High Fidelity and Organs

Joe, a friend of mine in his 20's, who knows all about computers especially multi-media, asked me "what is hi-fi?". I have other friends who set their Apple Mac on the counter to play music whilst they are working - playing music from unbelievably tinny speakers so that all you are getting is stuff between about 1kHz and 2kHz.  An iPod (which equates to all that is music for many folk), even in a dock, emits audio so horrible that I find it hard to listen to at all. MP3, clever though it is, has become ubiquitous - who now appreciates that there was (better) quality before MP3? Or that audio is an area where technology is actually going backwards?

In its hey day hi-fi was a cult as aptly portrayed by Flanders and Swann. It's followers believed (and still do) that gold plated connectors, oxygen free copper wire, and valves (vacuum tubes) improved fidelity, and poured scorn on CD's and anything digital.

Not that there isn't some truth here. One of the many things I took to pieces in my youth contained a valve audio amplifier which I noted for its quality. It was, of course, valve - but in particular the output stage was a balanced pair of pentodes, driven from a phase-splitting transformer. Because a balanced arrangement like this tends to cancel out the more objectionable 3rd harmonic distortion, added to the "soft" sound of valves (which in objective terms is due to the gradual limiting when overdriven, as opposed to semiconductors which suddenly overload), the sound was very good. A pity I no longer have that amplifier.

And so it was with pleasure that I read the interview with Bob Stuart of Meridian in E&T July 2012.  Here are some quotes. "One of the ironies of the digital age is that while we're listening to more and more music, we're listening to it on worse and worse playback systems.  The biggest threat to the success of audio companies is that Apple has become the world's biggest audio company."  "Music is one of the great social experiences, especially for the young, but they're listening to it on 1" speakers on their iPod dock... and these people are growing up thinking that this is what music sounds like." and "How does Stuart feel when a footballer pays £35,000 for a pair of his DSP8000 speakers only to plug his iPod into it?".

Console of the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ, Atlanta

Sadly I am unlikely ever to have £35,000 to throw around, and in any case my hearing is not so good now - reduced high frequency response and a bit of tinnitus. But I can still feel the difference between live sound and canned sound. Anyone who has heard the majesty of a large organ will appreciate that this experience is hard to reproduce on loudspeakers. Only two organs in the world (in Atlanta and Sydney) have 64' pipes - that corresponds to a fundamental vibration of 8Hz which is below the threshold of hearing: you feel rather more than hear the sound - you feel it in your belly.  Not that I have experienced the 64' sound, but I have experienced and loved 32'. Try a live concert of Saint-Saëns' Organ symphony. The Atlanta organ also is the only one with pipes working from 100" of pressure, resulting in a very loud sound. Indeed one could be forgiven for imagining that the designers were doing that, oh so American, thing of trying to be bigger, louder, longer and stronger just for the sake of being better than anyone else in the world.

Bruckner's organ in St. Florian's Priory

Whilst I am talking of organs (which I have noted people either love or hate with a vengeance) I can hardly omit reference to my namesake's organ. And whilst talking of keyboard instruments, the common piano is also remarkably hard to reproduce faithfully, this time due to its sudden transients and large dynamic range.  Here's another thing that has been dumbed down in modern audio equipment. The dynamic range of the human ear is immense, perhaps as much as 130dB. A good set of ears (mine sadly are no longer that good) can hear (in a suitably quite room) the Brownian motion of molecules of air hitting the pinna. No electronics that I have ever heard of, much less heard, even approaches this. In contrast popular music is actually designed to use a very limited dynamic range (put otherwise it is simply loud all the time) because that is "what people want" or more to the point it is "what people want people to want" because it makes the job of designing and marketing iPods and the like so much easier and cheaper. Classical music generally has a much greater dynamic range, but it is often artificially reduced when recorded or broadcast otherwise you would never be able to listen to it with ambient noise around (like in a car).

I still look forward to that day when audio reproduction can do justice to both organ (all 64' of, please) and piano. I hope technology can do me the honour before the capability of my ears to hear it fades altogether.