Analog Corner #265: Notes from the Road (Hi-Fi Shows & MQA)

At audio events held by the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society, I’m usually called on to speechify about one thing or another, or to roast an honoree at one of the Society’s December Galas. But at the spring 2017 Los Angeles Audio Show, Bob Levi, the Society’s president, quipped, “This is one awards dinner where you won’t have to entertain—so relax and enjoy!”

After the dinner and the speechifying, and my roast of Chad Kassem, founder of Analogue Productions, Acoustic Sounds, Quality Record Pressing, and Blue Heaven Studios. came the show’s 23 Alfie awards, in three categories—Best Personal Electronics, Best Speakers, and Best Electronics—the winners selected by teams of judges led by Roger Skoff, founder of XLO Electric Co., Inc., and VP at Large of the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society; Chuck Bruce, VP of Public Relations for LAAS; John G. Williams, VP of Hospitality for LAAS; and Mary Cardas, VP Gala producer for LAAS. Joining them were EveAnna Manley, of Manley Labs, and Part-Time Audiophile contributor Lee Scoggins.

Recipient of an “Alfie” award, Vandersteen’s System Nine was also John Atkinson’s best sound at the 2017 LAAS. (Photo: John Atkinson)

A few well-deserved Alfies went to such usual suspects as Wilson Audio Specialties (for the Alexx speaker), Dan D’Agostino Master Audio Systems (for the Progression preamplifier), Vandersteen Audio (for the System Nine, which adds a pair of Sub Nine subwoofers to the Vandersteen Model Seven II speakers and HPA amplifiers), as well as bigger players such as Sony and AudioQuest. But what the ceremony lacked in drama was more than made up for by diversity of products and manufacturers, many of the awards going to newer, smaller companies—eg, Starke Sound, Ryan Speakers, Vinnie Rossi, Vanatoo, and EchoBox. Hopefully, next year’s awards dinner will feature better stagecraft: musical intro and outro cues, envelope opening, nip slippage. . .

Although it wasn’t in the script, at the end of the evening Bob Levi asked me to make some closing remarks, so I took the stage and began “streaming” about the audio industry, about LAAS, and about what an amazing time this is for audio, particularly on the software side. I talked about how, for first time ever, you can now get music recorded at the highest sound quality, in whatever format you prefer. Still want CDs? You can have them. Vinyl? There’s more worth buying than any one person can ever consume. Reel-to-reel tape? The offerings are still small, but will only grow as labels drop their fear of bootlegs and open their vaults—after all, they’re happy to sell 24-bit/192kHz files, which are far more easily copied and distributed than are reel-to-reel tapes. You can even get some new music on cassette. Light poles and car bumpers festooned with 1/8″ tape may make a comeback!

High-resolution PCM and DSD downloads and MQA streams provide master sound quality at the push of a few buttons. Who could have imagined this 10 or 15 years ago, when it seemed the world was downrezzing to MP3 quality and enjoying it, because it was “indistinguishable” from Red Book CD?

For some, a generation or two of headphone-crazy young people consuming dumbed-down MP3s on iPods and smartphones seemed to spell the end of high-performance audio. The week Stereophile featured an iPod on the cover, I was thrown out of a well-known New York City audio salon. “Get out!” the owner yelled at me. “I don’t sell iPods! I don’t want you in here!”

Others, though, sensed an opening. They began producing better headphones and headphone amplifiers, some of them tubed, and as exotic and high-performance as anything built to drive loudspeakers. Grado Labs hit the jackpot. When cartridge manufacturing seemed about to bite the dust for good, Joe Grado and his nephew John Grado moved into headphones, probably never imagining that they’d tap into a key trend in Millennial-generation consumer electronics—nor could they have imagined that the cartridge business would again become a growth industry.

Portable music players followed that could store what most consumers would consider an entire music library of hi-rez files. The built-in audience for such products had to simply plug in and listen. And guess what—they show up at shows like AXPONA, LAAS, and the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, driving down the age demographic to well below grandpa level.

Easy access means that younger people finally get to hear what we knew to be true, and that they’d been told was audiophile foolery. Headphones and LPs became the gateway drugs to high-performance home audio.

MQA’s Bob Stuart performed MQA-vs-MQA comparisons in one of the Sunny Components rooms at the 2017 LAAS. (Photo: John Atkinson)

MQA at LAAS
At LAAS, MQA Ltd.’s Bob Stuart gave convincing demonstrations of MQA vs non–MQA-encoded files, as well as MQA’s hi-rez “unpacking” capabilities, in one of the Sunny Components rooms, using Wilson Alexx speakers driven by T+A electronics (footnote 1). MQA-encoded files go through a careful preview process in the mastering studio that sonically optimizes them for various playback situations (no decoding, MQA Core, or Full Decode), with appropriate filters correcting “de-ringing.”

Fortunately, the differences in sound spoke louder than did Stuart, who tended to get tangled in his own thoughts. I was told that Stuart’s seminar, which I didn’t attend, was far more effective at explaining MQA, while the in-room demos were far more effective at demonstrating it, less so at explaining it.

Rick Rubin (far right) and Michael Fremer (second right) audition MQA and non-MQA versions of Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen.” (Photo: Peter McGrath)

At the demo, which I attended with record producer Rick Rubin, founder of American Recordings, Stuart’s opening remarks assumed that the audience was well aware of what MQA was, which I think was not the case. If that describes you as well, see Stuart’s Q&A on the subject. In any case, for lovers of LPs and haters of CDs such as I, what Stuart says and plays in his demos totally vindicates our long-held, often ridiculed contention that, spatially, CD sound produces no there there, and is therefore unlistenable. MQA-encoded “Red Book” CDs can contain hi-rez (24/192 and higher) files that can be “unpacked” by an MQA decoder.

As Stuart writes in his Stereophile piece, “Temporal acuity manifests a survival characteristic, one with origins that must reach back to much earlier in the mammalian timeline than the emergence of Homo sapiens.”

I’ve long contended that, for whatever reason or reasons, CD sound makes people not want to listen to recorded music to the exclusion of all else—the way it was done by entire generations in the vinyl-rich 1960s and ’70s. It’s why listening to music became a background activity, something to do while doing something else: driving, working out, or whatever.

While CD apologists blamed the disconnect on too many choices of entertainment, including video games and home theater, I and others remained convinced that it was CD sound itself that produced a brain alarm that screamed to the subconscious “Get out of here and do something else! I’ve lost track of time and space! I don’t know where the tiger’s coming from!” Or, in my case, “Put on an LP and turn off that digital crap, you knucklehead!”

Footnote 1: You can find John Atkinson’s and Jason Victor Serinus’s reactions to these comparisons here.

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