Koss Totem Mani-2 User Manual download pdf (Page 82)

s music important to all humans?

I would say so, and it explains why

the ﬁrst humans began to make

music even before they discovered

ﬁre, or weapons with which to kill other

humans. We know, because we’ve found

remains of their instruments.

We also know that music is not lis-

tened to the same way by everyone. For a

substantial portion of the world popula-

tion, music has a deep importance, and

is listened to with a certain intensity and

concentration. That would be the case

of audiophiles, of course. For others,

it is the superficial aspects of music

that are important. I suppose that may

explain the success of “Rhythm” FM

stations…stations, as one wag has it, “for

people who can’t listen to music without

moving their hips.”

But earlier this year I came across a

clue to the mystery: why doesn’t every-

one get involved with music the same

way, and (by extension) why not all music

reproduction systems are “involving.”

When I’m on an airplane I don’t

buy the headphones and listen to the

airline’s canned music channels. But

when I was on my way to Vegas in

January, I brought along the magazine’s

iPod, chock full of albums encoded in

lossless compression. I also brought

along a pair of headphones with noise

cancellation: a little microphone picks

up ambient rumble and reproduces it in

reverse phase to cancel it out at the ear.

On the ﬁrst aircraft, a Boeing 737, that

worked well. But after changing planes at

Detroit I found myself near the tail of a

767, and the headphones could no longer

do more than make a minor dent in the

noise level. The result was a disturbing

discovery. Everyone was singing out of

tune!

No, not really out of tune, but I could

no longer tell whether they were in tune.

I tried some recordings by singers whose

pitch I knew to be particularly accurate:

soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian doing the

songs of Pauline Viardot (on Analekta),

or Margie Gibson singing Irving Berlin

(on Shefﬁeld). For all I could tell they

might be way off the right note. What

was going on here? Is this what it’s like

to have a tin ear?

Now I need to be careful here,

because “tin ear” is one of those epithets

you don’t toss off at anyone bigger than

you. It’s a value judgement and it will be

taken as such. I have a good ear for pitch,

and as an audiophile you almost certainly

do too. With the subterranean rumbling

of the 767, however, I was no longer sure

of the pitch I was hearing, and that made

music way less interesting.

I wound up looking for other music

and ﬁnally settled on the latest Coldplay

album, on which the dominant element

is — you guessed it — rhythm. And even

that wasn’t so hot.

This curious experience got me

thinking about a question that audio-

philes like to talk about: the ability of a

music system to deliver accurate pitch.

As nearly as I can recall, Linn was the

ﬁrst company to talk about this, advising

listeners to try to repeat a melody in their

heads. The easier that was, the better the

system.

Now that piece of advice made critics

of the high end movement snicker, espe-

cially in the years since digital became

the common home music source. Now

that wow and ﬂutter and other speed

variations are a thing of the past, how

can the pitch of the music be wrong?

It can’t actually be wrong, but it can

certainly be ambiguous. That was what I

experienced on the plane, and also what

I experience when I listen to a system

that doesn’t seem interesting. Maybe the

music is on pitch and maybe it’s not, but

you have to make an effort to tell one

way or the other.

And that realization brought me back

to a phenomenon I came across many

years ago: Shepard’s tones.

First demonstrated in 1964 (though

possibly it had precursors) by R. N.

Shepard, the tones are a series of notes

going up the scale, seemingly forever.

How is it done? Shepard used a computer

to manipulate the harmonic content of

the notes in an interesting way, so as to

make the exact pitch ambiguous. The

result is that you always know what

note you are hearing, but you lose track

of what octave it belongs in. You can

hear them at www.uhfmag.com/Tech/

Shepard.html.

Once the plane had landed I was

relieved to ﬁnd that my sense of pitch

had recovered just ﬁne, and the music

packed into my iPod was enjoyable once

again.

The fundamental building blocks of

music, which give music both its mean-

ing and its emotional impact, are melody,

harmony and rhythm. Muck them up, or

even make them ambiguous, and you’ve

just got less music. Either you need to

make an excessive effort to get involved

in what you’re hearing, or you can’t make

it out at all.

This wasn’t new to me, to be sure. I’ve

long used the word “musicality” to refer

to a system’s ability to communicate

music’s powerful message. You have too,

possibly. What the experience on the

plane gave me was a clue as to why some

systems with great specs can’t do it. It’s

not that they get the music wrong, it’s

that you can’t be sure if they get it right

or wrong.

STATE OF THE ART:

THE BOOK

Get the 258-page book

containing the State of the Art

columns from the rst 60 issues

of UHF, with all-new introductions.

See page 4.

State of the Art

by Gerard Rejskind

80 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine

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