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Since our insurance claim seems to be proceeding apace, I spent a little time today with our spreadsheet of stuff. I made lists of everyting costing $100 or more and categorized it as shared, for me, or for Miriam. Then I'm going to work on ordering stuff by priority. Since we won't be able to replace everything, this seems like a good beginning at figuring out what we will replace.
My stereo reciever and speakers are at the top of the list for me, for reasons that are kind of complicated, and not entirely rational. I'll talk about why, but it will be a circuitous explanation.
At the advent of recorded sound, there were no provisions for using electrical amplification to facilitate recording. From the invention of wax cylinders in the 1890s and through the changeover to recordings on discs, the recording and playback process relied entirely on acoustical mechanics. To record, the sound waves produced by the source were gathered by a large amplifying horn attached to a needle that vibrated with the energy transferred to it by those waves. That needle etched those vibrations into a rotating medium for preservation. The playback process was the same thing in reverse; a needle placed in the groove of the rotating medium vibrated in sympathy with the etched waves, and a large horn amplified those vibrations into something the user could hear.
The quality of these recordings was not good, to say the least. Still, they are very special to me. That specialness is one of the bits of irrationality connected to my love for vintage sound reproduction hardware. When the recording process is completely without external amplification of any kind, there's a part of me that feels like I'm being touched, physically touched, by the source of that recorded sound. Mechanical vibration directly from the musicians, or a speaker, was frozen in time, and then reanimated, right back to my ears. Someday, I'd really like to own the hardware to play such media.
In the 1920s, technology progressed to include electrical amplification in the recording and playback process. Huge amplifying horns to exploit acoustic properties to collect or distribute sound waves to make them strong enough to be useful weren't required anymore. As well, the use of microphones and such allowed a lot more control over the physics of the process. Frequency response could be hugely widened and normalized across the range of audible sound.
Obviously, an enormous amount of development occurred after that. New mediums like magnetic tape and increasingly sophisticated ways of recording and reproducing sound like the compression and expansion of audio on vinyl LPs through the process that eventually became standardized as the RIAA equalization curve for records (which itself unavoidably introduced distortion to the recording), and so much more.
Until the 1970s though, everything was still analog. Everything was recorded and played back via an electrical signal whose frequencies and amplitudes were, ideally, a perfect reflection of the sound waves they represented. (Of course, there is no such thing as perfection, despite audio engineers', acoustic physicists', and hi-fi enthusiasts' never-ending search for it. But they kept, and continue to keep, working on it, approaching some kind of definition and achievement of perfection in a way that, maybe could be described as asymptotic?) A fully analog recording and reproduction path still gives me a little bit of that feeling of being *touched* by the original sound source. I realize this is 1% empirical reality and 99% woo and mysticism. But there isn't a lot of room for woo and mysticism in my life, and this seems like a relatively harmless place for it.
When part of the reproduction path is digital, that chain of sound wave to electrical signal to groove on a record or waves on a tape, and then back again has a broken link. At some point in the process, that sound wave...wasn't really a sound wave anymore. It was something else, created by calculating the Nyquist rate for an arbitrary sampling rate, and setting the result down in a string of binary bits. The wave is chopped up into millions of discrete instances in time, and then passed through a DAC for reassambly into a wave again. The quality of digital-to-analog conversion in consumer equipment is variable, but then so is the quality of fully analog equipment, so thinking about that aspect, for me, is a red herring. It really comes down to the fact that, once, there would have been a wave analogous to the recorded sound reaching my ears through an unbroken chain of electro-acoustic processing. And then, there wasn't.
I'm not one of those people who think records sound better than CDs. In some cases they really do, but some of that has to do with poor mastering techniques and the loudness war that digital recording led to, pushing amplitude as high as it could go, and losing commensurate dynamic range. Once there was no physical limit imposed by a needle sitting in a groove, many more options were open. Publishers wanted their music to play louder than their competitors music so it would stand out on the radio, and producers obliged them.
Incidentally, lack of dynamic range due to loudness normalization is something that bothers me a lot about streaming music services. Volume level is normalized to facilitate listening in the car or on your earbuds, and again, the wide dynamic range of loudness and softness in recordings that take advantage of it is lost. I really think that most people don't care about this at all. And why should they? So few people sit in a quiet room and listen purely to music anymore that setting standards that enhance those people's enjoyment but annoy the vast majority of users who don't want to have keep adjusting the volume up and down doesn't make any sense. I don't mean to criticize here: this is the way people relate to and interact with music these days, and that is completely valid.
When I first bought a pair of good Klipsch speakers to use with my vintage Marantz, I can only describe it as a revelation. I played Blind Melon's self-titled album and thought I had some kind of ground loop causing a hum in my speakers. I changed cables around with no success, and then tried another album and it was gone. Then I realized that what I'd been hearing was analog tape hiss from the mastering process. I was floored. I hadn't *really* understand the details you could hear in recorded music before. I listened to The Dark Side of the Moon, and when I got to the The Great Gig in the Sky, I felt like the singer was singing inside my head. I remember both of those experiences so clearly, years later now.
For me, analog vs. digital, and vinyl vs. CD is not a quality issue. As I noted, sometimes you can hear hiss from analog masters that just isn't there on digitally mastered music, and I certainly play a lot more CDs than I do records, and even records were increasingly mastered digitally themselves before being pressed into vinyl. Sometimes the CD really does sound better, head to head. But that analog chain of sound wave to electrical signal to physical medium and back is broken, and that just makes me a little bid sad.
My mother suggested that, to save some of the budget in our insurance claim, I could probably find something modern that sounded at least as good as the Marantz for less money. (Honestly, I think Marantz hardware may be a little overpriced, even compared to similar vintage hardware, because of its name cachet: a potentially sacrilegious thing for a hi-fi enthusiast to say!) I probably could. But, and I suppose this is another potentially heretical opinion, it's not just about the quality. It's about the experience. And using that Marantz was part of the experience, for me. When it burned, I felt great distress at having failed it. I had allowed this rare device, that there are only so many of, and that I was fortunate enough to be the caretaker of, be destroyed. That really hurt, even though it wasn't my fault. In therapy, I talked about feeling like I had failed so many pieces of interesting vintage tech I was entrusted with the care of. What really helped was the therapist telling me I was just as much a victim as those things were.
I can't ever bring back the burned Marantz, but at least I can replace it, and do my best to use, appreciate, and take care of one of its siblings.
My stereo reciever and speakers are at the top of the list for me, for reasons that are kind of complicated, and not entirely rational. I'll talk about why, but it will be a circuitous explanation.
At the advent of recorded sound, there were no provisions for using electrical amplification to facilitate recording. From the invention of wax cylinders in the 1890s and through the changeover to recordings on discs, the recording and playback process relied entirely on acoustical mechanics. To record, the sound waves produced by the source were gathered by a large amplifying horn attached to a needle that vibrated with the energy transferred to it by those waves. That needle etched those vibrations into a rotating medium for preservation. The playback process was the same thing in reverse; a needle placed in the groove of the rotating medium vibrated in sympathy with the etched waves, and a large horn amplified those vibrations into something the user could hear.
The quality of these recordings was not good, to say the least. Still, they are very special to me. That specialness is one of the bits of irrationality connected to my love for vintage sound reproduction hardware. When the recording process is completely without external amplification of any kind, there's a part of me that feels like I'm being touched, physically touched, by the source of that recorded sound. Mechanical vibration directly from the musicians, or a speaker, was frozen in time, and then reanimated, right back to my ears. Someday, I'd really like to own the hardware to play such media.
In the 1920s, technology progressed to include electrical amplification in the recording and playback process. Huge amplifying horns to exploit acoustic properties to collect or distribute sound waves to make them strong enough to be useful weren't required anymore. As well, the use of microphones and such allowed a lot more control over the physics of the process. Frequency response could be hugely widened and normalized across the range of audible sound.
Obviously, an enormous amount of development occurred after that. New mediums like magnetic tape and increasingly sophisticated ways of recording and reproducing sound like the compression and expansion of audio on vinyl LPs through the process that eventually became standardized as the RIAA equalization curve for records (which itself unavoidably introduced distortion to the recording), and so much more.
Until the 1970s though, everything was still analog. Everything was recorded and played back via an electrical signal whose frequencies and amplitudes were, ideally, a perfect reflection of the sound waves they represented. (Of course, there is no such thing as perfection, despite audio engineers', acoustic physicists', and hi-fi enthusiasts' never-ending search for it. But they kept, and continue to keep, working on it, approaching some kind of definition and achievement of perfection in a way that, maybe could be described as asymptotic?) A fully analog recording and reproduction path still gives me a little bit of that feeling of being *touched* by the original sound source. I realize this is 1% empirical reality and 99% woo and mysticism. But there isn't a lot of room for woo and mysticism in my life, and this seems like a relatively harmless place for it.
When part of the reproduction path is digital, that chain of sound wave to electrical signal to groove on a record or waves on a tape, and then back again has a broken link. At some point in the process, that sound wave...wasn't really a sound wave anymore. It was something else, created by calculating the Nyquist rate for an arbitrary sampling rate, and setting the result down in a string of binary bits. The wave is chopped up into millions of discrete instances in time, and then passed through a DAC for reassambly into a wave again. The quality of digital-to-analog conversion in consumer equipment is variable, but then so is the quality of fully analog equipment, so thinking about that aspect, for me, is a red herring. It really comes down to the fact that, once, there would have been a wave analogous to the recorded sound reaching my ears through an unbroken chain of electro-acoustic processing. And then, there wasn't.
I'm not one of those people who think records sound better than CDs. In some cases they really do, but some of that has to do with poor mastering techniques and the loudness war that digital recording led to, pushing amplitude as high as it could go, and losing commensurate dynamic range. Once there was no physical limit imposed by a needle sitting in a groove, many more options were open. Publishers wanted their music to play louder than their competitors music so it would stand out on the radio, and producers obliged them.
Incidentally, lack of dynamic range due to loudness normalization is something that bothers me a lot about streaming music services. Volume level is normalized to facilitate listening in the car or on your earbuds, and again, the wide dynamic range of loudness and softness in recordings that take advantage of it is lost. I really think that most people don't care about this at all. And why should they? So few people sit in a quiet room and listen purely to music anymore that setting standards that enhance those people's enjoyment but annoy the vast majority of users who don't want to have keep adjusting the volume up and down doesn't make any sense. I don't mean to criticize here: this is the way people relate to and interact with music these days, and that is completely valid.
When I first bought a pair of good Klipsch speakers to use with my vintage Marantz, I can only describe it as a revelation. I played Blind Melon's self-titled album and thought I had some kind of ground loop causing a hum in my speakers. I changed cables around with no success, and then tried another album and it was gone. Then I realized that what I'd been hearing was analog tape hiss from the mastering process. I was floored. I hadn't *really* understand the details you could hear in recorded music before. I listened to The Dark Side of the Moon, and when I got to the The Great Gig in the Sky, I felt like the singer was singing inside my head. I remember both of those experiences so clearly, years later now.
For me, analog vs. digital, and vinyl vs. CD is not a quality issue. As I noted, sometimes you can hear hiss from analog masters that just isn't there on digitally mastered music, and I certainly play a lot more CDs than I do records, and even records were increasingly mastered digitally themselves before being pressed into vinyl. Sometimes the CD really does sound better, head to head. But that analog chain of sound wave to electrical signal to physical medium and back is broken, and that just makes me a little bid sad.
My mother suggested that, to save some of the budget in our insurance claim, I could probably find something modern that sounded at least as good as the Marantz for less money. (Honestly, I think Marantz hardware may be a little overpriced, even compared to similar vintage hardware, because of its name cachet: a potentially sacrilegious thing for a hi-fi enthusiast to say!) I probably could. But, and I suppose this is another potentially heretical opinion, it's not just about the quality. It's about the experience. And using that Marantz was part of the experience, for me. When it burned, I felt great distress at having failed it. I had allowed this rare device, that there are only so many of, and that I was fortunate enough to be the caretaker of, be destroyed. That really hurt, even though it wasn't my fault. In therapy, I talked about feeling like I had failed so many pieces of interesting vintage tech I was entrusted with the care of. What really helped was the therapist telling me I was just as much a victim as those things were.
I can't ever bring back the burned Marantz, but at least I can replace it, and do my best to use, appreciate, and take care of one of its siblings.
