Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

For today’s audiophile test track, my choice is: Radiohead: Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box [this is a post from the long defunct Spintricity Magazine posted in 2009]

This has been one of my test tracks for several years and we’ve heard this track on 50 to 100 different show systems in addition to well over 100 variations on systems here at Audio Federation.

That the number is so low for show systems is because Radiohead music is difficult to reproduce except as a kind of “confused electronic mess with singer”, singing words that usually do not mean anything [in reality, that last part is true on all systems. I’ve read and reread the lyrics and am still scratching my head. It is a kind of abstract poetry that kind of bypasses the cognitive parts of the brain.]

Similarly, many people think this is a bad test track, that this music is bad in general for audiophiles to play because it is not “well recorded”. In fact, it is some of the most well-recorded music I know of. It is just not ‘simple’ music with one to three instruments and maybe a female vocal. Simple music has become synonymous with “audiophile music” because simple music is hardest to butcher on badly designed systems.

Do you need top-flight equipment to hear Radiohead correctly? First, I am not sure I’ve ever heard it ‘correctly’, just more correct and less correct, and sometimes just ‘different’. This has been played on systems like the $7K Odyssey Audio and of course, numerous small Audio Note and Acoustic Zen Adagio systems – and they are able to handle many of the complexities, and some of the subtleties, just fine.

The usual problems systems have with this track, and the CD in general, are 1) notes incorrectly placed in the sound stage, 2) multiple notes mashed together into one, and 3) lack of separation. We are, of course, ignoring the problems some systems might have with all music, like incorrect tonality, unevenness of response, etc. These problems, 1,2, and 3, are related and can be described as the notes not being correctly position in space and time [start, stop, and duration], as well as frequency [tone] and amplitude [relative loudness].

It is only over time that we can come to realize just how much effort Radiohead has put into their music. How they make sounds out of thin air – that these sounds have certain positions, that they often move and change shape, and that the whole sonic stage is their playground. Instead of just putting out a simple love song with a 3-part harmony in the background, or angst ridden lyrics on top of computer enhanced guitars, they work like a painter with a canvas, painting sounds one by one onto the initially deathly quiet, silent, desert of a sound stage.

This is what I really love about Radiohead. Their music is harmonically interesting, playful, and emotional in a kind of gently angst-ridden wistful manner.

So what we are going to do now in this article, and for every article in the Listening section of our magazine, is to describe what the author found to be the significant notes and parts of the song in question, in this case Track 1 on the Radiohead Amnesiac CD. We will describe what we listen for, and several variations of what we actually heard, for each of these notes. We all do this on our favorite songs, right? From the intense drum solo at the start of “I Want My MTV” to the sweet delicacy of the chimes on Track 2 of American Beauty – we listen for special parts of the song, and over time we learn to hear that they sound different of different systems.

I am sure there are several things everybody listens for on their favorite songs. What we are going to do here is actually talk about them.

Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box, which really should be called “I’m a Reasonable Man, Get Off My Case”, which is the recurring refrain, starts off with the banging of what sounds like a stick on the edge and side of a steel drum. The drum is very slightly left of center. The strikes vary between hitting the edge, and hitting the side of the drum. The strikes on the side generate subtle secondary vibrations that almost, almost define the shape of the body of the steel drum [or whatever it is. It sounds like our Jamaican steel drum, but when hit on the top and side, and not on the traditional drum-playing surface. The strikes on the top of the steel drum also define the shape of the drum, but much, MUCH more subtlety].

What to listen for here is the different decays of the two different strikes, the secondary vibrations of the drum that define its shape, the solidity of the strikes, and sometimes, I can almost hear the stick not quite hit the drum edge straight on, and it slides a wee little bit against the drum during the strike. Behind the b-bamm-bamm of the steel drum strikes, there is the very faint drumming, on a traditional drum set, in an unrelated rhythmic pattern. I rarely pay that much attention to this background drumming, except to note that it is way, way back in the soundstage.

The intro, just described, lasts only a few seconds, and the real intro starts with some aggressive synthesized bass rhythms. Most systems, including those with 2-way speakers, get some satisfaction from this bass track. That doesn’t mean that they play it correctly, just that is sounds darn good anyway and that the bass, although deep, also extends up into the midbass. What I listen for is how tight and authoritative the drum beats are. This requires the entire system to be able to start and stop a note quickly, that is both channels and all components – at the same time. The speakers best able to handle this, in my experience, has been the big Triolon horns – they would suck all the air out of the room, and then pump it all back in. At least they felt like they were doing that to my chest. The second best, in this regard, was the Lamm ML3 on the Coltrane Supremes on the cement floor of our exhibit room at RMAF 2008. In this case, I believe I started to hear little reflections of the bass notes within the notes themselves, i.e. they weren’t all just a simple square wave. At this point I wish I could just stop typing and go listen again to make sure 🙂

Throughout all of this and especially as the song properly starts, there is the idea of the rhythm of the song, in particular the much-maligned idea of PRaT. Not sure why it is maligned, except to think that some joker once said they didn’t think it existed and forum group think did the rest. PRaT with respect to Radiohead, including this song, is an interesting and complicated thing. This is not Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild”. There are many sub-melodies and they have their own beats, which usually are only occasionally related to the main beat of the song itself. But if you listen, you can hear that they too have PRaT, and you can tap your toe to them – but people might think that you are listening to a different song than they are [and you would be!].

The vocals come in at this point, and a few more melodies. Vocals are, as usual here, understated. There is emotion, but it takes a lot of resolution and the ability to handle subtleties like the constriction of a throat after a particular word, and the shape of the mouth after, say, the word ‘case’. Is he pleading or demanding, threatening or entreating? He is not a crooner, belting it out so the whole world knows how he feels. He is just a reasonable man, like [most of] us, and is telling you how it is. Listening to how his lips move, listening to his breathing, and fancy not so ordinary guy stuff like tremulo, helps define the song itself for me. Certainly, a system like one with Audio Note electronics, Jorma Design PRIME cables, and Kharma speakers makes him sound almost actually emotional [?]. Most systems at shows do not have the sufficient resolution and subtlety and he sounds cold and unemotional and distant.

At this time, along with the voice, the keyboards start up a melody. Along with the voice, I also listen to this specifically to hear how much harmonic color there is in each note. Note, by harmonic color I do not mean smearing and over emphasis of particular frequencies to the exclusion of others. What I mean by excellent harmonic color is that each subtone be fully fleshed out and not dominated by, nor dominating, other nearby frequencies and overtones as they actually exist in the music.

For example, and this is still before the 1 minute mark, there is a brassy plucking sound in the left channel that starts up. This should have good rhythm, good brassy color, and good separation, especially from all the other stuff that is going on.

And that is the key to Radiohead, at least from the standpoint of my enjoying it so much, and that is having lots of separation. I can pick and choose, using my ears, any number of very entertaining and interesting melodies to listen to: the drums, the electronic beat, the steel drum, the voice, and the weird sounds. The sounds often get lost on many sound systems.

About this time a recurring constant tone is started. Its blandness and lack of texture can be annoying. It does have SOME texture, but so little that it is very hard to hear.

At about the 1 minute point, the voice picks up some gravelly overtones. Most systems seem to catch at least some of this.

At about the 1:40 point, there is a sound that sounds like a voice played backwards, over and over. Kind of a fffwwwhhhtt fwht fwht sound. [OK, well YOU try and pronounce it :-)]

At about the 2:30 point, the electrified voices and breathy sigh is fun. All through this song, more and more things start up in the background. Many of these things sound like voices, and it is all about delicacy, the purity of the tone, and the quickness and the separation: getting the sound to appear and disappear quickly and in isolation from the rest of what is going on.

At the 3 minute mark, lots of weird voices now. Some of them move back and forth between the speakers. How well does the system keep these separate from the song? There is a sound that I call a pig sound [kind of like on Pink Floyd Animals… but not]. How resolute are the subtones in this noise? Can you almost make out words? There are symbols being struck way, way in the back of the soundstage. The electronic beat is still a beating. The voice still has a beat of its own. At this point, most systems just jumble everything together. You can hear that there are noises – but not as something separate and as if it came from a different instrument the rest of the sounds. Does everything still have a separate and distinct well-defined beat? Or is it jumbled so much that all the different beats add up to having no distinct beats at all – and it just sounds like a badly recorded bar band?

The last word of the song, ‘case’, as in ‘get off of my case’, has a long drawn out ssssss. This is often a good test of sibilance.

The song then winds down after 10 seconds or so. This is usually anti-climatic. It is anti-climatic because 1) we are so burnt out by listening intently to everything and trying to identify the plusses and minus of a particular system configuration, and the corollary task of trying to express that in English to each other, and the other task trying to figure out WHY it now sounds the way it does, what cable/part is the most responsible for the current performance level. OR, 2) we are so overwhelmed by the intensity and beauty and power of the sound that we have to wait a little to recover from it all. 2, of course, is the most fun and it still happens on a regular basis, thank goodness.

Originally, when I started using this as a test track, it was just a nicely melodic song with a few things going on in the soundstage that I enjoyed and thought would be mostly acceptable to play at shows. It was later, when I played it at shows, that I learned just how hard it was for most systems to get anything near the right sound in the right places with this song.

It was only later that I listened deeper when using this music, looking for lots of separation and correct attack and decay. This is represented in my head by requiring that the images of the sounds on the soundstage be well-defined – but it is really also a requirement that the elapsed time and harmonic structure of the note be well-defined as well.

And it has been quite recent, since the influx of top-end gear here last year, and especially the little system with the Marten Coltrane 3-way speaker, the Audio Note Ongaku, and the Emm Labs TSD1/DAC2, with the Nordost ODIN powercord and mostly ODIN cabling [Jorma Design PRIME to taste] that it was realized that it is indeed possible to hear each strand of music, on its own, just like you can when you hear sound in the real world. The surprising thing here is 1) why didn’t we notice that this was so hard to do before? 2) Surprise that this is yet another thing that humans can do without and not whine much about [like B&W versus color TV], 3) what goes into making it easier to hear on this system? 4) We are doomed because we are now addicted.

After this discovery, we notice how we can and cannot do this ‘listen to a single instrument’ thing on other systems and it has especially become a new thing to listen for with this song.

Finally, this is still my primary test song. But… I have started playing various other Radiohead songs as test songs, because I see burn out on the horizon for this song – and I like it too much to let that happen.

[Oh well, best laid plans. That was in 2009. I hardly play this anymore. Why? Got soooo burnt out on it :-}} ]

Older people hear music better and there is hope for high-end audio as the earbud-wearing, cheap-headphone-toting kids grow older and start to hear more and more nuances and finer details of the music they are listening to

Some think we heard better when we were younger.

I used to think YES. This is exactly right.

That music sounded glorious in our teens because we could hear harmonics better. So even inferior stereo systems sounded Grrreat. [Boy, did they!]

That we spend our later years having to build systems with more and more resolution and harmonic content because we have a hard time getting the musical content past our aged ears and hardened listening centers and into our poor overworked tired brains

But now I really wonder if this is Bull Hockey.

That the young have unformed, lazy, uneducated ears. That they could hardly benefit from high res and rich harmonic content because their young ears and brains just cannot process it.

Of course, some people’s ears never grow up. They remain lazy and dull in their admittedly extra-curricular job as fine listening instruments.

But this explains why we have all these iPod, earbud-listening kids. This just sound grrreat to them. But later, as they get older, their ears will begin to develop and they will want a more refined listening experience.

This bodes well for the high-end audio business in the next couple of decades.

I came around to this point of view because sometimes I notice my ears becoming VERY sensitive. The sound of my [long] hair moving across my face was loud and annoying me. WTF?

I have come to realize that my hearing is often incredibly sensitive, especially in the early morning or late at night.

Often painfully so.

Well. Not painfully. Supremely annoyingly so, anyway, in the wrong environment.

So, it is not that screaming kids irritate adults because the kids are all that loud. It is that adults have more and more sensitive hearing as they age.

Sure we lose a few Hz at the top frequencies as we grow old, but the overall effect is one that allows us to hear the most fantastic nuances in music, voice, and in the sounds of the world all around us.

Cool huh? 🙂

The subwoofer has an interesting role in high-end audio.

I’ve been thinking about these beast ever since we started our new high-end audio subwoofers page in the Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy

It is both loathed and reviled and cheered and loved with abandon.

PRO

1. If your system is not flat to 20 Hz, then your system sucks. It is just for leettle boys.

[Of course, at 100 dB, a subwoofer flat to 20 Hz… oh, excuse me, it says 15 Hz on the spec sheet, would have to be registered as a weapon of mass destruction. It would be hard to walk across the floor of most homes but at least the mice would finally give up and go live somewhere else :-).]

2. Subwoofers are cool and should indeed be registered as WMD

3. It is too expensive to buy a full-range speaker that goes this low

CON

1. The crossover in your subwoofer is necessarily not as deft as that in your much-more-expensive speakers, and in any case it is different, so the overall sonic quality of your playback suffers.

2. Most real music does not go down to 20 Hz. In fact most modern music is heard through JBL-like speaker systems and the satisfying bass we hear on those systems is way above 20Hz.

3. Subwoofers take up space

Most people buy subs for home theater, pairing them with small speakers that only go down to 100Hz or so. They NEED to use subs to get any bass at all. I’ve heard Magnepan systems designed like this that were excellent – small Magnepan wall-hanging speakers and a REL sub.

Us? We’ll stick with full-range speakers that go down MOSTLY to 20… uh…. 25… uh … Hz. It works for us at this time.

Subs are just not a necessity for us.

However, having heard the Acapella ION Plasma tweeter again here for almost a year now – I think super tweeters might indeed be a necessity. 🙂

[Having a hard time convincing Neli of this… but there is just so much more Presence and Life when the high frequencies are fully fleshed out…  Then again there are the same pesky CONs #1 and #3]

In the end, it is this argument [and not the “You ain’t no manly man without a sub” argument :-)]:

How can it be “high fidelity” if your system can’t reproduce all of the frequencies?

I confess. We don’t use a subwoofer. And this question annoys me.