Spikes In The Living Room

(Addendum: I had to change the title of this post. There was so much spam on this particular post that I could almost hear pigs squealing in my sleep. Enjoy, thanks for reading).



Well, there it is, the elephant in the room as the saying goes. I guess that as the concept of home evolved over millennia, the inevitable arguments that accompanied it probably go back just as far.

Maybe Ramses wanted to build all those pyramids right there in the living room of the temple. Mrs. Ramses had something to say about it and Ramses and his buddies decided to build the things in the backyard ( likely after drinking copious quantities of fermented locust juice, or whatever they drank to get hammered in those ancient times).

These days, audiophiles and non-audiophiles alike struggle with speaker placement and diametrically opposed design elements. There are also considerations for people who don't own their own homes and rent apartments. To this day, my old landlord must be perplexed about those hundreds of pinholes in the hardwood floor. He'll never in a hundred years figure out that they were caused by speaker spikes and all those speakers that I moved around as I experimented with the proper speaker position looking for that perfect sound.

Judging by the lout that he sent over to fix my heater who proceed to attempt  manhandling my kinda freakin' expensive Linn Keilidh with beautiful cherry finish, he knew nothing about speakers ( nor spikes for that matter).

My current landlord hasn't noticed the Hubbell hospital grade duplex plug that I installed. I know what I'm doing and nobody got electrocuted when I swapped out the outlets, but he might have wondered why all the clocks were flashing as I shut all the breakers on and off one by one. So maybe your significant other doesn't like hundreds of little holes in the hardwood floor or bright red electrical outlets.

I can't really say for certain when audio started competing with furniture and when the ensuing domestic arguments started. Maybe we as audiophiles, and the industry as a whole, did it to ourselves. I remember reading an article in Stereophile years ago that touched upon this subject. It was a good article, but wasn't able to explain why high end audio is such a dude-centric endeavor.

Maybe one can simply attribute it to dude genetics. It is the same genetics that compel dudes to do stuff on a primal level. The irresistible urge to jam a Chevy small block into a lawnmower and race it, hook up batteries to automobile air bags and revel in the mayhem or ride greased pigs at the local rodeo.

For a few years in a row, I worked for Linn at a fairly large high end audio show. Some of you might have attended such shows. They are held in hotels and each manufacturer or retailer is set up in a room where all the ugly hotel furniture has been cleared out. There are usually 10 or more floors solely dedicated to the audio show. That's a lot of of rooms and a lot of equipment. This particular show would get upwards of 15.000 guests over the weekend when it was held. You guessed it; all dudes. Once in a while I would get a glimpse of a guy dragging his poor girlfriend by the hand. The rolling of eyes and accompanying sighs of exasperation said it all; " not another room".

Everybody loves music of one kind another, so it's not the music that is the issue,  it's equipment used to reproduce it. As a side note; I won't denigrate musical tastes, but suffice it to say that when I worked at those audio shows, I heard some mighty strange music. I always had a Buck Owens CD on hand when I would get fed up and it was time to clear the room, but that's an entirely different post. It's just that the love of the equipment to playback said music is squarely in the domain of dudes. These are just the observations that I've made over the years.

In the 50's equipment was large and unwieldy, but some of it had style. Judging by shows like Mad Men, everyone was probably too hammered to know the difference. Be that as it may, there was some nice looking equipment in the formative years of audio. The JBL Paragon pictured below is a prime example. Keep in mind that it a speaker only. No guts or electronics, just a speaker. Who knows what domestic situations arose in regards to this behemoth, but it had a certain amount style.

Also stirs Martinis

Everything was big in the fifties. Cars were the size of subway cars and pants had more fabric than the average two-person tent. It stands to reason that audio equipment was big. Strangely enough it is still big. One can have an entire computer in one's pocket or happily purchase a 500 square foot condo, but the laws of physics haven't changed. Big sound equals big air, so chances are dudes will want big speakers. Let's say you were to come home with a pair of Avant Garde horns, chances are there will be some explaining to do. Lots of explaining. Before the power is even turned on.

I will kill you in your sleep

It's an inherent dude thing. When I would bring couples into a sound room at the shop I worked at to show the equipment or set up a demo, there were two distinct reactions. As the husband would look at the amplifiers the size of MIG welders, towering speakers and bright blue speaker cables the approximate diameter of a sewer pipe, an involuntary sound would escape his lips," Cooo-oool!". The wife not so much. Whether vocalized or tacitly implied by body language, the meaning was crystal clear; " You're not putting THAT in my living room."  ( in all honesty, stellar sounding as they were, Dunlevy SC-IV speakers were butt-ugly).

Honey, get some pork chops, the dog is scared

A lot manufactures figured this out eventually and a many speakers were finely crafted with the highest quality wood veneers, so well-made in fact that they could rival even the nicest Italian furniture.  I think that therein lies the inherent perception of audio components. Some people perceive them as pieces of high performance equipment ( to be proudly and prominently displayed of course) others perceive these as utilitarian pieces of furniture, Furniture that should at least try to blend in with the rest of the furniture and the drapes. I acquiesce to the last point as I can see why somebody whose spent a considerable amount of time and money on decor would desire that. Ugly is in the eye of the beholder however, and speaking for myself , I kinda drool when I see big fat AC cables.

$10, 999, not kidding. Shut up.

I have had to come up with many creative solutions over the years to help customers solve their aesthetic differences. One couple had an exceptionally beautiful home, but the Krell Master Reference amplifiers did not match the design parameters of the home ( both the architect and the wife couldn't get past having immense black boxes on casters in the living room). A custom enclosure was designed in the basement and custom wiring was made to accommodate this set up. The ventilation wasn't great and I suspect that to this day there are the remains of many crispy mice in that dungeon-like enclave.

A dude once showed up and expressed interest in some Paradigm speakers. After a short demo, he asked if they would sound good in a closet with louvered doors. I wasn't sure if I had heard him correctly and asked him to repeat the question. When I asked the the inevitable question of why, he simply stated that his wife did not want to see the speakers. At all.

This guy was attempting to circumvent the laws of physics in order to keep his wife happy, and I tried my best to be diplomatic about the whole inane situation. I refused to sell him any speakers until he had the whole thing sorted out. I just couldn't take this guy's money, also I wasn't keen on selling him Paradigms period. I wasn't a fan of that brand's Monitor series, and even though I am a staunch advocate of Canadian brands, and I secretly thought that they might actually sound better in a closet.

At the same shop, I once sold a real nice Krell/Totem set up to an interesting couple who shared the same taste in music, among other things. A few years later, as I was crossing the street, I heard a car honking at me. It was the husband of the aforementioned couple and he insisted that I come over for dinner at some point in the near future. They simply wanted to express their gratitude because they loved the audio system that I had sold them. They had set it up properly and thoroughly enjoyed countless hours of listening to music, going so far telling me that I had somehow increased their quality of life. It felt good to be appreciated, as well as being secure in the knowledge that I had helped out some nice folks. Also, that some of the best chocolate cake that I ever had, I think I ate half of the entire thing.

When all is said and done, I guess things will always remain the same. Sure, some dudes will appreciate a nice B&B Italia custom sofa in the living room, and the very same dudes will see absolutely nothing wrong with rebuilding their vintage BSA motorcycle in the very same living room. Women will continue to be exasperated and wonder if we'll ever grow up ( still not sure about the latter). People will continue to work out their differences, as they have always done, but if you have great sounding music in the background, it will make for a much more civilized discourse. If you happen to be one of those guys that is fortunate enough to have a man cave in which to set up your  audio system, I'm coming over. And I'm bringing some Buck Owens CD's.

Let's Get Juiced.

Oh that crazy electricity. Ever since Tesla and Edison duked it out in the AC/DC wars, electricity has fascinated us and caused many a kid to blow up toasters with a fork.

Tesla might have been, shall we say, eccentric, but not quite as nutso as Edison who electrocuted an elephant to show the dangers of AC electricity. His DC system, of course, was bogus because we all know that DC voltage can't be transmitted very far.

Don't misconstrue DC as being innocuous however. I know all too well what can happen with DC voltage, capacitors and screwdrivers. I don't recommend this, but it can be an interesting experiment to short out a very large capacitor with a screwdriver or other metal objects.  Capacitors store juice for a while and react quite violently when shorted out. Fun, but dangerous.

Years later, electricity continues to be misunderstood. In Canada a lot of out power requirements are met via massive hydro electric projects. So much so in fact that we sell the surplus to New York State in some instances. Sorry Big Apple, but a lot of your juice is from Quebec. If you don't believe me, and you live in NYC or upstate New York, all you have to do is stick your tongue in a socket; you will definitely get a slight maple syrup aftertaste. I once had to explain to a very pretty gal in New York city that hydro electric power does not mean that water is coursing through the wires behind the wall. She never quite believed me, but it's a long story.

I have been zapped more than a few times in my life. Milwaukee used to make metal-bodied drills. They had tendency to short out and send some nice, clean 110 volts AC right through your guts. You didn't even have to hold the tool, holding a metal step ladder for someone using that drill was enough to transmit that juice.

When I was 10 or 11 years a friend of mine decided to have some fun at my expense. It took me a few years to realize this. He told me that if I hooked up a desk lamp in parallel to a speaker output of my amplifier that it would act like a light organ and pulse to the music. It sounded like a cool idea. What actually happened was a very loud bang and a shower of blue sparks. In that brief moment, I learned a about electricity and people being assholes and I was relegated to listening to music in mono for several years until I was able to afford a proper amplifier.

North America uses 110 V Ac at 60 Hz and I'm not sure why. Maybe to be different, probably for the same reason we started driving cars on the right side of the road . When British Columbia was founded, we still drove on the left, but it scared horses or something about avoiding piles of their poop, or something, so we switched. Maybe something similar happened when the big wigs sporting huge sideburns decided on 110V.

Europe is on a 220 V 50 Hz system. This explains the little voltage dials on the back of amplifiers and why your electric shaver blows up when you are on vacation. This also explains why British speaker manufacturers had to change their speaker connections. It seems that British mains plugs and dual banana plugs were the same size. You know at least two or three dudes blew up speakers with was the catalyst to necessitate this change. Same reason a warning is included on the packaging of an iPod Nano stating " do not eat iPod".

Years ago, George Tice understood the vagaries of AC power and its direct effect on the performance of audio components. Those massive Tice Titan power conditioning systems became a benchmark in high end audio. Companies like Blue Circle and Shunyata have upheld this tradition and a good power conditioning is the essential part of a high end system. Except for people who consider it to be some some sort of audio voodoo, and that's when the arguments start.

I won't even think about getting roped into arguments about whether or not the the machine shop down the road is causing weirdness in Beethoven's 5th symphony, or your house being a Faraday cage or maybe an illicit hydroponic agricultural facility in that run down house across the street.

Companies like Linn, Krell and Bryston were vehemently opposed to power conditioning or even upgrading AC cables ( strangely enough, Bryston now makes their own power conditioner).

My old Linn Aktiv LK-85 amplifiers had massive toroidal transformers and, against Linn's better judgment, I plugged them into a power conditioner. They benefited greatly resulting in more detail and blacker blacks in the background. When Linn made the jump to Slimline switching power supplies,  I still wasn't sure if I preferred the sound to good old transformers, but I eventually found that they also benefited from power conditioning.

Also that big-ass utility company that would sell juice to New York was notorious for frequent power failures. The technicians enjoyed sending a surge of voltage through the lines when replacing transformers. Maybe they did it specifically to make me angry. Paranoia aside, I had a fried preamp on my hands after one their blackout parties. Lucky for me Linn has some of the best service around and they repaired it for me ( way past the warranty period). No amount of angry letters to the utility company would make them buy me a new preamp, so that avenue was futile ( that might make them send even higher voltages to apartment).

This close encounter with large amounts of electricity also emphasized the need for good surge suppression and spike protection as well as power conditioning. A good power conditioner will take care of this as well.

I recently attended a Nordost cable demo at a friend's high end audio shop. Only an audiophile would spend a sunny Saturday afternoon cooped up in a darkened sound room doing A/B comparisons with cables. The Nordost Rep was knowledgeable, and all techno-babble aside, I was astounded at the audible differences that could be heard by plugging a high end AC cable. The fact that one cable cost more than a Toyota Yaris is irrelevant.

I live in a rental apartment that suits my needs, but more importantly suits my audio system. The electrical box is located in a little room where the washer and dryer are. It is a frightening rat's nest of wires that looks like it might have been hooked up by monkeys. If I so much as plug in my electric potato peeler ( yes, I'm that lazy) the lights flicker.

I recently found a used Tice power conditioner in a shop that mainly sells turntables to clueless hipsters. It had been sitting for a while, and owing to the obscure use of this mysterious black box, it was difficult to sell. I got it for a decent price, even though I had to run a gauntlet of hipsters and shitty Kenwood turntables.

When I got everything wired up, the end result was astonishing. Black, velvety backgrounds and loads of detail. I needed a few more items to complete the upgrade so I went to an industrial electrical supplier. I am always met by blank stares at these places when I ask for  "Hospital Grade " plugs. I found a technician who knew what I was talking about, but was suspicious as to why I specifically wanted hospital grade. Not like I was asking for large balls of Uranium.

 I replaced the duplex outlet with a hospital grade and the landlord is none the the wiser. The upgrade was complete and it gave me immense satisfaction to stare at the big black power conditioner and the cherry-red hospital grade plug.

I had an old Adcom line conditioner kicking around and I installed a hospital grade AC plug on that. I run my lamp and my clock radio on that unit. It's not like my clock radio is now keeping time as if linked to the vibrations of Cesium atom, I just think it's cool and I haven't been late for work yet. I also made sure I shut off all the breakers before I jammed a screw diver into the wall. I've been juiced enough times to know better.

Slings and Arrows Of Outrageous Audio.

It might seem trite to quote Shakespeare, but many of his quotes have found their way into the daily vernacular and parlance of the common man. His incomprehensible plays written in archaic English were foisted upon me against my will in high school. Like all the algebraic formulas that I had to learn by rote , the still developing mind of a high school student knew that this would prove to be absolutely useless in adult life.

A lot of people quote Shakespeare without knowing the origin or even the meaning of what they are saying. This leads me to believe that had ol' Will had been born in modern times, he would be a audio critic at The Absolute Sound or something. If he had been born in Canada, he would be a Tory politician or maybe a an artist designing our funny-looking money.

Don't get me wrong, I am in no way criticizing Shakespeare, after all his works have endured for centuries. My electronics instructor, for instance, was way more full of shit, preferring to ramble on about his TRS-80 computer and obsolete ham radio. Perhaps his Korean war flashbacks made him a little nutso, and this might help explain why I still don't know anything about how to fix your TV. I did make it a point however to memorize Ohm's law. This would prove useful in later life.

As a young audiophile I hadn't yet acquired a lot of common sense and was easily impressionable. I would listen to a lot of nonsense from older audiophiles. It took several years, but it eventually dawned on me that things are not always what they seem. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the laws of physics in high school, eh ?

The early days of audio were a different time. Everything was stuck in the analog domain and we took manufacturers  at their word. Even the audio gurus at the local audio shop did not have all the answers. That is probably because we didn't have the questions yet.

I'm sure that there are many among us who are still kicking themselves for not figuring out that good quality interconnects and engineered speaker cables would be the actual arteries of a quality sound system. Everyone was using plain old lamp cord back then with nary a second thought. Many of us still think that we could be millionaires had we figured this out early on. Monster cable did, but the extremely low capacitance of their early speaker cables would gleefully blow up amplifiers without warning. Their legacy lives on at Best Buy who sell their overpriced "power conditioners" that also have a tendency to blow up. Plus ca change....

We would use the crappy interconnects that came in the box with the components. We used to call them patch cables back then, and it was a given that they would soon fail. The cheap molded plastic would break and the connection severed, or even more frustrating, become intermittent. I am still astonished that these pieces of junk are still being manufactured today. Even the crackheads who steal extension cords from your backyard for the scrap copper don't want these ubiquitous pieces of red and white shite.

Useful for spinning around to amuse your dog

 Then, as now, there were many companies who were more than willing to prey on the naivete of burgeoning audiophiles. There were some mighty dumb tweaks back then, and they all hooked up into the tape monitor loop. DBX made a line of expander/compressors. These black boxes purported to increase the dynamic range of an audio system. What they did is induce a kind breathing into the sound, as if your amplifier had asthma and was hooked up to a little respirator. These units were not cheap either.

My all time favorite however was the outboard reverb unit made by (who else) Sansui. The San-sewage gizmo was also meant to be hooked up in your tape loop. It had a large spring inside and the audio signal would literally pass through the spring.  You can't make this stuff up. My buddy had one and we spend countless hours amusing ourselves by hitting the top of the box with our fist and listen to the resulting boing-oing sound coming out of the speakers. It was hilarious. What wasn't hilarious was that it was marketed as a serious audio device and was quite expensive.

Some early car radios had also experimented with this technology where a spring was attached to the speakers. Every time the car would hit a bump, that hilarious boinging sound would be produced. It was probably invented by the same geniuses that gave us the under-dash 45 RPM record player. Cars built like tanks, riding on bias-ply tires and not equipped with air bags probably benefited from not have jarring sonic distractions. One was busy enough looking for the ashtray and lighter. Ah, the good ole days.

Who was smoking what down at Sansui headquarters?

The years went by and I became an avid reader of Stereophile magazine. I also drank a lot of their kool-aid. As mentioned in a previous post, it took a while for my friend at the Linn audio shop to convert me to Linnism. He let me spin my wheels while happily selling me used non-Linn components.

It was already a given in audio circles that the Linn LP-12 was the benchmark for turntables. Linn turntables would work best on a piece of furniture that did not store low frequency energy ( ie massive and heavy) and they worked even better if they were wall mounted.

It was also rumoured that Ivor Tiefenbrun invented the speaker spike, but I have yet to conform this as most search engines are frustratingly opaque and seem most efficient at finding bullshit.

If you will allow me to go on a tangent, I just wanted to point out that after reviewing my stats, it seems that the vast majority of readers here are Linn owners, so I might be preaching to the choir in many instances. That suits me fine, it's like talking about cars with car guys, you are speaking the same Linn-go ( pardon the pun, I couldn't resist). Or like two-wheeled road warriors comparing Lycra outfits and how they pertain to butt-hurt all the while convinced that they could do the Tour de France tomorrow....er.... scratch that one and forgive me for leaving images of men in spandex etched into your brain.

When I first started writing this blog, I began in my own backyard but soon found out that we Canadians are an angry bunch. We seem to have a reputation for being polite. While we do enjoy our donuts and our Ski-Doos, some Canadians seem liked they might have a had an encounter with an angry moose ( it actually does happen).

I posted this blog into the forums of a Canadian used audio site that rhymes with Shmuck Audio Tart, and was soon besieged with angry comments. None more so than by the moderators themselves.  There were a few people who scoffed at my lowly LP-12, but these angry moderators ( don't they have a job or something?)  were threatening me with " sanctions". I wonder what they meant, Perhaps they were going to contact Tim Horton's and have me banned for life and leave me unable to ever purchase donuts ever again.

Angry moose aside, the Brotherhood of the Linn understands one thing; Linn components do not like tweaks. I eventually accepted this and life has been easier, and I don't have to worry about charlatans anymore.

Getting back to the audio kool-aid, as I said my buddy at the Linn shop just let me do my thing, and he knew full well that I would eventually come around. He sold me all kinds off oddball CD players. I had a California Audio Labs which I soon traded in for a Sugden.

I bought all manner of gizmos as dictated by the writers at Stereophile. I purchased a Theta Time Linque Conditioner, which was supposed to re-clock the digital stream and eliminate jitter. I bought a Townshend Audio Seismic sink (it actually made the Sugden sound a little better)

One of the aspects of audio that seemed to get a lot press was anti-vibration. This makes sense to a certain extent, so I eagerly read about cones and spikes. I also the perused the design parameters of extremely expensive audio racks, that claimed to have vibration elimination properties and tune components.

I already knew how to weld and had access to a metal shop. It wasn't so much cheapness on my part as the fact that I knew I could build my own audio rack . I thought that I could make it sturdier and I could also make it custom fit the components that I had. I spent several years making many different racks. I experimented with custom machined cones, included spike-supported shelves, filled hollow spaces with sand and even tried suspending shelves from stainless steel cables. Some of the racks looked really cool, some ended up in the alley from where the junk pickers in beat up GM pick up trucks would grab them.

In the long run, other than the decorative appeal, I could not hear any discernible differences in sound in these racks. I didn't know if the end result was better or worse, and with all that futile welding, I probably wasted enough Argon gas to fill the Hindenburg. All this tweaking was starting to stress me out.

I did make some custom furniture pieces for my friend's audio shop. They were purely store fixtures and aesthetics were the main concern. I soon realized that I could put my fabrication skills to good use and maybe indulge in the time-honored tradition of bartering. It seemed more productive than making audio racks for myself and either throw them out or re-fabricate them into BBQ stands.

After some wheeling and dealing and equipment trade-ins, I eventually took my friend's advice and made the jump to an all-Linn sound system ( as mentioned in a previous post).

I set up all the gear on my overly complicated audio stands. It sounded great of course, but I still wasn't at ease. I still had a bad case of tweakophilia and maybe a touch of what the writers at Stereophile so aptly described as audiophilia nervosa.. Like in that Little Willie John song I'm Shakin' where he shouts "I'm nervous!" ( hey you kids, Jack White's I'm Shakin' is a cover of a very old song, and get off my lawn while we're at it).

My Linn mentor was still admonishing me and told me to stop messin' around and not worry so much. I couldn't leave well enough alone, but he was soon to be proven right.

The first thing I did was put the Linn Genki CD player on the Townshend Audio Seismic Sink. I thought that maybe my polarity was reversed or maybe I had eaten some bad cheese and was hallucinating. I checked the cheese for greenies and double checked all my connections. All good. I removed the Seismic Sink and the difference was palpable. That fairly expensive gizmo made my CD player sound worse. Much worse. I eventually sold it to some uber-tweeker who would go on techno-rants about Black Gate capacitors or something every time he saw me at the coffee shop.

I still had some MIT speaker cables hanging around, some of you might remember those, they had a big mystery box glued onto the wire in series . To this day I don't know what was inside those boxes. MIT 's literature mentioned something about a network, but it could have been dead squirrels all mashed up in there for all I know. I procured some Linn banana plugs and soldered them onto the MIT's. I hooked them up to my LK-85 but something wasn't right.

At the shop where I worked several years later with the owner who would flip out at the mere mention of Linn, I casually mentioned absolute phase. His reaction was not unexpected and his diatribes made me laugh. It was not rocket science however. The Linn LK-1 and Kairn preamps had a reverse absolute phase, so all that was required was to inverse the polarity on the speaker cables( at one end only)

So after a careful polarity check, the MIT's were hooked up. It sounded weird, Muddy and no sound stage. I hooked up the Linn LK 400 speaker cables and everything fell into place. I got pretty much the same result when I tried MIT interconnects. Dang. I hooked the Linn interconnects back up. I still had that weird emotional attachment to the MIT's ( because they were expensive) but they were now virtually useless. I sold them on one of the used high end audio sites, you know the kind. You exchange 40 e-mails and are expected to solve the buyer's technical conundrums ( not unlike selling old bike parts on craigslist).

Still not completely satisfied with having all Linn components, I tried to tweak the speakers. The Linn Keilidh's had an optional composite base that was available. It was a brilliant idea because they made the speaker's footprint wider and were supposed to tighten up the bass and the imaging ( which of course they did). Not completely convinced, I removed the bases from the speakers and took some measurements.

I went to a large industrial metal supplier and ordered large lead slabs in the same dimensions as the pseudo-granite bases. They had immense slabs of lead and would simply slice off a slab like a large salami. The one foot square slabs of lead must have weighed in excess of a 100 pounds each. I took them home and drilled the necessary holes for mounting and for spikes. None of my friends seemed to be available for heavy lifting, so it took a little bit of maneuvering.

I fired up the stereo eager to hear the effect of my new, possibly toxic bases, smug in the knowledge that I might just have outwitted the engineers at Linn. It take long to find out that I was wrong. I was suddenly confronted with excessive, wooly bass. It boomed and chugged, and try as I might to convince myself that this was good thing, it soon started to annoy me.

I also wondered about the long term effects of having large, untreated slabs of Lead sitting in my living room, but it wasn't like I was licking them or anything. Back in the day, teachers in the high school science lab would give us blobs of mercury to play around with, so a few lead fumes didn't seem to be a problem to me. It's just that the sound sucked, and I soon removed the lead slabs and re-installed the original Linn ones. I got 10 cents on the dollar at the scrap yard for the lead.

It finally dawned on me that Linn components don't interact well with tweaks. I finally took a my friend's advice and just enjoyed the innocuous looking metal boxes with the funny logo.

The only tweak that we ever did to Linn, which I learned first-hand when I eventually started working at the Linn shop, was to disregard the speaker placement parameters indicated in the owner's manuals. For example, Linn suggested that the Keilidhs be placed 4 to 12 inches from the back wall. This went against years of experience and listening to all types of speakers. We would do the "tune dem" . All speakers need to be tuned to a room, but Linn has a very specific methodology on how to go about it. Most of the Keilidhs that we installed in customers' homes tended to be be in the 20 to 24 inch range from the back wall ( Kabers and Keltiks even more so ).

The only reason that we could come with for this discrepancy was the difference in construction in homes in the UK and homes in North America. Rooms tended to be a little bigger in North America and cheap-ass drywall was the material of choice for walls. This is probably why most people in condos hate audiophiles and want to puncture their speakers with large screwdrivers.

We did install the supplied spikes on all speakers but not for the reasons that are usually accepted as common wisdom. Without opening a can of pointy worms, and keeping in mind that physics bored the ass offa me in high school, spikes are a simple way of coupling speakers to the floor. The motion of drivers moves cabinets and a good anchor point is essential. The taller the speaker, the more the bass driver will make it act like a lever, so it is necessary to spike those things nice and deep into your hardwood floor. This does not always end well ( see previous post The Wife Acceptance Factor).

To yet again quote Shakespeare " there's the rub". Spikes and cones are not de-couplers nor act like diodes. They are actually very efficient couplers. 

 

I learned this over time with lots of empirical evidence to support the results. Those little suckers concentrate vibrations into one tiny point almost amplifying those pesky acoustic waves. Similar to what a sports cleat does. Other than mangle other players' hands, they grab the earth and transmit that energy.

I don't want to start a complicated debate, but I proved it to myself yet again recently. I had some cones lying around and decided to install them under an older Mac mini, the ones that still have a CD drive. Even die-hard bachelors are familiar with washing machines that do a spin cycle with an unbalanced load.  When one inserts a fairly scratched CD into the Mac's drive and proceeds to rip it to iTunes, the ensuing vibrations are like that washing machine. The cones that I had installed under the Mac transmitted those vibrations so accurately that I could have tuned a guitar with the resulting shaking that was induced into my desk. The whole thing was happily oscillating along at the same frequency as the Mac's CD drive.

One final note about equipment racks. I recently attended a hi-fi show a local hotel and one thing that struck me was the the expensive racks that were used for the displays. These racks are marketed as essential audio components and priced accordingly. The stratospheric price tags on some of these racks was astonishing, considering the build quality.

Knowing a thing or two about metal things, I personally thought the quality was lacking. Some were made with sliced chunks of aluminum extrusion ( pardon me British friends; Ah-loo-min-eeum). Extruded aluminum is relatively inexpensive and judging by the way some of the pieces were cut maybe they had trained some monkeys to operate a horizontal bandsaw. These racks, who shall remain nameless, were retailing in the 3000 dollar range. Another overpriced rack was made out of ready-rod, otherwise known as threaded rod, the type that one can buy at any Home Depot and it was well into the 1000 dollar range.

50 cents a foot, if you can actually find an employee at Home Depot.

The only advice that I can offer on audio racks is buyer beware and keep in mind that you have to assemble these racks yourself. At least they won't make you walk a maze and try to sell you meatballs like IKEA.

These days my Linn system sits on an old mid-century teak thing that I found in a movie prop surplus shop and the only tweaking that I indulge in vacuuming around my speakers. I haven't welded anything together in a while, and that's not bad thing, because with all the toxic fumes, I would have probably ended up unable to add two and two together from the brain damage.

Bass: The Bad Boy From Beatsville

Some of you might have picked up on the fact that I swiped the title of this post from The Cramps. The Cramps started off with two guitar players in the band and no bass player. They quickly realized that having no bass kinda sucks and makes the band sound a little creepy.

Some classic rock aficionados might be quick to point out that The Doors also eschewed the use of a bass player, opting instead for " the cheapo organ sound". This illustrates my point, because I can think of no other band that sounds creepier and generates larger waves of depression from speakers. From the first time I heard this band in my youth until the present day, it has always reminded me of nails on a blackboard; and let's just leave it at that.

Bass is the most misunderstood component of music. It is also the most difficult part of the audible frequency spectrum to reproduce accurately. It is hotly contested and debated ad infinitum. And bass players often get a bad rap, not the kind of derision usually directed at drummers mind you, but many jokes are made at their expense.

Like many things musical these days, bass has evolved into a caricature of itself and has become a seriously misunderstood phenomenon amongst the masses. One has to delve into the roots of modern music to gain a little perspective.

I know about as much about Classical music as a dog knows about theoretical particle physics. When I was selling audio, we would often tell a prospective customer to come back at a later date with some CD's that he liked and was familiar with. Many of them returned with Classical music.CD's and asked for a demo. It completely threw me for a loop. I couldn't for the life of me, point out various nuances in the audio system when I was listening to some Bulgarian harpsichord player. I had no point of reference ( also it sucked).

Igor ! More brains !

I recently went to a friend's high end audio shop. He had just received a pair of Wilson Sacha and I wanted to hear them. Breaking my own cardinal rule, I didn't bring any CD's along. One of the salesman ( who obviously did not know me) brought me to the large listening room and fired up some tunes on the Devialet that driving the Wilsons. He put on some Opera. Firstly, I am perplexed as what it was about my demeanor that would make that dude think I was remotely interested in opera. Secondly, Opera scares the hell out of me and thirdly; no bass. Someone needs to have a long talk with that boy, or maybe he just didn't want anyone of my greasy ilk hanging out in the store for too long.

As I have stated in a previous post , I learned long ago to avoid discussions about audio or music in bars. They always would devolve into bold catch-all statements like " Hendrix was the greatest guitar player who ever lived" or the even more infuriating, " My Sansui rocks, man". It was exasperating and impossible to refute, especially with drunks who fixated on a single thought and continue to repeat it, mantra-like.

So at the risk of starting another argument, let me tell you a little something about the roots of Rock'n Roll and the influence of bass in its development. John Hammond was a seminal record producer, talent scout and ethno-musicologist. He organized the now legendary " From Swing to Spirituals" concerts at Carnegie hall in the 30's and 40's.

Unbeknownst to pretty much everyone at the time, the performers included, an incredible event was about to occur. This event would become a catalyst to everything that would follow in its wake and reverberate from decades to come, even in abominations like Duran Duran and Nickleback ( apologies from all of Canada for the latter).

In December 1938,  The Count Basie Orchestra were the main cats at this concert. Hammond had also invited a pair of relatively obscure piano players named Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson. They played a pair of grand pianos that were set up nose to nose. They were about to set the musical world on its ear by featuring a new type of music. It had been called Stride but had evolved into a new form and it was called Boogie Woogie.

What was amazing, as well as mesmerizing, was the infectious rhythm of the left hand bass parts of that frenetic piano playing. Most Boogie Woogie was 16 bar and the left hand dexterity that Pete and Albert possessed was exceptional.The bass parts were rock solid and relentless ( many Boogie Woogie pianists developed tendonitis as a result).

2 pianos , 12 roadies

Even if you don't dig old music, you owe it to yourself to at least check it out, it is available on Youtube. Pay particular attention to the left hand bass parts. Boogie Woogie eventually took the nation by storm and entered the mainstream musical vernacular. Big bands adopted it with a passion and it prevailed until the end of the 40's.

The last cats to hitch their wagon to this musical genre were Country musicians and in the late 40's, a new musical genre emerged called Country-Boogie. The self-explanatory name of this style says it all, infectious rhythms to the strains of wild pedal steel guitars. Country Boogie is often cited as Rockabilly's big brother. At Sun records another as-of-yet unnamed musical catalyst was brewing. Drawing on many influences, Sam Phillips and some unknown hillbilly cats were experimenting with a new sound. There are many theories as to where the name came from, but it was new and raw and it was called Rockabilly. These early cats often did not use a drummer. The upright bass doubled as a percussive instrument as the strings were slapped on the bridge. Maybe you heard of a cat called Elvis and his seminal Sun sessions.

Long ago, rock critic Lester Bangs hit the nail on the head when discussing this obscure musical genre, " Rockabilly was the only true Rock n' Roll " He wrote, " It never went anywhere." Quite true at the time. So inane bar arguments notwithstanding, that is the nutshell that created the Rock n' Roll that you are listening to and the reason that I started talking to myself in bars.

Regardless of opposing views on musical historical timelines, I think that we can all agree that bass is the rhythmic force that drives music. It is the part of the musical spectrum that makes us connect with the music that we like. Whether one listens to acoustic jazz or is ordering new woofers after a very loud Kraftwerk listening session, we like our bass. Somewhere down the road it went sideways and bass " jumped the shark".

The main problem from the start was that a lot of people confused bass with excessive mid-bass. That misconception still prevails today. At the dawn of high end audio. getting tight, deep and coherent bass was difficult. Amplifiers simply did not the slewing rate and the damping factor necessary for controlling drivers. Speaker technology was not quite there either as the materials technology of the time was limited and made it difficult to manufacture stiff drivers. All those inebriated Sansui people fail to notice that the foam surrounds on their 70's speakers with the cross-hatch wooden grilles are crumbling. One can even hear the death rattle of the woofers, but I guess it just makes that Classic Rock more classic-sounding.

Thankfully high end pre-amplifiers emerged in the 70's and people started to understand that tone controls were nothing more than rotary turd polishers, but those people were a minority. The debate rages on to this day, and this another argument that I try to avoid.

It's like talking to someone who has ADD when I try to explain that tone controls are nothing but filters and you can't add artifacts to something that has already been mastered and recorded. I suppose these tone control disciples could hire one of the hundreds of underemployed bass players to come over to their place and play along with the stereo.

As tone controls became de riguer on all those big ugly receivers, some genius along the way decided that a loudness control would be a good idea. I still see them around and they are the sonic equivalent of a loud drunk at a wedding who becomes even louder as the night progresses, and decides to grab the microphone away from the master of ceremonies ( maudlin speeches or bad karaoke are sure to ensue).

Then the big manufacturers decided that this abomination wasn't sufficient and started marketing equalizers to the masses. Home theater receivers took that several step further and started offering tone controls or EQ for each of the multiple channels and even including time delays fro each channel.They claimed that it was done in the digital domain, but it was really an analog function. The sonic equivalent of drowning in a sea of chicken soup.

Although in defense of that intellectually challenged kid brother of audio,  Anthem's new HT receivers include a neat DSP function for room correction. It truly works in the digital domain, and it's not bad.

Which brings me to the subject of home theater. I don't want to indulge in a rambling diatribe about this branch of consumer electronics, but suffice it to say that I was not pleased when it came on the market and we had to sell it. None of my old school audiophile co-workers and I gave a damn about video resolution, screen gain, and center channel speakers.

These receivers were all menu driven, hellishly complicated to learn and sounded like crap when playing music. I was perfectly happy watching Bugs Bunny cartoons on a 19 inch CRT with 79 cent speakers inside it. It seemed more pure. However a a salesmen with a zen philosophy of cartoons doesn't sell much stuff and is soon fired, so a lot of reading of instruction manuals will be necessary. The dumbest thing to emerge from home theater's rapidly escalating market share was sub woofers.

There were subs around in the early days, but no one really paid attention. If someone wanted big bass, they would purchase those monstrous Infinity speaker systems that had Emit-r tweeter towers and separate woofer towers. Useful if you lived in a large structure like a barn I guess ( or to quickly break a lease), but they wouldn't fit in most people's apartments.

Sub woofers have probably created more arguments between neighbors than demented dogs barking all night, rusty Chevy's on blocks and busted fences combined. Home theater sales soon surpassed 2-channel audio sales and lots of people had HT systems in their homes. I guess if you want Smaug the Dragon shaking your drywall loose it serves its purpose, but it's not for everyone.

Forgetting for a minute that most amplified sub woofers are pretty crappy, people seem unaware that they are designed specifically for movie soundtracks. Six channel movie soundtracks are just that,; they are mixed in 6 channels in the studio. The 6th channel is a low frequency effect (LFE) track and is mixed accordingly. Maybe the movie explosions gave your mother-in-law a coronary, but forget about playing music through your sub.

That is the main misconception right there; sub woofers are not designed for music.

There are some expensive subs on the market, but they still aren't made for music. They just can't keep up with the pace and timing of the music and often don't integrate with the rest of the audio system.  It can be distracting, because it is difficult to forget that you are listening to a sub. Also, keeping with the Linn philosophy; excessive bass masks low level detail. I've heard a couple of exceptions, REL subs seemed to integrate nicely and disappear into a room, and even though Linn makes very good subs, I would opt for a larger Linn speaker instead.

As stated earlier, most people misconstrue excessive mid-bass for good, deep bass. The question must be asked however, who among us has ever heard truly deep bass? Open E on a bass guitar is 41 hz, which is pretty deep. Most speakers might roll that off at -3db and there aren't a ton of songs in the key of E. Crappy speakers can't reproduce the harmonics that go with that note anyway, so it might end up sounding like that angry sea lion who had a staring contest with me at the Aquarium ( he won).

The lowest note I ever heard was a stirring experience, truly a testament to the power of bass and its effect on the human psyche. Montreal is a city in eastern Canada whose claim to fame is the invention of the best food ever concocted; poutine. There is a little mountain in the middle and on the gently rolling western slopes of this mountain sits St .Joseph's. This is a scale replica of St. Paul's in Rome, but it is still huge. I usually don't go inside buildings of this nature. They kind of scare me, the priests always seem to be giving me the hairy eyeball and the holy water burns.

Most of the people at a blues bar.

The building is a tourist attraction and is usually open to the public. One day I just happened to be riding my bike in that general vicinity. I had heard that there was a massive pipe organ in there, and on a whim, I decided that I wanted to hear it. On the weekend, the organist is present and will usually play some music for several minutes every hour. I walked in there making sure that there weren't any priests staring me down, and proceeded to walk around.

The dome is huge and pretty impressive to look at once inside the building. It is so huge that it has a reverb delay of seven seconds. Without warning the pipe organ stated playing. It is one the top 60 largest in the world and the biggest pipe is 30 feet long ! The organist fired up a tune, the type that one would expect to be played on pipe organ. The acoustics of the dome made it eerily enticing. Then he hit a low note. That particular moment is hard to describe in writing, one has to actually experience this first hand. It was insane, it goes beyond shaking your entire body, it keeps resonating. It was an enjoyable, but disconcerting brief moment. The tune only had few low notes and it was soon over, also being inside that huge non-secular building was starting to freak me out. I left almost immediately after that. I've rarely heard anything like that since, and that moment stayed with me. I'll bet all the holy water in the large bowl near the exit that there isn't a sub woofer on earth that can make that sound.

I'll bet those hip-hop lovin' woof-balls on wheels guys think they might have it covered; but they'd be wrong. No discussion about bass would be complete without ridiculing those car audio guys with massive subs. This rolling madness is beyond bass and even the loudest of rappers would tell these guys to turn it down. I'm not sure where or how this mobile sonic assault began, but it makes little sense. You rarely see these guys ,who seem to have a propensity for wearing backwards baseball caps, blaring opera as they roll down the street.

They have even transcended trying to annoy people with hip -hop and have given up on music altogether. There are  SPL contests where a so-called burp is played. It is a nondescript low frequency tone which is blasted for a few seconds. Levels in excess of 170 dB SPL can be produced. You can see these guys grinning from ear to ear in the aftermath as the bowel-liquifying sound levels literally crack car bodies and pop windows.  I don't know why they are grinning, they just destroyed their Honda.

These woofers also produce about the same amount of heat as the space shuttle on take off ( and literally louder), so they have a tendency to fuse voice coils into  blobs of metal. Everyone needs a hobby I guess, but this one seems to be in the same league as guys who destroy their expensive 4x4's in butt-to-butt pulling contests down at the ole waterin' hole.

Dr. Dre says shut up.

Bass will always remain an enigmatic and elusive component of music reproduction systems. Before I became a Linn fanatic years ago, I found it difficult to understand their approach to bass. I eventually understood however. I now know what to listen for in bass articulation and am still satisfied when I can actually hear the notes that the bass player is playing. When Linn says pitch perfect, it means that if a song is in  the key of A you will hear it in A, and that's good enough for me. Linn is currently offering digital processing for various speakers ( including several non Linn speakers) called Exakt box. It manages speaker characteristics in the digital domain, mainly in the low frequency register.

There is just one simple rule to follow really; big bass equals big air. Some might disagree, but if you want more bass, get bigger speakers. It ain't gonna be cheap and a $ 600 sub woofer is a woefully inadequate substitute. Unless you have some really obnoxious neighbors that you want to annoy.

Woofers and Whisky

A few years back, I had befriended a younger co-worker who was an absolute computer whiz. I was perplexed by this generation's innate computer ability and even more so by the fact that they all seemed to be messing around with PC's rather than Macs. Nonetheless, this whiz kid became my mentor and provided invaluable assistance navigating the convoluted and stubbornly illogical ways of iTunes.

What struck me the most about this cyber-generation was their perception of what "good stuff" was and where it was made. Most of us who remember big ugly TV's made out of fake wood in neo-Spanish styles will usually snort in outrage at the mere mention of goods that are made in China. This generation sees nothing wrong with that, and more importantly, perceive goods that are made in USA as junk.

That was this brainiac kid's perception, and it seemed to amuse him when I bristled at the mere mention of this. He had never heard of ( nor didn't seem to care ) of Caterpillar bulldozers, Chris King headsets or Krell amplifiers. The fact that we made good stuff in Canada seemed unfathomable to him. His smirk revealed to me that he thought that I was simply making that up on the spot. I guess he was oblivious to the country of origin of the Bombardier train that he took to work that morning. I am certain that he didn't give rat's ass about Moon Audio, the ( heavily counterfeited) Canada Goose Parkas or that quintessential Canadian invention; the Robertson screw.

We eat these when it's cold outside, tastes like Tim Horton's donuts.

Hell, we are responsible for the mighty Canadian Space Arm that was fitted on the Space Shuttle and later the ISS. We could slap around Russian satellites with impunity, flick small asteroids out of orbit and open a very large space-beer should the opportunity present itself.

Needless to say, when I tell people of his ilk that my stereo was made in Scotland, they flat out don't believe me. They put on smiles that are usually reserved for doddering old men or violent mental patients.

What everyone seems to agree on however, is that if Scotland is known for one thing, it must surely be whisky ( or whiskey, the spelling debate rages on, even in my spell-check). Even the most loutish  Canadian beer swiller is aware of fine Scottish single-malts. Pretentious hipsters and status-seeking real estate mavens alike revel in blathering on about the most obscure Scottish distilleries that they can think of. I am sure that their mangled mispronunciation would get them a few stiff slaps on a Saturday night in Glasgow.

Some people dream of taking a vacation in Scotland to tour all of these distilleries. Devout Linnites will often include a tour of the Linn factory in Glasgow on their bucket list. It's a Linn thing. Some car enthusiasts dream of touring the Ferrari plant. Some might want to combine booze and stereos and do both while in Scotland. There's the problem.

I was fortunate to have had a friend who had a Linn shop. As a friend and eventual employee, I got to mess around with equipment that some can only dream of owning.  I did however, miss out on an opportunity. Linn's founder, Ivor Tiefenbrun used to invite all his dealers to Scotland. Everyone would eventually get their turn. One day it was the Canadians' turn. I didn't get to go, but judging by the tales that I heard upon my friends' return, that may not have been a bad thing.

The visits at the Linn factory were supplanted by lots of good booze. It doesn't matter if it's Linn or Ferrari, a power point presentation always takes on a new dimension when lubricated by some fine local alky-hol.

Ivor would take that one step further however. He would take his dealers out on the sea in a large boat to indulge in what can best be described as a booze cruise. There would be copious quantities of food as well as every type of Scottish whisky imaginable. The boat was equipped with a Linn audio system of course, but that just probably added to the malaise. I guess you can guess the rest. High seas, lots of food, insane amounts of booze and a bunch of audio-selling landlubbers. The sea was angry that day...scratch that... everybody hurled until their guts were inside out. From what I gathered, they were pretty far from Glasgow, so it took a while to get back. I was glad that I had stayed behind, my feet planted firmly on terra firma, and going to the local pub, rather than some lurching boat, after we locked up the shop.

My co-worker at the Linn shop and I had become good buddies, and as well as being a barfly, was a dedicated Linnist. Even though he was obsessed with the Beatles, I didn't hold it against him, and we drank many a pint. More importantly however, is that he had the keys to the shop.

The shop was housed on the first two floors of an old Victorian greystone. One particular evening after many pints and a meal that consisted of nothing but bar peanuts, we decided to grab a couple of six packs and head to the store.

The listening rooms were set up like comfortable living rooms and filled with insanely expensive Linn equipment. It seemed like a great idea. We got to the shop and turned on the lights.We cracked open a six pack of beer ($8.00 Cdn) and fired up a six pack of Linn Klimax amplifiers ( $95,000 Cdn).

He had a Beatles compilation. It was yet another re-mastered Beatles CD, among hundreds of other re-masters that was supposed to reveal never heard before nuances. Yeah, yeah, so maybe I heard a truck rolling by outside the studios, or maybe there was an orchestra playing in the next studio or maybe the engineer cursed. I still didn't like the Beatles.

I dug up a CD that I liked and was familiar with. Jimmie Vaughan's Do you Get The Blues. It was ( I thought) a great sounding, well recorded CD. Jimmie's band was like a Gospel set-up featuring a trio of back-up singers and Hammond B-3 organ. There was no bass guitar, as the B-3 took care of bass duties as well. I was stoked. I cracked another beer and let'er rip with 2400 watts of Linn amplification at my disposal.

Something wasn't quite right though. As they might say in Glasgow, it sounded like shite. In my alcohol-induced haze, I wasn't sure what to make of it. I was disappointed, because that CD had always sounded great. In the back of my head, there was a little voice that was still more or less sober and he was telling me that the mastering was shite.

I already knew this, but the boozy haze made it difficult to understand. High resolution audio systems, Linn in particular, are merciless when it comes to revealing bad recordings or shitty guitar players. You can suck but you can't hide if your music is played on a Linn system. This is the cold, hard reality of high end audio, but as time progressed, everything started sounding weird when booze and high end audio were combined.

This is a good reason to keep drunk people away from your stereo and also why crappy stereos have tone controls. Hundreds of thousands of equalizers have been sold over the years. These were not all sold to commercial establishments in need of sound reinforcement. A lot of them were purchased by people who sit around and fiddle with the sliding knobs for hours as they would get progressively more and more hammered. Yes it's true that nothing messes up sound more than an equalizer ( the sonic equivalent of putting a bucket on your head and hitting it with a ball peen hammer), but give a bottle of whisky to an equalizer knob-fiddler and bad things will happen. I have replaced enough blown woofers on warranty to know this is true.

In had one guy who kept blowing up (literally) his tiny Paradigm bookshelf speakers. Bad enough that he had purchased Paradigms in the first place, but he was driving them with a big ugly amp that used as much juice as a couple of pizza ovens ( and probably sounded like pizza ovens). He kept returning the much-abused speakers for warranty work. He was seemingly proud of his dubious achievements as he kept repeating the mantra of drunken idiots everywhere . " That's rock n' roll, man". He couldn't fool me, man; I was convinced that he was shithouse-liquored when he fried his speakers. I can only imagine what musical abomination he was subjecting these speakers to. The last time he brought his speakers back, one of them had quite literally caught on fire. It was burned to a crisp and all that was left was a charred wooden shell. Needless to say the warranty was not honoured. He should have bought cheaper booze and a better stereo.

Other than crappy stereos, wedding bands and 80,000 watt sub-woofers in Hondas, booze can also be  blamed for bad sound. It plays tricks on your mind and for some reasons that are not yet fully understood by academics, causes a dip at around 1000 Hz.

This is why cocktail parties always seem to get louder. There are always one or two obnoxious people who can't handle their booze and almost completely lose the ability to hear themselves. Hence all the shouting and idle threats. These often seem to be the same people that make a beeline for the stereo. They either crank the volume, crank the treble control ( if there is one) or switch to some horrible dance music station. Usually it is all three at the same time.

This results in a few things; the collective volume level of conversation increases even more, people start breaking things as they attempt to dance and a living room fight might ensue. Either way, when the host wakes up the next day to deal with the aftermath, he can be assured that the volume knob on his ghetto blaster will be broken as drunks made repeated attempts at cranking it to 11.

Pabst Blue Ribbon is right around the middle.

As booze dampens mid range perception,  the natural tendency is to crank the volume. Sometimes it results in playing the same song over and over again. If you happen to have neighbors that indulge in cheap street-level drugs, you can almost be assured that they will blast techno music all day and all night. They will be using speakers that are the electronic equivalent of crystal meth, and it is a given that said big honkin' hollow-bodied speakers will be on the floor, and most likely up against a wall (the wall adjacent to your bedroom, of course).

I can't be too judgmental, because I have probably annoyed more than my fair share of neighbours over the years. I have been known to play the same song over and over as I accompanied it with an invisible fiddle. When I lived in a small apartment building with walls so thin that I could hear the neighbour writing on a piece of paper, I was known as that " crazed hillbilly upstairs". I would indulge in pedal steel guitar-heavy listening sessions that would twang all around the building.

The frequency and length of these listening sessions would eventually taper off. Audiophiles are familiar with a phenomenon called "listener fatigue". For any non-audiophiles reading this, that is a condition that happens after an hour or two of listening to sub-par audio systems. It sounds harsh and annoying and your brain tells your ears that he can't take it anymore. The same happens when a speaker is driven beyond its limits or an amplifier is over-driven to the point of clipping.

As much as my neighbours wanted to come over with a hockey stick and beat me with it, they knew that the sessions would rarely last long or go much past 9:00 pm  because I would develop a type of listener fatigue. The booze started to make the music incomprehensible at a certain point and I would simply turn the stereo off. It would also become increasingly difficult to chose the next CD. I just couldn't decide what to listen to next as I stared blankly at all the CD's. All that tiny writing didn't help either ( at least records were huge and even after many beers you could still see the cover).

I eventually moved to another apartment that had better acoustics. It wasn't the reason that I moved there, but it certainly helped. I made some upgrades to my Linn system and started messing around with Mac Minis and computer audio. Everything sounded great, but something was still amiss. After a few drinks, the system just didn't sound right. It didn't engage me the way that I expected it to. It wasn't just the sound emanating from the speakers; some of my favorite tunes didn't sound right. It seems that after a few libations, I had the attention span of a squirrel and would quickly flip from song to song. I would eventually give up to go sit in the backyard and throw pine cones at unsuspecting neighborhood cats.

I eventually gave up drinking altogether for various reasons. It was nothing earth-shattering, there were no cops involved and I wasn't blowing tweeters; I simply didn't feel like it anymore. The guys down at the liquor store miss me, but I now have a few extra bucks in pocket. My Linn system is sounding as it should and when I turn it on the next day, the volume isn't set at jet engine levels. I have also stopped playing invisible fiddle altogether.

Downloads: The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea

There seem to be a couple of enduring myths about Canada: one is that it is a frozen wasteland ( all our igloos melt in the summer) and the second being that the RCMP ride around on horses while sporting red tunics.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are just that; a police force. Out of the ten Canadian provinces and three territories, only three have their own provincial police force, so the rest of of the country falls under the jurisdiction of the RCMP. Many towns and small cities are also under their jurisdiction.

They might be chasing bad guys overseas and setting up spy operations, but the average Canadian citizen is more likely to receive a jaywalking ticket or a dog poop citation from the RCMP.

One the duties that the RCMP have taken on is cracking down on illegal downloads. You read that correctly. From the reclusive pervert who downloaded 500 Gigs of porn to the unsuspecting kid who just happened to download a couple of bit torrents, anyone can receive a citation and a large fine in the mail. They simply find you through your IP address. 

So, one day some oblivious Canuck will be  having coffee and downloading some crappy mp-3's and he might suddenly be confronted by a bunch of dudes with boy scout hats accompanied by 8 German Shepherds breaking down the back door. All those crackheads stealing expensive bikes are of little consequence to the RCMP, because there is some evil downloading afoot.

This endeavor is so futile that is borders on the laughable. The floodgates have been opened and this torrent of wayward bytes has become almost unstoppable. The double-edged sword of the computer revolution has bitten us on the ass, but more specifically, has bitten the music industry straight in the bag.

The moral ( and legal) implications have been with us pretty much since the dawn of the internet. There have been high profile cases such as the infamous Metallica vs. Napster debacle. The multimillionaire longhairs are still among us and Napster has gone the way of Netscape, but that court battle resulted in a Pyrrhic victory. There were may other illegal music downloading sites that soon popped up. They have come and gone, but as long as there are computer nerds and crazed hackers, there will bit torrent sites.

Case in point is The Pirate Bay. They have been playing cat and mouse with authorities ( not sure which authorities exactly). They seem to stay one step ahead by constantly changing country code domains. One day they will be using .kz ( Kirghistan) and the next just as likely to be using to. ( Tonga). ( Tonga is an island country in the South Pacific made up entirely of metallic postage stamps).

Some so-called private torrent sites have recently popped-up. There is one in particular (sounds similar to Twhat.cd)  that is making the rounds. This site is run by some unusually angry and power-mad computer geeks. Like most basement-wankers they wield their power in cyber-space and are fond of uttering idle threats. In the real world people of this ilk would be quickly dispatched with a few skillful punches to the face, but alas, this is not the real world.

Access to this site is granted after completing an " entrance exam". One is required to answer many arcane technical questions in order to be accepted as member. The alternative is to be invited to join. The criteria are as complex as they are convoluted. There are over two hundred " rules" These rules are, of course, enforced by un-groomed and asocial geek sergeants-at-arms, and one can be summarily banned for any perceived slight or transgression.

Keeping an active membership is just as complicated and is an ongoing process. One is expected to seed one's entire CD collection to the site and keep it seeding 24/7 in order to keep up a predetermined seeding ratio. Should other members not want these particular files, they are removed from the site and you are right back at square one. You may not seed other torrents that were obtained elsewhere, they want your CD's only.

In all fairness, there is a lot of obscure music available on this site and most of it is in a lossless format ( FLAC). Any audiophile worth his salt will treat mp-3's with the contempt that they deserve and only download lossless files ( as it should be), but the process is so tedious that it could easily become a very time consuming obsession. There is a simple solution to avoid all of this nonsense; one could simply buy the music.

Just never you mind why I have intimate knowledge of this torrent site. I am not condoning or denouncing illegal downloads. It is not my intention to pontificate on the moral and legal aspects of this practice. It exists and one will have to come to to one's own conclusions.

I think that on a certain level, the music industry did it to itself. Consumer goods have always been more expensive in Canada, because we are not taxed enough. The vast majority of the Canadian population live within an hour or so from the U.S. border. This has given rise to the uniquely Canadian pastime of cross-border shopping. When a case of 24 beers cost almost $30 and CD's used to retail for $28, the temptation to take a little drive to a place like Bellingham WA is hard to resist. CD's in the U.S. were a more reasonable 15 bucks or so, but the fluctuating value of the Canadian dollar did not always make it worthwhile to drive down there.

Back then it would just be easier to head to the local CD store downtown and pay the exorbitant prices. I did enjoy spending an afternoon at the Virgin Superstore ( changed to HMV later), but had to limit my CD purchases, otherwise, at those prices, I could have easily spent spent two weeks' wages in an afternoon. To complicate matters I have a tendency of liking very specific types of music, a lot of it by independent bands on small labels, I found the mainstream selection at the large stores lacking.

Many large North American cities have seen an upsurge in the rates of commercial leases, sometimes reaching astronomical levels, making many music superstores unsustainable. This, and the ease of free downloading, were definitely contributing factors to the demise of CD's and CD retailers. I did find the average retail price of $30 for CD's hard to swallow.

Perhaps it's generational, a new brand of music consumer who is not familiar with the retail experience. Maybe it's the ease of downloading the latest pop song, the music being as disposable as the mp-3 file itself. Then again maybe it's paying a buck to download one song only from I-tunes; quick and dirty and only a dollar. Or maybe it's just the inherent cheapness that is endemic to the human race as a whole. Everybody loves a deal, but free stuff is better. Who doesn't rejoice when finding a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk (an increasingly common occurrence because of our new weird plastic money here in Canada, it just slides out of your pocket).

A few years back, when Linn made the decision to stop making CD players altogether, I sensed a little bitterness in some Linn aficionados. Linn had seen the future and the future was digital streaming and network players. I was curious about this new direction  and went to see my friends at the Linn shop. Linn people ( and most other audiophiles) are never ones to back down from a technical challenge. The network players seemed  complicated  and required Linn's software and you had to figure out how to turn your iPhone into the remote control device to run all this. I was a little overwhelmed at first. Also I didn't have, nor want, an iPhone. I didn't need a GPS in my phone to figure out where I was, and the RCMP could easily find you with a GPS enabled iPhone.

I asked my buddies at the Linn shop how it all worked and they showed me, although I sensed a slight lack of enthusiasm on their part. It turns out that Linn recommended that the users of this new device hire a " ripping service" to get all of their CD's inside the box. Other than occasionally letting one rip, I wasn't sure what a ripping service was. I wondered  if it was like those guys that staple photocopied ads on telephone poles offering to transfer VHS tapes onto DVD's.

When I asked my friend what happens when you acquire new music and you want to load into the Linn software. His flippant answer sort of annoyed me as he stated that " There isn't anymore good music". The national Linn rep was on hand and he chimed in " We just don't have the artists anymore." Problem solved it seems., but I called bullshit.

There was tons of new music being made and I wanted it. The boys at the Linn shop were convinced that I was some kind of hillbilly. This might have something to do with the Rockabilly and Country CD's that I would bring along every time I visited and wanted to listen some equipment. Then again, I found their own tastes in music questionable ( I'm just being polite, they had bad taste in music). Still, it wasn't the answer that I had been expecting ( also sorry Linn and Ivor, a freakin' ripping service ? C'mon !).

Before all this, I been ordering CD's from places like the now-defunct Hepcat Records ( they even had a printed catalogue). There are now many specialized sites like this nowadays, and you don't even have to buy the physical CD if you are so inclined, you can purchase a FLAC download sent directly to your computer.

Before Elon Musk was making funny-looking cars that ain't got no gas in 'em, he had started a company called Paypal. Now Paypal is as ubiquitous as credit cards and most on-line stores accept it.
If one wants to get music, Amazon has pretty much every CD ever pressed. Bulgarian mountain goat yodeling ? Got it. Scottish Death Metal Bands with Tourette's Syndrome ? How many would you like ? Drunken Canadian hockey-fight songs ? More than you can shake a stick ( as it were ) at, and we have 'em in English and in French. Whip out your Paypal and all this can be yours. If you bought a Tesla car with Paypal, good for you. Give Elon a call when you are stranded in the middle of a highway a long way from home with dead batteries.

There are many sites for the more arcane musical genres as well. If one likes independent music with an emphasis on Americana, CDBaby out of Portland OR has thousands of names to choose from. If you don't like shitty pop music with cowboy hats, you can find out what's going on in real Country music at Lonestarmusic. com. If your tastes are less on the good ole boy side, Allflac.com has a huge selection, and the name implies it is all in FLAC. Linn has their own label and at Linn Records you can find some stellar sounding 24 bit files.

I guess that CD's original claim about perfect sound forever was short-lived, if not short-sighted. Who could have anticipated the demise of the CD retailer? HMV just re-opened a scaled-down version of their store downtown. CD's are the last thing that they are interested in selling. They have lots of glittery T-shirts, bobble-heads and other shiny things for tourists.

I don't trust all those bit-torrent sites anyways. Who knows what kind of havoc these sites of questionable origin can wreak on your computer. Woe is you if you're using a PC, but these sites even make Mac's go a little wonky. They have a tendency to generate lots of those insidious pop-under ads. Sure I would like to make a million in 7 days, beat all the slot machines in Vegas and meet some Russian models, but my hard drive doesn't seem to agree. So don't be a cheap-ass. Buy some music, save yourselves some headaches and keep your hard drive safe. And who knows, you may help support some independent musicians and help them buy some new guitars and have something other than Ramen noodles for lunch. And that can't be a bad thing.

The Linn Religion

When I started working in audio, CD's weren't even a glint in the eye of Darth Vader...I mean Sony. The shop that had hired me sold lots and lots of turntables. I was working with knowledgeable guys that were a lot older than I . These men were serious audiophiles, and being a youngster, my brain was not yet addled by the worries of the grown-up world such as car payments and where the closest liquor store is (or the onset of faulty memory). My brain was still like a sponge, absorbing knowledge at break-neck speeds.

When I wasn't busy vacuuming the carpets, fetching the boss's dry-cleaning or unloading massive speakers from delivery trucks, I was learning about turntables. We had many turntables on hand, including some expensive ( for the time ) models. We had those big. ugly Empire turntable, the futuristic looking J.A. Michell's and two brands that I knew nothing about: Ariston and Fons.

One the older guys, who was fond of wearing a large calculator on his belt, bragged about his audio system, and being naive, I was fairly impressed ( in retrospect, this guy was nerd and was a total dick to me). He bragged about his turntable. I had heard of Lindt chocolates, and wondered why a chocolate company would make audio equipment.

"Oh, you mean Linn, not Lindt? " " Got it" ( I hadn't gotten it at all). And why is Sondek not spelled properly ? I was confused. I did some research the old-fashioned way, which in those days consisted of going to audio shops, pestering the salesman and stuffing a bag full of glossy pamphlets. (I think people still do that at audio shows).

It turns out that the Ariston Audio RD-11 and Fons turntable were knock-offs of the now legendary Linn Sondek LP-12 ( and they also were made in Scotland) . OK...now I got it.  A source of endless amusement in those days ( I still find it amusing) was that when all three speed buttons were pressed simultaneously on a Fons turntable, it would start whirring uncontrollably and rev up to about 400 rpm.

As my boss was fond of cursing at me in Yiddish, I would wait until he wasn't around to play with the Fons. It would also amuse customers, as did the name. Unfortunately for Fons, there just happened to be a new TV show with a character who had a very similar nickname, so combined with the entertaining, and possibly dangerous, uncontrolled spinning, it was hard to take that product seriously.

Used to literally fly off the shelf

As my journey into the world of audio continued, I had become good friends with a couple of guys when I began working at another shop. As mentioned in one of my earlier posts, one of those guys owned an up-and-coming audio shop and he also happened to be the local authorized Linn dealer.

I used spend as much time as possible at his shop on my days off, and he eventually convinced me to buy a Bryston 2B, a pretty good amplifier for its day.  I still didn't know who this Linn chick was, as I wondered for many years what Clyde-built was and the who the hell was this Clyde dude.

As a side note, it turns out that Clyde is a river in Glasgow and Clyde-built was a synonym for well made products. There was an old saying, it seems, about  how differently circumstances might have turned out had the Titanic been built in Glasgow.

I was still quite young and easily impressed by shiny objects. I had purchased a J.A. Michell turntable. I didn't quite realize that, cool as it looked, it was a shitty turntable. It used to annoy me when it would so easily skip as I walked across the room. My friend kept harping on me to buy a Linn turntable, but the subdued design of the wood plinth and overall understated elegance did not sway me. Yet.

I kept bringing rock n' roll records to his shop on my days off just to listen to the high end systems that were available. Having seemingly infinite patience, my buddy would willingly do A/B comparisons of two LP-12's with different tone arms and even cartridges. I was reluctant to buy one these things because of the fairly steep cost. Working in some bogus audio shop selling portable radios to little old ladies and blank cassettes to annoying wanna-be-dj's did not particularly pay well.

I saved up some money and eventually bought a Linn LP-12. When I finally got the box home , I eagerly unpacked it.( I still love the smell of brand new audio components in the box, even more enjoyable than when I used to sniff markers back in my school days).

Something wasn't quite right however. I stared at this big wooden square thing and soon realized that there was no tone arm on it; it was just a deck. I called my friend immediately, and he was more than slightly amused. Chalk that one up to lack of experience. So yeah, I  had to spend more money. I needed a tonearm and my friend obligingly sold me one. The tonearm came with instructions and cardboard templates. I soon found out that I also had to go out and buy a big-ass drill bit for the job of mounting this tonearm. I would be damned if I was going to pay someone for drilling a hole. I got it done.

Time went on and I became an avid reader of Stereophile magazine and, I must admit, drank a lot of their Kool-aid. I messed around with various brands and bandied about various names. It just sounded cool to talk about brands with bad-ass name like like Spectral and Threshold.  If I talked about Linn, some people thought that I was talking about an ex-girlfriend.

Years went by and other endeavors held my interest I didn't worry about buying new audio components. I messed around with the, at the time, the relatively obscure pastime of car audio. It was all DIY in those days, and I had completely deconstructed the interior of some old Buick and transformed it into the first 1000 watt plus car audio systems in the city. Needless to say, the cops didn't know what to make of it, but were more than eager to present me with excessive noise tickets. Those bylaws had probably been written decades before and likely pertained to horses trotting around the city too loudly.

I messed around playing in a few bands as well. I spent a few years having my eardrums blown out by Fender amps cranked to 11 and threw my back out hauling those same amps up 3 flights of stairs late at night after gigs. I was always on the look out for records for my collection and sought out lots of 40's and 50's music. It all came to screeching halt when, as mentioned in detail in a previous post,  records mysteriously disappeared from  retailers' shelves.

I was still visiting my friend's Linn shop on a regular basis. We always talked about audio, but my musical tastes always seemed to perplex him. Very little Country and Rockabilly ever made an appearance in that store or made its way into Linn speakers. One day I had been lamenting the recent demise of vinyl. I had a NAD CD player kicking around that I had traded some tools for (which he not unexpectedly scoffed at, the player, not the tools ). I didn't use it much, but I had acquired many CD's of late. I was getting some DJ gigs and CD was the way to go. He surmised that I would be soon be needing a good CD player. When he told me what a Linn Ikemi CD player was going for, I think that I had a small brain aneurysm.

I had lived in large loft for many years and the cavernous nature of this open space made for horrendous acoustics. It didn't matter if a bunch of crazed musicians cranked a quintet of Fender amps, the copious quantities of booze and the cathedral-like reverb made for good parties. Not so great for high resolution audio. I eventually moved to a small apartment and with its relatively more civilized environment, came a desire to do something about my outdated audio system.

I still had my now ancient LP-12 but knew that I would have to address this new found lack of vinyl. My buddy would constantly extol the virtues of Linn. At this point Linn had a complete range of electronics and speakers. I refused to believe him. I had swallowed way too much Stereophile Kool-aid.

If I were to mention sound-staging and imaging, he would quickly dismiss that and say that it wasn't important, just listen to the music ( and see if you can follow the tune). If I were to ask what happened to the bass, he would tell me that it was the right amount of bass for that size speaker. It took me a while to realize that excessive bass masks low level detail . It also took some getting used to when actually hearing the notes that the bass player was playing. Articulate bass, who knew ? ( also all the bass players that I had played with seemed to be a little on the crazy side).

More importantly, I would argue, I listened to a lot of Rockabilly records. A lot of them were recorded pretty lo-fi, and in some cases , in some garage somewhere in Louisiana using only one microphone. It didn't matter according to him, he told me that I would just hear more of that music.

He was proven right, of course. A few years later, I happened to be playing some Johnny Burnette. There is one slow, bluesy track called " Blues, Stay Away From Me".  The level of detail was astonishing; I could actually hear Dorsey Burnette's fingers on the upright bass.

I didn't immediately heed his advice and purchased a pair of B&W P-4's. I returned them a week later. How can I put this succinctly ?  I *curse-word-of-your-choice* hated them. It was like the sonic equivalent of the black plague ( minus the rats). He took them back graciously while giving me a wry smile that tacitly implied  that I was an idiot. The very same day he offered to lend me a pair of Linn Keilidh's to take home. I couldn't believe how accommodating he was (in comparison to other audio shops that had salesmen who required punches in the face).

What I really like about Linn at this point was all the names of the components had the letter K in them ( Kool by me) and the fact that they were made in Scotland. Way before I ever became a Linn disciple, I always had an affinity for bagpipes. One of the founding peoples of Canada were Scots and there  is still large percentage of the populace that have Scottish heritage. It seems to follow that many cities and towns in Canada host Highland Games every summer ( The Simon Fraser University and the Vancouver Police pipe seem to kick a lot of kilt at these games). I have been enthusiastically attending these for years. There is nothing quite like the sound of many pipers and drummers in tight formation and in full regalia. A word of caution though, never attempt a Cutty Sark drinking contest with a bunch of pipers. It's true that Canadians are smug about their drinking prowess, but that is small potatoes to dudes that can toss a tree trunk clear across a field.

Needless to say, I kept those speakers. The problem was that the rest of my equipment wasn't sounding so good. As any devout Linnite is aware, Linn sounds best with other Linn components. Thanks to all the high end audio magazines that had indoctrinated me over the years, I still had a touch of that strange disease called " audiophilia nervosa". My buddy kept telling me not to worry about stuff like that; Linn takes care of all that.

So, what? No more fiddling with knobs, numerous black boxes, oddball cables and getting lumps of solder entangled in my carpet? Those Spartan looking Linn boxes filled me with apprehension. What?  Linn cables too? The answer was an emphatic yes. The conclusion was, "Just listen".

My friend traded in my LP-12 for a used Karik/Numerik set-up for playing my CD's, as I decided to make the switch from vinyl  (see previous posts about vinyl). I needed more squipment, but I unfortunately had (and still do ) champagne taste on a beer budget. I hustled dome contract work for the shop, built stuff for them and, hell, I think I even cleaned the bathrooms, but I soon had an entire Linn set-up in my home. The conversion was complete; I had embraced the Linn religion.

At this point I guess it would seem inevitable that I would end up working at this shop. I embraced the Linn philosophy as I was taught the intricacies of Knekt multi-room systems and how to convert components from passive to Aktiv ( active amplification by-passing crossover networks for those non-Linn readers that are unfamiliar. To know more, Google it, it will be worth your time).

I also lifted many extremely heavy things. Wilson Audio never seems to neglect the weight of their speakers when discussing specs, almost as if it were a badge of honour. Yes Wilson are fine speakers, and yes they are freakishly heavy, but if you want feel what a hernia is like, try to lift some Linn Komri's. When the Komri speakers first came out, there was only one pair available in Canada. each dealer had their turn to try them out. When these behemoths arrived at our store, the crate itself seemed larger than a Smart Car. The demo room was also on the second floor. Once we wrangled those speakers out of the cases, it was time bring them upstairs. We soon realized that they did indeed weigh as much as a Smart Car and we were gonna need more guys.They cost about 2 1/2 times the price of a Smart Car, but keep in mind that's impossible to in any way look cool while driving a Smart Car.

Get a forklift and call a doctor, will ya ?

I also worked a few of the high end audio shows in the Linn room. Among other things, my duties consisted of doing short demos for visitors that piled into the rows of chairs. My other chief duty was keeping said audiophiles away from our brand new Linn CD-12 player. For some reason they " just wanted to pick it up". When asked why they couldn't pick it up, I would curtly answer " because it cost 30 freakin' grand". How the hell does picking up a CD player help you determine what it will sound like? That nugget of wisdom eludes me to this day.

During this audio show I spoke to many people and soon came to realize just how many audiophiles had an opinion about Linn and just how this brand had polarized them into different camps. By nature audiophiles are elitist. That is not a derogatory description,; we are elitist due to the very nature of the pastime itself. Big deal. However, I was taken aback by the vitriol that was sometimes directed at Linn as a brand. It seemed that people either loved it or hated it. Often the ones who disliked it the most were the ones accusing us of being something akin to religious zealots. Again big deal. Some would say it was "The Linn way, or the wrong way" Once again, big deal.

More acrimonious than the age-old Chevy vs. Ford rivalry, more defensive that Harley riders and angrier than hockey fans in Canada who just lost a game, the debates raged on. It wasn't really debates, more like one-sided tirades directed at us. I think the Crusades were started over something more trivial than this, or maybe Mob wars (eh.. you gots no respect).  I just ignored these seemingly frustrated audiophiles. What can you say to some raving psycho who claims that he could build a Klimax amplifier himself in his basement?  Judging by the look of that freako, it seemed that he spent an inordinate amount of time in basements.

You learn to let it slide, confident in the knowledge that the gospel of the Linn is on your side. I did take exception a few times, however. Years ago, I ran into a young lady who showed interest in coming over to my place late one night.When we got to my place, I powered up my Linn system and put on a bit of music. She immediately said " That's no good". What, the free drinks, my apartment, my hair..what? When I asked what she talking about, she meant to say that the stereo was no good. I cranked up the volume. " Nah. Still no good. " After a stunned silence on my part, I asked her to leave. At this point, you might think that I'm a little nutso myself, but a man 's gotta have his priorities straight (also, there was more beer left for me). Don't mess with a man's car, don't drink his last beer and don't mess with his stereo. I have my priorities straight; don't mess with my Linn religion.