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sexy piano playing / digital vs. analog / tubes vs. transistors



Gould didn't inject sex into piano playing; since 1955, the word "sexy" has taken on additional connotations in informal conversation. In the 1975 movie comedy "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother," there's a mock opera, and Dom DeLuise sings: "Why don't we all try / Some very sexy wine ..." Wine is as non-sexual as piano playing, but "sexy" was now taken to mean anything unusually thrilling, exciting, colorful, fun, pleasurable, maybe slightly forbidden or naughty. I think "sexy" first began to diversify into wine, piano playing, automobiles, vacation destinations, men's clothing, and mathematical theorems in the heyday of Frank Sinatra, his Rat Pack, and the "swingers" culture starting around 1966. It's sort of a Playboy magazine thing. Can openers can be sexy now.
 
Digital music recording vs. Analog is one of my favorite controversies, right up there with Vacuum Tube (Valve) vs. Solid State (Transistor/Chip) electronic processing and amplification of music. Both controversies bring out the paranoid and conspiratorial in people; scratch an Analog and Vacuum Tube fanatic, and you often find someone who believes water fluoridation is a Communist mind-control plot.
 
Digital processing of music began with experiments by Thomas Stockham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. His first specific challenge was to identify and, if possible, remove the "Bad Parts" of archival Caruso recordings (from circa 1905).
 
He recognized that most of the bad junk wasn't from scratches or dirt or metal or Bakelite warping in the original cylinder grooves, but was caused by the primitive sound-collecting horn into which Caruso and his orchestra all had to shout; the horn funnelled the music to mechanically wiggle the groove-cutting needle. Digitizing the best surviving Caruso sources made it possible to remove most of the anti-musical effects of the horn mathematically.
 
The comparison of RCA's vinyl LP releases of Caruso before and after Stockham's "Soundstream" processing are startling; essentially Stockham was able to send these abusively squawky, nasal recordings into the future so that they now sound as if they were recorded in a good studio with electronic processing circa 1935 -- the kind of very adequate recording technology we associate with early Billie Holiday. For the first time, listeners were treated to more than just a hint or tease of what Caruso had been about.
 
The new digital recording, editing, processing and playback technology clearly promised many more kinds of miracles, technological, musical and artistic, and financial, and largely delivered on many of these promises.
 
Nevertheless, the world in 1970 was thoroughly and expensively invested in Analog technology, and people -- experts and just stereo/hi-fi freaks and music lovers -- were reluctant to submit to this unexpected revolution.
 
Many stereophiles were suspicious of DDA LPs -- recorded and edited digitally, then pressed into ordinary vinyl analog LPs. Led by one obscure professor of "psychoacoustics," a sort of underground resistance movement arose that claimed listening to digital music or sound has negative psychological effects on the human brain -- in effect, long periods of listening to digital music drive you nuts: depression, epileptic seizures, that sort of thing.
 
The idea was that our ears and brains evolved entirely to receive and process analog sound sources. Although by the time it comes out of the living room speakers, digital music has been "blended" and "smoothed" so that it seems to sound exactly like analog music, it isn't. Deep limbic parts of your nervous system respond to the purely digital, quantum, discontinuous nature of the digital sound and music, and the neurological response is all bad.
 
I haven't heard much from this particular conspiracy theory cult in a long time; obviously the musical and music-technology world failed to heed the warnings, and the world went digital bigtime. But now would be about the time in which all of us would be showing the neurological and psychiatric effects of the new digital music world.
 
Gould would have immediately jumped on the digital bandwagon because of his commitment to the "perfection" he believed he could get from heavily edited studio recordings. Compared to razor-blade analog tape-recorder editing, the digital editing process is an astonishing revolution. Each mistakes can be instantly "undone"; 90 percent of the tedium and frustration is banished forever; and digital editing (by the time the supporting software became sufficiently sophisticated) offered artists and engineers thousands of new possibilities analog editing never allowed. If you can explain what you want to the computer in mathematical lingo, you can get the effect you want out of the speakers. A digital splice suddenly offered the engineer an instant a thousand times more precise and specific than an analog razor-blade splice.
 
Less conspiratorial audiophile purists still invest heavily in analog technology (turntables and still-produced audiophile analog vinyl LPs) and are still convinced that digital music has imposed a perceivable harshness and coldness to music reproduction. For them, AAA is the only way to record, process, reproduce and listen to beautiful (e.g. symphonic) music, second only to physically being in the audience.
 
I'll say just a bit about my other favorite controversy, tubes vs. transistors. Tube freaks maintain that only vacuum tubes can pass all the higher harmonics of music from stage to stage in a music reproduction system. Amplification tubes take all the harmonic information they receive as inputs, block none of them, and merrily pass all of them to their outputs.
 
By their fundamental physical nature, transistors cruelly block whole families of higher musical harmonics. (If you want to know what effect a lot of this harmonic blocking would have on music, listen to the "musical" qualities of a pure sine wave, which contains only its fundamental pitch, and is devoid of all higher harmonics.) So no matter how much money you pay for a solid-state stereo system, you are brutally forcing the music through inherently anti-musical electronics.
 
Does anybody today take this theory so seriously as to still run a vacuum-tube stereo system in their living room? You bet! Thousands of people! Communist China has taken over the manufacturing of (Tiger Brand) vacuum tubes -- very pricy, but you can still buy 'em -- and audiophile magazines are filled with ads for brand-new vacuum-tube stereo amplifiers and pre-amps. A typical modern tube power amp sells for $8000 to $10,000, and nobody's ashamed to ask for it, and nobody in the Audiophile Kult hesitates to pay. 
 
Unfortunately all the old 1950s-vintage vacuum-tube hi-fi equipment like Dynaco, Hafler and Fischer tube amps is now totally worthless, so if your granddad left any in the basement, just e-mail me and I will be happy to take it off your hands. Also old slide rules.
 
Is this harmonic-blocking transistor-vs.-tube theory true? Is it really supported by physics? 
 
Well, yes. And the effects on music are immediately clear to all German shepherds and dachsunds.
 
Elmer (who used to live with audio engineers)