As any fan of the Food Network knows, a few scrapes from an orange peel adds zest to a dish. San Francisco Bay Area indie-popsters the Orange Peels, according to master chef Allen Clapp, reinvented themselves by inviting more cooks into the kitchen. The result, Sun Moon (Minty Fresh), is a fully collaborative and very tasty effort. Last summer, Peels bassist (and Clapp’s wife) Jill Pries asked the other two band members—guitarist John Moremen and drummer Gabriel Coan—to drop by their Sunnyvale, Calif., home/studio. “It didn’t mean I was happy about it,” says Clapp, grown used to demoing the band’s material before presenting it to the others. “I told her I didn’t have any songs ready.” Clapp will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Orange Peels feature.
Clapp: Above is a Radio Shack catalog from 1978. Amazing how much stereo prices have actually dropped since then given modern feature sets. Why is that? Hmmmm …
Why is it so hard to buy a good stereo these days? Over the past decade or so, a number of my friends and I have found ourselves in the position of needing to replace our stereo systems.
In the olden days, the remedy for this situation was to go to Radio Shack, the Good Guys or just about any department store or hi-fi shop and buy a replacement. No problem.
Over the past few years, it’s become nearly impossible to find a good stereo. The places that used to carry stereos now sell things that look a lot like good stereos on the surface. But what they’re really selling in these places are digitally processed, multi-channel home-theater systems.
This is not a stereo.
Don’t be fooled when the sales person describes how easy it is to achieve spectacular digital reproduction of your favorite music on this system. It is a lie, and really the thing they’re selling you is not designed to reproduce what we think of as music.
OK. That sounds pretty ridiculous, and some of it may not be completely true. However, the part that is true is that most big-box outlets, electronics stores and home-entertainment retailers won’t be able to sell you a simple, good sounding two-channel sound system.
The things they sell are designed to reproduce more than two channels of audio. They’re designed to play back sounds encoded into DVD and Blu-ray discs to recreate the sense of being in a movie theater, where there are speakers in front, to the sides and to the back of the viewer.
So, if your first order of business is to reproduce movie sound, you probably actually do want to buy one of these monstrosities, and hook up the required number of speakers (at least five) and be prepared to organize your entire living room around the placement of said speakers.
But if what you really long for is a way to listen to music and have it sound musical, a simpler approach must prevail.
Salespeople, technology magazines and the home-entertainment industry want to convince you, the listener, that you’re somehow not getting the whole experience of music unless you listen to it in surround sound. This is not true, for a billion reasons, some of which I’ll go into in a bit.
The first and most important reason is that this music was never recorded with the idea that it would be listened to in this way. Unless the disc you have is a DVD-audio disc mixed specially for multi-channel delivery, it wasn’t designed to come out of five speakers.
From the mid 1960s until now, almost all music has been mixed and mastered for two-channel audio for one simple reason: Most people have two functioning ears.
Now what about features that purport to deliver the sense of the music being performed in a real acoustic space—the rear channels certainly would help the listener feel like they were right there on stage with the band, right? This is B.S.
Unless you listen to music in an anechoic chamber, the room your speakers inhabit has an acoustic signature of its own. Speakers interact with the acoustics of the room. Some of the sound reaches the listener’s ears directly. Some of the sound the sound emanating from the speaker bounces off the ceiling, walls and floor before it reaches the listener’s ears.
That sound that bounces around in the room arrives at the listener’s ears after the direct sound. Recording engineers and acoustic experts call this “reflected” sound. If you were to listen to speakers in a room with no acoustic reverberance whatsoever, you would only experience the direct sound from the speaker. But because very few people have such a room (and because few people could tolerate being in such an isolated acoustic environment for very long without feeling extremely claustrophobic), most music interacts with the room acoustics to some extent.
This means your ears are actually getting sound from the front, back and sides of the room when you listen to just two speakers. It happens if you only listen to one speaker as well (back to mono!). The difference between this natural, reflected sound and the “Dolby Digital” five-channel sound of modern home-entertainment systems is that those reflections are created digitally. They’re phony.
Sure a lot of music is recorded in studios that use digital effects to create a sense of space in a mix, but at least those sounds are intentional elements of the recording process. Since the 1950s, “fake” means of creating reverb have been employed in recorded music—from spring and plate reverbs to tape echo and isolated reverb chambers. But when additional effects are added at the listening stage, you get further and further from what the music actually sounds like.
Now I realize most home entertainment systems have a mode to bypass all that digital five-channel crap and just give you the stereo signal, but I have to say I’ve been completely underwhelmed by their ability to do a good job of it. Whenever I have to listen to music on one of these things, it rarely sounds like the music is being fairly represented, and it never sounds fun.
Maybe the reason for this is that the system isn’t really designed to do a good job of it. Most of these systems have a lot of EQ going on to optimize the sound of the center channel, subwoofer and rear channel sound for movies. If you want to hear a really impressive explosion, definitely invest in a home-theater system!
But if you listen to the Kinks or Miles Davis or Ralph Vaughan Williams, chances are you’re gonna want to hear it in the way it was designed to be heard: in stereo (unless you have an early pressing, in which case, you want to hear it in mono).
So where do you turn these days to get a good stereo?
You’re probably going to have to find a hi-fi shop locally or go online. But here’s the good news. There are some great sounding stereos out there right now, and they’re not that expensive.
I recommend getting what’s called an integrated amplifier. It’s different than your parents’ old “receiver” because it doesn’t have an AM/’FM tuner built in. Simply put, it’s an amplifier for your speakers and headphones that has a number of inputs for things like a turntable, mp3 player, satellite TV or whatever you decide to hook up to it.
Manufacturers such as Rotel, Marantz, NAD and a host of others have made these things since the 1970s, and they’ve continued to improve them ever since. There are newcomers in the market that offer hi-fi options for a little more dough, and you might want to look into manufacturers who make integrated amps that feature built-in digital-to-analog converters to interface more gracefully with your digital gear (many current model TVs for instance, only have an optical digital output). Or you could purchase a stand-alone digital-to-analog converter (most people call them a DAC).
I’ll just say that one of the reasons people seem to prefer analog sound sources to digital is because cruddy converters on the listening end usually end up making things like mp3s and CDs sound worse than they should (there are converters built into iPods, iPhones, CD players, Home Entertainment Systems … you name it—if the source is digital, it has to be converted to analog in order to be heard).
Build your system around one of these and you won’t be disappointed. Of course, you’ll need some nice speakers, too! I love speakers and own many, many pairs. They’re really cool, and basically haven’t changed much since their invention in the early 20th century. (See earlier post about Altec 604Bs.)
For now, just try to remember that music should be fun! Let’s try and keep it that way.
Video after the jump.
