The death knell sounds for those old LPs

Originally published 16 March 1992

A friend down in Flori­da sells high-end stereo equip­ment. By high end, I mean off the top of the scale. He has music sys­tems in his shop that cost more than my car.

He is a per­fec­tion­ist. Noth­ing but the best record­ings and sound repro­duc­tion equip­ment will do. In past years, this has meant well-cared-for vinyl LPs and a $25,000 top-of-the-line turntable. My friend looked down his nose at cas­sette tapes or CDs.

On a recent vis­it to his shop, I noticed a dra­mat­ic transformation.

LPs have giv­en way to CDs. The $25,000 turntable has been replaced by a $6,000 CD changer.

Anoth­er ana­log audio­phile has sur­ren­dered to dig­i­tal sound.

In ana­log record­ing, sound is repro­duced as wig­gles in the groove on a vinyl disk or lev­els of mag­ne­ti­za­tion on a tape. The con­tin­u­ous vari­a­tions of the groove or mag­ne­tized tape are anal­o­gous to the con­tin­u­ous vari­a­tions of sound.

In dig­i­tal record­ing, the ampli­tude of sound is mea­sured elec­tron­i­cal­ly at fre­quent inter­vals, typ­i­cal­ly 44,000 times per sec­ond, and stored on CD or dig­i­tal tape as a string of num­bers, or dig­its. On play­back, the num­bers are con­vert­ed back into sound.

Grooves on a vinyl record can wear out (espe­cial­ly on a cheap turntable), and mag­net­ic tapes can demag­ne­tize and blur. But bina­ry num­bers, once stored, nev­er change. That’s one obvi­ous advan­tage of dig­i­tal recordings.

How­ev­er, the con­ver­sion of sound into bina­ry num­bers and back again can be far from per­fect. Until recent­ly, my friend would have said that these elec­tron­ic trans­for­ma­tions cause an unac­cept­able sac­ri­fice of fidelity.

Now, appar­ent­ly, he has changed his mind.

One rea­son is bet­ter elec­tron­ics, and there­fore more faith­ful record­ing and playback.

Anoth­er rea­son is what com­put­ers can do with sound while it is stored in dig­i­tal form.

My friend’s new ulti­mate sys­tem has at its heart a $15,000 Marantz AX-1000 audio com­put­er, designed by Philips in the Nether­lands and made in Japan. Two small col­or mon­i­tors on the face of the machine dis­play a wealth of pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion. The com­put­er is sup­ple­ment­ed by a Nakamichi 1000mb 7‑disc CD play­er, sell­ing for $6,000, and a pair of $15,000 Merid­i­an D6000 remote-con­trolled, self-tun­ing speakers.

Here’s what a cus­tomer gets for his mon­ey. The com­put­er can do straight-for­ward stuff like scratch sup­pres­sion. It can also adjust music for the par­tic­u­lar acoustics of a room. It pumps out “pink sound,” a kind of all-fre­quen­cy sta­t­ic, lis­tens to the response, and deter­mines how the room responds to dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cies. Then the com­put­er changes the sound to cor­rect for any unde­sir­able distortions.

Once the acoustics of a room have been straight­ened out, the com­put­er can add unique acousti­cal effects of famous con­cert halls. By punch­ing a few but­tons on a remote con­trol, one can lis­ten to music as it would sound in Vien­na’s Gross­er Musikvere­inssaal, Bayreuth’s Fest­spiel­haus, New York’s Met, or Boston’s Sym­pho­ny Hall.

My friend’s high-tech, high-priced equip­ment pro­duced some impres­sive, bone-trem­bling sound, but, quite frankly, I could­n’t tell the dif­fer­ence between the con­cert halls of Boston and Vien­na, nor could I detect the effects of “tun­ing” the room.

“Just lis­ten to that!” he gushed as he made some sub­tle adjust­ment. He spoke a lan­guage of “poise,” “col­or,” “tex­ture,” and “artic­u­la­tion.” I lis­tened but missed the subtleties.

Nev­er­the­less, I felt I had seen the future. Soon, even inex­pen­sive audio equip­ment will con­tain sophis­ti­cat­ed com­put­ers, and ears will become mere appendages to sil­i­con chips. Com­put­ers will elim­i­nate hiss and hum from flawed record­ings, or add the sounds of shuf­fling feet, cough­ing, and rat­tling pro­grams to achieve true con­cert-hall sound. Com­put­ers will cor­rect for dis­tor­tions caused by imper­fect speak­ers or ampli­fiers. Com­put­ers might also change the sound of a horn to that of a flute, or trans­form the dis­tinc­tive shad­ings of Van Cliburn’s style into the nuances of Horowitz.

Assum­ing, that is, that we want such things.

Dig­i­tal record­ing plus com­put­ers equals a music rev­o­lu­tion. Philips and Sony and oth­er audio equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers will find a hun­dred ways to lure us to the cut­ting edge of the new tech­nol­o­gy — minia­tur­iz­ing, com­put­er­iz­ing, adding fea­tures, enhanc­ing fideli­ty — teas­ing us out of dol­lars and sense.

Already, my old LP col­lec­tion sits on its shelf in shab­by but dig­ni­fied silence. Near­by is a grow­ing col­lec­tion of iri­des­cent com­pact discs in glit­ter­ing plas­tic cas­es — scratch-proof, pro­gram­ma­ble, com­pat­i­ble with com­put­ers. Soon DATs (Dig­i­tal Audio Tapes) and DCCs (Dig­i­tal Com­pact Cas­settes) will climb onto the shelf with the CDs — and my affec­tion­ate­ly-regard­ed ana­log records in their tat­tered card­board slip­cas­es will be tipped into the rub­bish bin of history.