Demanding Attention or Earning It?

One of the two best jobs I had in my 50 year working life was the 8 1/2 years I worked for QSC Audio Products in Costa Mesa, California. I started as an engineer and left a manager and the ownership, especially Pat Quilter and John Andrews, were always not just supportive but good friends. The company I started with in 1983 wasn’t at all the same place when I left, but it was still a pretty good place to work and the products we made were always something I felt proud to be associated with. At least all of that was true until one of my last escape trips to San Francisco. The products didn’t change, but my perception of what amplification and our products were doing to music, musicians, and the audience shifted dramatically over a short period of time.

There used to be a lot of music on the streets of San Francisco, before the place turned into a bankers’ paradise and hell for everyone else. I would ride my motorcycle up PCH to San Francisco, snag a room at a motel on Fulton Street across from Golden Gate Park and a couple of blocks from the ocean, lock up the bike, and take the bus downtown to wander the streets near the pier or take the Bart to Berkeley and hunt for music and street entertainment. I was never disappointed or at a loss for something to look at and listen to on those trips. On that last trip, Fisherman’s Warf was brimming with entertainment. Walking along Embarcadero was like being in the middle of a festival; comedians, magicians, con artists (“I bet $5 I can tell you where you got your shoes.”, and musicians on every corner, part of almost every storefront. The street talent was intimidating. None of it was amplified and all of it was audible. I stood in a small crowd and listened to a guitarist who could have been Michael Hedges, his technique and style was that striking and original, until he took a break. I suspect his tip jar haul that morning was at least $200, it was overflowing with $10 and $20 bills. A little further down the street, there were at least 50 people clustered around a comedian whose routine was pretty much a hip take on Don Rickles and no one escaped un-insulted. I heard classical violin, bluegrass banjo and acoustic guitar duets, a solo singer unaccompanied by anything other than the applause of her audience, a sax trio, and a kid who duplicated Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solos as perfectly as humanly possible. By the time I found the Bart for Berkeley, I was down almost $100 well-spent entertainment dollars.

Downtown Berkeley was a different story. There were still entertainers and great street food vendors, as before, but everyone was amplified. Right off of the Bart, I was assaulted by a loud three-piece blues band producing more noise and distortion than music, even though it was sort of obvious that the players were talented. Instead of attracting a crowd of listeners, the band’s cacophony acted like a cop telling people “Move along, nothing to see/hear here.” The less attention they attracted, the louder they got, and the more alone they were. It didn’t get better on the street. There must have been a dozen amplified acts in two blocks of Shattuck Avenue and they were all competing with each other for attention and irritation factor. There were no crowds of people around any of them. There were a couple of non-amplified performers, but they were drowned out by the electronic “enhancement” of their entertainment neighbors. My prime motivation for going to Berkeley was always a food cart near the Bart station that served the most astounding shrimp-stuffed rice flower confections. I stocked up, hiked over to the UofC Berkeley campus and found a quiet spot to eat.

Afterwards, walking around the campus grounds, I was back in unamplified territory. The University of California campus is, in my opinion, one of the wonders of the world. The place houses the best engineering, chemistry, science, journalism, creative writing, and music departments in the known universe and the campus is beautiful. My alma mater, then Cal State Long Beach, is a beautiful campus and I spent hundreds of hours enjoying those gardens and buildings, but Berkeley is a level above that. As you might expect and I definitely hoped, it wasn’t hard to find students producing amazing music there and that helped gird me for the noise gauntlet I’d have to pass through on my way back to the Bart.

Back at home, in Huntington Beach, a few days later I was stuck revisiting that experience: entertainment vs noise production, attracting attention vs demanding it. Our company, QSC Audio, at the time only made power amplifiers¹. Our whole mission was to increase the volume of any damn signal to the point of pain and beyond. In concert after concert, bar after bar, and even a few neighborhood parties, I witnessed the abuse, misuse, and needlessness of most audio amplification; almost all amplification, in fact. As much as I liked the company and the people I worked with, the products seemed to me to have no other purpose than to destroy music and music appreciation. The more powerful our amplifiers became, the worse the music they amplified sounded. It wasn’t, of course, the fault of the amplification, but it was because there is no qualifications required to use the stuff. Any damn moron with a few thousand dollars can buy a PA system and turn music into deafening noise.

Other than making money, I could not see the point in our corporate existence. Up to that moment, I’d felt like we were part of the music business and making a contribution to music. Afterwards, not so much. That might have been the moment when I realized that I need some sort of “mission” in my life to be happy, but I’m not that bright. It took 10 wasted years in medical devices flailing about looking for a purpose in a purposeless industry, severe burnout, and the good luck to have met Michael McKern, a man to whom “mission” is a core principle, to clue me into the concept.

Now, watching even folk musicians at local farmers’ markets drag their bullshit battery-powered Roland or Fishman rigs out to try and demand the attention they feel they so richly deserve or seeing bands like Snarky Puppy, who should know better based on their semi-live album sound quality, let ego overwhelm any attempt at sound quality and a musical experience is just painful. It is a painful reminded that I spent a good bit of my life enabling this garbage and nothing I do can atone for it. The fact is, if your music is worth listening to, it will be heard. Yeah, some deaf assholes will bitch “I can’t hear you,” but sacrificing the quality of your performance for deaf people won’t fix their problem and it will drive away people who give a damn.

¹ We’d experimented with some “brass and fern bar” products, QSC Series 2, that included line inputs, phono inputs, and a mic pre for announcement purposes. The products stunk and the market was gone before we managed to deliver an unwanted product. One of our CEO’s brilliant ideas that should have been ignored until he went back to pestering secretaries.

The Question isn’t “Can I Tell?” but “Do I Care?”

In pro audio, audiophile, and just general listener discussions, we often get heavily involved and invested in the miniscule things we can and the things we imagine we can hear. When I was teaching the McNally Smith College “Recording Theory” course, I spent some time on digital and analog recording technology including digital compression algorithms and the history of their development. You shouldn’t be surprised to know there were a fair number of committed vinyl analog fanatics among 50-120 young music technology students and you might use that as evidence that young ears supposedly being more discriminating would pick the “higher fidelity” analog technologies. Jumping to that conclusion would be better evidence that the jumper is biased and doesn’t know kids very well. Critical thinking and discrimination are skills that are developed, not something we’re blessed with as children and lose as we become older, cynical, less sensitive, and lazy. (Although all of those things do seem to be a part of growing older for many people.)

  In this class, I played a variety of analog and digital musical signals, demonstrating dynamic range, signal-to-noise, harmonic and transient (slew rate) distortion, and a few other concepts that are important to audio professionals. One of the early takeaways for many of us is disappointment in our lack of ability to accurately pick out some pretty dramatic signal flaws in excellent critical listening environments. One of the class assignments was to setup a listening test (A/B, A/B/X, etc) and document the experience as accurately and honestly as possible. Not an easy thing to do, I know. However, many students came away from that assignment with a lot more questions than answers regarding their own hearing, the analog vs digital arguments, digital audio compression, and all of the other related issues in this debate. Which was the point in the assignment.

I, too, have had a lot of questions regarding all of these issues for the last 40-some years, beginning with the compromises and systemic defects I discovered in phonograph RIAA pre-emphasis/de-emphasis when I built my “Musicians Preamp” product in the 70s and the analog tape recording limitations and compromises I wrestled with for almost 40 years of my audio engineering career. Now that I’m 70+ years old and am quite certain that my hearing is compromised and will only get worse with age, I am seriously questioning even my own opinions and dogma regarding what I am capable of hearing in recorded music. I mean I question what I hear all the time. Even more, I wonder how much I even care about the miniscule differences.  

In Glyn Johns’ bio, Sound Man, he commented regarding some work he did at Ocean Way in the late 90’s, “the few remaining studios that had stayed true to the acoustics for which they were originally designed in the late fifties, not succumbing to the commercial pressure of having SSL consoles and Hidley acoustic designs, both of which have been responsible for systematically reducing the quality of recorded sound like some invidious cancer." I am more than with him on the SSL consoles and while I’m not sure if I’ve been exposed to any Hidley rooms, I agree that most studio designs are intended to be as neutral and boring as possible to compensate for the lack of engineering skills that is common today. You can’t screw up the mic or instrument placement if every spot in the room is the same as every other spot.

Compare Johns’ statement to the more typical old guy’s whine about digital recordings: this one was in the June issue of Tapeop Magazine, “The reason I’m contacting you is what I’m hearing in many 'digitally remastered' CDs, and even records cut from them. Which is… nothing. No air around the instruments, like a picture done with tempera paints. Listening on a reasonable stereo sound system, the image collapses front to back. I started to pay attention to this after a conversation with a friend about how, even with the hiss, cassettes have more life than the digitally remastered CDs." This guy (Peter Engel) is old enough to be able to brag about having worked with Steven Temmer at Gotham Audio, so he is at least my age if not a decade older. (Never listen to the fidelity opinions of old farts, that is the first rule of any critical listening discussion.) Of course this guy imagines he is comparing apples to apples by discussing remastered CDs that he can compare to his vintage vinyl collection, but even that is tainted by the acoustic design of the mastering facility which is in no way similar (usually massively improved) to 1970s mastering engineering facilities. </engepeter@gmail.com>

The “problem,” if there is one, is that we like what we’re used to; especially when we can identify that the sound source is the one we’re used to. Whatever artifacts and distortions that are present in compressed digital audio are what most of us are listening to now: through streaming audio, DVD and Blueray videos, our car and home stereos, our phones and other portable audio devices. It is, obviously, easy to identify a record in playback. Even an old fart can hear the pops, crackles, hiss, and weird panning limitations of a cut record. You can’t practically A/B/X test vinyl against any fair digital reproduction thanks to all of those anomalies and distortions.

A younger-than-me friend is a fanatic about his CD collection conversions. Every CD he buys is converted to a 44.1k/16bit AIFF file and stored on a huge hard drive and played through a 90’s Nokia phone that he is convinced has “great converters.” Years ago he tried compressing a CD and let Apple’s iTunes do the job. The default iTunes MP3 format was/is 128kbit/sec and even an old guy can hear vocal sibilance distortion and cymbal harshness in that format. However, his attempt appear to be mostly to “prove” that MP3 compression was audibly defective and he accomplished that goal. When he in my home, we are as often as not listening to an MP3 version of whatever I’m demonstrating and if he knows he’s listening to an MP3 he “hears the artifacts,” but when he doesn’t know the source he either assumes it is an MP3 and gets snooty or when he assumes he’s listening to multitrack mixdown he does not notice anything anomalous or irritating. My takeaway from that is that it’s more about what he sees or thinks he sees than what he hears.

However, I have decided the real issue for me at this point in my life is “do I care?” I do not. Since reducing my several-hundred CD collection to 320kbit/sec MP3s and copying the collection to a trio of USB sticks that I have plugged into my studio computer, my office computer, and our home entertainment computer, I listen to my music collection almost infinitely more than I have in the past decade. Like all of those terrible young people, I am picking convenience and playback variety over purity. Your mileage may vary.