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Recording of February 2006: <I>Fox Confessor Brings the Flood</I>

NEKO CASE: Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Anti 86777 (CD). 2006. Neko Case, Darryl Neudorf, prods.; Craig Schumacher, Chris Schultz, engs. AAD. TT: 34:55
Performance ****½
Sonics ****

When we left Neko Case, in 2004, the alt-country/alt-something singer had just released The Tigers Have Spoken. Loaded up with covers, albeit cool ones such as Loretta Lynn's "Rated X," this live album lacked something. It was hard to connect to, and didn't dig as deep as or possess the sparks of promise that made her 1997 debut, The Virginian, and its 2000 follow-up, Furnace Room Lullaby, such…

Fine Tunes #8

Bill Gates would have you believe we live in a plug'n'play world. Apple has proselytized same since day one. But I'm here to tell you it just isn't so for high-end audio. The orientation of a component's AC plug—even the quality of the wall receptacle itself—affects the sound! Oh no, Mr. Bill, not something else to futz with! Will it never end?

Alas, it will not. Understand that all the elements I've told you about so far—speaker placement and room modes, cable hygiene and dressing—have a cumulative effect that pays off big time when you plunk yourself down in the sweet spot and turn your…

Space...the Final Frontier

High-end audiophiles are space freaks---we relish the warmth and spaciousness of a fine, old performing hall almost as much as we do the music recorded in it. But my attendance at a series of orchestral concerts held last summer brought home to me---as never before---the sad fact that our search for the ultimate soundstage is doomed to failure: we're trying to reproduce three-dimensional space from a two-dimensional system, and it simply can't be done.

The performance hall in Boulder's Chautauqua park is a big, barn-like, wooden building that has no memorable acoustical signature, unlike…

Space...the Final Frontier Page 2

It's rather like height information: Some systems sound as if they reproduce it, even though there's no way two mikes can capture it or two speakers can reproduce it. The up-and-across imaging of the Chesky Test CD LEDR demo is ersatz, too, because it relies entirely on the ear's interpretation of a progressive change in the spectral distribution of the signal. If the CD is paused when the "image" is at its highest point, then restarted for a fraction of a second, the sound will be heard to image at the height of the speakers, not above them. We have to hear it changing in order to interpret…

Space...the Final Frontier Page 3

Part of the art of recording is in getting just the "right" mix of reverb and direct sound, and it usually turns out that the reverb content is below the level where masking can occur. Once a stereo recording is made, the amount of reverb on it is the same whether we listen to it in mono or stereo. But in stereo, the two-source reproduction unmasks some of the reverb that's obscured by the mono reproduction, making the sound fuller and richer.

Exactly the same thing happens when we reproduce that reverberant field from two more directions, such as from the left- and right-rear quadrants…

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A case history
Generally, the engineering community simply dismisses high-end audiophiles as a lunatic fringe. But the High End, itself, has been unabashedly hostile toward the sonic qualities valued by audio professionals.

John Atkinson's 1992 review of the Westlake BBSM-6F and the Acoustic Energy AE3 loudspeakers (Vol.15 No.1, p.207) is a case in point. The Westlake is a typical professional monitor of moderate size, that I understand to have been designed "by the book." The AE3 is a high-end consumer loudspeaker with all that that implies. JA faulted the BBSM-6F for a balance…

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Surround recordings
Although proper surround reproduction requires a minimum of four loudspeakers, the maximum number of signals that can be delivered to consumers is two: front left and front right. This is as true for video sources as it is for audio-only ones. Home Theater's Dolby Surround channel is "matrixed" (footnote 7) into the stereo front signals as antiphase information, making it sufficiently different from the front-channel information in that it can be separated out by L-R subtraction and routed to the rear speakers. The same process allows us to extract ambience from…

Space...the Final Frontier SIDEBAR 1

SIDEBAR 1: Comb-Filtering & Soundstage Depth
Is soundstage depth a psychoacoustic illusion brought on by strong reflections of the speakers' sounds from nearby walls? While there's no doubt that discrete sidewall reflections can lead to beyond-the-speaker lateral imaging, and that planar speakers produce very strong reflections due to their undamped full-range backwaves---which do contribute an added sense of spaciousness---conventional monopole speakers tend to be quite directional in their upper midranges and above.

This is true even with small speakers. Fig.1, for example,…

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SIDEBAR 2: Blumlein on Soundstage Depth
Interestingly, Alan Blumlein's original 1931 patent application on stereophonic reproduction was quite specific about a two-channel system's ability to reproduce two dimensions---width and depth---to the front of the listener. This might be expected from the nomenclature: the word "stereophonic" is derived from the Greek word for "solid." To quote from the patent application, as reprinted in the 1987 AES Anthology, Stereophonic Techniques (footnote 1) compiled and edited by John Eargle:

"The fundamental object of the invention is to provide a…

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SIDEBAR 3: A Matter of Interpretation
While I don't disagree with J. Gordon Holt's feeling that many "audiophile" loudspeakers are designed to have a degree of response shaping---though I can think of as many that tilt up as tilt down---it's only fair to point out that, by his own admission, JGH has never actually auditioned either the Westlake or the Acoustic Energy loudspeakers he uses as examples in developing his hypothesis.

He does imply that predicting a loudspeaker's sound quality from its on-axis frequency response is not a trivial matter. I agree, so here are my…