In recent years, a combination of personal realization, experience, and the influence of friends have guided me down the path of modern audio technology to develop an appreciation for the aesthetic value of what has become a mainstay of our current infrastructure for music listening. This began working on music in an isolated context, removed from live music, when I was listening to and trying to reproduce the sound of a Kenny Wheeler solo. It dawned on me that I was trying to reproduce either an inaccuracy or a fiction: the sound on cheap headphones was anything but the full, glistening sound of Wheelers horn playing. If anything, it sounded thin and had a timbre equivalent to that of cheap plastic. The remainder of what I believe ought to have been in the recording was the byproduct of imagination and wishful thinking.
The duplicity of mind forced by this grade of acoustic reproduction left me often listening to sound from a distance, without the wish to come as close to the recorded sound as I would have a living trumpeter. At that time, I found motivation to pursue more accuracy in my listening technology on the premise that I would have greater success instinctively reproducing a sound on the trumpet that I actually heard, rather than imagined.
The first experience of an aesthetically transparent listening to recorded music came at a headphone shop that carried Stax electrostatic ear speakers. The test track was So What from the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. With my eyes closed, the track started half way in, and at the first note of Miles’ playing, my body jumped back involuntarily. It took some time before I could allay the conviction that the musicians where in the room at such proximity as would warranty my stepping out of their reach. Given this new benchmark for listening and short of cash, I bought and resold several pairs of lower end headphones, briefly settling on a pair of Audeze LCD-2 cans driven by planar magnetic technology before acquiring a introductory pair of Stax.
During this journey, I feel as though I consistently discovered new levels of aesthetic response to recorded material, each of which has come increasingly close to emulating the kinds of experiences that drew me into music performance to begin with. As I was became more focused on setting up a studio for serious production work, I concluded that it was necessary to have a pair of high fidelity, open-back headphones that were portable in addition to being considerably transparent and detail oriented. The Stax, wonderful though they are, provided little in terms of portability because the ear speakers are attached to an amp with an un-extendable cable. In line with this decision, I auditioned several headphones and eventually concluded that the Focal Utopia had the combination of portability, clarity, resolution, and balance that I was looking for. One such pair was heard at a local Vancouver headphone shop called the Headphone bar (the owner of which is immensely helpful to many an audiophile). The second was heard during the purchase of my first upright piano, a Boston 118s, from a retired Chinese engineer and audiophile. Less than several months after this second hearing, a set appeared on the Canuck Audio Mart forum for a reasonable price. I obliged. At this time, I also purchased two pairs of Focal studio monitors. First came the Shape 65 and these were followed by the Twin6 Be. These purchases, along with the Audeze LCD-2, set the stage for the next leg of my audiophile journey.
A chance encounter on craigslist for the prospective sale of my Audeze LCD-2 headphones culminated in meeting with a soon-to-become friend who would entirely change the course of my sonic life. What began as an auditioning session soon turned into a more extensive conversation about audio technology, sound, and music. We both shared info on our listening systems, and I was invited to hear a pair of Bower and Wilkins 802D’s. In coming weeks, we met both in my studio and in his listening room. I shared the sound of my recently purchased Focal Utopia and was then inducted to a new standard for listening and mastering.
The 802D’s offered a level of holography, depth, nuance of detail, and range of sound that I had not heard before. It was by far the closest to the physical experience of a live concert of any sound system available to me. I discovered that the 802D’s were used in recording studios and mastering houses around the world, including the Abbey Road studio in London, the CBC studio in Vancouver, and the local Railtown Mastering studio. At that time I placed a wish (really a pipe dream) for a pair and moved on.
Over the course of several months, my new friend and I would get together for listening sessions, and I began to think about producing music that would be audible appropriate for systems of this level of fidelity and grew increasingly concerned about my ability to hear the work I was actually doing with anything less than proportionally capable equipment. The principle that kept running through my mind is that your music can be no better than your ears. Becoming accustomed to the quality of these speakers, the Focal Twin6 Be seemed less than palatable, sounding thin and grainy or pixilated in comparison. Additionally, the Utopia’s made me familiar with a benchmark for headphones that made listening and recording with the Audio Technica ath m50 and m70x less than enjoyable.
The major event came after the onset of Covid 19 when I received a call from this friend. He decided to upgrade to the latest release in the Bower and Wilkins series, the 802 D3, with the offer that he would sell me his previous pair. I immediately accepted and began scraping money together from the sale of my Focal Twin6 and a few other sources. After some effort, the 802D’s were in my studio, ready for ample listening.
The coming weeks contained numerous experiences of acclimatization. Hours of listening and adapting to this new-found sonic horizon lead repeatedly to a heightened euphoria out of the sheer fidelity of the experience. Many times it required a break to let my brain rest and regain equilibrium while comprehending the sheer amount of information these speakers present. For someone not as involved with sound and music, I cannot say if the effects would have been this significant, but for me, this was nothing less than a sonic revelation. Unquestionably, this provided one of the few paths available during Covid for me to retain some semblance of sanity and connection with musical experience in light of all of the venue closure and concert cancellations.
Following this, I set my mind to acquire a set of closed back headphones for tracking that would have some proximity to the calibre of the Focal Utopia and the Bower and Wilkin’s 802D. With the exceptional difficulty of Covid 19 lockdowns, I was able to audition the Focal Elegia, the Mr. Speakers Ether CX, and the Focal Stellia. Needless to say, only the Stellia came to approximate the Utopia in terms of resolution and detail. This was a predictable outcome as they use similar Beryllium drivers to the Utopia and are the closest in price of the three. Despite the slight midrange boost, it proved to be the final piece in the puzzle to translate an analogous aesthetic response while engaged in focused listening across open back, closed back, and speaker environments, effectively closing the loop of required listening platforms for recording, mixing, and mastering.
Given the amount of work and money that must be allocated to this, one might ask ‘why go to all of this trouble?’. This is a valid question. Perhaps it is in part my Swiss ancestry with a penchant for quality and excellence. I can say for certain that the impulse stems from a wish to emulate certain qualities of authentic musical experience. Having spent so many hours listening with great focus to the depth and complexity of a trumpet, one associates the perception of ‘real’ music with nuances of timbre, dynamic range, frequency balance/response, detail, and so forth. The more time I have spent with higher end audiophile and studio equipment, the more I have come to the conclusion that the aesthetic implications of fidelity in representing music are inseparable from those of the substance and quality of the music itself.
In a conversation with a local composer and educator, he put forward his perspective that he was a musician first and foremost and could not always tell or at times did not care about the acoustic reproduction of the music he was listening to. My own experience, having become acclimatized to high fidelity acoustics, stands in contrast to this: the calibre of presentation is a much a part of the music as is an excellent performance to the work of a great composer. It could hardly be argued that Pablo Casals’ or Yo-Yo Ma’s performances of the Bach cello suites are not significant expressions of Bach’s music. Without such performers to reproduce his music exceptionally, it would hardly have stood the test of time as it has. If one were to imagine a world in which the best renditions of Bach were delivered only by student musicians, it would be a wonder if Bach would have the reputation that he does (notwithstanding the fact that all other music would relatively be all the more unlistenable). The argument is evident. Music in the abstract sense only represents a fraction of the totality of musical experience: the composer, the performer, the music itself, the medium of delivery, and the listener all participate in the chain of communication without which no music can exist.
In terms of listening experience, the more integrated, dynamic, and transparent the representation of music is with the source of the music itself (be that music as it exists in ideational form or as it was initially performed in a recording session) the more one is able to experience the whole of what music as it exists and as it is intended to be heard. As far as we can perceive a sound or other feature of experience as being musical, I have come to hear high fidelity sound as being part of music itself. It is as inseparable from the platform of digital music as is the performer for music in the Western Classical tradition.
The tradition of Western thought speaks of the philosopher’s trinity of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty as the three faces of the Real. Though poets tell many a lie, the English Romantic poet John Keats speaks rightly about the interchange of these values in Ode to a Grecian Urn stating “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” As a listener, this truth is embedded in the psyche’s response to music. The more true to form the experience of a recorded work is to its moment of inception, the more beautiful. It fills the mind and body with an enhanced sense of sonic reality and its concomitant responses. To fully capture and reproduce nuance of detail, range of frequency production, dynamic response, and so on is essential to successfully convey the purpose, meaning, emotion, intellectual content, and spiritual inspiration of great work. Even where one is able to hear error and imperfection with exactitude, that is music too, and for a producer or engineer it is indispensable in making decisions of realism vs perfection of artifice in the recorded work.
As an inspired composer transparently reflects in the created world the domain of music to which he is subject, audio reproduction technology at best brings the listener into intimate unity with music as it originally exists. When recording and original performance are heard as one, the same moment of transcendent magic present in a historically important concert, a great work of composition, or an inspired improvisation has transpired.