2025-04-15 03:00:00
Last weekend I spent a few hours watching Coachella on YouTube. The audio and video quality are high. It’s free of ad clutter, but maybe that’s because I pay for Google Music? The quality of the music is all over the map. If I read the schedule correctly, they’ll repeat the exercise next weekend, so I thought a few recommendations might be helpful. Even if it’s not available live, quite a few captures still seem to be there on YouTube, so check ’em out.
I tried sorting these into themes but that tied me in knots, so you get alphabetical order.
Lady Gaga brings it.
Not sure what kind of music to call this, but the drums and guitar (played by identical twins Simone and Amedeo Pace) are both hot, and Kazu Makino on everything else has loads of charisma, and they all sang well. Didn’t regret a minute of my time with this one.
I have no patience whatsoever for EDM. Deadmau5 and Zedd and their whole tribe should go practice goat-herding in Bolivia or anything else that’ll keep them away from audiences who want to hear music played by musicians. But there were multiple artists this year you could describe as X+EDM for some value of X, and much to my surprise a few of them worked.
(One that notably didn’t was Parcels, whose genius idea is EDM+Lightweight Aussie pretty-boy pop. On top of which, every second of their performance featured brilliant lights strobing away, shredding my retinas and forebrain. I say it’s EDM and I say to hell with it. Go back to Australia and stay.)
But Mr Böhmer not only held my attention but had my toes tappin’. His stuff isn’t just hot dance moves against recorded tracks, it’s moody and cool and phase-shifty and dreamy. It helps that he plays actual musical notes on actual keyboards.
I thought “I remember that name.” (Sadly, on first glance at the schedule I did not in fact recognize many names.) Ms Gibbons was the singer for Portishead, standard-bearers of Trip-hop back in the day. Her voice sounds exactly the same today as it did three decades ago, which is to say vulnerable and lovely.
The songs were all new (aside from Portishead’s Glory Box) and good. Beth never had any stage presence and still doesn’t, draped motionless over the mike except when she turns away from the crowd to watch someone soloing.
What made the show a Coachella highlight was the band, who apparently had just arrived from another planet. It was wonderfully strange as in I didn’t even know what some of the instruments were. Anyhow it all sounded great albeit weird, the perfect complement to Beth’s spaced-out (I mean that in the nicest way) vocal arcs.
This posse of sixtysomething women won my heart in the first three seconds of their set with a blast of girl-group punk/surf guitar noise and a thunderous backbeat. The purest rock-&-roll imaginable, played with love and bursting with joy. They can sing, they can play, they still have plenty of moves. It‘s only rock and roll but I like it, like it, yes I do.
OK, this is another X+EDM, where the X is “Ghettotech, house, Rap & Miami base” (quoting their Web site). I have no idea what “Miami base” is but I guess I like it, because they’re pretty great. Outta Detroit.
Their set was affably chaotic, the rapping part sharp-edged and hot, and they had this camera cleverly mounted on the DJ deck giving an intense close-up of whichever HiTech-ers were currently pulling the levers and twisting the knobs. Sometimes it was all three of them and that was great fun to watch.
I’m an elderly well-off white guy and am not gonna pretend to much understanding of any of HiTech’s genres, but I’m pretty confident that a lot of people would be entertained.
They are historically important but the show, I dunno, I seem to recall being impressed in 1975 but it felt kinda static and tedious. The only reason I mention them is that a few of their big video-backdrop screens, near the start of the set, were totally Macrodata Refinement, from Severance. I wonder if any of the showrunners were Kraftwerk fans?
Give Coachella credit for giving this a try. Dudamel is a smart guy and put together a program that wasn’t designed to please a heavy classics consumer like me. I mean, opening with Ride of the Valkyries? But there were two pieces of Bach and the orchestra turned into a backup band for Laufey, an Icelandic folk/jazz singer, a Gospel singer/choir, and some other extremely random stuff. If you’re not already a classics fan, this might open your eyes a bit.
I’m sure you’ve already read one or two rave write-ups about this masterpiece. It’s going to be one of the performances remembered by name forever, like Prince at the Superbowl or Muddy Waters at the Last Waltz. They built a freaking opera house in the desert, and that makes me wonder what the Coachella economics are; someone has to pay for this stuff, do Gaga and Coachella split it or is it the price of getting her to come and play?
To be fair, as the review in Variety accurately noted, it was pretty well New-York-flavored hoofing and belting wrapped in a completely incomprehensible Goth/horror narrative. So what?! The songs were great. The singing was fantastic and the dancing white-hot, plus she had a pretty hard-ass live metal-adjacent band and an operatic string section, and she brought her soul along with her and unwrapped it. It was easy to believe she loved the audience just as much as she said. She didn’t leave anything on the stage. They should make it into a big-screen movie.
I did feel a little sorry for the physical audience, quite a bit of the performance seemed to be optimized for couch potatoes with big screens like for example me. Anyhow, if you get a chance to see this one don’t miss it.
There were three nights and thus three headliners. You’ll notice that I only talked up Friday night’s Lady-Gaga set. That’s because the other two were some combination of talentless and uninspired and offensive. Obviously I’m in a minority here, they wouldn’t get the big slots if millions didn’t love ’em. And I like an unusually wide variety of musical forms. But not that shit.
2025-04-06 03:00:00
This week marks the second anniversary of the launch of the CoSocial.ca Mastodon server, which is one leg of my online presence (the other is this blog.) I’ve never been more convinced that online social interaction has to change paths and take a new direction. And I think CoSocial has lessons to teach about that direction. Here are some.
A personal note: I’ve been fortunate in that bits and pieces of my career have felt like building the future. For example, right now, about the Fediverse generally and CoSocial in particular. In this essay I’ll try to explain why. But it’s a fine feeling.
This is maybe the biggest thing. The Web, by design, is decentralized. You don’t need permission to put up any kind of Web server or service. Social media should follow the decentralized path blazed by the Web and by the world’s oldest and most successful conversational app, namely email.
It seems painfully obvious that a network of thousands or millions of servers, independently operated, sizes ranging from tiny to huge, is inherently more flexible and resilient than having all the conversations owned and operated by one globally-centralized business empire.
To be decentralized, you need a protocol framework so the servers can talk to each other. CoSocial uses ActivityPub, which at the moment I think is the best choice.
Some smart people who like the Bluesky experience are trying to make its AT Protocol work in a way that’s as demonstrably decentralized as ActivityPub is today. Maybe they’ll succeed; then operations like CoSocial should maybe consider it as an alternative. We’ll see.
Our goals do not include enriching any investors. We plan to pay the people who do the work and have just advertised for our first paid position.
We’re not-for-profit because the goals of the investor community are incompatible with a healthy online experience. In 2025, companies are judged on profit growth; everything else is secondary. If you can grow your audience organically, good, but the world is finite, so when you’ve attracted everyone you’re going to, you’re going to have to focus on raising prices and reducing costs. Which is likely to produce an unpleasant experience for the people you serve.
Cory Doctorow aptly uses “enshittification” to describe this often-observed pattern.
There are a lot of different ways to set up a not-for-profit. The simplest organization is no organization: Someone buys a domain name, puts up a server, invites people on board, and uses Patreon donations to keep the lights on.
Which is exactly what Chad did at Mstdn.ca, and it seems to be working OK. It’s a testament to the strong fibres of the Web, still there after all these decades of corrupting big money, that you can just do this without asking anyone’s permission, and get away with it.
But we didn’t. We are a registered co-operative in BC, Canada’s westernmost province. It took us a couple of months to pull together the Board and constitution and bylaws. We have to file annual reports and comply with governing legislation.
I am absolutely not going to suggest that a cooperative is the optimal not-for-profit approach. But I am pretty convinced that if you want to be treated as an organic component of civil society, you should work within its frameworks. Plus, it seems to me, on the evidence, that member-owned cooperatives are a pretty great way to organize human activities.
As I write this, most modern social-media products let you just roll up to the Web site and say “I wanna join”, and they say “click here”. Or even just make a couple of API calls.
We’re not like that. You have to apply for membership and offer a few words about why. Then you have to [*gasp*] pay. A big fifty Canadian dollars a year buys a co-op membership and a Fediverse account. The first year of Fediverse is $40 so we can book $10 of your initial payment as payment for a CoSocial share (refundable if you later cancel).
When you apply, we check that you did so from an IP address in Canada, we glance at your reasons for wanting to join, then if you haven’t already contributed, we send you an email asking you to pony up and, once you have, we let you in.
The whole thing takes maybe five minutes of effort from the new member and a CoSocial moderator.
What matters about this process? The fact that it exists. Nicole the Fediverse Chick can’t get a CoSocial account, nor can any other flavor of low-rent griefer or channer or MAGA chud. Just the fact that you can’t join by calling a few APIs filters out most of the problems, and then being asked to, you know, pay a little money, takes care of the rest.
Which is to say, being a CoSocial moderator is dead easy. Sure, we get reports on our members from time to time. So far, zero have been really worrying. On a small single-digit-number of times, we’ve asked a member to consider the fact that they seem to be irritating some people.
And we throw reports from Hasbara keyboard warriors and similarly non-credible sources on the floor.
The key take-away: Imposing just a little teeny-tiny bit of friction on the onboarding process seems to achieve troll-resistance in one easy step.
We have a bank account and credit cards and so on, but we run all our finances through a nice service called OpenCollective. Which makes all our financial moves 100% transparent: Here they are.
CoSocial has none, and never will.
It is a repeating pattern that advertising-supported social-media products offered by for-profit enterprises become engulfed in a tempest of controversy and litigation.
Since it’s axiomatic that centralized social media has to be free to use, ads are required, which means the advertisers are the customers. Those customers will continuously agitate for more intrusive advertising capabilities and for brand protection by avoiding sex, activism, or anything that might make anyone uncomfortable.
I don’t know about you, but I’m interested in sex and activism.
Intellectually, I appreciate that advertising should be a normal facet of a functional economy. How else am I going to find out what’s for sale? But empirically, advertising as it’s done now seems to exert a powerfully corrupting influence.
I’m not claiming that CoSocial is. But I am arguing strongly for the combination of decentralization, not-for-profit, legal registration, non-zero onboarding friction, transparency, and advertising rejection. There are lots of ways to shape resilient social-media products that do these things. There are other legally regulated non-profit structures that aren’t co-ops.
Also, there are plenty of other organizations that would benefit from hosting social-media voices: Government departments, academic institutions, sports teams, fan clubs, marketing groups, professional societies, videogame platforms, and, well, the list is long.
Slow and steady. We’re tiny, less than 200 strong, but we get a few new members every month. Two years in, a grand total of two members have decided not to renew.
We’ve got a modestly pleasing buildup of money in the bank account, which means that we need to get serious about becoming less volunteer-centric, and thus more resilient.
The service is fun to use, it’s reliable, and about as troll-free as can be. Come on in!
(But only if you’re in Canada and willing to pay a bit.)
2025-03-28 03:00:00
I’ve written a lot about ways of listening to music; in the current decade about liking YouTube Music but then about de-Googling. What’s new is that I’m spending most of my time with Plexamp and Qobuz. The trade-offs are complicated.
I liked YTM because:
It let me upload my existing ten thousand tracks or so, which include many oddities that aren’t on streamers.
It did a good job of discovering new artists for me.
The Android Auto integration lets me say “Play Patti Smith” and it just does the right thing.
But the artist discovery has more or less ran out of gas. I can’t remember the last time I heard something new that made me want more, and when I play “My Supermix”, it seems to always be the same couple of dozen songs, never anything good and new.
Also: Bad at classical.
I think I might keep on paying for YTM for the moment, because I really like to watch live concerts before I go to bed, and it seems like YTM subscribers never see any ads, which is worth something.
I wrote up what it does in that de-Googling link. Tl;dr: Runs a server on a Mac Mini at home and lets me punch through to it from anywhere in the world. I’ve been listening to it a lot, especially in the car, since YTM got boring.
My back inventory of songs contains many jewels from CDs that I bought and loved in like 1989 or 2001 and subsequently forgot all about, and what a thrill when one of them lights up my day.
I still feel vaguely guilty that I’m not paying Plex anything, but on the other hand what I’m doing costs them peanuts.
But, I still want to hear new stuff.
I vaguely knew it was out there among the streamers, but I got an intense hands-on demonstration recently while shopping for new speakers; Phil at audiofi pulled up all my good-sound demo tracks with a couple of taps each, in what was apparently CD quality. Which opened my eyes.
What I like about Qobuz:
It pays artists more per stream than any other service, by a wide margin.
It seems to have as much music as anyone else.
It’s album-oriented, and I appreciate artists curating their own music.
Classical music is a first-class citizen.
While it doesn’t have an algorithm that finds music it thinks I’ll like, it is actively curated and they highlight new music regularly, and pick a “record of the week”. This week’s, for example, is For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) by Japanese Breakfast. It’s extremely sweet stuff, maybe a little too low-key for me, but I still enjoyed it. They’re coming to town, I might go.
This isn’t the only weekly selection that I’ve enjoyed. Qobuz gives evidence of being built by people who love music.
What don’t I like about Qobuz? The Mac app is kinda dumb, I sometimes can’t figure out how to do what I want, and for the life of me I can’t get it to show a simple full-screen display about the current song. But the Android app works OK.
As for Qobuz’s claim to offer “Hi-Res” (i.e. better than CD) sound, meh. I’m not convinced that this is actually audible and if it in principle were, I suspect that either my ears or my stereo would be a more important limiting factor.
Yep, I still occasionally drop the needle on the vinyl on the turntable, and don’t think I’ll ever stop.
If you really want to support artists, buy concert tickets. That thrill isn’t gone at all.
2025-03-18 03:00:00
This will be the 30th “Long Links” post. The frequency has fallen off over the years; perhaps my time for long-form pieces has decreased or, just as likely, I protect my sanity in these dark days by consuming less. No, I don’t filter out Fascist Craziness, because it’s a thing that needs to be understood to be resisted. Thus, today’s Long Links does contain “the world is broken” pieces.” But not only; there’s good news here too, including fine typography and music.
Let’s start with music.
“All of Bach is a project of the Netherlands Bach Society with the aim to perform and record all of Bach's works and share them online with the world for free.” The project manifests on YouTube and I have spent a lot of hours enjoying it. The performances are all competent and while I disagree with an artistic choice here or there, I also think that many of these are triumphs.
One such triumph, and definitely a Long link, is Bach’s last work, The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080. Bach didn’t say which order the many parts of the piece should be performed in, or what instruments should be used, so there’s a lot of scope for choice and creativity in putting together a performance. This one is by Shinsuke Sato, the maestro of the Netherlands Bach Society. It is clever, unfancy, and its ninety or so minutes are mostly exquisite.
Vi Hart, mathemusician is now a Microsoftie, but has been one of my intellectual heroes. Get a comfy chair and pull up Twelve Tones, which addresses profound themes with a combination of cynicism, fun, music, and laserbats. You will need a bit of basic music literacy and intellectual flexibility, but you’ll probably end up smarter.
On the “everything is broken” front, Israel/Palestine looms large. Here are two New York Times gift links that face the ugliness with clear eyes. First, ‘No Other Land’ Won an Oscar. Many People Hope You Don’t See It is what the title says. Second, it’s bad that criticism of Israel has become Thoughtcrime, and worse when AI is weaponized to look for it.
Adrian not Pyotr, I mean, and space opera not musical costume drama. In particular, The Final Architecture series. It’s ultra-large-scale space opera in three big fat volumes. I would say it’s mining the same vein as The Expanse and while it didn’t hit me nearly as hard as that did, it’s fun, will keep you turning pages.
I’m a photography enthusiast and as a side-effect am gloomy about pro photogs’ increasing difficulty in making a living. I also buy a lot of stuff online. For both these reasons, What WhiteWall’s New Shopify Integration Means to Photographers caught my eye. First of all, it’s generally cool that someone’s offering a platform to help photogs get online and sell their wares.
Second, I can’t help but react to Shopify’s involvement. This gets complicated. First of all, Shopify is Canadian, yay. But, CEO Tobi Lütke is a MAGA panderer and invites wastrels like Breitbart onto the platform. And having said all that, speaking as a regular shopper, the Shopify platform is freaking excellent.
Whenever I’m on a new online merchant and I see their distinctive styling around the “Proceed to payment” button, I know this thing is gonna Just Work. A lot of times, once I’ve typed in my email address, it says “OK, done”, because it shares my payment data from merchant to merchant. Occasionally it’ll want me to re-authenticate or send a security code to my phone or or whatever.
If I were setting up an online store to sell anything, that’s what I’d use. I mean, I’d hold my nose and let the company know that they need to fire their CEO for treason, but it’s still what I’d probably use.
Speaking of photography, I’ve repeatedly written about “C2PA”, see On C2PA and C2PA Progress. I’m not going to explain once again what it is, but for those who know and care, it looks like Sony is doubling down on it, yay Sony!
Vancouver residents who know the names “Concord Pacific” or “Terry Hui”, or who have feelings about False Creek, will probably enjoy Terry Hui’s Hole in Vancouver’s Heart. You will have noticed some of the fragments of this bit of history going by, but Geoff Meggs puts it all together on a large vivid canvas that will you better informed and probably somewhat mind-boggled.
By which I mean a video screen used recreationally. Check out Archimago’s HDMI Musings: high speed cables, data rates, YCbCr color subsampling, Dolby Vision MEL/FEL, optical cables and +5V injection. Yes, that’s a long title, and it’s a substantial piece, because HDMI is increasingly how you connect any two video-centric pieces of technology.
From which I quote: “This recent update makes HDMI the fastest of all currently-announced consumer Audio-Video connection standards, the one wire that basically does it all”. I’m not going to try to summarize, but if you plow through this one you’ll know a lot more about those black wires all over your A/V setup. There’s lots of practical advice; it turns out that if you’re going to run an HDMI cable further than about two meters, certification matters.
Where do people learn about the world from? The Pew Research Center investigated and published Social Media and News Fact Sheet. I suspect the results will surprise few of you, but it’s nice to have quantitative data. I would hope that a similar study, done next year not last year, would include decentralized social media, which this doesn’t.
I know that Ed Zitron’s Never Forgive Them went viral, and I bet a lot of you saw it go by, or even started reading then left it parked in a tab you meant to get back to, because it’s so long. Yeah; it’s arguably too long and too shrill, but on the other hand it is full of truth and says important things I’ve not seen elsewhere.
For example, I suspect most people reading this are angry about the ubiquitous enshittification of the online, but Zitron points out that people like us suffer much less because we have the money and the expertise to dodge and filter and route around a lot of the crap. Zitron actually purchased one of the most popular cheap Windows PCs — the kind of device ordinary people can afford — and reports from the front lines of what is in part a class war. The picture is much worse than you thought it was.
Here are a few bangers:
“It isn’t that you don’t ’get‘ tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for
you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.”
“almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively
adversarial to the user”.
“The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it
leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma.”
It’s where I got my start. Two of the most important things are typography and color. And there’s good news!
The Braille Institute offers Read Easier With Our Family of Hyperlegible™ Fonts, which begins “Is this font easy for you to read? Good—that’s the idea.” Like! Would use. And in an era where the Web is too much infested by teeny-tiny low-contrast typography, it’s good to have alternatives.
Now, as for color: It is a sickeningly complex subject, both at the theory level and in the many-layered stack of models and equations and hardware and software that cause something to happen on a screen that your brain perceives as color. Bram Cohen, best-known for inventing BitTorrent, has been digging in, and gives us Color Theory and A Simple Color Palette. I enjoyed them.
If you know what “IPv6” is, then Geoff Huston’s The IPv6 Transition will probably interest you. Tl;dr: Don’t hold your breath waiting for an all-IPv6 Internet.
And, much as I’d like to, it’s difficult to avoid AI news. So here is plenty, from Simon Willison, who has no AI axe to grind nor product to sell: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024.
I can testify from personal experience that Andy Jassy is an extremely skilled manager, but I found Amazon and the endangered future of the middle manager, from CNBC, unconvincing. The intro: “Jassy's messaging on an increased ratio of individual contributors to managers raises a much bigger question about organizational structure: What is the right balance between individual workers and managers in overall headcount?” There’s talk of laying off many thousands of managers.
Before I worked at Amazon I was at Google, which has a much higher IC/manager ratio. Teams of 20 were not uncommon, and as a result, there was both a manager and a Tech Lead, which meant the manager was basically an HR droid. Amazon always insisted that the manager sweat the details of what their team was working on, deeply understand the issues they were facing and what they were building. I don’t see how that’s compatible with increasing the ratio.
And, Google management was way weaker than Amazon’s, not even close. So I’d have to say that the evidence is against Andy on this one.
Japan has one. It’s called Naoshima. Great idea. I’d go.
2025-03-08 04:00:00
I bought new speakers. This story combines beautiful music with advanced analogue technology and nerdy obsession. Despite which, many of you are not fascinated by high-end audio; you can leave now. Hey, this is a blog, I get to write about what excites me. The seventeen of you who remain will probably enjoy the deep dive.
Totem Tribe Tower loudspeakers, standing on a subwoofer.
This picture makes them look
bigger than they really are. They come in black or white, satin or gloss finish.
Prettier with the grille on, I think.
My main speakers were 22 years old, bore scars from toddlers (now grown) and cats (now deceased). While they still sounded beautiful, there was loss of precision. They’d had a good run.
Just in the last year, I’ve become convinced, and argued here, that both DACs and amplifiers are pretty well solved problems, that there’s no good reason to spend big money on them, and that you should focus your audio investments on speakers and maybe room treatment. So this purchase is a big deal for me.
The number of boutique speaker makers, from all over the world, is mind-boggling; check out the Stereophile list of recommendations. Here’s the thing: Pretty well all of them sound wonderful. (The speakers I bought haven’t been reviewed by Stereophile.)
So there are too many options. Nobody could listen to even a small proportion of them, at any price point. Fortunately, I had three powerful filters to narrow down the options. The speakers had to (1) look nice, and (2) be Canadian products, probably (3) from Totem Acoustic.
I do not have, nor do I want, a man-cave. I’ve never understood the concept.
And you have to be careful. There are high-end speakers, some very well-reviewed, with design sensibilities right out of Mad Max or Brazil. And then a whole bunch that are featureless rectangles with drivers on the front.
Ours have to live in a big media alcove just off the kitchen; they are shared by the pure-audio system and the huge TV. The setup has to please the eyes of the whole family.
At this point in time, a position of “from anywhere but the US, the malignant force threatening our sovereignty” would be unsurprising in a Canadian. But there are unsentimental reasons, too. It turns out Canadian speaker makers have had an advantage stretching back many decades.
This is mostly due to the work of Floyd Toole, electrical engineer and acoustician, once an employee of Canada’s National Research Council, who built an anechoic chamber at the NRC facility, demonstrated that humans can reliably detect differences in speaker accuracy, and made his facility available to commercial speaker builders. So there have been quite a few good speakers built up here over the years.
What happened was, in 1990 or so I went to an audio show down East somewhere and met Vince Bruzzese, founder of Totem Acoustic, who was showing off his then-brand-new “Model One” speakers. They were small, basic-black, and entirely melted my heart playing a Purcell string suite. They still sell them, I see. Also, the Totem exhibit was having a quiet spell so there was time to talk, and it turned out that Bruzzese and I liked a lot of the same music.
So I snapped up the Model Ones and that same set is still sounding beautiful over at our cabin. And every speaker I’ve bought in the intervening decades has come from Totem or from PSB, another excellent Toole-influenced Canadian shop. I’ve also met and conversed with Paul Barton, PSB’s founder and main brain. Basically, there’s a good chance that I’ll like anything Vince or Paul ship.
My plan was to give a listen to those two companies’ products. A cousin I’d visited last year had big recent PSB speakers and I liked them a whole lot, so they were on my menu. But PSB seems to have given up on audio dealers, want to sell online. Huh?! Maybe it’ll work for them, but it doesn’t work for me.
So I found a local Totem dealer; audiofi in Mount Pleasant.
For this, you should use some of your most-listened-to tracks from your own collection. I took my computer along for that purpose, but it turned out that Qobuz had ’em all. (Hmm, maybe I should look closer at Qobuz.)
Here’s what was on my list. I should emphasize that, while I like all these tracks, they’re not terribly representative of what I listen to. They’re selected to stress out a specific aspect of audio reproduction. The Americana and Baroque and Roots Rock that I’m currently fixated on are pretty easy to reproduce.
200 More Miles from the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session. Almost any track from this record would do; they recorded with a single ambiphonic microphone and any competent setup should make it feel like you’re in the room with them. And Margo’s singing should make you want to cry.
The Longships, from Enya’s Watermark album. This is a single-purpose test for low bass. It has these huge carefully-tuned bass-drum whacks that just vanish on most speakers without extreme bass extension, and the music makes much less sense without them. You don’t have to listen to the whole track; but it’s fine music, Enya was really on her game back then.
The opening of Dvořák’s Symphony #9, “From the New World”. There are plenty of good recordings, but I like Solti and the Chicago Symphony. Dvořák gleefully deploys jump-scare explosions of massed strings and other cheap orchestration tricks in the first couple of minutes to pull you into the symphony. What I’m looking for is the raw physical shock of the first big full-orchestra entrance.
Death Don’t Have No Mercy from Hot Tuna’s Live At Sweetwater Two. Some of the prettiest slide guitar you’ll hear anywhere from Kaukonen, and magic muscle from Casady. And then Jorma’s voice, as comfortable as old shoes and full of grace. About three minutes in there’s an instrumental break and you want to hear the musical lines dancing around each other with no mixups at all.
First movement of Beethoven’s Sonata #23, “Appassionata”, Ashkenazy on London. Pianos are very difficult; two little speakers have a tiny fraction of the mass and vibrating surface of a big concert grand. It’s really easy for the sound to be on the one hand too small, or on the other all jumbled up. Ashkenazy and the London engineers do a fine job here; it really should sound like he’s sitting across the room from you.
Cannonball, the Breeders’ big hit. It’s a pure rocker and a real triumph of arrangement and production, with lots of different guitar/keys/drum tones. You need to feel it in your gut, and the rock & roll edge should be frightening.
Identikit from Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool. This is mostly drums and voice, although there are eventually guitar interjections. It’s a totally artificial construct, no attempt to sound like live musicians in a real space. But the singing and drumming are fabulous and they need to be 100% separated in space, dancing without touching. And Thom Yorke in good voice had better make you shiver a bit.
Miles Runs The Voodoo Down from Bitches Brew. This is complex stuff, and Teo Macero’s production wizardry embraces the complexity without losing any of that fabulous band’s playing. Also Miles plays two of the greatest instrumental solos ever recorded, any instrument, any genre, and one or two of the ascending lines should feel like he’s pulling your whole body up out of your chair.
Emmylou Harris. This would better be phrased as “Some singer you have strong emotional reactions to.” I listened to the title track and Deeper Well from the Wrecking Ball album. If a song that can make you feel that way doesn’t make you feel that way, try different speakers.
I made an appointment with Phil at Audiofi, and we spent much of an afternoon listening. I thought Audiofi was fine, would go back. Phil was erudite and patient and not pushy and clearly loves the technology and music and culture.
I was particularly interested in the Element Fire V2, which has been creating buzz in online audiophile conversation. They’re “bookshelf” (i.e. stand-mounted) rather than floorstanders, but people keep saying they sound like huge tower speakers that are taller than you are. So I was predisposed to find them interesting, and I listened to maybe half of the list above.
But I was unhappy, it just wasn’t making me smile. Sure, there was a stereo image, but at no point did I get a convincing musicians-are-right-over-there illusion. It was particularly painful on the Cowboy Junkies. It leapt satisfactorily out of the speakers on the Dvořák and was brilliant on Cannonball, but there were too many misses.
Also, the longer I looked at it the less it pleased my eyes.
“Not working, sorry. Let’s listen to something else” I said. I’d already noticed the Tribe Towers, which even though they were floorstanders, looked skinny and pointy compared to the Elements. I’d never read anything about them but they share the Element’s interesting driver technology, and are cheaper.
So we set them up and they absolutely aced everything the Elements had missed. Just vanished, I mean, and there was a three-dimensional posse of musicians across the room, filling the space with three-dimensional music. They flunked the Enya drum-thwack test but that’s OK because I have a subwoofer (from PSB) at home. In particular, they handled Ashkenazy pounding out the Beethoven just absolutely without effort. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard better piano reproduction.
And the longer I looked at them the more my thinking switched from “skinny and pointy” to “slender and elegant”.
A few minutes in and, I told Phil, I was two-thirds sold. He suggested I look at some Magico speakers but they were huge and like $30K; as an audiophile I’m only mildly deranged. And American, so no thanks.
I went home to think about it. I was worried that I’d somehow been unfair to the Elements. Then I read the Stereophile review, and while the guy who did the subjective listening test loved ’em, the lab measurements seemed to show real problems.
I dunno. Maybe that was the wrong room for them. Or the wrong amplifier. Or the wrong positioning. Or maybe they’re just a rare miss from Totem.
My research didn’t turn up a quantitative take on the Tribes, just a lot of people writing that they sound much bigger than they really are, and that they were happy they’d bought them.
And I’d been happy listening to them. So I pulled the trigger. My listening space is acoustically friendlier than the one at Audiofi and if they made me happy there, they’d make me happy at home.
And they do. Didn’t worry too much about positioning, just made sure it was symmetric. The first notes they played were brilliant.
See all those auditioning tracks up above, where it says what speakers “should” do? They do, that’s what they sound like.
I’ve been a little short on sleep, staying up late to listen to music.
As noted above I have a subwoofer, and my preamp lets you configure where to roll off the bass going to the main speakers and hand off to the subwoofer. I wrote off to Totem’s customer-support email address wondering if they had any guidance on frequency. They got back to me with specific advice, and another couple of things to double-check.
High-end audio. Simpatico salespeople. The products last decades. The vendors answer emails from random customers. Businesses it’s still possible to like.
2025-03-07 04:00:00
Today I canceled my Amazon Prime subscription.
As I wrote in Not an Amazon Problem (and please go read that if you haven’t) I don’t see myself as an enemy of Amazon, particularly. I think the pressures of 21st-century capitalism have put every large company into a place where they really can’t afford to be ethical or the financial sector will rip them to shreds then replace the CEO with someone who will maximize shareholder return at all costs, without any of that amateurish “ethics” stuff.
To the extent that Amazon is objectionable, it’s a symptom of those circumstances.
I’m bailing out of Prime not to hurt Amazon, but because it doesn’t make commercial or emotional sense for me just now.
Yes, free next-day delivery is pretty great. In fact, in connection with our recent move, I’ve been ordering small cheap stuff furiously: (USB cables, light switches, closet organizers, a mailbox, a TV mount, WiFi hubs, banana plugs, you name it).
But the moving operations are mostly done, and there are few (any?) things we really need the next day, and we’re fortunate, living in the center of a 15-minute city. So getting my elderly ass out of my chair and going to a store is a good option, for more than one reason.
Second, for a lot of things you want to order, the manufacturer has its own online store these days and a lot of them are actually well-built, perfectly pleasant to use.
Third, Amazon’s prices aren’t notably cheaper than the alternatives.
Amazon is an US corporation and the US is now hostile to Canada, repeatedly threatening to annex us. So I’m routing my shopping dollars away from there generally and to Canadian suppliers specifically. Dumping Prime is an easy way to help that along.
Second, shopping on Amazon for the kinds of small cheap things listed above is more than a little unpleasant. The search-results page is a battle of tooth and claw among low-rent importers. Also it’s just really freaking ugly, hurts my eyes to look at it.
Really? I have no idea what they were.
Finally, one of Prime’s big benefits used to be Prime Video, but no longer. There was just no excuse for greenlighting that execrable Rings of Power show, and I’m not aware of anything else I want to watch.
Amazon is good at lots of things, but has never been known for good taste. I mean, look at that search-results page.
Yep.
Yep, no complaints. There were only two please-don’t-go begs and neither was offensive.
No hard feelings.