Well, it DOES take a system – otherwise no music comes out of them speakers.

And building a great sounding system takes time. It is not something everyone has the patience for, or the skill for, or desire for, or the time for.

I was remonded of this when a commercial came on TV for some, what I presume to be special in some way, brake pads. Yes, I am sure there are lots of people who shop the Auto Parts store and like to install custom brake pads on their automobile.

But I am not one of them. And I think the vast majority of people are like me.

So where does that put the ordinary person who does not want to put together a system a component at a time anymore than they want to put together a car a brake pad at a time?

We’ve talked about the system approach before, on both our Classic Systems page as well as our old Turnkey Systems page.

There are actually very few systems that really sound great – and they take awhile to find – but there are some. And most can be tailored a little bit one way or the other to suit the type of sound to suit the buyer (do you want all-season or performance tires, do you want a sunroof, do you want a nav or a dvd player, …).

To this end we are creating a Recommended Systems section that will list the systems we set up here that we think are killer in some way or another – and we will try to categorize the system’s sonic goals in the same way as was done in the Audiophile’s Guide’s sections on speakers, amps, CD players and preamps.

We are just starting the construction of the Recommended Systems pages – so if anyone has any ideas on how they would like to see the systems arranged or what information they would like to see about each system – please let us know!

Thanks, and Enjoy!

P.S. Oh, so it looks like Sonic Flare also mentioned selling complete systems this week as well. This meme must be getting around. Good.

… over in somebody ELSE’S system.

Repeat after me:

There is no perfect speaker.

There is no perfect amplifier.

There is no perfect…

It is the components that one Hasn’t heard that are the most incidious at making us doubters, making us wonder if THEY perhaps are the *** U-L-T-I-M-A-T-E *** COMPONENT.

Some of the Jones’ components are good, most are just OK, just like all components once you actually get to hear them for yourself.

It is the one’s we haven’t heard, where we wonder “maybeTHAT box has EVERYTHING… sophistication AND magic AND impressiveness!”, that are the most insidious, making us doubt everything we have learned up until now.

Truth: There are very, very few components that really ARE significantly greener than the rest. Most are just… different. Hey, at least half are actually worse than average :-).

However, it is the actual hearing one of these 8th wonders of the world that REALLY gets us hooked, dooms us to keep looking, always looking, across the street to see if the grass really IS greener over there.

It is our job here, our responsibility, tough life that we have, to scout around the 1000s of speakers, 1000s of amps, and cables and cd players, and preamps and powercords and determine which are truly special and which are just …nice.

Unlike most dealers we actually do not care if they ‘sell well’ – if they are really great sounding we will make the effort ourselves to help build their brand and get the word out there.

Unlike most reviewers we do not have to find a great component each and every month.

Unlike most reviewers (and most dealers who seem to rely more on the big bamboozle – yes, I just had to put bamboozle in somewhere; bamboozle is just too fun of a word to leave out of any good Blog for too awfully long 🙂 ) we actually care about how the components really sound because we play them here for very picky people who will spend some of their hard-earned to take what they are hearing home with them if they really like what they hear (and can afford what they hear).

We take this responsibility to heart – some components are really pretty good so there is no real need to replace them with the hot new brand X, the grass often really isn’t greener (it just the low angle you are looking at it from that makes it look greener 🙂 ) – save a few bucks.

OK, three smiley faces is all I allocate myself for each post (not really, but I bet you wish it were true) so I had better be…

…outa here.

Thinking about the added suspense that the music on the SACD version of Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms seemed to have (see last post), I wonder if and how this might be artificially produced by a system.

When humans talk to each other, at least in English, they can communicate to a listener that they should expect something to follow a particular phrase by at least three methods:

1. raising the frequency of the last word of the phrase, near the end of the word
2. drawing out the last word of the phrase (saying the word very slowly)
3. adding a lot of ‘uh’s or ‘um’s after the phrase

It seems like music also uses these same techniques (a background beat might replace the ‘um’s to mark tiime after a phrase).

So why are only a few systems able to communicate this ‘suspense’? Are so few able to render the characteristic raise in frequency at the end of an anticpatory note? Or is it that LPs and CDs for the most part do not have a high-enough resolution to contian this kind of subtle information?

At a CES a few years ago, there was a system with Joseph speakers, Joule amps and Audio Aero CD player that had oodles of suspense. It was great fun and seemed to communicate the musician’s desire to be suspenseful with both the listener and their fellow band members. So now one can wonder things like: did this system have a tendency to raise the frequency of the sound at the very end of major notes, just a little, to artificially add suspense?

What about the recording engineers who made the Brothers in Arms CD? Did they do the same? Do they have a little knob in the studio that says “suspense”?

I don’t know. I do know I like suspense and anticipation in music. It adds to the excitment and highlights the webs of communication going on both between the individual band members (for example, think jazz and one musician prompting another to play a few notes, who does the same right back at them, back and forth) and between the band and the audience.

The audience can also communicate suspense and most other emotions back to the band and to others in the audience though crowd mutterings and clapping and shouting and whistling. This is one of the things that can make live shows and unprocessed live bootlegs that are recorded from the audience so involving.

[I would like to talk some more about this ‘muttering’ another time, by which we are refering to the largely involuntary sounds an audience in response to what the musicians are doing – and how this is a large part of the (near) instananeous feedback loop between the audience and the musicians which is a whole nuther communication channel being used that is almost completely disjoint from the actual melody being played. The ‘suspense’ added by a musician is almost a bridge between these two channels; one channel being of sound and the other one is .. a deeper message about being human and alive at that moment].

OK, it is time to start composing these posts in somethng that has a spell checker… 🙂