High-fidelity dork-out

My listening room is comical because the TV sucks so bad. It was a freebie that I trash picked from an art show. I don't really do surround-sound either, I like two-channel and I spend a lot of time listening to music... mostly from the computer, sometimes from vinyl. I can't remember the last time I took out a CD. I've taken quite a bit of care to ensure that the vinyl setup is as close to optimally accurate as possible -- but even so I only like vinyl for the fun factor, it is NOT a technically superior medium to digital by any stretch.

I don't have a bunch of money so I put this system together with a lot of gear that I bought broken on Ebay and then fixed. It's 4-way multi-amped through a DCX2496 active crossover/processor. It does lots of different slopes and alignments, time delays, phase correction, dynamics processing, global and channel-specific parametric EQ... basically everything. I have a CX2310 that passes through the two low channels with no alteration but sums their content below about 35Hz to send to two sealed subs. Since the main speakers are passively-radiated, sealed enclosures take care of the "kick" in a small room.

My mains are RTR HPR-12s from around 1973. The woofers and passive radiators are original, and they are fantastic. 92dB sensitivity and they extend smoothly down to 30Hz. The mid and high drivers in this setup are newer -- silk dome tweeters and carbon fiber/kevlar midbass drivers. I originally biamped these speakers (with passive mid/high networks) because I realized that they were capable of much more than the original crossovers were allowing. Soon after, I dumped the paper midranges and piezo tweeters for silk and carbon fiber, and went full-active.

Active quad-amping means that every driver is run directly from its own amplifier channel. The DCX brings them all into time and amplitude alignment, and adds some EQ to address problems with the room. There's a good amount of Auralex room treatment behind the listening position and in the corners, and bookshelves in bass-critical and reflective spots, but EQ is still needed since the room is so small and all the surfaces are quite hard. With processing and measuring from the listening position, the response is within 3dB of flat from 10Hz to 22kHz. With the additional efficiency/headroom provided by multi-amping, the system can reach 113dB SPL at the listening position with typical musical signals before one of the amps clips.

I have two crossover alignments programmed into the DCX that I switch between occasionally. One is a Linkwitz-Riley 48dB/oct arrangement with basic time alignment and EQ. The other is a Butterworth 18dB/oct arrangement by Jean-Michel Le Cléac'h, which uses altered time delays and a reversed-polarity mid to achieve minimum phase variance across the spectrum (about 150 degrees, as opposed to well over 600 in the LR-48 alignment). It's important to note that these two alignments measure almost exactly the same in frequency response -- variance is less than 1.5 dB -- from the listening position in my room, yet they do seem to sound quite different. I'm agnostic on the question of phase audibility, but it's fun to be able to switch between these two.

If right now you're thinking "No! You need an all-analog signal path! Tubes! Better sources! Electrostatics! First-order passive crossovers! Better interconnects! This is so uninspiringly mid-fi..." then you should just close this browser window and go somewhere else. I like science, and I especially like how it helps me produce repeatably verifiable and measurable improvements in playback accuracy. Hey, Jonny Greenwood doesn't like audiophiles, and neither do I.

For the record, yes, all competently-designed solid-state amplifiers do sound the same, assuming that their output impedance does not react too much with the speaker (though even this is debatably audible). Tube amps do sound different, but they also measure differently (higher distortion, which last I checked, means lower fidelity). I don't like tube amps driving speakers (unless we're talking guitar amps), but I like the euphonic contribution of a tube headphone amp to certain headphones.

Rod Elliott has a great article on multi-amping on his excellent website.

HydrogenAudio is the best online forum for getting no-nonsense information from people who like science and disallow snake oil. Everywhere else I've found to be a mixed bag.

DIYAudio is good if you want to build or repair something. Of course you could just hire me.

Oh and the two subs, the rack, and the turntable stand are all homemade. The turntable, phono preamp, and DAC are heavily modded; and the three NADs and SX1200 were all dead at some point and are now alive again.

More love for Cormac McCarthy

I keep returning to Cormac McCarthy's novels; he may be my favorite fiction writer. He often gets lumped in with "postmodern fiction writers" like Don DeLillo, who is usually 'blamed' for spawning more recent literary figures like Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Foster Wallace. I don't think that's fair to McCarthy. He's more cast in the mold of Conrad, Melville, and Faulkner.

I had just finished reading No Country for Old Men when I stumbled across the first and only negative review I've seen of the new Jonathan Franzen book, Freedom, in the Atlantic. Reading it made me appreciate McCarthy even more, since his novels aren't about 'banality' or 'the mundane' or 'the people next door' --- they're somehow premodern apocalyptic texts in a vaguely postmodern format. Unlike most "postmodern" novels, they don't deny transcendence and revel in vanity, they just find that the one transcendently True element in human(-ist?) existence is the violent will to power (remember the Judge: "War endures"). In a way, it's really quite a Christian view of evil, except for the characters' despair that God seems to have abandoned them and left things to run amok. Evil (of the specifically American variety, kind of like Junot Diaz's "fuku Americanus") portrayed thus has more in common with the work of Flannery O'Connor than with any American 'social fiction' now.

The Atlantic's review complains about Franzen:

Even when he finally loses his temper, the book shows him no respect: the chapter in question is called “The Nice Man’s Anger.” Would he have turned out less of a clown had Freedom been written after the BP spill? I doubt it; Franzen must riff and smirk for our age, the Age of Unseriousness. No sooner does Walter declare his love for his assistant than we are forced to follow him to the bathroom, where, unable to pee, he wastes water in “an unnecessary flush.” How tiresome all of this is; literary fiction has drawn man smaller than life for much, much longer than it ever did the opposite.

McCarthy is just the opposite, he's telling the Truth as he paints characters larger than life. Melville does it with Captain Ahab, Conrad does it with Kurtz. In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell wonders:

The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talkin about. I've heard it compared to the rock --- maybe in the bible --- and I wouldnt disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.

I wonder if that's the whole point of McCarthy's writing. The Truth is both transcendent and terrifying, contrary to the chroniclers of banality like Franzen. Reviewers constantly compare authors like Franzen to DeLillo, to whom McCarthy is considered a peer... but what DeLillo got right -- that his imitators don't -- is just this: the truth is terrifying. He doesn't express it nearly as explicitly as McCarthy, so the mood is paranoia instead of meditative, fatalistic despair. But it's the same underlying principle; when you look reality squarely in the eye, you will come apart. McCarthy illustrates the coming apart itself with unflinching directness, DeLillo critiques the social and technological defenses we put up to prevent it. Later writers like Franzen seem to have lost the sense that banality conceals dread; they treat the banality as the sum of reality itself, not a distraction from it. They just want to write dialog as snappy as DeLillo's, and without weight behind the surface, it quickly gets boring.

Romance about trades

Camille Paglia has finally jumped on the manual-is-intellectual bandwagon. I do kind of want to hate on her for being so late to the party, but her essay for The Chronicle Review is another concise and clear statement of what I was arguing before when I got mad at Stanley Fish. I'd like to see more academics rejecting the romanticization of their "trade" (since that is what it is).

(Of course, credit always needs to be given to relative outsider Matthew Crawford for injecting this whole conversation into the public/popular arena. The more prestigious academics are slow to join because THEY are the ones at whom the critique is most often directed.)