Hip Boots: Wading through the Mire of Misinformation in the Audio Press [Issue No. 12]

Hip Boots: Wading through the Mire of Misinformation in the Audio Press -- Straight Wire ; John Atkinson in Stereophile ; Dick Olsher in Stereophile ; Harry Pearson in The Absolute Sound!

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Remember "The Admonitor" from our early days? It focused on technical misstatements and general misrepresentations of the truth in audio manufacturers' advertising. Eventually we discontinued the column because we perceived that the central issue was the credibility of the media, not just the credibility of the pages purchased by advertisers. In this new column, both editorial and advertising pages will come under scrutiny, with emphasis on the exposure of deliberate hype as well as sweet ignorance.

So many years have elapsed since our last column in this vein, and so many printed absurdities have insulted our intelligence and gone unanswered, that we are experiencing a kind of embarras de richesses as we look at the choice of subjects for this first go-around, like a hungry man at the smorgasbord trying to decide what to put on his first plate.

We might as well observe the accepted tradition and start with something fishy...

Straight Wire

In Issue No. 10 we put in a good word for this wire and cable marketing company because of something intelligent they once said, but now we are sorry. Their currently advertised product (we saw it in Stereophile) is the Triaxial Power Cord, headlined as the Power Conductor. It is "the cleanest sounding AC cable," the ad says, priced--we kid you not--at $149 for the 6-foot length and $199 for the 10 foot model.

Do you understand? This is a line cord, to plug your equipment into the wall, at $1.66 to $2.07 per inch! We refuse to dignify the ad by arguing with its pathetic pseudo technical claims about low Q, RFI, etc. All you need to know is that there are hundreds of yards of wiring in your wall and that the electricity does not know where the wall stops and the line cord begins. If the latter is of large enough gauge to handle the current flowing through it and is adequately insulated, you have a good one. Of course, for all we know, Straight Wire may be willing replace all the wiring in your wall with the Power Conductor, possibly even discounting it to $1.25 per inch. Or how about putting in the "cleanest sounding" feeder line between your house and the power substation? How about pouring a bottle of Perrier into the river to make it cleaner? We are aware that just about all marketers of audiophile-oriented wire and cable products, not just Straight Wire, make totally untenable and, indeed, ignorant claims.

The Triaxial Power Cord, however, sets a new record in one or the other of two categories: (1) contempt for the mentality of the well-heeled audiophile or (2) totemistic belief in the Cable as the mystical repository of good sound.

John Atkinson in Stereophile

The high-end audio journals are probably the main source of folklore passed on from audiophile to audiophile, and right now Stereophile has the largest circulation of them all, so that it is capable of derailing more minds with casual misinformation than the rest of us. Hence our present concern.

When Larry Archibald, the automobile repairman and audio entrepreneur who had acquired Gordon Holt's faltering publication (we know the syndrome!) in 1982, decided four years later to import John Atkinson from England to be his editor, it looked to us like a good move. Larry, like Mussolini, had "made the trains run on time," and now he was ready to go quasi-slick with the magazine, under the stewardship of someone who had done it before in the home country of audiophilia. About a year ago Stereophile became a monthly, and we must give John Atkinson full credit for the professional discipline it took to make that happen and keep it going. We could use someone like that.

When it comes to science and technology, however, we have a big problem with "JA." He talks too much about technical matters in his articles and editorial comments, even when he is not actually expected to, and he is too often wrong. He interrupts a perfectly straightforward discussion of equipment with a gratuitous, grandstanding technical aside, clearly intended to remind the reader that he is in scholarly company, and makes a mess of it. We have kept track of quite a number of these bloopers, but one is all we have room for here, and we picked it because it starts out by taking our name in vain as it were, referring to "DCM loud speakers, the Time Windows made famous by writer Peter Aczel in the first incarnation of his magazine The Audio Critic." (Actually it was Bob Waterstripe who made the speaker famous-our review merely helped him a little- and the eventually lost vitality of the company was the con sequence of his departure, but that is not our subject here.) Remember, then, that this is just one example out of many.

In the June 1988 issue of Stereophile, in his review of the DCM Time Frame TF-1000 speaker, John Atkinson writes en passant, "If a loudspeaker produces an output pulse that is an exact replica of an input pulse, then by definition it must have a perfectly flat frequency response.

In practice, as to do so would necessitate the speaker being able to reproduce the DC component of the pulse- something that only a fan can do, DC implying a constant velocity stream of air-some modification of the pulse shape is inevitable, equalizing the areas above and below the time axis." That is the rankest nonsense-quite aside from the terribly constructed second sentence--and indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of waveforms.

All that JA would have had to do to test his statement was to plug the output of a square wave generator into the AC (i.e., DC-blocking) input of an oscilloscope. Except at the lowest frequencies, where the phase shift introduced by the blocking capacitor causes some tilt, the waveform is exactly the same as with DC coupling-and most certainly at any frequency ever used for pulse testing a loudspeaker. DC components and blowing fans forsooth! The flat ramp of a square pulse is synthesized by a long series of harmonics at exponentially declining amplitudes-pure AC, John, courtesy of Monsieur Fourier-and a loudspeaker of sufficient bandwidth without amplitude and phase errors could, in theory, reproduce it perfectly. (Look, Ma, no fans.) All this is pretty elementary stuff and makes us won der why ex-editor Holt, who appears to know about such things, is not asked to edit the incumbent editor. Quis custo diet ipsos custodes? Larry Archibald cannot be expected to catch the technical bloopers, but he ought to be aware by now that audio journalists who are on shaky ground technically are in plentiful domestic supply-he did not have to import one for that.

Dick Olsher in Stereophile

While we are on the subject of our brethren in Santa Fe, let us kill two birds with one stone: settle a minor grudge and straighten out some major misinformation.

In the January 1988 issue of Stereophile, referring to the Baerwald lateral tracking alignment in a tonearm review, Dick Olsher wrote as follows: "A now defunct audio critic and publisher, whose identity I shall not divulge except to say that his initials are PA, fervently promoted this alignment. This same fellow went on to claim that correct tone arm geometry was not a matter of opinion, and that for a given record geometry there was only one correct or optimum alignment. I flatly disagree. I know of one other rational alignment geometry, which is based on minimizing the 'time-cumulative' annoyance factor of tracking distortion.

This procedure generates two null points across the record so that the three intervals defined by these points have equal amounts of total time-integrated distortion. Having experimented with this type of alignment, I can tell you that it is, indeed, very listenable." What a loser, "this fellow" Dick Olsher! By the time his oh-so-knowledgeable words appeared in print, the widely circulated comeback issue (No. 10) of The Audio Critic had been in the hands of its readers for almost a month- and what was the lead article? None other than "Lateral Tracking Alignment Revisited," explaining in painstaking detail the specifics of the "other" alignment (the one we call Lofgren B), complete with optimization charts, references, and other previously unpublished information. A certain reviewer, whose identity we shall not divulge except to say that his initials are DO, was left with egg on his face.

But wait-that is not the whole story. Whether or not he knows calculus, Dick Olsher obviously has never set eyes on the integral which the Lofgren B approach requires to be minimized by optimizing offset angle and overhang values; his explanation involving three intervals of equal distortion is the most horrendous gobbledygook, unrelated to the actual nature of the alignment. He has got it "bass-ackwards"-it happens to be the Baerwald solution in which three maxima are made equal... hell, read our article. The sad part is that we know exactly how much, or rather how little, information DO had on the subject and where he got it before he garbled it. Every bit of it came from a telephone conversation with Sao Win, one of the grand total of four persons who could possibly have told him about Lofgren B (the other three being Graeme Dennes, Barney Pisha and your Editor, none of whom did). It was all news to DO, but he quickly decided he could gain some Brownie points among his readers by tossing off such a hip little tidbit and at the same time be one up on good old "defunct" PA. Burn, baby, burn.

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Almost sloshing over our hip boots is the much more seriously mis-informative loudspeaker cable article by Dick Olsher in the July 1988 issue of Stereophile, for which he has already run into a lot of flak, but not the right kind. We have yet to see a subscribers letter or manufacturer's comment pointing out that he actually wrote two articles in one, the first having absolutely no connection with and no relevance to the second. The first is a rambling hodgepodge of technical vignettes on subjects as loosely related as low level noise currents, skin effect, thermo-phonics (!), Fibonacci numbers (!!) and so forth. The intent is to have the reader say to himself, "Hey, this guy knows his stuff!" Then comes the second part, consisting exclusively of self-indulgent subjective observations and descriptions of quasi mystical experiences a la Enid Lumley-'dark electronic flavoring,’ disembodied treble, "airy and quick" bass (yes, bass), liquid textures, etc., etc.-without any attempt to establish even the vaguest cause-and-effect link between these sonic impressions and the previously discussed technical parameters, or to normalize the listening comparisons to some sort of initial reference or common denominator (let us not even talk about ABX). Thus the introductory technical palaver was sheer window dressing; it might as well have been published, for whatever it was worth, in another magazine two months earlier or a year later.

Why is it so terrible for the high-end audio community to accept the simple fact that audible differences between loudspeaker cables are amplitude (i.e., equalizer-type) differences of a few tenths of a dB and, on the bass end, Q (i.e., damping) differences? It is so obvious from a simple analysis of the cable as an LCR network between a source impedance and a termination impedance. (See also Issue No. 10, page 22.) We have started to model some of these differences-typical as well as extreme cases-with a neat little piece of software easy enough even for your Editor, namely the MICRO-CAP II

Macintosh Professional Circuit Analysis Program, by Spectrum Software of Sunnyvale, California.

Our plan was to have some of this work published quite casually in this issue (as hinted on the back cover of No. 11), but we have meanwhile become so disgusted by the intellectual unaccountability of various wire/cable marketers and their journalistic sycophants that we want to tighten up the article, add a few more examples to it and make it into a full-fledged tutorial-cum-exposé.

This is the darkest side of the audio industry today, where the temptation of easy high-ticket sales without any engineering overhead has produced a whole subculture of charlatans, hustlers, parasites and suckers. Where is the FTC? Where is Savonarola?

Harry Pearson in The Absolute Sound

"Records are more revealing of the performance of components than are CD's because they contain more information. At this point, I see little to be gained from using CD's as a source, since they are so limited in what they can reveal."

-Harry Pearson (The Absolute Sound, Spring 1988). "A properly dithered 16-bit digital audio storage system with accurate analog-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to analog (D/A) converters will outperform any analog storage medium in existence...[It] is distortion-free, displays no noise modulation or other digital artifacts, and resolves arbitrarily small signal details well below the least significant bit (LSB) of the number system employed."

-Prof. Stanley P. Lipshitz, Ph.D. (AES, March 1988). No comment is necessary except to note that we have measured a few playback systems that appear to satisfy the conversion accuracy requirements stated by Dr. Lipshitz, who is possibly the world's top authority on the subject.

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[adapted from TAC, Issue No. 12]

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Also see:

Records & Recording: Good Engineering in the Service of Good Music -- Recent CD's from the Record Companies That Know How to Do It: Delos ; Denon ; Digital Music Products (dmp) ; Dorian Recordings ; Reference Recordings ; Sheffield Lab

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines