Hi,
Interesting posts by Jonathan Weiss of Oswald Mills Audio.
Vintage Schizophrenia in Stereophile
Regards
Rajiv
Interesting posts by Jonathan Weiss of Oswald Mills Audio.
Vintage Schizophrenia in Stereophile
With some pleasure I'm watching what is happening in Stereophile vis a rethinking of vintage speakers. Many have probably seen Art Dudley's recent piece in the Aug. 2012 issue on the five vintage drivers to hear "before you die." My vote had been for the RCA LC1, which made it into the issue. I particularly liked Art's no nonsense statement that " the best vintage gear offers an abundance of musically agreeable qualities that are missing from even the best contemporary gear" even though I don't agree with it (that's why we created OMA after all.) I had Art at the NYC DUMBO showroom before he wrote the piece and went on and on about how I thought that reviewers should have heard or keep as a reference something like the RCA LC1. And Art, despite the piece in Stereophile, has never heard an LC1, of this I am sure. Hopefully we will fix that soon. But at least he seemed receptive to my rant.
Where this gets interesting is the unhinged, apoplectic writeup John Atkinson unleashed in his review about a month earlier (on the Stereophile website) about all the vintage speakers being used at the Capitol Audio Fest show he covered. Imagine, you go to a show and a good percentage of the rooms are using really OLD speakers which you can't buy (too easily) to demonstrate the stuff the vendors DO want to sell. What does that say? It says speakers today are not what they should be. And this is a real problem for magazines like Stereophile. Magazines, both the print and the online variants, earn their keep by being authorities. They tell us, the consumers, what we should want and buy. But magazines and their critics don't know anything about the history of audio, in particular speakers, and they can do little more than ask around as to who the experts are, and conduct an informal survey of what might be significant (in the case of Dudley's piece) which is not exactly authoritative. And if these speakers are in fact better (Dudley rightly noted in some but not all respects) than contemporary offerings, the industry and also the magazines have a big, big problem.
Thus the diagnosis of schizophrenia. The right brain (Stereophile's) is thinking vintage, the left is denying any validity, and Stereophile will continue to lumber off course until it does not matter any more- the market will shift or disappear under its very nose (or eyes, or feet, or your choice part.) I have no doubt that most if not all of the rooms doing horns, vintage coax and the like were very juvenile efforts at Capitol Audio Fest, but I also know that when Robin Wyatt brought a pair of Quad ESL 57's to the Waldorf show a few months before Capitol, they were an enormous hit, and several people went out and bought them as a result of hearing them for the first time.
Audiophiles can't hear these differences as easily as layman- they've sucked in too much propaganda from the magazines. Their minds snap shut. Layman, in contrast, tend to just listen. What they hear from vintage speakers is greater dynamics, lower distortion, more natural sound, a more effortless presentation. What audiophiles hear is less bass, less high frequency extension, and generally less imaging, all of which are artificially generated by-products of today's compact, inefficient speaker designs.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but the magazines have done an about face over the decades vis CD vs Vinyl, Tubes vs. Solid State, and perhaps the next reversal will be Inefficient Modern Direct Radiators vs. Vintage Speakers.
Jonathan
Revisiting my original post, I think it is worthwhile looking at Stereophile and Atkinson's coverage of the Capitol Audio Fest show in a bit more detail.
Capital AudiofestDay Two Late Afternoon | Stereophile.com
The very first image from the Capitol Audio Fest- Day Two Late Afternoon review on the Stereophile website shows a big black horn speaker with what appears to be a red Victrola type horn perched on top, pretty obviously a DIY attempt. Easy to dismiss. In fact, that black horn enclosure is an RCA MI 9462. Which is the basis for the current production Ocean Way HR-1 top of the line loudspeaker product offered by Allen Sides, the legendary recording engineer and owner of Ocean Way Studios, one of the world's most famous. Not only was that speaker the basis for his own mastering room, but that system was sold to Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones. In fact, if you go to Singapore or Hong Kong today and visit the most expensive high end dealers in either city, both are carrying Ocean Way systems based on the exact speaker shown in this blog (and other "vintage" RCA cinema speakers), and on the "retro" technology which Atkinson has dismissed.
In other words, Stereophile is missing the boat. The real edge in audio today is exactly the burgeoning efforts found at a show like this, however "pre-mature" they may be. At least they are heading in the right direction, and if Atkinson thinks that the audio public that travels to shows want the audio equivalent of seeing Fords, it goes a long way to explaining the rapidly declining health of audio. What they want is an entirely different sound, and the "marquee" brands just don't deliver.
The exhibitors that received very negative coverage were all engaged with a retro approach, working with larger drivers or horn systems, both of which Atkinson clearly disdains. They want to achieve high efficiency, again something which the mags and the industry turned away from decades ago. In their stead we now have little woofers and very big amplifiers. When Atkinson makes a statement: "when done right, a low-power SET tube amplifier driving high-sensitivity speakers can get close to some of the aspects of music reproduction that conventional systems can overlook", any intelligent reader knows that "can get close," "can overlook" and even "when done right" are all equivocations meant to trivialize a very different approach to sound reproduction. One which Atkinson not only does not get, but does not want to even discuss. We don't find out what those "aspects of sound reproduction" actually are? Dynamics? More natural sound? Timbral accuracy? Lower overall distortion?
It gets even more ironic when you consider that the Stereophile show reports from Munich Hi End this year clearly stated that the 1920's Western Electric speakers shown by Silbatone were both the best sound of show and the biggest hit of the show with spectators.
Jonathan
Regards
Rajiv
