One of the first CD player reviews
Audiophile wank has spewed from the mouths of reviewers for many years (I’d love to see just how far back this goes — did the press ever talk about the luscious high-end on the first wax cylinders?). For my first exhibit I present this review of the first Sony CD player, from 1983. IN DIGITAL!
Featuring all of your favorite vague adjectives:
… the sound was so opulently gorgeous it almost defied belief! It was a total incarnation of the perfectionist’s wildest dreams: rich, velvety, airy, awesome, liquid, yet incredibly detailed. There were none of the analog disc’s problems. No marginal mistracking, no subtle VTA-error distortions, no disc-resonance smearing, no feedback-induced low-end boom or mud, no ticks or pops or pressing grumbles even at the highest listening levels. And there was no analog-tape flutter or modulation noise or transient-rounding or print-through or hiss.
I’d love a history of these reviews for each new audio technology as it came out.
Fluted Vocals
Here’s what you do if your flute playing skills exceed your vocal ones:
(For those who don’t spend hours of their leisure time shifting around ones and zeros, this chick is supposed to be singing along to the music. The game processes the notes being sung and gives you points on how well you match the melody. However, the software doesn’t care about timbre or anything fancy, it’s just looking for pitch, so really you can use anything that can produce a tone. Like a flute.)
I tried this once by whistling. It turns out I’m not so hot at holding whistled pitches either.
CDs: in memoriam
There are a few things I miss about CDs.
They started up straight away. Just push play. It was just one mechanical action between you and the music, nothing to boot up and double-click on. It was much less of a physical divide when there is only a split second action required between you thinking “I want to hear this music”, and that music actually starting. With MP3s it’s a much more elaborate protocol of clicks, responses, re-clicks and confirmations. Before you could just get it on with the music, now you have to take it out to a movie and dinner first.
Of course, you now inevitably have a much larger library of music at your mousetips, but you have to go through the booting up ritual even just to see that selection of songs. If, after browsing by mouse through the acres of uncovered albums you decide that in fact nothing suits your mood right now and you’ll listen to chattering rain on the windows instead, it’s too late. You’ve already committed yourself to booting up the computer. There’s this extra task “starting up the computer” which has incised itself into the middle of the music, it’s now a three part process.
But it’s not like that’s a majorly taxing physical task. In terms of purely calorific value, pressing your Dell’s power-on button is worth about negative one-quarter of one M&M. But that’s not the point. It’s the time taken, the wait for the music library to appear on the screen, the worry that the battery might run out before the peasant’s in Beethoven’s 6th get back to their partying. Every little disconnect adds up.
What I want is a hefty leatherbound catalog of my music. Every beefsteak-thick page has the album art, liner notes and track list on it. If I touch the page with my palm my computer instantly starts to play the selected piece. Of course, the major problem would be how the hell to add extra pages to the thing. It’s totally cheating if this all done on a single electronic screen like an iPod. I want physical, tactile interactions. I want to flip pages. I want to be able to measure the size of the library by the heft of the book in my hands — and until we can electronically create mass, which is never — that’s not gonna happen.
I strongly feel that people want music to retain some physicalness, but in an age of MP3s I’m not sure how we do that.
For now, I’ll click folders, and be thankful for the gigabytes of music. I don’t miss CDs enough to retreat back to them.
Fairly Hot Friday Linkage
Instrumental edition. To keep the eye you aren’t pretending to do work with entertained we have for your internetting pleasure….
- The BeoTime alarm clock — homing in like a laser-sighted jaguar on that group of people whose love for woodwinds is only slightly surpassed by the huge piles of money lying around their castle. Yours for a tad under four-hundred smackaroos.
- A woodier woodwind – Like the arboreal George Mallory, this guy had an inextinguishable urge to get all homnidy with what nature had provided. Unlike Mallory this meant wiring up a tree in his backyard and then bowing the crap out of it.
- Playing the black keys – If, like the NYPD, you are finding it hard to relinquish the mechanical ball of joy which is your typewriter AND your wax-cylinder gramophone is currently in the shop for repairs then this musical typewriter might be just what the old-timey doctor ordered. Then again, if you enjoy your music to actually be composed and, you know, pleasurable perhaps it’s better to pass.
Have a good weekend! I have not one, not three, but TWO work barbeques to attend over the next two days — although surprise suprise, now that it’s Friday the weather is switching from as sunny to possible to dribbling water. Oh dear.
Wireless Access
Most of today was spent trying — and failing — to persuade DNA to be stickier than it wishes. The rest of the day was spent on a personally more interesting, but equally frustrating project. I’m converting my old desktop into a media-serving, AVI playing, MP3 streaming beast. This makes inordinately huge amounts of sense because (a) I listen to all my music via MP3s, (2) I only really use my laptop, which has crappy sound, and (iii) I have a big old, shiny old, fairly new old widescreen monitor just BEGGING to display Hulu.
This project results in gallons of wire being chucked around the room, hard disks being ripped out, stuck back in, pulled out again, cursed at. It also results in the largest dilemma currently known to Ben-kind: what do I do about my radio? Do I get rid of it and wire everything through the computer instead?
No. I don’t want to get rid of my radio. I love my radio, despite its single 3.5mm input. Even if I had the most amazing freakin’ internettified electronic orgy of a media server imaginable, I would still want it. All the digital satellite stations in (or hovering above) the world can’t replace the warm-blanket reassurance of the local station identification monologues. It feels like someone is keeping an eye on the empty corridors of the county while I am falling asleep.
I think what the cool rich kids do is buy a huge fancy schmancy receiver type dealie, with fifty thousand audio inputs on the back. However, since I’m a destitute graduate student I’ll stick with my cute little 1-input JVC jobbie, and try to resolve the wiring issues with careful thought (and also maybe duct tape and solder).
Hmmm. I guess that wasn’t really much of a dilemma after all.