London Calling

Need I elaborate?

There is clearly a feeling of triumph: Of good vs evil, of intelligence over power, of empowerment vs dog-eat-dog. The feeling is so strong you could cut it with a knife and make cheesecake out of it.

Don’t get me wrong, Obama at this stage is more of a symbol than a reality. But if you are an American, you are tempted to believe that this feeling of hope is itself enough to crystallize some aspects of American reality and that out of this crystallization could come a better America and one that is far less of a disease on the face of the world.

And that will be important, perhaps vital. Out beyond the big problems of the International Economy, Terrorism and international tensions await the really Big problem of the Environment.

Indeed, for me, this whole economic meltdown and the semi-coordinated international response is just a prelude to the far larger world-shaking problems that the Environment will begin to throw at us, perhaps even during Obama’s reign.

We are, after all, dwelling in humanity’s distant future in the 21st century, and very soon this will become quite evident. Let us hope that we are prepared for that.

Hum….how do describe Cairo in a short amount of time? Well, you can’t, really. With the business, concrete, dust, noise, diesel fumes and heat (even in the “winter”, as Egyptians call this time), it’s a city that will easily overpower your senses. It is, of course, Chaotic, but nicely so I think. I think that cities that overly orderly and quiet seem a little dead to me (like Geneva, for instance). Cairo, however, is not in danger of that. For instance, there seemed to be no traffic lights or direction at even large intersections. But the Cairo-ians seem to roll with the punches. indeed, they appear to be much less aggressive than New Yorkers would be in many situations. No doubt, being part of a society that has religion so close to mind at all times seems to help things.

In New York, however, authorities must solve certain kinds of problems quickly or they will soon have a mob on their hands. Not so, with the hospitable Egyptians. Over the years my experience with Egyptians has always been positive, and this has done nothing to change that.

Yeah, me. Lookin’ kinda worldy-wise and bad-assy, if I do say so myself (or did Zoidberg merely hire somebody to stand-in for him in the photo? You’ll never know for sure!)

Some Islamo-cats I fed.

More later, maybe…

Today I took a scuba diving refresher course. About 3.5 years ago, I got my scuba license, and moved to England before I was able to use it again. But today was fun, after some initial trepidation. indeed, during the pool dive in the morning, I found myself panicking a bit while going through the mask-clearing procedure. But after some practice and remembering the basics, I got back into the groove.

And I guess that’s key in a lot of endeavors: Get yourself well-trained and well-prepared, and then panic won’t cause you to do things you might not normally.

And why, do you ask, have I learned to both scuba dive and snowboard in my middle age? Basically, to change my “operating system”: By stretching myself continually into new zones of operation, and away from my ‘natural’ comfort zones, I am hoping that I can move beyond the basement, so to speak, or at least beyond the confines of perception imposed by who I am or, at least, who I have been up until now.

This has in fact been a strategy of mine much of my life: Pushing myself into situations that I would not naturally fit into. It gives you new perspectives and changes you.

For me, true change never happens on the back of mystical or “big” experiences; rather, it happens as a result of long-term exertion towards something, or by soaking in an environment that is decidedly different from the ones in which you were formed. On the other hand, the big experiences can indeed catalyze changes you have been working towards for a while, but the big experience does not actually cause a change by itself.

Tomorrow we will go to Cairo for the day, including see the pyramids and sphinx, of course. That’ll be quite the big experience, but I’m not expecting much from it. On the other hand, there’s value too in merely encountering some of the big sites of human history.

Tomorrow we go to Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt’s Cancun, on the Red Sea. There’s not much to see there, though, except for nice water and reefs for scuba-ing and so on. I haven’t had a do-nothing chillout vacation in a long time, so I’m looking forward to it.
Actually, back in early 2006 I got a scuba license. But that was before I knew I would eventually move to the UK, so I haven’t used it except for my qualification dives in the Bahamas that Spring. So I might take a wreck-diving course. We’ll see.

Actually, travelling from the UK is very different than from the US. From the US, most places you would want to go are so far away that you do it once in a life time. As a result, it’s kind of rare to find people in the US who have been to places like Bruge, or Saas Fee. Egypt is one of those once-in-a-lifetime place.

But not from the UK. In fact, from the UK Egypt seems like it resides on the very edge of the same world in which the UK, France, Germany, Greece and Turkey reside.

Ah. What else? The financial markets? Who knows. It’s a whole new world. But since I work in a bank, I am seeing close up the consequences of needing to hold cash. And with the basel requirements, you can’t just charge in and bet the store on something very risky. There’s quantified measures of risk-return, and if the risk is too high then it makes more sense just to put the money into the bank or other financial instruments.

As for England, it is FINALLY (after almost 28 months) feeling less foreign, and the crazy things that the British do seem just almost comprehensible now. I guess I’m getting over a long stretch of culture shock.

Well, let’s see if I can post photos from Egypt, but they may not be interesting enough for me to bother. In which case, I, most humble Zoidberg, might be offline for a week or so, so try to keep it together while I’m gone.

…no, not the speakers. Not the amplifier. Not the CD player or the cables or your turntable. Some of the smarter anti-audiophiles are smart to point out that none of these matter unless you fix your…

ROOM.

You might think this is the one component you can do nothing about, at least not without remodling, but that’s not true.

But let me back up. If you have a room where you have to turn your TV up to very loud levels before you can understand what the people on a show are saying, then you have some problems with standing waves in your room. What that means is that the frequencies that cluster around the human voice happen to have wavelengths such that, if you could see those waves, you’d find they fit almost a perfectly even number of times across the length of your room. In other words, if you could see the waves frozen in time, you’d see that one cycle ends just at the walls.

What this causes is for some frequencies to gett cancelled and others to in effect get amplified as the wall reflects the sound wave back on itself. This will make the most expensive system in that room unlistenable.

In fact, if you are on a budget you can spend a small amount to make your system sound significantly better. The main way is to look in the audio magazines and purchase those odd little triangular pillows to place in the upper corners, and small rectangluar pillow-like things at key reflective points half way between the listening position and your speakers, up byb the ceiling.

By doing this you’ll hear a huge difference.

You also want to make sure that your speakers are not in the corners of your room (ie, positioned along the diagonals), as bass frequencies in effect get amplified in those corners (though sometimes you can do this deliberately to boost some bass).

If you want to get technical and see how “flat” your room response is, go to Radioshack or wherever and get and SPL meter, andn then order a frequency tone CD to test your room’s response. If you’ve got that right, then youn can start worrying about the components and cables and whatnot.

Well, basically because they do. If you’ve got any kinds of ears you’ll easily hear the difference between cheap cables and expensive cables.

Funny enough, there are those who claim complete mastery of electromagnetic theory and who claim that lamp cord would be e4xactly equivalent to good quality cabling. But don’t believe those idiots for a minute. They completely have no understanding of the basic physics of electromagnetic signal propagation in a conductor, nor do they realize that the few simple engineering formulas they might be aware of are not much more than rules of thumb.

Meanwhile, as someone who has degrees in physics and electrical engineering (yes, Zoidberg is smart!), and someone who was actually a practicing electrical engineer (in an area close to physics), I’ve been exposed to huge amounts of electromagnetic theory, and I know enough to know that it’s pretty obvious that the medium can impact the signal.

One thing to note is that, due to the skin effect, it is indeed true that most of the charge in a piece of wire conducting a signal is at the surface of the conductor or wire. Thus, those multi-threaded designs do offer signal a lot more surface area. It is not unreasonable to assume that this might indeed allow the signal to have a lot less dispersion as it travels through the wire.

Or maybe not. It’s also quite possible that the reason better cables sound better is for more basic reasons such as material purity and quality. It doesn’t really matter…people who live with audio knows that cables make a difference, and the small companies that make them often arrive at their designs after a long process of testing and theoretical considerations (remember that many of those building cables are indeed engineers or physicsts and not unaware of physical theory).

But then again, you will find that there is in general a relationship between cost and sound quality, though of course there are exceptions.

What you can do, if you live in the US, is to sign up to The Cable Company, and they will send you pairs of cables to try. Each audition costs a few bucks, but these will be applied towards your final purchase. It’s fun to get three or four kinds of cables and test theb difference for a day or two each. You will indeed hear a difference. And of course, it’s not quite true that the differences are always in terms of quantitative difference…some cables sound a little different than others, not necessarily worse or better. Me, I called my speaker manufacturer and asked them what kinds of cable they tested their speakers with, and they told me StraightWire, as this is the wire they use internally inside the speakers as well. During my auditions, these ended up sounding perhaps second best, but only marginally so, and at a cost that was far less than the best-sounding cable I auditions. I think I spent about $600 on interconnects plus speaker cable.

Is it worth it? Actually, not always. Ifr your system is not of particularly high rez, then adding expensive cabling is the last thing you want to do. But if you have a very solid system, good cabling can bring back some very subtle but important audio cues in the music, particularly around spacing and air and finer detail. It won’t be nearly as big a difference as changing to a great set of speakers, for instance. But having solid cabling can allow what should be a great system to live up to its real potential.

OK, let me remind those that find this post that I’m not interested in debate. Wait, there are exceptions: If you have an MS in Electrical Engineering and are (or have been) a working engineer (like me), then I’m kind of interested, particularly if you understand digital signal processing in any kind of detail.

Ah but then again it might not matter, because I trust my ears. I know when I hear something and I also know when the difference is so small I can not qualitative say that the difference I am hearing isn’t actually do to a change in attentiveness in myself.

But 44kHz and 16 bits is not one of those things. I know this because I have several recordings in both CD as well as SACD or DVD-A format, and the difference can be large.

But let’s go back to some of the technical reasons, and my ATTACK! on the anti-audiophile. The first thing to keep in mind is what the Nyquist theorem does and does not say. Nyquist (which is a mathamatical theorem, by the way), basically says that if I want to capture an audio-like signal (consisting of a combination of sinusoids according to Fourier theory), then I need to “sample” at twice the highest frequency of the signal.

The first caveat is that basic Nyquist does not refer to digital sampling per se. Nyquist assumes that your samples can be any height. When we now quantize our samples as in a CD signal, this now means that our samples can’t be any height at all, they can only be a height allowed by our digitization scheme. What this now means is that we can no longer perfectly reconstruct the original audio signal.

Now the argument from the anti-audiophiles is that 16 bits is enough: 16 bits gives you 2-to-the-16th-power number of sample heights, and the ear isn’t sensitivie to any more than that.

This is true and untrue. Actually, it’s completely untrue. All other things being equal, most studies claim that the ear can hear perhaps 17 or 18 bits. The anti-audiophile will argue that this is more than enough for recorded music, and one might concede that point.

But the important aspect of this is that, as your CD player attempts to recreate the audio signal, it stupidly just builds waveforms out of the quantized samples. Since these samples no longer correspond to the original waveform, what your audio system in effect does is introduce “quantization noise” as this new non-perfect waveform is no longer sinusoidal! And a waveform that is no longer sinusoidal not only has leeched energy from the original perfect tone, it has generated a host of crappy little parastici tones that have no musical relationship to the original. And now, multiply this noise by every single tone in your music and what you have is life-eating crud.

this is most dramatically seen in the residual “ringing” in a square wave, otherwise known as Gibbs phenomenon: Put in a perfect square wave into your CD sampler and out comes a square wave that is no longer square but where the horizontal parts are shaky. These shaky parts are in themselves audible and have no musical relationship to the original signal. This is one reason why CDs tend to fatigue your ears and sound.

All of this, of course, assumes that you have perfected everything else in the recording and mastering process. The moment we add imperfections such as jitter, things get bad quickly. In fact, go listen to early digital recordings: They’re glassy, harsh, and unconvincing-sounding. In other words, they sound like crap. The nature of the CD format is such that there is little or no headroom for such imperfections; they are immediately audible.

Another problem with CD is that the format has removed some of the more arcane but important supersonic queues that our ears are apparently aware of. Ah, you say, “supersonic” is by definition not audible. It therefore doesn’t matter. But to that this audiophile would respond, “don’t argue with me but get your own papers published that contradict current scientific knowledge”.

But the basic idea here is that our ears and brain can infer some supersonic aspects of an audio event based on certain very subtle but theoretically audible queues. To give an example, with many media two high frequency non-audible pitches can create sum and difference frequencies which are themselves audible. And then, somehow, our brain is apparently able to reconstruct some of the supersonic events that allow a recording to sound far more realistic. CD, however, eliminates this possibility due to the necessary anti-aliasing filters.

But none of this matters. The proof is in the pudding and the difference between CD and high-rez formats is quite audible (to the point to where my non-audiophile wife, who doesn’t even like music asked if the CD and SACD version of the live Kraftwerk album were the same recording).

Now don’t get me wrong, CD can get VERY good when everything is the recording chain is handled perfectly (having 24 bit recording technology helps, of course). Take Raising Sand on CD and put it on your high-end rig. WOW! It really sounds very good. But then again, the new chipsets are actually upsampling to 24 bits and then using some DSP magic to guess what those waveforms are supposed to be.

More later…perhaps I’ll take on why cables matter, and they do.

Well, I see from the Fripperblog that Steve Wilson has been working on some 5.1 remixes of the Crimson classics.
I sincerely hope that those 5.1s will show up on an audiophile format such as SACD which will allow for a high rez 2 channel version as well. That would kick ass.
And although I get the excitment that surrounds 5.1 formats, I haven’t made the leap yet: It’s hard enough getting the wife to accept the two black boxes that sit 3 feet away from the back wall of our living room. Furthermore, it’s would be a real hassle running the cable to get the side channels. And you need several more channels of amplification. Oh, and let’s not forget that subwoofer and center channel.
But a lot of audiophiles are very welcoming of the format, and not really because it can sonically place you in the pit of some great orchestra. Rather, because all those channels can help recreate the sonic space in which the music occurred far better than 2.
Why? Because in reality sound comes from everywhere in a concert, not just two sources in the front. That two channels can trick our ear in the best of circumstances is a great and wonderfulk thing, but it has its limitations.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of recordings ever made are in two channels, so I have worked slowly and steadily over the years to purchase gear that maximizes that experience within my budget. (And my budget is higher than others might be willing to spend on such things, I admit.)

My rig now consists of a Linn universal digital source, a Krell integrated amplifier, and my constant companiions my Thiel 1.5s, purchased back in 1995.

Oh, and my Straightwire cables.

Yes, cables are important. And for anyone wandering into this blog looking for a fight, know rthat you will not find one. I’ve never been interested in debating either the quality of my ears nor my knowledge of electrical engineering.

I remember back during the Elephant Talk days, I asked whether the IACE Sherbourne house lecture ｂｙ　ＪＧBennet was extractable from the CD formats of Exposure, as it had supposedly bee on vinyl (this, at least, waｓ　Ｆｒｉｐｐ’ｓ　ｏｒｉｇｉｎａｌ　ｃｌａｉｍ）．

Ａｔ　ｔｈａｔ　ｔｉ９ｍｅ　ｓｏｍｅ　ｊｏｋｅｒ　ｒｅｓｐｏｎｄｅｄ　ｔｏ　ｍｅ，　ｇｉｖｉｎｇ　ｍｅ　ｓｏｍｅ　ｓｉｌｌｙ　ｔｅｃｈｎｉｃａｌ　ａｒｇｕｍｅｎｔｓ　ａｓ　ｔｏ　ｗｈｙ　ｔｈｅ　ｔｒａｎｓｆｅｒｒａｌ　ｔｏ　ｄｉｇｉｔａｌ　ｓｈｏｕｌｄ　ｈａｖｅ　ｎｏ　ｉｍｐａｃｔ　ｏｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｒｅｃｏｖｅｒａｂｉｌｉｔｙ　ｏｆ　ｔｈｅ Bennet talk. He tried to give me arguments about dynamic range and so on, and he was completely convinced of what he was saying, and dismissed my own replies out of hand, as if I didn’t understand what dynamic range meant in a digital system.

As our discussions went on, it became clear that I was not speaking to another electrical engineer (I worked at Bellcore, Bell Communications Research, at the time as an electrical engineer in the field of optical amplified multiwavelength optical networks). I even quoted (with page numbers) well known textbooks in digital signal processing, and tried to explain to him what “quantization signal to noise ratio” was as well as what Dynamic rnage means in a digital system (it does NOT mean the difference between the ‘loudest’ sound and the ‘quietest’).

The guy eventually responded that he felt persecuted, like Galileo, and he informed me that he learned what he knew “from the internet”. To this physicist-turned-electrical engineer (with degrees in both), you can’t imagine how absurd that sounds. So I stopped debating the guy. Actually, it wasn’t a debate: I was informing him of what any electrical engineer working in digital transmission systems knows.

Likewise, this post and the following ones are NOT a dialogue. I am not interested in a debate. But I will publically smash some of the misconceptions of the anti-audiophile.

Or I may get too busy and/or lazy to bother. But that’s my short-term aim.

True to the nature of wives, my wife is blaming ME, Zoidberg, for the financial collapse.

Well, she’s blaming our loss-of-retirement funds on me, because I failed to act and withdraw everything from all of our financial instruments.

And I do take some blame for this, as I have co0onsistently refused to embroil myself in this whole market turmoil. As a non-professional who has worked at a rating agency, worked on Wall Street and now works for a/the major UK bank, I know enough to know that you can’t outguess the markets.

Oh people think they can. They think they’re doing great but if you look at their long term performance all they have done is basically almost matched one of the major indices. Furthemore, you’ll hear the day-traders bitch about a bear market, but the real pros can beat a bearish market. (They can’t always defy gravity and make money, but they w3on’t go down as much).

Meanwhile, history teaches us that the market has ALWAYS returned to normal. It returns not only to normal, but even after the great depression it picks up all the growth it was missing out on during the depression or recession.

So as someone who is at least a decade away from retirement, I refuse to try to outguess the big fund managers and withdraw my money.

The wife, meanwhile, tries to point to all of the times she wanted to dump everything as “proof” that she had some telepathic or divine ability to guess the future of the stock market. But I didn’t really want to sell and get stuck with some losses. I wanted to leave it to our very excellent financial advisor and ride it out.

What’s the alternative? That the world’s financial markets will irrevocable collapse? Well then the modern world would collapse also, and stocks and retirement would be the least of our worries.

Meanwhile, can we really say that the modern world and technological growth will just come to a screeching grinding halt? Nonsense. The future is an ineluctable force and our collective human progression something that cannot be stopped.

Yes, Zoidberg once met Paul Newman (who died today). Interviewed him, actually, during the 1976 Democratic National Convention. I hear you doing the math…no, I’m not 60 or whatever. I was a kid reporter for Childrens Express Magazine and we got an interview with Paul Newman.

Earlier in the day we had attended some kind of press conference or something with Paul Newman and he was speaking about the environment, perhaps (I can’t really remember). I remember seeing two teenage girls (or perhaps they were in their early 20s) follow him off the podium, and one of them exclaimed to the other in excited tones, “I touched Paul Newman!”

Even as a kid I thought this was incredibly hickish. In fact, I could scarcely understand or believe it.

So later on in the day at his hotel room upstairs we asked him all sorts of banal questions. Actually, just prior his press agent told us not to ask any “personal” questions. He answered humorously and without energy or apparent emotion. Perhaps he saw us as indiscriminate reporter blobs instead of children. But as the interview was clearly winding down, I asked about the girls I had seen. I asked: “So do you like being chased around by girls?” And he replied “No.” After that, the handler declared the interview over.

Back in the office down on Park Avenue South, I took some heat for allegedly causing the interview to end early, but the way I had perceived it was different: With a banal interview about to end, I had asked an interesting question but got a banal, uninteresting answer. No loss.

That’s my Paul Newman story.

At the same DNC, I shook Jimmy Carter’s hand prior to the nomination, and got that Senator/Astronaut’s autograph (I had faithfully watched the moon missions as a kid). Oh, and I guess it’s somewhat interesting that, on the way back home from downtown, a gang of kids jumped me on 162nd street and St Nicholas Ave. and one kid held a knife to my belly. I was not scared because I was from that neighborhood and I could tell the kids were just fooling around trying to scare me. So I pushed the knife away and then ran home. Didn’t even bother telling my parents about the incident.

Yes, I’ve led a strange life.