1) Can you give our readers a personal history, and a bit about your early musical influences?
I don’t come from a family of musicians. No one can play an instrument or sing but my Dad swears the Irish “shanachie” storytelling blood runs in our family. My Dad baptized me and my brother in old movies growing up. Film combines music, writing, acting and visuals which played a bit part in my creative development. Movies like Moby Dick, The Cowboys, The African Queen and The Blind Samurai allowed me to observe the human experience from the safety of my home until I had my own experiences to write about.
I consider myself a writer first, a singer second and a musician third. I didn’t have fancy taste growing up, I wasn’t spinning Thelonious Monk records in high school and learning about classic musicians. However I do remember my earliest experiences of becoming addicted to choruses. I distinctly remember as a child becoming obsessed with “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics,“Tennessee Hound Dog” by the Osbourne Brothers and “Everywhere” by Michelle Branch [Which was a bizarre experience writing a song on my new album 20 years later with John Shanks who wrote that song.]
2) We love your EP. To our ears is a wonderful slice of baroque pop, with use of trumpet, pedal steel, banjo, and other interesting brush strokes. The mix is really great too. How was it recorded?
I like the term “Baroque pop” I might have to steal that from you when people ask me what my my genre is! My mother who was born in Mexico loves bluegrass music for some unknown reason and hearing those harmonies, banjos and upright basses that appear in bluegrass music influenced me. I also started playing folk instruments when I was younger but I’m from a small town in which banjos, autoharps and dulcimers aren’t as uncommon as they are in Los Angeles. I also just have this inherent fascination of instruments from around the world and the weirder the better in my opinion. I think classic cars and musical instruments are the closest thing inanimate objects get to having a soul.
The people behind the instruments on my EP and album were hired through the studio I recorded at. Tom Weir who owns Studio City Sound is a veteran audio-engineer and he hooked me up with all the players. Most of the session guys on my album are nestled in the music industry and I’d like to believe they had fun with the freedom of playing whatever they wanted on my songs. My producing style was pretty hands-off because I figured what advice could I give to a trumpet-player who has dedicated his whole life to this instrument? But where I got to add my touch was after, during editing. I would then sift through everything and chose riffs and phrases that felt most true to what I was trying to say in my song.
3)Pressing your own vinyl is serious undertaking. Tell us about all the moving parts, and the quality control involved.
Money is the only moving part. Money is the only thing allowing or preventing any artist from reaching their potential. My music has felt like my wife and kids that depend on me for survival and I have to go into the world doing whatever I have to to protect it. It sounds dramatic but it’s how it feels without any sort of label or structure. I’ve done all kinds of (mostly legal) work to fund my music which might be another interview entirely. Luckily my family supports my endeavors and without that support my creativity and personality would have died years ago.
On a more technical level I used RTI and Dorado Packaging for my first EP and Gotta Groove Records in Cleveland for my second record. These manufacturing companies are superb in their own quality control so it makes it easy for me. The studio I record at is also high quality and everyone on my records are top-notch people in their field. So the benefit of hustling to pay for everything yourself is when you hire the best you get the best, and mediocracy isn’t my style.
4) Are your songs based on real events, fiction, or a combination there of?
Real events.
5) Can you describe your home playback system?
My phone and a guitar amp that I plug it into haha. One day I’ll have a nice set up but I’m still living day to day.
6) What current artists and sounds have caught your ear?
My own band (whom I found through posting on Craigslist.) Zach Paul is violin player with a side hip-hop project and I find his juxtaposition interesting. I also love watching his solo ambient shows. And my guitar player Ben Thomas is currently getting his master’s degree in jazz guitar. He continues to amaze me with how he can sing, write and pick up any instrument and play it well. They both use pedals to layer and change the sounds coming from their instruments during our shows which creates such a full and gorgeous sound.
7) Do you play live gigs around Los Angeles?
I’ve been playing with the two guys I just mentioned. We played the Troubadour in L.A. along with The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and we’re all itching to gig more.
8) Tell us all you can about your debut full length LP, Birdcage. We think it is just superb on every level.
Well, it was a journey. It took about a year and 5 months from start to finish. Each song was a journey- physically, emotionally, financially, collaboration-wise. I’m proud of it, I’m happy it’s been birthed and I’m glad it’s over. I am relieved but there’s a bitterness in my relief due to everything I went through to create a professional product and if that even means anything. This album “Birdcage” is about longing. Maybe the whole thing is a cry for help, maybe it’s a middle finger to the world, maybe it’s growing pains, maybe it’s my own epiphanies. All I know is it was something I had to do, I did it, and I’m grateful to be healthy and to live in a free country where I can even pursue a dream.
Order Birdcage here:
https://www.sophiapfister.com/vinyl/sophia-pfister-birdcage-vinyl-lp
Order the EP here:
https://www.sophiapfister.com/vinyl/sophia-pfister-12-record-ep-reissue
Bandcamp download of EP:
]]>I was born in Paris, France in 1973 and grew up there. I moved to the US in 1993, spent a couple of years at Berklee College of Music and moved to New York in 1995. My dad is Lebanese and my mom is Canadian. I think that may have helped spark my interest in exploring other cultures, which led indirectly to jazz. I was first exposed to jazz at my local high school, where there was an excellent music teacher by the name of Annick Chartreux. She is responsible for quite a few of her students becoming professional musicians, in different genres.
Early mentors include saxophonists Philippe Chagne, Jean-Louis Chautemps and Eric Barret in France. Later, in my formative years in the US, studying with Dave Liebman, Bill Pierce, George Garzone and Joe Viola was seminal for me. Yet later, starting in about 2010, I studied with Sophia Rosoff, which also felt like a breakthrough.
My heroes and inspirations are the greats of this music: Miles, Monk, Trane, etc. On saxophone particularly: Joe Henderson, Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz.
2-Your music, to our ears, aside from being exploratory, evocative, and picturesque in nature, is quite remarkably recorded. You seem to take great care in this. How common is this among recording artists today, and why is the sonic quality/recording process of your albums important to you?
I think that with the advent of digital, the ease of recording these days and the loudness war, most records don’t sound as good as they could, unfortunately. It’s great that it’s possible to record cheaply but there is still no substitute for great microphones, a great sound engineer who knows exactly where to place them, a great sounding studio etc. I strive to make the best recordings I can. I spent a long time trying to get the saxophone sound I want, so I want it recorded properly. Same for all the other instruments. The way the music is recorded really affects the way the listener perceives it. If everything feels natural and organic, if the recording is balanced and inviting, then I think people can get into the music more. That’s what I am trying to achieve.
It’s easier said than done, but I’ve learned a lot about recording over the years and I know what works for me at this point. I like recording all in a room, not wearing headphones. I like recording to tape. I like certain microphones, mixing boards etc … I try to work in places that will have the gear I want. I’ve recorded 6 albums with engineer James Farber and I love working with him. At mastering, I will ask the mastering engineer not to use too much limiting, which means that my CDs don’t sound as loud as others, but also don’t suffer from the artefacts of excessive limiting. I try to avoid sample rate conversion. I am picky about the final steps in mastering, which can really make or break a record, in my opinion.
3-Can you tell us about your home playback system, and about your listening habits at home, and on the road. Do you go record hunting?
At home, for serious listening, I have a Fisher integrated tube amp from the sixties, which has been modified and revised, Rogers JR 149 speakers, a Garrard 401 turntable in a Steve Dobbins plinth, a Magnepan Unitrac arm with a Shure V15-III cartridge (JICO neo-SAS stylus), an Arcam FMJ CD 23 CD player and a mac mini that goes to a Wavelength Brick V3 DAC. I sometimes also use the Sennheiser HD 600 headphones. I have room treatment from GIK on the walls.
I also have a second system in my living room with a Dual 1229 turntable, a 90s Yamaha amp (that I’m hoping to change soon) and Polk Audio speakers.
On the road, I have an iPod Touch with Etymotic Research ER-4 headphones.
I listen mostly through speakers. I enjoy listening to music with people, which makes it a more communal experience. I listen to vinyl, high resolution files and CDs. I’ll buy new music on vinyl if it looks like it’s well done or high resolution files if they are available. I don’t have any streaming services. I listen to all sorts of music, but mostly jazz and classical.
I buy records on eBay and in record shops. There is one near me in Brooklyn where I’ve scored some good LPs!
4-Can you tell us what are you current ear worms? Secondly, there any fellow artists who you feel deserve wider exposure that you would like to tell us about?
Recently, I’ve been listening to Toots Thielemans’ first record, “Man Bites Harmonica”, John Lee Hooker’s “Travelin’” and Hampton Hawes’ “Four”.
I think there are a lot of contemporary artists, particularly in jazz, that deserve wider recognition. In fact, most jazz artists deserve wider recognition! I think your readers might enjoy the music of pianist Laurent Coq, saxophonists Chris Cheek, Bill McHenry and JD Allen, and composer and pianist Guillermo Klein.
5) Do other art forms such as books, visual arts, or cinema influence your creative process?
Yes, definitely. Visual arts in particular, as a way to think differently about form and its relationship to artistic personality. I remember seeing a Picasso sculpture exhibit a couple of years ago and being impressed by how diverse his output was, yet his vision was always present. Literature can be an influence too. I have a song called “Middle Earth” in reference to Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. Sometimes someone else’s own creative process can be inspiring. I’m a big Stanley Kubrick fan and his well known perfectionism is an inspiration when doing quality control on an album! The time and effort you put into something always makes it better.
6) MQA has been a controversial topic among audiophiles recently. It has been criticized for being lossy, a closed proprietary system, and a fee generating scheme. However, some have subjectively claimed it “improves” the sound of digital masters. What is your take?
I honestly don’t know what MQA sounds like, as I’ve never even heard an MQA file. I have a problem with the fact that proponents of it seem to want to apply it retroactively to recordings. I don’t think that’s wise, given that approval for the master was given years before. Whatever MQA does, good or bad, it does something and thus I think it runs the risk of changing the sound of a recording in a way that the artist and/or producer didn’t sign off on. I also don’t like the fact that, according to what I’ve read, MQA encoded files are supposed to gradually take the place of high resolution recordings. I am happy to pay for high resolution recordings, I want to keep the option of buying them as a consumer.
7) Lastly, can you tell us about your fascinating new project, which is going to be an all analog vinyl (AAA) release?
The new record is called “No Filter”. It’s a quartet recording that I co-lead with guitarist Greg Tuohey, who I’ve known since we were both at Berklee, with Joe Martin, who I’ve played with for almost 15 years, on bass, and great young drummer Kush Abadey. Like my last record “The Turn”, it was recorded live to two track tape (half inch tape at 30 ips) by James Farber at Sear Sound. It was mastered by Bernie Grundman, who also cut it to vinyl directly from the analog tape. It will be pressed at QRP. The music is all originals, some by Greg, some by myself. We are really happy with the music and sound and we hope people will dig it! It’s coming out in October on Sunnyside but you can preorder the vinyl on my website www.jeromesabbagh.com. We also sell reel to reel tapes on a case by case basis, as some people have been requesting them. And the record will be available on CD and download.
Jerome’s Summer Day 2018 Playlist:
Kurt Rosenwinkel, “Kama” (“Caipi”)
Laurent Coq, “Life” (“Kinship”)
Rebecca Martin & Guillermo Klein, “Just As In Spring” (“The Upstate Project”)
Jozef Dumoulin, “The Dragon Warrior” (“Rainbow Body”)
Frank Wess, The Very Thought of You (“Magic 101”)
D’Angelo, “Prayer” (“Black Messiah”)
Craig Taborn, “The Shining One” (“Daylight Ghosts”)
Schumann, 3 Gesänge, Op. 83: III. Der Einsiedler (“Einsamkeit Lieder” by Matthias Goerne and Markus Hinterhäuser)
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Preferred work flow: I have a simple chain with 3 analog pieces in between DA and AD. I work back to each single from the overview by skipping around with the cursor to sections of each track for a few seconds. It’s a mostly analog chain for the EQ, MS, compression and limiting. Also at times I use a linear phase EQ in Sequoia 12, or the internal DeEss.
Generally I do a first pass on my own, then do revisions based on comments. I work unattended 100% of the time, at odd hours of the day or night, as inspired to do the best work for the particular aspect of the job that’s next in line.
Fair Hedon: We have seen numerous trends come and go in the marketplace, everything from DSD, 24 bit downloads, Blu-Ray, streaming, and the resurgence of vinyl. One controversial topic currently being hotly debated is MQA. What is your take?
Brian Lucey: When I first heard about MQA I wondered why would anyone bother with such a concept, as streaming the full file is only going to get easier over time, and the reduction of data with MQA is minimal . Let’s just sell the 24 bit files at the mastering session sample rate, not higher and not lower, and call it a day? Too easy perhaps for the creativity of modern commerce.
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U.K. based audiophile cable maker Black Rhodium has had numerous positive reviews across the globe, and has been a great resource for those in shopping for high performance cabling at all price points. The cables are designed solid engineering behind them, a bit of trial and error, and, yes, listening. Black Rhodium now has a dedicated North American importer and distributor in Robert Meeks, proprietor of engulfaudio: HI-FI PUBLIC HOUSE.
Lead designer Graham Nalty graciously agreed to answer a few questions:
1) Can you tell us a bit about your background and how Black Rhodium came to be?
My background is electrical engineering and I studied Mechanical Sciences at Cambridge University. I was interested in railways at the time so I joined British Railways to work in signalling. I then moved on to research into new signalling systems. At the same time, I always enjoyed music and, being and engineer, I built my own audio amplifiers. After 13 years with the railways, I left work to set up a shop to sell hi-fi equipment, specialising in demonstrating loudspeakers in customers’ homes. At the same time my interest in electronics pushed me to design audio amplifiers that had the best sound quality possible. I sold amplifiers in kit form to designs that I wrote that were published in specialist magazines. When that business reached a peak, I moved on to manufacturing amplifiers for sale. Whilst I was pursuing sound quality in amplifiers, I realised that good cables made the system sound better and I added the manufacture of cables to my amplifiers. Within a few years, sales of cables became more successful than amplifiers and by the mid-1990s, I concentrated fully on developing cables. I created the business Black Rhodium in 2002, after previously selling cables in the same brand as my amplifiers. The Black Rhodium brand has since progressed as further understanding of how the Laws of Physics affects sound quality has moved the business to higher and higher levels of sound quality.
2) What about Black Rhodium designs, philosophy, business model, and customer relationships make it unique in the marketplace?
What is very special about Black Rhodium is the strong commitment towards achieving the very best sound quality by thinking through the design process, developing engineering solutions to minimising distortion, then developing prototypes and understanding which design techniques deliver the clearest sound. At Black Rhodium we take great pride in offering our customers products that really make a positive difference to their pleasure in their music. What is unique about Black Rhodium is the commitment to use every possible measure to improve sound, in contrast to those whose cables boast one special attribute, but whose design is not so string in other areas.
3) Can you tell us about how you test finished designs, and about your reference system, along with your musical preferences?
I always like to test finished designs first on a low cost system in comparison to a known product in my current range. I regard it as most important that a new design should give greater listening pleasure with greater separation of instruments and voices. I like a system with extreme clarity of sound and my loudspeakers are a small sealed box made from a concrete polymer material. This construction avoids the resonance that limits the sound in most wood or chipboard cabinets.
4) What do you for enjoyment when not designing audio cables and running your business?
I enjoy going to the cinema and attending live musical concerts, especially large scale works such as Beethoven’s Choral symphony, Mahler symphonies, Choral music. This sort of music makes the heaviest demands on a home hi-fi system. I also have a strong interest in railways.
Subjective listening:
I installed Black Rhodium speaker and interconnect cables through out two systems, and they are have brought an unparalleled musicality. natural tone & timbre, and resolution to table that is difficult to give up. Specifically, the $275 Symphony RCA and XLR IC’s, and the $400 Foxtrot speaker cables are amazing values. The build quality and the custom connectors are unheard of at this price, and the aforementioned sonics are superb.
We highly recommend checking out this cable buying guide produced by Black Rhodium. It is absolute common sense and be applied to any brand of cable you are shopping for.
Black Rhodium USA is actively seeking qualified dealers. Please contact-
Robert Meeks: [email protected]
I got interested in electronics as a child (I think around 10 years old) when I had a class teacher who had an electronics set in the corner of the room. There was one time a week when we could all choose which of the class ‘toys’ to play with, the electronics set was the one which grabbed me, not sure why. I can remember trying to work out, with a transistor, how the current could ‘decide’ which way to go between the two other terminals (it comes in on one of the three legs). I never figured that out! A best friend at school a year or so later had a ‘Denshi block’ electronics set – where all the components are encapsulated in plastic boxes with metal terminal lugs on the outside, these blocks pressed into a grid. I investigated and found I probably couldn’t afford so luxurious a kit so I settled on a cheaper ‘Philips’ set which I calculated I could buy if I sold my collection of Lego. Lego had been my primary toy for as long as I could remember so it was a real watershed for me to sell that off and re-invest in electronics. I’ve not looked back since!
As a secondary school boy a few of my colleagues were also interested in electronics so we egged each other on in the projects we’d undertake although none of mine had much connection to audio. I had a couple of articles published in magazines and earned a little pocket money through that. In the sixth form I got a job at a local electronics shop on Saturdays (later it grew into a much bigger enterprise Watford Electronics )
The job helped with my electronics knowledge and also provided parts at a discount. Seeing as by this stage electronics was my life-blood it made sense to me to apply for an EE course at university where I picked up some theory to back up my years of practice and experience in the hobby field. It was at uni that I first got bitten by the audio bug – I had a ‘music centre’ which accompanied me to and from my lodgings each term of my first year but my heart was really set on acquiring a separates system, fueled by poring over the magazines ‘What HiFi?’ and ‘HiFi News’. Using the earnings from my summer job I was able to fulfill my aspirations – one component being the now legendary NAD3020 amp.
For several years after I graduated my interest (and work) in electronics was quite separate from my pursuit of audio. This ‘Chinese wall’ started to dissolve when I undertook to re-design the PA system for the church I attended. It was such an interesting challenge that after I’d completed it I got into building myself a poweramp and modifying my CD player. This was around the time that Ben Duncan published his series of DIY pre-amp articles in HFN+RR so I owe much of my inspiration to Ben. I was able to return some of the favour in proof-reading some of his book on power amplifiers years later. I eventually left my job in industrial vibration monitoring and went to work as digital designer for a pro-audio company. Audio really had taken over my whole life – the year was 1989.
My greatest interest nowadays is in asking and answering the question ‘How low can I go?’ – by which I mean how cheap can I make something while it still sounds good? I have long been of the view that audio kit is overpriced – but this is just an expression of the problem that all electronics made in Western countries is overpriced. (Jason @ Schiit recently found out he was being royally stitched up on the price of his AD DAC chips – this is a rather different, but nevertheless very interesting topic). Since I’ve been living in China I’ve had my eyes opened to just how cheap audio gear can be, from many hours shopping on Taobao. I’ve posted up some of the extreme bargains I’ve found to my blog – diyAudio – abraxalito
I started out my current line of research by asking the question….”how much of my present level of audio reproduction is due to having sub-optimal speakers and how much is due to the electronics?’ As I’m not a speaker designer I decided to begin an answer to that question by tweaking some ready made audio components, which of course I bought on Taobao. The first one was a DAC based on the AD1955 – which I went crazy on modding. I was feeding it to cheap active speakers at the time for the rest of the system and fed from a QA550 SD card player. I found the precise topology of wiring layout in the DAC and speakers made a difference to the sound – star grounding sounding by far the best. But most DACs use groundfills because that’s what the manufacturers tell designers to do in order to achieve lowest power supply inductance. So I started to doubt whether manufacturers really had listeners in mind, they are really focused on getting the best numbers….
2) Can you tell us about how you view measurements in the context of audiophile grade audio components? Also how they tie into the marketing of these products?
How I view measurements to a large degree depends on which hat I’m wearing – design engineer or consumer. Wearing my EE hat measurements are an invaluable way for me to tell if my design in theory has worked out in practice. They’re a way to tie models to reality. Just as one example – on my present DAC design I have a filter which if not given the correct load impedance doesn’t give a flat frequency response (FR). The impedance, coming as it does from an active circuit is hard to measure directly but the frequency response is quite quick to check, so the flatness is a way of seeing if my theory for the input impedance of my active circuit is borne out in practice. At first it wasn’t, and by quite a large margin so the FR measurement was crucial feedback in the design process. I had to adjust my mental model for how the circuit really worked.
As potential buyer of an amp or DAC, measurements as they’re presently constituted are far less valuable. The manufacturers of course are likely to use them in the same way I do, to check there are no mistakes made in the manufacturing of the product, that the amp sold is indeed the design the engineers consciously intended it to be. As guarantors of audio quality though, the current crop of measurements is severely lacking.
Take for a start THD measurements. Nowadays even ‘objectivists’ will say they’re not particularly useful without knowing which harmonics are contributing to the number. This is a good start (Earl Geddes wrote a paper with a new metric proposed) but doesn’t go nearly far enough, mainly because the stimulus (a single sinewave) doesn’t look in any shape or form like music. Music’s ‘crest factor’ – a measure of the ratio of peak to average power will usually exceed 10dB and on classical music (the form I spend most time with) will be 20dB or so. For a sinewave this number is 3dB. How this makes a difference is that its the low signal-level performance of an amp (the now legendary ‘first watt’) that is most crucial – a single sinewave spends such a small fraction of its time exercising that range of output levels that its close to useless at characterizing SQ (sound quality). In the early days of audio, sinewave test tones were the only ones practical to produce, in the digital era though there is really zero excuse not to test amps with a high crest factor signal. Indeed Audio Precision has had this facility for a couple of decades but it has still to catch on. There’s at least one exception though, that being ‘Neurochrome’ who are showing multitone test results for their ‘Modulus’ range of amps. In part this is down to my low-key educational program on DIYaudio – the founder of this numbers-driven audio business hangs out there.
THD measurements on DACs have turned into something of an ‘arms race’ amongst chip manufacturers for who can deliver the lowest possible numbers. I suspect that THD numbers have been part of the reason why sigma-delta DACs have upstaged the older multibit chips, as their vital stats look so much better, with immaculate-looking FFTs down to the lowest levels. Speaking of FFTs I won’t let them pass without a comment – there are artifacts which are easy to see on FFT plots so those are the things designers target for elimination. There are others (noise modulation being perhaps the most important one) which are much harder to spot due to the way the FFT operates. The monoculture of measurement tools (THD, FFT) hasn’t been a good thing in my view for subjective sound quality – we need only look to economics to begin to see why. In that field there’s a saying, Goodhart’s Law which goes ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’ THD and FFT are in my mind akin to the measurement tool which contributed to the last financial crisis, ‘VaR’ (value at risk).
3) I understand you have been working on a unique DAC design for a few years now. Can you explain your concepts in as much detail as you can without compromising any proprietary data?
I’ve been working to understand what the main contributions to how a DAC sounds over a number of years yes. The first DAC design I did was while I was working at SSL over 25 years ago – this was using the new ‘Bitstream’ Philips chips (SAA7321) – at that stage about the only slightly different thing I did was drive two chips in anti-phase and re-ordered their data so both phases of ‘left’ came out of one chip and two ‘right’ phases came out of the other. I didn’t evaluate the SQ particularly critically in those days as I hadn’t enough listening experience to build up a mental picture for how a good DAC should sound. What I did notice in these first generation S-D chips though was low-level ‘birdies’ during quiet passages. My next design was using the SAA7350 and in that device the low-level idle-tone performance had been improved. I took the view at that time that it was really low-level linearity that mattered in a DAC which was why I was fairly well convinced that S-D DACs were the future.
Fast forward to when I started my ‘hobby’ project, I kicked off with a latest generation S-D DAC chip in a relatively poor implementation from Taobao. I figured if it didn’t sound good it would give me a chance to explore how cleaning up the layout (as the manufacturer’s recommendations had largely been ignored) changed the sound. What surprised me was how much better I could make this sound with relatively simple tweaks. The really low hanging fruit for DACs I discovered was getting a good layout, which of course contributes nothing to the BOM cost whatsoever. I played around quite a lot with the output op-amps, at that stage I had no inkling of how sensitive op-amps were to their power supplies. I discovered that to get the best sound out of an op-amp in that position the feedback capacitance should be as low as humanly possible. Despite many hours spent hunched over my computer simulation I was never able to find a connection between the value of that capacitor and any changes in measurement (meaning THD).
Having got a very satisfying improvement in the sound from that S-D DAC I was curious to learn what the attraction was with NOS DACs so I bought a very cheap toy TDA1543 board. I found it a bit dull, lacking ‘detail’ at first but its qualities gradually grew on me. I tweaked up the famous ‘NOS droop’ to get a flatter frequency response which helped but I also threw out the output RC filter. I then wondered how a better measuring multibit DAC might sound so I investigated the CMOS cousin of this chip, the TDA1545. I had been given samples of this back when it was first introduced but never put them in a circuit. Being super-lazy about building from scratch, the vehicle I chose for them was the Lite DAC-AH which comes kitted out with eight TDA1543s (they have the same footprint) and an op-amp for the output stage. What was of interest with this project was the impact of low-pass filtering between DACs and output stage. I found I was able to control the amount of ‘detail’ in the sound with a series of ferrite beads – the more beads I added, the less detail I heard. But as this ‘detail’ got quieter and quieter I found I was rewarded with improved tonal colours and more depth to the soundstage. It then dawned on me that the ‘detail’ I had missed on first switching over to NOS from my AD1955 was an artifact, not a feature.
The absence of ‘detail’ with the TDA1543 and its presence with the unfiltered TDA1545 made me wonder whether the reason the latter chip hadn’t gained such traction with audiophile DIYers was they hadn’t appreciated the ‘detail’ that arrives when the 1545 is directly connected to an op-amp. I reasoned that ‘detail’ was caused by RF upsetting the input stage of the opamp, the RF originating at the power supply of the DAC. The TDA1543 being a bipolar (referring to the types of transistors used internally) design doesn’t pollute its power supply to the degree of any CMOS DAC but it draws at least 10X the current because its ‘on all the time’. CMOS chips only draw power at clock edges but this characteristic modulates their supply to the detriment of the sound. Seeing as I wanted my design to use as little power as possible, I decided to go forward with the CMOS DAC together with some kind of low-pass filter to remove the ‘detail’.
The kind of filter I have used in my designs has changed a lot as I’ve experimented with multiple options. Because inductors in passive filters tend to be bulky things, as well as having relatively poor tolerances, for a while I was using an active filter. But not one based on op-amps, rather discrete transistors. Op-amps generally aren’t great for sound quality but I’ve not anywhere read about this weakness being tied to any objective characteristics. The key to why they’re bad seems to be they run in classAB so contribute noise to their supplies when driving any kind of load. To get the best sound out of any op-amp, don’t make it work at all hard. JFET input stage types are best because they’ll work with very high resistor values without becoming too noisy. If you use it with no smaller than 200k resistors even the humble TL084 can put on a good show. Nowadays I avoid them and use discretes in classA to maintain hygiene on my power supplies.
A very important aspect of a DAC is its I/V stage – the older generation of S-D chips (prior to ESS) like AD1955 explicitly tell designers not to use passive I/V – op-amps are de rigeur in manufacturers’ recommended schematics. DIYers though tend to like passive I/V in NOS DACs which is where I started out when I began playing with TDA1543. The traditional EE view is that passive I/V sucks because DACs have signal-dependent output resistance, so having a relatively high impedance load causes distortion. Whilst this is true without a doubt, I have doubts that its the reason for differences in sound between active (non-op-amp) and passive I/V. That’s because when using passive I/V I found differences in the power supply impedance made a difference to the sound, most markedly in the bass. I experimented with huge amounts of capacitance (I gave up around 1F, this not being made from a supercap which has too high internal impedance for the job) and always found more = better bass.
I built some prototype DACs as ‘towers’ where the tower was built out of a hexagonal cross-section of capacitors, stacked vertically. But the time consuming nature of creating such dissuaded me from turning these DACs into published designs. Its just too impractical to parallel up hundreds of caps, not to mention the sheer bulk! I was pondering a solution for what seemed a very long time – until I happened to notice that the bass of a commercial DAC using opamp I/V wasn’t as much affected by adding capacitance. Op-amps present a very low impedance to a DAC when used in ‘virtual earth’ mode. Of course op-amps have other drawbacks – primarily in the higher frequencies due to supply noise I mentioned earlier – but I got to thinking that perhaps lower impedance to the DAC would be beneficial. A passive I/V resistor of lower value doesn’t help as lower values need higher gain, what’s needed is a true current-to-voltage converter. So I built one from a common-base transistor – this got incorporated in a modification to the commercial DAC I mentioned earlier – if your interest is piqued the discussion about this DAC is here:
Sure enough the common-base transistor did the trick of giving better defined bass without needing a hundred or more caps. I was another step along the path of reaching my goal of a pocket-sized DAC with audiophile sound.
The common-base transistor has the slight drawback that it needs a fair bias current in order to present a low impedance to the DAC, and its impedance changes slightly with signal current. I figured I could improve on it by using negative feedback around a common-base input transistor. This gave a lower powered solution with more stable input impedance which I first incorporated into a prototype I called the ‘Domino DAC’. It acquired this moniker because it has two sets of six LEDs in a pattern which look like a ‘double six’ on a domino. The LEDs were used as references for the active output filter. The design has no inductors so is nice and compact – being balanced though it needs output transformers which do tend to be rather bulky!
The final innovation – I call it that because I’ve not seen it applied in any commercial or DIY DAC to date – is to move the anti-imaging filter to a position upstream of the I/V stage. The advantage here is that no active circuitry is exposed to the ‘raw’ wideband output from a DAC which can easily reach into the 10’s of MHz. Lynn Olson verified the wideband nature of his PCM63 DAC’s output with an RF spectrum analyser so became convinced of the need for some filtering. My filters take his suggestion for rather gentle low-pass filtering much further and are still a work in progress – to catch up on the latest developments, pop over to my Hackaday project:
]]>Fair Hedon: Chris, I understand you have been living in Japan for the past several years, and you have continued to pursue the art of cable design relentlessly. What are your current projects?”
Chris Sommovigo: This year I took on some major expenses in order to have two custom machines built for me here in Japan. Together they allow me to continue making the products that I have been making for the last two years on my old machines, but they also have given me some new capabilities for things that I have wanted to make but couldn’t with the old ones.
One of these new ideas is a conductor that I call “Zoltan Matrix” – which is an outrageously complex conductor that I use in my ultra-reference Indigo line.
One of these ideas is something far simpler and less expensive: Ghostwire
Although I’m a one man manufacturing operation, I have products that span from the reasonably affordable to the mega expensive. I build them all here in my workshop, and I even make a part of the packaging here using handmade washi-paper that I buy from a 350 year old shop.
FH: Let me say I have always had a huge amount admiration for small, artisanal hifi companies that invest in their business, to produce products reach for the state of art, as daunting as that can be, instead of spending money on ads, trade shows, and other expenditures that add nothing to the quality of the product. So by investing in these machines and things as far out as washi paper, you clearly are not compromising.
I have to say, am always intrigued by cable geometry. How do you come up with the geometries, do you visualize them? Do you use computer aided design? Pen and paper? And once you build a prototype, do you have a process to listen for specific things?
CS: There has been an evolution in my work between the industrial model and the artisanal model I presently rely on:
I started this adventure back in 1992 when I founded Illuminati to make what some have called the first “true 75 Ohm” SPDiF cable. At that time and up until around 2010 or so, I was always reliant upon a subcontractor to run my cables. I found a specialty subcontractor through connections that I had in the microwave and RF world – folks who run small to medium sized jobs for military, aerospace, and surveillance – and I leaned on them for their precision abilities. They still make the precision cores for my digital cables, but those are worked into designs that I enhance and modify in-house.
The impression that I have is this: 99.99% (or more) of the all of the cables made in the consumer electronics industry are what I called “cable sausage” – designs compromised by the need to fit into an industrial model that squeezes cables out of thermoplastic extruders like sausage. I understand and appreciate the need to be able to manufacture cables in lengths measured in miles instead of meters – you have to supply lots of distributors and resellers, and you’ve got to be able to terminate these cables in-house rather quickly, because labor is expensive. This manufacturing model meets a need, but it also requires – as I mentioned – a kind of compromise that shoehorns any cable design into the standard capabilities of industrial subcontractors.
Keep in mind, though, that some subcontractors have some pretty wild capabilities – things that most folks don’t even imagine – so I’m not totally knocking the idea of subcontracting. But this is an important inflection point when comparing what I am now doing to what I have done in the past (and what almost everyone else still does).
My own manufacturing abilities began initially as a way to explore how I could produce quality cables almost entirely in house (I don’t draw the raw/bare conductors themselves, but source them from others and then work them into my designs). I wanted to do this because I felt the need to be able to design and express designs at-will without having to run 1,000 feet of this or that just to test a new idea. That’s an unsustainably expensive way to develop products, and I wanted to try some things that were not within the capability-envelope of the subs that I knew.
So this started back in 2006 or 2007, when I obtained my first machine – a small used braider that was originally designed to make catheters for the medical industry – and started the work to make the micro-braided tonearm cables for the Continuum Audio Labs Caliburn/Cobra record players.
Projecting from there, over the course of the last decade, I’ve acquired tools and machines to help me express, test, and manufacture design ideas that would be naturally rejected by subcontractors because they would fall outside of their regular capabilities.
The design process begins as a thought, usually as an articulation point away from something that I’ve already done and toward an iteration. “What happens when I change this or that element?” – because I have in-house capabilities, I can run 25 feet of a test cable and find out, even if the new idea is complicated. So it begins with something that is already proven to be worthwhile, and it articulates in iterative experiments away from an established, core idea.
This gets tested in the ‘big rig’ and also, where possible, in the headphone rig. For instance, when I’m messing about with USB cables, I listen in the big rig and again through the DAC/Headphone systems that I have here, and try to draw parallels between them.
Sometimes these new designs are merely iterative evolutions, sometimes they are complete bastardizations. For instance – recently, I decided to try something “wrong” with an interconnect design – that is to say, against cable engineering conventions and habits. It was just a “what if” scenario, so I made a small run and tested in the big rig. When testing, I tend to use less than a handful of recordings that I know extremely well.
My go-to recordings tend to be from Todd Garfinkle’s “MA Recordings” label because his are purist, two-mike recordings done extraordinarily well and in very reverberant spaces. Natural acoustics help me to track differences between components, because this is a very complex series of radiation patterns that help to create the illusion of space (as emanating through the sound system) that is captured by two microphones and emanate through two loudspeakers. I typically use “Sera Una Noche: La Segunda” and also “Calamus: The Splendor of Al Andalus” as my main references, because I know these recordings intimately.
Listening to Al Andalus with the ‘wrong’ (heretic!) design was a shock. Same music, same recording, same space … but it seemed that the presentation was utterly different. There was an effortlessness to the presentation that boggled my mind. I hadn’t expected anything like this, and – in truth – it has got me thinking in new ways. The only other times I’ve been this surprised by the element of effortlessness was when I first heard my Berning Siegfried (which I still use), and when I first tested Zoltan Matrix.
This wasn’t at the same level of Zoltán Matrix by far, but it was enough of a surprise that I couldn’t stop “testing” … repeating track after track from the two albums, then stretching into other types of recordings – even studio recordings with artificially derived reverb – to see where the design would fall apart. Lots of ordinary music-sourced break-in, also subjecting it to my own break-in track, and then re-listening.
So sometimes designs begin as moderate articulations away from a known and established design theme of mine, and sometimes they are more like a rebellion away from an established design theme. In this case, the rebellion was worth the deflection. Most times it’s a disaster. I’ve got a “cable graveyard” full of expensive disasters.
Now, in the case of Ghostwire, I was just looking for a way to distill a simple but very effective design motif into something more affordable -and- something able to be produced and used in long runs. This is a special circumstance for me, because most of my designs do not really lend themselves to manufacture in long lengths. There is a hand-made aspect to them, and it’s just not easy to hand-run something 15 meters long. I did this once for someone here in Japan. They wanted a 15m run of my Matrix interconnect. It was extremely difficult to do. Swore off ever doing that again. The whole Black Cat Redlevel line has a lot of handcraft in it, so I don’t think I’ll ever really want to run anything longer than 6 or 8 meters of one of those designs.
And here is where we get into an aspect of my business that is poorly understood by folks outside of the manufacturing segment, because they tend to think that if they are buying a very long cable that it should be cheaper by the meter to them. They understand this idea because the industrial “cable sausage” model teaches us that things become cheaper in quantity, and that we should be looking at these things as commodities subject to an economy of scale. The opposite is true in terms of what I do, and so I cause some confusion (and a little bit of dyspepsia) when I say that it will be more expensive per meter to do a long run than a short run, because the increase in labor is substantial.
Ghostwire was designed and manufactured to mimic the commodity-model a bit more closely. I have no problems doing a 15m run or a 30m run of something because the labor involved is the same as it would be for a 1m run, and the terminations are also less involved. The capabilities I had built into the new machines as a custom consideration enabled me to cut, in half, the machine time required to make the Ghostwire product.
So these in-house capabilities that I enjoy enable me to create many inflection points in the catalog, from the entry-level to the radically complicated, and I can do all of these as a one-man operation. I’m not unique in that way, generally speaking, but my in-house capabilities are pretty rare.
The downfall of this model is that I will only be able to grow to a certain point before hitting a wall. I won’t be able to expand if I want to remain a one-man operation, or else I would have to hire and scale up to expand. For now I’m content to be the only one touching these products – from raw materials all the way through to the packaging – as it lends me a kind of satisfaction that the industrial and quasi-industrial models lack. I approach my work as an artisan, artistically if you will, in that the ideas expressed in these cables are the products of my own hands and they fall far away from the limitations that the industrial model superimposes on ordinary cable design and manufacture.
This is therefore not a business, in the ordinary sense. It is much more like a self-indulgence that happens to have the side-benefit of helping me to feed my family.
FH: That is a remarkable overview of your evolution. There is no doubt what you say is true concerning the standard industrial model of cable “sausage” making. There are some brands where every conceivable length and termination of every cable type is in stock either at the warehouse, or in the big box stores. There is no other way it can be done, and I agree there is an inherent compromise.
In your case, it is a bit ironic that a longer run of cable is more costly, but it is clear why, as you explain, it is very labor intensive. Consumers are used the pricing model of: add X dollars per extra meter. It simply does not apply with bespoke cable products.
You use the phrase unsustainably expensive, and I think the reason many artisanal businesses fail is because they go down this path as a badge of honor. This applies to everybody from pickle makers to micro brewers.
I find absolutely fascinating your can do wild experiments and even break every normal design rule to see what the result is. This is sort of venturing into the unknown, but I would have to think it keeps your brain firing on all cylinders and opens up new potential methods, maybe by accident.
To say your in-house capabilities are pretty rare would be an understatement. I would venture to say that there may not be another sole proprietor cable artisan on the planet with your investment in machinery and materials. While there may ultimately be a limit to what you can do by yourself, it has to be incredibly satisfying to ship a cable half-way around the world when it is done.
I also wonder how you are finding running a business in Japan as opposed to the USA, and how this artisanal way of life may be part of the fabric of Japanese culture.
CS: There’s no doubt that Japanese culture and the pervasive respect, in Japan, for artisanal work has had a tremendous influence upon me while I’ve been here – I feel more at home in this atmosphere, for instance, than in the strict mercantilism and industrialism that seems part and parcel of modern Western business culture. There is a value that the artisan brings to their work, an investment of self, that is missing from the purely commodified approach – the Walmartification – that we usually encounter.
That said, there remain artisans in our industry – even in the West – and I don’t mean to exclude them in my attribution above. But there seems to be a struggle of identity that remains, in my estimation, because there is pressure to somehow ‘win’ market share. This places a kind of pressure on a business toward consistent expansion. It’s not enough that you might make one of the best thingies in the world – the impulse to try and dominate that segment of the market seems characteristic of ordinary business-thinking. No one runs a race with the intention of coming in 2nd place.
The impulse to win market share dominated my thoughts, at least when I was younger. As a 25 year old entrepreneur, I intended for Illuminati to become a dominating force in the market. I had a better “thingie” and I thought that I would grow the company as something to be reckoned with – to spread my concepts and philosophy far and wide by gaining dealers and distributors and … and … and …
It has taken a lot of rough road, skinned knees and bloodied mouth – and finally some wisdom, in the form of a business allegory – for me to see the folly in my distraction. I refer on my website to the allegory of the Mexican fisherman under the link: Let’s Get Small
When I first read this, the wisdom of it overwhelmed me. There was a choice to be made, in a very literal sense, between my life and my business. Chasing more and more money (or recognition, or market domination, or influence, or power, etc) seemed to be a trap that can rob one of their life. Imagine amassing millions or billions or trillions and then, at the last moment of one’s life, not being able to purchase a millisecond more of time alive on this earth – even for the price of one’s entire fortune.
It was also a choice between doing things the way that they have always been done, as a strict matter of business, or doing things that way I wanted to do them.
I made a choice, and I’m blessed to be able to feed my wife and children, to shelter and clothe them, and still be able to do what I do in the way that I want to do it. Not concentrating on chasing money or dominating market segments allows me to make what I think of as very special products for the few people who also think that they are special.
In this way it becomes a curiously interesting and rare circumstance whereby I can earn my living without threatening the status quo, without being “competition” in some economic battle for market share against my colleagues, and so there’s really been none of the overt sniping that sometimes happens when two or more philosophies collide in a marketplace. No one is gunning for me because I’ll never be large enough to threaten their market share.
It’s a rare circumstance, and I’m deeply grateful to my customers for making this dream possible for me. I’m able to personally make every cable that leaves here, and this is just not possible when you require deep and wide distribution to support a family of employees in an industrial – or even quasi-industrial model. These are fundamentally different things – not better or worse in this way or that – but certainly different from each other.
I’m an artist living by the sea making cables one set at a time, and each one is something that I am personally responsible for from the initial gathering of raw materials to the final packaging. There are only a few folks like this in our industry, and I think that it’s a lovely and satisfying way of doing things, and I think of this approach and these artisans as precious. But in order to venture down this road one first has to accept that this is hardly a road to riches.
I’m typing this to you as I sit at the dining room table with my kids and wife. The kids are on summer break, and we’ve just had some lunch together. They are learning to play poker and cracking themselves up into hysterics with all the funny “winning hands” they have created, with no regard for the official rules. I’m in shorts and a T-shirt doing some emails before getting back to to my workshop to complete some cables that are on order.
It’s not a shabby life …
FH: I have to admit I always though of your approach to cable design as very much in the Zen tradition. I have been to Japan once, and from what I understand, there is no quick path to master status. For instance, a sushi chef can spend as much as six months to a year just perfecting rice, or tamago, the egg omelet, before they can move on to anything else. This weeds out those without singular focus. This would be unacceptable in the West, where instant expert status and gratification have become pervasive.
To your point, I have never seen, it may have happened, I just am unaware, a small company make near perfect products for their purpose then move into “expansion” mode and have the products remain identical. I have just never seen it. The story in your link is just devastatingly great.
What I find interesting, aside, is that most of the great scientific breakthroughs that led to millions of new products being developed, were not discovered with profit as the main motive, if was people with an unstoppable drive for knowledge. I can give endless examples from Tesla, to the ’69 moonshot. Many free market people like to argue that the private sector drives all. But in fact, the United States government put a man on the moon. And that in turn spawned innumerable private enterprises. Same for what we now call the internet: it started as a government communication system.
Pivoting slightly, one thing about you that always amazed me was your ear for exotic hifi. I would always hear about a really cool Italian amplifier, or some interesting speaker or headphone amp. Can you tell me what your current systems are comprise of? Anything you have taken notice of recently?
CS: Exotic HiFi: I tend to look for the outliers, and then from among them the ones that are playing with compelling and interesting ideas. HiFi is overfull with people making the same thing, over and over again, and putting it in a new package. I’m not knocking that: 90% + of loudspeakers in our industry pivots from Thuras’ bass-reflex idea, which he patented for Bell Telephone in 1930! But it’s also nice to explore comparatively modern ideas, and so I’ve had my time with Lincoln Walsh-style omni speakers, plasma-tweetered speakers, speakers with modern enclosures (the bent-plywood designs of Davone weren’t only beautiful – they were also quite functional).
Right now I’m running a system that isn’t so exotic (save for the Continuum Audio Labs “Caliburn” system with a Soundsmith Strain Gauge cartridge) – Soundsmith Monarch loudspeakers (which never cease to unhinge my jaw), and some amps: a Soundsmith-modded Tandberg amp, a pair of Klimo “TINE” mono blocs, and also my trusty Berning Siegfried SET OTL. Preamp is the “Merlino Gold Plus” from Klimo. Digital is a truly outstanding DAC/server combo from Clones Audio in HK: HOST server and ASHER DAC, and I’m running Roon. Fantastic stuff, and it rolls in at a price that’s far below its performance envelope, in my opinion.
Soon I’ll be taking delivery of a set of Altec 844A monitors, as well. Completely different thing, but there is something supremely satisfying about VOTT-style presentation. As well, I’ve been saving my shekels to buy a Western Electric 16A reproduction that’s made by my friend in South Korea. These kinds of things fall away from the strictures and expectations of the “high end” but they don’t fall short on producing sublime musical experiences.
I’ve also been getting back into recording again, slowly, as time permits. My wife is a classical violinist, Masters in performance from New England Conservatory, and we’ve recently set up to do some Franck and Fauré in a local performance hall with a pianist-friend of hers that also graduated from NEC. I found these extraordinary ribbon mics handmade by a Russian fellow in Utah, really quite stunning transparency. I also recorded a live gig at a Jazz club up in Tokyo called the Pitt Inn. This was a performance of Satoko Fujii in two ensembles – the first was a quartet, and the second was her ‘orchestra’ that consisted of mostly brass (maybe 19 or 20pcs?), an amplified acoustic bass, and a drummer. WAY OUT stuff – from collective improvisation in the first ensemble, to more of a Schulleresque “Third Stream” crossed with Coleman’s Free Jazz … highly energetic, visceral stuff – but not for the feint of heart.
I make all of my mic cables, of course – a variation on the Matrix build in a product that I don’t really sell ‘officially’ called “Phox” (don’t even recall why I named it that). It distills the Matrix approach into a cable that can be made for very long runs if needed. Doesn’t have the advantage of an air dielectric, but it’s better than cable sausage. Perfect for mic cables.
FH: I think you are saying that there is really not much innovation going on in hifi, just repacking of tried and true in a new veneer for marketing purposes, along with tons of product churn, and “MK II” and “MKIII” designations that really not evolutionary, but done to appeal to the restless audiophile market.
Well, your systems sound exotic to me! My father had a Tandberg integrated amp and tuner in the early 80s…FYI, for my desktop system I have a CLONES Audio 25p power amp I use under my desk driving a pair of Spendors. I love Funjoe’s products and I hope to hear the new server. I also run Roon.
Sublime musical experiences you say? Sign me up! I have also dabbled in recording, but the trick is to find musicians, but you seem to have solved that problem..I have even have four Revox reel decks, one a 15 ips 2 track. How did you make the recording in the jazz club? Portable digital rig?
CS: I think that innovation is dangerous to an established business interest, even if the business began with innovation. Take Jim Winey’s planar-magnetic loudspeaker. Wow. You know, my first truly “audiophile” speakers were a used set of Magnepan MG-2B that I bought from Peter McGrath’s in Miami. Drove them with the Adcom 555 – didn’t know at the time that Nelson Pass designed it! But getting back the planar-magnetic design – something quite novel in that day. Magnepan has made a wonderful reputation with that operating principle, and very little has changed since JW’s first product. Winey created something innovative and valuable, and the business has been iterating on that theme ever since.
There is nothing ethically, morally, philosophically wrong or even distasteful with basing a business on tried and true principles – it’s business! Take my obsession with very old tech from the Western Electric era, and later the Altec-Lansing era. In the right circumstance, this stuff raises goosebumps unlike anything else I’ve listened to. How far have compression drivers really evolved since Wente and Thuras designed the 555 receiver for WE? Not much at all.
But sometimes the sameness gets boring for me. Makes me itchy. I’ve mostly stopped reading the trades, the usual suspects, because it’s just a lot of recycling of old ideas and old prose to talk about old ideas as if they’re new, exciting, and “the best” – Groundhog Day. It’s not that these things aren’t delivering compelling performance – many of them are, and they deserve accolades for their performance. But much of it has ceased to be interesting to me, so I wind up directing my attention elsewhere.
The Pitt Inn recording was done with a handheld pair of spaced ribbons (Fig 8) and a Sound Devices 702, with some FetHead inline amps for the ribbons. Peter McGrath turned me on to the Sound Devices stuff some years back – nice high-resolution recorder, although I’d prefer better mic preamps. But when you’re sitting in a tiny jazz club cramped against others in the audience … not much room for a “rig” of any consequence. I’ve also got an over/under XY large diaphragm condenser that’s decent – but it’s no Manley Gold Reference Stereo … I just don’t have the dosh to buy one of those. Heck – I don’t even know if Manley’s still making that one.
I’m still in the process of editing the Franck and Fauré (and the solo piano Debussy material I did with the pianist in the same hall). Hoping to do some more things this autumn and winter, and yes – you’re right – finding musicians isn’t easy. I’m especially interested in doing some out of the ordinary 20th Century classical stuff, and it’s near-impossible to get any classical musicians to knuckle-up and try something outside of their comfort zones – especially in Japan, where traditional repertoire is the only thing rewarded with attendance. I can’t blame the musicians – it’s hard enough to make a living playing classical ‘greatest hits’ for a mostly frugal audience … imagine trying to get an audience for Schoenberg, Scriabin, or Ginastera?
It’s the 100th birthday of Thelonious Monk. I tried to recruit some pianists to do something in honor of his birthday. Nope. Nada. Zip. You know who’s doing something for Monk’s 100th Birthday in Japan? WONK – (I guess if you invert the M to W you get WONK) – but I haven’t heard of any jazzers stepping up to the plate. That’s a sin. But maybe it’s also an indicator of a kind of pervasive conservatism that seems to govern Japanese culture. I’m no expert … maybe I’m just not hanging out with the right people!
FH: Chris, this has been very illuminating, and tremendously thought provoking. What is next on the horizon for you?
CS: I recently played with an interconnect idea with the intention of doing things the ‘wrong’ way, against conventional wisdom and accepted ‘best practices’ – indeed, against my ordinary habits of cable development. The result was astonishing.
While it wasn’t close to the Indigo in terms of ultimate performance – Zoltán Matrix (ZMX) is, so far, completely untouchable – it stood in the family of ZMX in that it presented the music with a kind of effortlessness that I’ve only otherwise heard from ZMX and also my Berning Siegfried.
Awhile back I introduced a direct-only product called Airwave, and it was essentially a way to deliver a cable that was simultaneously high-performance and entry-level, which meant simplifying a process I developed for Redlevel’s Mk. II series cables (The Tube, Lupo, and Matrix) called “nami” (波) which is Japanese for “wave” (as in ocean wave) – the tool I had made for this process (shout out to Christopher Hildebrand of Fern & Roby for machining the tooling for me!) is a hand tool, and the conductor has to be run by hand into the cable’s body.
The Airwave products were intended to make use of a form of Nami processing, but not involve nearly as much handwork, and be able to sell for a more accessible price. It borrows some from Black-Cat Redlevel, but is simplified and distilled. It doesn’t approach the performance envelope of Redlevel too closely, but for the price I don’t think it can be touched.
The new design is a cooperation between my 32-element Matrix braid and the internal (simplified) Nami conductor of the Airwave, in an unconventional, counterintuitive relationship to each other.
This has also lead to developments in the loudspeaker-cable end of things, and I’ve decided to let these things, which will also be part of the 3200 series. I’ve just got a funnel page up to gather the email addresses of people who might be interested in the 3200 series once it’s released: http://www.3200series.com– I don’t expect to be able to release these products until late Autumn, slated for November 14 launch.
At the moment I’m working on how to express this in production with a reliable consistency. Getting from prototype to production can be time consuming, which is why I don’t foresee the release until the verge of winter. Won’t be cheap! Won’t break the bank …
Chris
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Bonus:
Sommovigo’s End Of Summer Albums:
