Walkman through. Within weeks, he and I were spending the whole day at work talking "tube talk". UPS was bringing weekly deliveries of RCA 45's and 50's directly to the job site. We would be shaking, opening the boxes and holding the tubes up to the light, reveling in the beauty of the globe-shaped masterpieces of the 1930's.
The rest of the crew would roll their eyes. They would admit, when pressed, that these tubes were beautiful as "industrial art", but went on to say, "how can these dusty old globes outperform modern high-end gear at re-creating the sound of live music?" When we informed them that not only could these objects play music, but that they were capable of producing sensations of grace, beauty, and excitement on a level *beyond* today's hi-fi, they began to actively ridicule us. To them we had become "high-fever" boys, lost in retro-land.
One particular fellow worker, a carpenter and a fine artist, was especially active in his ridicule of us. Over and over, every day, he kept saying: "*It can't be worth it!*" It turned out that he was an active music lover with a wide-ranging record collection. Further conversations revealed that he was a BIG George Jones fan. So I invited him over after work to hear some country favorites.
When we got to my studio I asked, "Shall we start with *George*?" He gave me a big smile. As I set the tonearm down and turned up the volume I heard "He said he'd love her 'till he died ... " coming from the speakers. When I turned around this man had his hands covering his face and was shaking his head. "*It's worth it, it's worth it, it's really worth it* ... " he repeated through his hands. This man quit his job and invested his life savings to open a store in the SoHo district of Manhattan, selling pure triode amps and horn speakers. I know, this sounds like a man joining a cult, not a document of a musical catharsis.
The real subject of this essay is: What in the nature of reproduced music moves us profoundly and inspires a purgative cleansing of our hi-fi sensibility? How can a simple, inexpensive, 5-watt record playing system move people to change the course of their lives? I could tell you many more stories like the one above, or I could tell you that this was simply the result of using directly-heated triodes and horn speakers. I am afraid that would be an oversimplification and would take us away from the possibility of discovering what is really going on here.
I have been forced to ask myself: What aspects of this reproduced sound elicit the dramatic attitudinal and behavioral changes that I've observed? You must understand, that this type of reaction, this letting out of breath, this surrender to the music, this feeling of finally understanding what reproduced music can do to us, is not simply an equipment change, but a profound change of mindset.
Over the last decade, I have listened to most of the big commercial high-end systems (such as the Infinity IRS-V's, the Wilson Audio WAMM, the Apogee Diva, etc.) I have also been exposed to several Japanese-style triode/horn systems. These setups usually feature small triode amps driving Onken or Altec horn loudspeakers. The high-end and Japanese-style systems could not be more different in character. The differences are not in how much detail, how much spatial information, or how neutral the tonal balance is, but rather, in the essential character of the musical presentation.
When I asked my Japanese friend what he thought of the WAMM's he had just heard, he said, "*Giant robots are no fun*." Another Japanese friend said, "*Too serious*." I believe the Japanese prefer a system that "embraces" the listener like a friend or a lover. Kondo-San, designer of the Ongaku amplifier, refers to his "deep emotion" upon first hearing music played through silver foil capacitors. This is not the way Americans talk about their hi-fi experiences.
When the Japanese discuss the relative merits of an audio component they sound like they are talking about orchestra conductors. When Americans talk audio, it sounds like an optician's convention. Americans rarely mention their feelings when telling their friends about an audio component they have heard. What I am suggesting is this: the difference between these two audio cultures is not simply "taste" in hardware selection, but a fundamental difference in the sensibility that informs this "taste".
An audio system, like a painting or a novel, represents a series of decisions by the "author" to effect the final "work". The quality of the novel, painting, or audio system is the sum quality of all of these decisions. Each of these decisions has moral, ethical, and technical implications as regards the final product. The quality of all of humanity's creations resides in this moral, ethical, and technical decision-making. I daresay we can evaluate the character of an entire culture on the apparent quality of its decision-making. What we regard as a person's "taste" is really their character.
All of the members of a family, from one to many, and the ways they "support" themselves in society, all combine to make a little mini-culture. Whatever importance the making or reproduction of music in the home assumes is a reflection of the nature or quality of this mini-culture. In other words, it is the result of ethical family decision-making.
In Japan, ethics is taught as a subject in the elementary schools and a person's hobbies and interests are considered more important than what he or she does to earn a living. People are respected as much for their aspirations as their achievements. Fast-food chains compete for the most beautiful "bento", or lunch box. Ferrari's, Harley-Davidson's, and Western Electric audio systems are collected as masterpieces of industrial art. The Japanese have a firm grasp on form following function. In the U. S., I am afraid these lofty concepts are only rarely discussed.
I am not trying to suggest that one culture is superior to another, but that a distinctly materialist drift in recent American thinking has pointed product design and consumer taste in a direction where durability, originality, and beauty are more of a liability than an asset. I would also like to suggest that this has begun to change. By the end of the Eighties, high-end audio had become such a vacant form of conspicuous consumption that its lack of aesthetic, philosophical, or scientific underpinnings led the dedicated few to build their own.
When you build your own audio gear it is *imperative* that the choice as to what to build is informed by a philosophy and an aesthetic surrounding "what is important" to the builder. As a creator, the home builder becomes immediately involved in the aforesaid ethical decision-making. How it looks, how durable it is, and how much pleasure the audio creation gives are all in the hands of the creator. The most successful home builders find themselves in an ongoing engineering and aesthetic dialogue with others of their kind. These dialogues then connect together to create an audio sub-culture that soon begins to affect the consumer mainstream.
In Europe and Asia this home builder audio sub-culture is massive and highly developed. In America, during the Eighties, our own Do-It-Yourself culture almost died. A small handful of U. S. music lovers, repulsed by the sterile high-end sound of the Eighties, began experimenting and looking back historically to discover where audio went wrong. At first, this search was an engineering fact-finding mission, but it rapidly began to look like all the big pieces of an astonishing audio technology were in place by 1955.
In the late Fifties, just as audio was about to become a legitimate branch of engineering and science, the mentality of the consumer and the manufacturer shifted dramatically towards the small and the disposable. The effect of this shift has been to replace engineering creativity and an ethics of beauty with marketing and "the bottom line". The transistor pocket radios set the tone for consumer electronics for the next three decades. The "acoustic-suspension" loudspeaker and the possibility of light, cool, 100-watt (transistor) amps set the tone for the home hi-fi industry.
The present quality of products is in such decline that it behooves us to re-invent the radio, television, and home hi-fi. The coterie of serious home designers (not the parts-changers) had discovered by the mid-Eighties that there was more to music reproduction in the home than flat in-room response. These designers would ask themselves fundamental questions about what a home music reproducer *should* do. A few of them began to look at the Japanese and European hi-fi cultures and started to ask: Why are these systems so different and what are these music lovers listening for?
They soon discovered that not all audiophiles were satisfied with the "does it sound like live?" critique. Instead, these audiophiles would ask questions like:
Is the music thrilling?
Does the system convey moods or feelings?
Am I filled with awe at the artistry of the composer or conductor?
Does listening induce peacefulness and reverie?
Can music inspire great joy when played through the system?
What *range of emotions* is the system capable of conveying?
In other words, the communication abilities of the music reproducer are the first consideration. In America, we assume that if it were to sound "just like live", all of the emotional content would be conveyed *automatically*.
I submit this is a poor premise to base an entire industry on. There is no law that demonstrates or suggests a perfect reproduction of the original soundfield would convey *any* of the original artistic quality of the performance. Additionally, there is no parallel in other media. A photograph is no substitute for a painting. Motion picture film or video will not capture a theatrical production or sports event. Bronze castings of marble sculpture lose most of the original beauty. What makes us think that vibrating transducers will communicate artistic quality just because they are almost linear?
What is important to remember here is to remember that the record playing system is a media of its own like film, paint, or clay. With any artistic media, communication is achieved through the creative use of dynamic contrasts (drama) and profound architecture (form and structure). In this country, the creators have chosen to build audio that emphasizes the mental picture of the performance. Image, depth, transparency, and grain are of high importance to American audiophiles. Alternatively, the Euro/Asians have chosen qualities that emphasize the emotional content. These music lovers design for maximum dynamic contrasts, presence, vividness, and effortlessness.
This visceral approach to audio design, as opposed to the cerebral, allows for a direct experience of quality. Aspects of life such as God or beauty or love are experienced *directly*. No thoughts or measurements are required to prove these experiences ... we all know them from direct experience. Anyone looking at a Ferrari or a Rembrandt will experience its quality.
I am suggesting that Americans now begin to ask more from a home audio system. Rather than design systems that fool the ear (is it live or ... ?), let us design systems that move the heart. Let us experience the beauty and profoundness of great compositions directly. Any system will play a great *recording* well, but few audiophile systems will play the great recorded *performances* well. A truly wonderful hi-fi will force you to become involved in a great performance, *even if* it is poorly recorded. With these types of criteria, even very modest systems are capable of great beauty and excitement.
We can now see that music reproduction systems can be radically different in the character of their presentation, based solely on what the designer or audiophile decides is important. If we design for imaging, detail, and small size, that is what we will get. If we design for dynamics, presence, and beauty, we can have that too. However, our emotional response to musical program will be very different on these two types of systems. With this foundation it becomes possible to understand why audiophiles might choose horn loudspeakers and low-powered triode amps.
At equal acoustic outputs, as compared to conventional dynamic or electrostatic loudspeakers, horns offer a dramatic increase in dynamic capability, image size, and presence. Harmonic distortion drops to a quarter of the value found in audiophile direct radiator systems.
In contrast, most direct radiators severely compress dynamic contrasts and reduce image size to the proportions of a symphony on a table-top. These are both severe distortions for which there are no measurements. More importantly, these are distortions which reduce the fun and excitement of music.
When reproduced music lacks weight and body, when sudden transients fail to startle, and the lead singer is only two feet tall, what's left? Detail? Transparency? Tonal balance?
People often say that most horns "sound like horns" and are therefore "disqualified from audiophile consideration". To me, a 90% reduction in image size is a gross distortion, but owners of "mini-monitors" talk endlessly about imaging and transient response. But without weight and body, the transients fail to startle and lose most of their emotional power.
A system capable of reproducing an enormous soundstage, that showcases dynamic contrasts, and presents music with realistic presence, weight, and body will never fail to excite and arouse. These are the traits that the triode/horn systems use to communicate. These are the traits that stimulate our body and our unconscious mind. These are the qualities I believe must become an American engineering priority if American audio and home theater are to become vital and important "mini-cultures" of our domestic environment.
Few families can afford a regular diet of theater and concert tickets. When they can, most working parents are too tired to engage in dressing up, driving, parking, standing in line, etc. Consequentially, the popularity and importance of these stay-at-home "events" increases.
My experiences lately have shown the best triode/horn systems can easily exceed the movie theater sound of childhood memories. We all recall going to see James Bond, 2001, or the "spaghetti westerns" on the big screen. These are big wonderful memories. No one can ever forget the sound or excitement of these events. I think we all yearn for feelings like this. Live opera is the same, but who gets to go?
What I am suggesting is that the technology *already* exists to stimulate our hearts, our minds, and our bodies as nearly profoundly as the theater or the orchestra hall. What we must do is open our closed, ethnocentric audiophile minds and explore all of the technologies available, taking from the old and the new as it suits our purpose.
I have mentioned how the dynamic capabilities, low distortion, and giant soundstage of horns might contribute to the new "world-style" audio-visual systems, but I have said nothing about where triodes of the directly-heated variety can fit into this new type of audio. This is because by nature their low power is at odds with our goals. We are seeking effortlessness and dynamic impact; for these purposes, one can never have too much power!
With existing types of high-power devices, there is a catch. MOSFET's, bipolar transistors, tetrodes, and pentodes all have one thing in common: without global feedback, the distortion, bandwidth, and risetimes are severely limited. There are several tricks to reduce or eliminate global feedback but none of these topologies approach the simplicity of the directly-heated triode circuits.
Triodes can have open-loop bandwidths over 100 kHz, in addition to being linear and predictable in operating characteristics. The most obvious characteristics of directly-heated triode amplification are lack of dynamic compression, lack of confusion and congestion, and a feeling of purity that enhances the beauty of the individual musical lines. All of these traits appear to be related to the triode's ability to be fast and clear with *no negative feedback*. But they are still very low power. We get a little lucky here because horns are very efficient.
It is not surprising that three decades after the invention of high-power tetrodes and beam tubes and two decades after the invention of solid-state power devices, big American theaters were still using triodes to power their sound systems. The reliability, clarity, and impact of these triode/horn systems gave theaters like Radio City Music Hall and the Ziegfield no reason to upgrade.
My intent here has not been to revive ancient technology, or to discredit the ingeniousness of contemporary American audio designers, but to revive our sense of consumer and marketing ethics. I believe we have accepted too much advertising hyperbole and engineering dogma and it is beginning to cost us our musical souls.
It is time we stop and re-assess our domestic entertainment priorities.
If we conclude that musical reproduction in the home is not improving and
is in fact becoming sterile and unprovocative, then it is time to ask our
audio critics and engineers to subscribe to a higher aesthetic and ethical
ideal than the present one, which emphasizes photographic verisimilitude
at the expense of emotional verity.
by Herbert E. Reichert