Seeking perfect sound
So, are we there yet? Derek Powell wonders if it really doesn’t matter any more.
Last week I listened to an organ concert in a familiar venue, but with a completely new instrument. A venerable (but serviceable and well-tuned) pipe organ had been replaced by an Allen digital organ. So I was listening to music generated not by the physical process of air passing through pipes but by an array of speakers. I wondered if I would be able to hear the difference between ‘pure’ notes generated by metal or wooden tuned pipes and ‘reproduced’ notes, digitally generated, electronically amplified and sent through what was effectively a stereo speaker system (with a pair of surround speakers at the rear for ambience).
This was a fascinating test. I knew the venue well and had heard the organist play the pipe instrument very recently, so I expected to be a little disappointed by the sound of woofers and tweeters. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t hear any coloration, distortion or artifice at all. This was a well-specified instrument, with many more stops (voices), played by a world-class concert performer, and the effect was striking. Compared to the old but real pipe instrument, it didn’t sound like listening to a recording through speakers, it was more like hearing an orchestra playing live, where before I had been listening to a string quartet.
Now it is well accepted that live versus recorded music tests don’t actually prove anything. Almost exactly a century ago, Thomas Edison’s notorious ‘Tone Tests’ had audiences claiming they could not distinguish between a live singer and a mechanical gramophone. Clearly this was a nonsense, demonstrating much more about clever psychology than sound reproduction in the stage-managed tests. Nonetheless, as my recent experience demonstrates (if not proves), we are certainly closing in on the time when reproduced sound can be considered if not ‘perfect’, then perhaps as close to reality as it needs to be.
But if so, why does the enjoyment of ‘hi-fi’ sound systems seem to be in a decline?
Quest for quality
That is not to say that people are no longer finding enjoyment in listening to reproduced music. Far from it! However, I have noticed the quest for quality in reproduced sound is fast disappearing. Very few houses today seem to have a listening room — with a pair of speakers dominating and the couch positioned just so. But of course that doesn’t mean music is missing from people’s lives. Rather, the trend is to make music ubiquitous — either by placing it everywhere in the house or by opting for a solo listening experience with your soundtracks taken with you to be enjoyed wherever you are. Today, if music is easily accessible, then the reproduction just needs to be OK, it doesn’t need to be great.
Inevitably though, neither typical earbuds nor a Bluetooth speaker on a shelf has the same impact as a pair of quality floorstanders driven by a decent amplifier. To put it simply, quality is missing.
Dr Sean Olive, a past president of the Audio Engineering Society and now Acoustic Research Fellow at Harman, has expressed similar views, noting in an interview last year that: “Since the 1980s we’ve moved from large, analog, component-based audio systems dedicated to the living room to portable, digital, highly integrated, wireless speaker systems connected to the Internet.”
He links this trend to a decline in demand for quality citing a statistic that “55 percent
of Americans typically listen to music through their laptop or PC speakers” and noting that “sound quality has been sacrificed for portability, convenience, and low cost”.
It is partly the case that this is a generational movement owing much to the lifestyle of Gen Y and young, high-spending consumers. If that’s the case, who will be the buyers of high-end sound systems in the future? Adding to the industry concerns is the observation that the trend may also extend to home theatre, as the younger generations eschew big screens in favour of entertainment on phones, phablets and tablets accessed wherever they are, whenever they want it.
Sean notes also a drift amongst consumers to the replacement of physical media by subscriptions to streamed music services, and I wonder if this is a pointer to the trend away from ultimate audio quality. There is no doubt that the choice in music and media is exponentially wider than it was a decade or two ago. One of the results of greater choice is that people are spending more time exploring the new, rather than returning to favourites time and again.
I remember an early mentor of mine, Alex, who had a truly extraordinary domestic hi-fi system. His capacious lounge room was set up with a wall of different speakers connected to a switching system that allowed him to play different records (this was the vinyl era, pre-CD) using whichever of a half a dozen different turntables he chose, played through to any of the speakers. Alex had a quite narrow and specialised musical taste, so for each track, he had painstakingly experimented until he discovered the optimum combination of cartridge, tone-arm, turntable, amplifier and speaker. Listening sessions at his house often extended far into the night as he would switch between different pick-ups and speakers to bring out the subtlest nuances from each of his favourite albums.
My friend was often accused by others of listening to the equipment rather than listening to the music. That was understandable but unfair, because tonal differences were clearly audible between the same recording played on different equipment. He certainly took things to the extreme, but for him, each of his beloved tracks was worth the investment of time and money to make it sound just right.
My point in re-telling this story is to contrast this with the situation now. Today Alex would have access to a much wider range of tracks in his chosen genre. While I can’t be positive, I’ll bet that he would have spent more time listening to different tracks rather than striving for perfect sound on just a few.
Quantity’s e ect on quality
This idea about access to variety in music and entertainment is crucial. If we look at quality in sound in just one situation — personal listening — we can compare the cassette Walkman of 30 years ago with any smartphone and headphone combination today. It’s hard to put a single number on the improvement in sound quality, but let’s be generous and say the sound is twice as good from a smartphone with reasonable quality files into a reasonable set of comparable headphones. Meanwhile, the amount of music that could be carried or accessed on the move is now literally thousands of times that of a Walkman. With a couple of decent subscriptions, you can now have access to more tracks than you could listen to in a lifetime.
It is no surprise, then, that the quest for quality has paled somewhat as people prefer to explore more new music, now that it is possible to do so wherever they are. It even holds true for my digital versus pipe organ story. The new instrument has the range of sounds needed to play a much wider repertoire of organ music.
You only have to glance through these pages to see that despite the massive growth in portable sound and ubiquitous wireless speakers, there are still plenty of manufacturers dedicated to moving the state of the sound quality art forward, and rightly so.
But in terms of our central question — are we there yet? — I’d have to say it for very many people, perfect sound doesn’t matter any more. They’re enjoying exploring the side tracks too much. Derek Powell
Almost exactly a century ago, Thomas Edison had audiences claiming they could not distinguish between a live singer and a mechanical gramophone. Clearly this was a nonsense...”