Music as Art (or bullshit)?

The internet news has had a good time with “Asshole of the Year” Martin Shkreli’s greed and corruption, but one small aspect of the multi-millionare’s story seems to have barely dented the group consciousness. Shkreli paid $2M for a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album, just for the bragging rights. Many of us have heard that, but until the recent edition of Pro Sound News I hadn’t heard much about the Wu-Tang Clan side of the story.

First, here’s what Shkreli got for his money:

• “An engraved silver-and nickel box and a 174-page manuscript containing lyrics, credits and anecdotes, printed on gilded parchment and encased in leather by a master book binder.”
• A pair of customized PMC MB2-XBD studio monitors (list price $85,500).
• A guarantee that “there are no other physical or digital duplicates in existence.”
• A requirement that they buyer “may not release any of the content for a period of 88 years.” Here’s the bullshit part (outside of all things SHkreli): On their best day, the self-promoters also known as the Wu-Tang Clan are not known for any particular audio fidelity concerns. Their “music” (see sample below) is pretty much the usual hip-hop culprits of sampled instruments, sampled voices, cheezy repetitive beats, what passes for spoken word “poetry” in this sad age, and indiscriminate distortion mostly due to noise-induced hearing loss since the primary requirement from speakers from Wu-Tang’s producer, Tarik Azzougarh, is “I like my music super-duper loud.”

At the self-delusional side of this transaction is Azzougarth’s claim that this whole marketing scam was an attempt to “bring value back to music.” (Choke. Sorry. I threw up a bit.) “We wanted to do something that was radical and the complete opposite of everything the music industry stands for,” said Azzougarth from his palace in Morocco.  Music, he said, “Feels like it’s something you play in the background while checking your Twitter feed and updating your Facebook status.”

He fixed that, for sure. Shkreli had an intern pick up the “album” and other bullshit included in the $2M purchase and, supposedly, he hasn’t listened to any of it yet. He’s bragged about it, but since it’s not really music, original, interesting, or even worth showing off to his prison buddies he hasn’t listened to it.

Way to go Wu-Tang Clan and Azzougarh! You’ve not only taken kid’s music to the heights of fine art (stored in a 1%’er’s closet where no one will ever have to suffer hearing or seeing it) you’ve saved the rest of us from having to listen to your godawful bullshit in bank elevators, on what passes for speakers on some saggy-pants kid’s cell phone or the bleed from his earbuds, or as the warm-up music pre-concert anywhere ever. Your “world-record breaking art project” has assumed a place slightly below every kid’s favorite display format; mom’s refrigerator. Your little piece of drivel is well-hidden in the asshole-of-the-year’s walk-in closet. Better yet, the FTC might end up owning all of Shkreli’s crap and, when that happens, they might just toss the whole mess into a dumpster.

Acoustic Resources–Room Modes

I hesitate to include the original Room Modes calculator in this series, since it absolutely requires Visual Basic to work properly. Since it works incredibly well and, supposedly, VB was cobbled back into Office 2010, I’ve added it to the list of my old MSCM class reference materials and tools.

For you less-technical Mac users and non-VB Windows-based Office suckers, I’ve linked the more remedial Linkwitz Lab MacRoomModes calculator. It works, but no nearly so easily, since you have to resort the data manually to get the sequences right after entering new room dimensions.

More computer OS-independent is the JBL/Infinity Harmon Room Mode Calculator. I have no idea where I found this and it seems to be missing in action on the current JBL website. The thing to keep in mind with this tool is that the first tab, “WAVES,” is where the room dimensions must be entered. The 2nd page’s fields are protected.

Acoustic Resources–New Gervais Tools

In his terrific book, Home Studio: Build It Like the Pros, Rod Gervais included links to a collection of very useful spreadsheet tools. I collected them into a single spreadsheet, labeled the tabs, and gave that to my MSCM students: New Gervais Tools. Rod provided us with calculators for Sabin RT60, panel absorber design, mass-law transmission loss, room modes, and quadratic diffusors.

 

There is a whole folder of acoustics tools, including this tool and many others, called "Acoustics." If any of that is useful to you, go for it.

Acoustics Resources–Sabin RT60 Calculator

When I taught “Acoustics” and, later, Room Acoustics at McNally Smith College of Music, many of my assignments directed my students to fool around with some spreadsheets I’d created to experiment with the effects of building materials and acoustics tactics. One of the most popular was an Excel file called “Sabin RT60 Calc.” I started work on this spreadsheet on the Office version that came about the time Office appeared on Windows for Workgroups v3.01, back in the late 80’s. It took a serious upgrade with Office XP and a bunch of additions in Office 2003, where its development stopped when Microsquash removed Visual Basic macros from Office. To use the whole "tool," you'll need to enable the macros when you open the file. Dropbox.com is a bit of a pain to use as a cloud resource, but at the top right of the screen you'll find a "Download" button. You can ignore the bit about creating a Dropbox account, if you like, and just download the file to your computer.

 

The first tab in the spreadsheet is the “Sabin Calculator.” However, the coolest thing (IMO) about this spreadsheet is the “Materials List” tab, which contains data for 280 different acoustic materials from really slick RPG specialty absorbers to empty theater seats and wall board. The idea is that you can cut-and-paste the “Material” through the “8k” data into the “Sabin Calculator” room surface fields and build a pretty detailed estimate of your proposed room’s reverberant characteristics. I’ve used it in all sorts of room designs and, outside of room mode problems, it is very accurate.

If your room is relatively dead (<1.0S) or small (<3,000 cubic feet), the next tab, “”Norris-Ering Calculator,” uses the “Sabin Calculator” data to more accurately estimate the reverberation. The flaw in the Norris-Ering formula is that it can not cope with absorbtivities >1.0, which isn’t often a problem but can rear its ugly head with some exceptional specific frequency absorbers.

The “Measured RT60” tab is a place where you can put three sets of measured RT60 test data in a spreadsheet for averaging.

 

Finally, the “Helmholtz Absorbers” tab contains a spreadsheet with calculators for two different sorts of Helmholtz absorber designs, perforated panels and tube traps.

 

Best of all, it’s free and easily modified. If you add anything cool to the spreadsheet, I’d appreciate it if you would send me an updated version and I’ll put it on the site and if you “sign” your update it will remain on the spreadsheet.

Bullshit Audio Terms

I’m not even close to being the first guy to gag on the bullshit marketing terms applied to non-existent audio equipment qualities.

Immersive: As in “I felt the music was all around me. . .” (Other bullshit terms used for this generally non-existent quality are “open,” and “air.”) Bob Carver made a nasty audiophile device called the “Time Lens,” back in the 80’s. If you like “immersive,” you’d love this thing. This awful device screwed with mid and upper-mids L/R phase relationships so severely it was hard to locate any sound sources in some rooms. Carver had some really fancy explanations for why sound seemed to be originating everywhere but from the speakers, but simple test equipment (an oscilloscope) demonstrated the fact that frequency-dependent phase relationships were being messed with and the result was semi-entertaining until it gave you a headache. A surround sound mix can be “immersive,” if the speakers and listener are properly placed. Otherwise, stereo means “solid” which will always put the listener in a position facing the sound sources and, at best, a good mix and proper playback system will provide left, right, close and distant perspective. And that’s it. If you hear signals behind you, your system or room acoustics are screwed up.

Warm: (aka “creamy,” silkiness,” and “natural”) Ideally, you might hope this means some mild addition of even harmonics—mostly 2nd—distortion contribution that might seem pleasant. Usually, what most people call “warm” is the result of slew or crossover distortion and is in no way pleasant if you are used to listening to low distortion reasonably accurate sound reproduction. Distortion-wise, we tend to “like” what we’re used to hearing and if we spend enough time with low fidelity equipment and recordings we’ll learn to love that. That is not, however, a good thing.

Presence: Three decades ago, I had the pleasure of getting to mess with a Mark Levinson stereo power amplifier when I was a design and test engineer at QSC Audio Products. The Levinson claim to fame from advertising and reviewer hype was “presence.” hen I put a Mark Levinson amp on the bench, what I found was a slowly rising upper-midrange shelf that peaked at about 3dB at 3kHz (along with the associated phase distortion created by this built-in EQ). Otherwise, there was nothing special about this overpriced equipment in any regard. It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t particularly stable when super-sonic signals or reactive loads were introduced, and it wasn’t particularly low distortion (IMD or THD wise). A few moments with some simple electronic test tools would have dispelled the magical claims from a power amplifier with a silly built-in EQ, but audiophile magazines shy away from test equipment and objective listening tests.

Wide Dynamic Range: Dynamic range is a fairly straight-forward specification in audio equipment: “the ratio between the largest and smallest values of a changeable quantity.” At the most impractical theoretical extreme, the human ear is capable of detecting 140dB of aural signals. That assumes 0dBSPL as the threshold of hearing, which quickly deteriorates from infanthood to adolescence with age and noise exposure to more practical values of 15 to 30dBSPL. This also assumes the maximum sound pressure a human can tolerate and discern is 140dBSPL; a dubious claim at best. 140dBSPL is, for example, typically described as a full-throttle jet engine at 50 meters. A typical gun muzzle blast generates an impulse sound pressure level of 140dbSPL or more and that exposure is commonly known to cause permanent hearing damage. Relative to 1V (0dbV), the theoretical perfect (but practical) unity gain amplifier will produce 123dB of dynamic range. This can be bumped up to about 129dB if the relative maximum is 10VRMS. So, regardless of the unrealizable human hearing maximums, 123-128dB of dynamic range is pretty much as good as it gets in the real world. This relatively straight-forward specification and its associated practical limits are regularly ignored in the bullshit marketing world where numbers as insanely silly as “200dB” are quoted regularly and stupidly. Keeping in mind the analog thermal noise threshold, it’s useful to remember that every combination of amplifiers that produces an exponent of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.) will reduce the combined dynamic range by 6dB. “Floating-point audio” or 64-bit or any other bullshit aside, physics and biology put an end to the realistic gains we’re going to get from playing with numbers.

This list of bullshit words is not by any means complete. I’ve left out color and taste sensory analogs, for example. A good rule to apply to modern ad-driven reviews and marketing claims is “any asshole can write marketing bullshit.” There is no one checking these claims with test equipment or even half-decent ears. So, if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

Technorati Tags: advertising,marketing,audio equipment,product reviews

Killing Music Loudly

I’ve owned a couple of recording studios, worked in a dozen studios owned by far richer people than me, designed a few studios, owned a sound company, designed and manufactured pro audio gear for six different companies (including my own, Wirebender Audio Systems). For 50-some years, amplification, microphones, and loudspeakers have been my life's major fascination and research subject. I taught recording studio design and acoustics, microphone theory and application, recording technology theory, and another half-dozen subjects at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul, MN.

 

With all of that behind me, I’m rarely encouraged by the sight of microphones and a sound system in a live performance venue. Almost all of my favorite live performances have been as close to sans-PA as possible. I used to play, and spectate, at a folk club in Dallas called “the Rubaiyat.” It was a 50-80 person club that served booze and bar food and hosted some of the best known folk acts of the 1960’s: Tom Rush, Tim Buckley, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Tom Paxton, Jim Croce, Arlo Guthrie, and lots of lesser-known talents including a spontaneous 2-15 member group we called “the Volunteer Jug Band.” There was no sound system of any sort in that club and the audience heard the performers just fine. I’ve seen a couple of shows at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis and those acts either didn’t use the house system at all or used it so carefully it was unnoticeable. In fact, that might be the key to running a great sound system.

 

The best known and most widely used live microphones in the world are a pair of coarse objects known as the Shure SM57 and SM58. The most critical quality these two blunt instruments bring to a stage is indestructability. The 58, for example, is known for its ability to be dropped from a 20’ stage to a concrete floor and not sound any worse than before the fall. Maybe the beginning to reinforcing sound rather than just making shit louder would be to get rid of the crappy tools and try doing the job well for a change?

On the Ground Video

More of a place marker than anything, but part off this video was recorded in our old Little Canada house.Through a weird combination of NPR and motorcycles, Andrew Melby included me on an email asking for an "abandoned house" that he could use as a backdrop for a Heireuspecs video. We were in the process of selling our home and moving to Red Wing, so while our place wasn't "abandoned," it wasn't being lived in at the time and I volunteered it for the project. 

Our house is scattered all over this video. In order of appearance: the guitar player, Josh Peterson, is situated in my wife's old art studio, in the basement. The keyboard player, DeVon "DVRG" Gray, is sitting in front of our bedroom closet. Bass player, Sean "Twinkie Jiggles" McPherson (a fellow McNally Smith College instructor, is standing in front of a paneled bookshelf I'd built in the living room. Lead rapper, Midway Felix, is sitting in that same bedroom closet and, then, magically moves into the living room for that knotty pine paneling look near our bay window and down to the basement (where my bass trap comes into even better view). The drummer, Peter Leggett, is sitting under the stairwell in the basement, where I had installed a really terrific 5.1 entertainment system. You can even see the edge of one of my built-in bass traps at the far left of the camera. 

I do not know the location of the decimated warehouse where the dancer is doing her bit, but that was NOT our home. ;-) I really don't where Chastity Brown is pictured singing her parts, either. 

For us, this was a really nice ending to our 18 years in that home. When we moved there, in 1997, the place was a wreak. The previous owner had pretty much trashed the property, inside and out, and we wanted to live by a "lake" so badly that we took on far more of a project than we'd imagined. Our grandson grew up in that house and along the shores of that lake. 2 1/2 dogs and a half-dozen cats spent their lives in that home. Dozens of wonderful friends enjoyed fireworks on Little Canada Days in our backyard, starting with our oldest daughter's wedding reception and continuing until the last August we lived there, 2013. The yard was home to parties and a graduation ceremony for a summer Production class at McNally Smith College when the school decided to be too cheap to bother with a graduation ceremony for the first time in its history. 

This was one of the official videos for Heiruspecs' album "Night Falls."

Creating Space

One of the many things recording engineers (a grossly abused and debased title if there ever was one) talk about is “creating air” in recordings, especially vocal recordings and double-specially background vocals. Most recordists (a more accurate and humble word for what we do in recording studios) use EQ, delays, and misunderstood plug-ins to create “air.” Most recordists understand that there are a limited number of dimensions we have to work with in reproducing a musical performance: left-right (or all the way around in surround), louder-softer, and higher-lower frequency spectrum. There are, however, at least two other possibilities: front-back and lower-higher. Of course, phase distortion provides even more space-creating possibilities, but they are unpredictable and, often, weird. These additional dimensions are only available if the recordist knows something about acoustics and psycho-acoustics.

In a possibly hopeless attempt to convince a friend that her vocal group could benefit from a little microphone application knowledge, I went looking for some artwork to help with my descriptions. Luckily, Sterling Audio had exactly what I needed. The illustration at right is one of the points I was trying to make. My friend’s group is a fairly large women’s vocal group and their bandleader semi-wisely selected a collection of six low cost large-element condenser microphones with which he lines up in even spacing across the stage, randomly distributing the microphones across 11 performers. The original intent was something like the above illustration. Obviously, 11 into 6 produces a significantly different dynamic, but the flawed concept is the same.

Performance-wise, the problem is even more dramatic. During a recent show, I solo’d up each vocal mic and discovered that the vocalists could be counted on one of two possibilities: 1) some singers naturally gravitated to grouping around a mic and singing “together” and 2) some naturally filtered to an abandoned mic and sang “solo.” If you’ve never sang in a group this might surprise you, but if you have this will be a no-brainer: the solo vocalists were consistently off-time and key and the together vocalists consistently delivered stronger, tighter, more in-key performances. So much so that I found myself naturally fading-out the solo mics and blending the group performers by ear, as I pulled down disagreeable faders and pulled up the performances that blended well.


Most recordists think the best way to record any signal sources more complicated than one voice is to distribute as many mics across the various sources as possible. Hell, hip-hoppers put two mics on one voice to optimize phase distortion and tonal weirdness. Here’s where I disagree with “common knowledge,” regarding the best way to record/reproduce/reinforce a group vocal. Sterling Audio’s article suggests, “There may not always be enough resources for separate microphones or recording tracks” as a reason for simplifying the number of microphones involved. I think the recordist better have a damn good reason for using more than a stereo pair in this kind of situation. “Depth of field” comes from the various time delays caused by the distance of the sound source from the mic. Vocal groups, horn players, and ensembles are often perfectly capable of figuring out where they should be, physically and sonically, in the mix and allowing them to perform for the microphone as a listener often produces incredible results.

The fascination modern recordists have for vintage recordings, oddly, doesn’t seem to extend to vintage recording techniques. Due to the lack of console and record media channels, the old-school guys were forced to learn something about microphone polar patterns, acoustics, and music. Today, “more is better” and too many recordings have the spacial characteristics of a pair of headphones.



POSTSCRIPT: A friend and ex-student, Steven Sullivan, took all of this to heart and produced a record limiting himself to no more than 8-tracks and very few effects. 

A Beginner's Guide to Self Immolation

is the record and it well-deserves your attention. Steven says the idea behind this record was, "The original idea for this album was to go back to basics and record things very simply. I had grown tired of modern recording and mixing techniques and decided to put some self-imposed limitations on the entire tracking and mixing of the album. It changed a little as the process went on, but basically I only used one mic, a long ribbon mic, through a 1950s design preamp and opto compressor, and that was it. So I'd go in the tracking room, point the mic at the piano, play through the tune, scoot the mic closer to the drums and play the drums, go sit down with the acoustic guitar and move the mic closer to it, stand up and sing, and it really allowed me to focus on the music instead of the technology. Part of my concept was that it would end up sounding kind of home made and low-fi since I'd limited myself so much, but to my total surprise it ended up being maybe the highest fidelity, most organic, best feeling record I've ever done."

Driving A Throwaway World

My hometown theater spent about $150,000 on audio gear this year. The theater was pretty well equipped before, with JBL MP418SP subs and JBL MP415 mains, a decent collection of QSC power amps, perfectly functional monitors and side-fills, and a 24-channel Yamaha analog mixer. Everything worked and it was paid for, something hardly anyone cares about in today’s jacked-up credit card and second-mortgage world. For the $150k, the town got a 48-channel DiGiCo SD-9 Surface & Two D-Rack. SD-9, Dynacord PWH subs and Dynacord Cobra tops, with Dynacord VL 262 under-balcony fills and front stage boxes, and a crap-load of EV power amps oddly located about 100’ from the speaker boxes (a whole ‘nother discussion). So far, pretty much no one substantial who has played the auditorium has wanted to mix on the DiGiCo. So, mostly the ~$40k spent on the mixer has been for some pretty undemanding shows with the toughest stuff being low-turnout local pop bands. As a local taxpayer, I’m less than impressed with the decision process the city used to spend my money.

At a completely different end of this discussion, though, I can’t see anyone having a good justification for spending more than $5-8k on a digital console of any sort. Using actual business rationale, the payback on digital gear has to be really short to make any sense at all. The Return on Investment (ROI) should be calculated to arrive in 3-5 years (max) because the equipment will be obsolete and unrepairable in about that time. If you don’t think that is either a reality or an important part of the decision-making process, you are part of the reason that we live in an unsustainable throwaway society.

On a much lower economic scale, I recently bought a pair of Red Wing boots. I live in Red Wing and some of my neighbors make these things, so I decided to spend big and buy local. The boots I bought, on the left, are pretty high priced but they are tough and well-built and super comfortable and (above all, for the investment price) are repairable. They can be resoled by pretty much any shoe repair shop anywhere in the country. I expect to be wearing these boots the day I die. On the other hand, Red Wing and pretty much everyone else imports boots from China and other low-labor-cost places like the boots on the right. They are, admittedly, a little cooler looking, cheaper, and just as tough and comfortable. I don’t know if those things are true, but I assume they are and don’t care. I can not convince myself to spend $200 on a pair of boots that I’ll wear out in a year and have to toss because the soles are not replaceable. Crazy, right? Probably.

Likewise, I can’t convince myself that there is any sonic or functional value to a $30k DiGiCo console over a $5k Midas or Yamaha or, even, a $2500 Presonus digital console. I sincerely do not believe there will be any noticeably audible difference in any of this equipment and I fully expect each of these products to be junk in well under a decade. Since you could buy 6 of the Midas/Yamaha consoles for the same money in that period, I’d think the decision is a no-brainer. Why it wasn’t for our city confuses me.

Quality in the Disposable World

I’m taking the Guitar Repair and Building Program at my local technical college. During a discussion with an instructor, we touched on a misconception about customers’ expectations and dissatisfaction inclinations. Like a lot of small business people, my instructor was under the delusion that customers will naturally complain if they are disappointed with service or product quality. Many larger companies are equally happy to pretend that they are getting 100% “compliance” from dissatisfied customers. The fact is that most customers simply log their dissatisfaction and tell themselves they will remember to never buy that particular company’s product or service again. Most executives are perfectly happy with that outcome. Sounds like a perfectly balanced system, right?

At the other end of this “system” is the wrong-headed conclusion most business people make about customer loyalty. I’ve heard more than a few executives claim that customers don’t shop out of loyalty any more. The problem isn’t with customers, it’s with businesses. Loyalty is not a one-way street: you have to give it to get it. Counter-intuitively, you have to work at giving it.

During my ten years with QSC Audio Products, we’d developed a pretty thorough system of handling customer complaints, tracking customer purchases, feeding back customer and product information to marketing, engineering, and manufacturing, and statistically analyzing our product warranty problems and costs. When I left that company, I’d been recruited by an MI conglomerate to turn their low end sound equipment division into something more resembling a competent manufacturer. During the initial talks, I’d been led to believe the company was considerably more substantial—organizationally and financially—than it actually was. So, that moment of employment was doomed from the beginning. If I wanted to fund a start-up with my own equipment I’d have started-up my own company.

Late in the 30 days I wasted in Indiana, I was asked by the company’s guitar division customer service manager to explain QSC’s quality management system.  About 1/10th of the way into the discussion, he interrupted me to say, “That’s all way too complicated and expensive.” He went on to say that the company shipped product with a known 50% defect rate, based off of the internal random inspection data from a few years back (Since they quit inspections after a few months, product quality had probably gotten worse.). From a suspected 50% defect rate, about 1% of the company’s customers complained, expecting some sort of warranty response. If they stonewalled that first complaint, about 1% of the first 1% would come back for more abuse. No special inspection was done for warranty replacement instruments, so at least 50% of the replacements were also defective out-of-the-box. According to the manager, that 1%-of-1% routine applied to warranty replacement complaints. So, while at QSC we were aiming for 6-sigma (99.99966% defect-free, but often struggling with three-sigma performance; 99.73% defect-free), his company could boast an uninformed-by-reality 99.99235% non-warranty-claim rate without spending a dime on quality control and while shipping product that most customers would call “junk.” Between that and a conversation with the CEO regarding the discrepancy between the information in my offer letter and reality, I quit a couple of days later.

Those statistics are from large-quantity production. Small quantity (boutique) production and service businesses don’t have access to actual numbers and formal inspection procedures and if they rely on customer complaints for feedback they are committing business suicide. In fact, the only way a small business can get any kind of information about customer satisfaction is to hunt for it. When someone cares enough about the product or its performance to complain, a conscious customer service tech should take that complaint seriously and to heart. The 1% of your customer base who care enough about your product or their expectations to complain are rare and valuable. If you choose to ignore them, don’t complain when your customer base makes its buying decisions solely on price and delivery. You have informed them through your actions that you don’t give a shit about their expectations and the result is that they won’t care about you or your company’s survival.