In the Golden Age

By Bill Heck
 

Ah, to have lived in the Golden Age of…well, anything. The Golden Age of philosophy? Ancient Athens, hobnobbing with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Less ambitiously, there’s the Golden Age of American literature: maybe the mid-20th century, when we could hang out with Faulkner and Hemingway, or perhaps earlier so we could look over Melville’s shoulder. There’s even a Golden Age of American Industry for a few postwar decades, when American industrial might was unchallenged and a husband (it was always a husband, wasn’t it?) could provide for an entire family with a single factory job.
 
Then there was the Golden Age of American Classical Music, in the pre-WWII and postwar eras when giants roamed the land: Reiner, Szell, Ormandy, and Stokowski and their city orchestras, when first radio and then television networks competed to be highbrow: NBC even had its own symphony orchestra!
 
And the Golden Age of High Fidelity? Well, that could have been in the 1950s – 60s when the classic Marantz, McIntosh, KLH and then Advent appeared, or perhaps in the 1970s – 80s when exotic “high end” brands arose, tubes all aglow: Audio Research, Conrad-Johnson, Mark Levinson.
 
You may have noticed that all these Golden Ages have something in common: they happened in some magical past. We hear that philosophy has been all downhill since those smart Greeks; literature has succumbed to the way of Kindle; classical music is a mere footnote to popular culture; American industry is a shadow of its former self. And audio? Alas, High Fidelity has given way to MP3 and earbuds, with a few remaining enclaves accessible only to those with megabucks for gigantic amplifiers and massive speakers – and even multi-thousand dollar cables!

I won’t try to speak for philosophy or literature or even manufacturing, but there’s something odd about the tales of the demise of classical music. If serious music is sunk, how is it that we see a steady stream of classical recordings being released each and every week? And how is it that even newly minted musicians, those so obscure that only their mothers have heard of them, amaze us with their talents on a daily basis? Listen critically to some of those giants of yesteryear: Schnabel and Richter were known to hit some clinkers, and some of those legendary orchestras seemed occasionally lost in thickets of (sometimes wrong) notes. The level of accomplishment of even the rawest rookies these days is amazing, as they confront works formerly thought nearly unplayable and toss them off with ease. Orchestras in cities that you never heard of could play rings around some of the fabled bands of a few decades ago. And wait – how is it that those cities you never heard of even have orchestras? Still more: what about those contemporary composers who are once again writing music that ordinary music lovers actually want to hear? While there’s no denying that the classical music world has issues to confront, in many ways we are in the Golden Age of Classical Music: more music, and more ways to access it, than ever before.
 

But what about the Golden Age of High Fidelity? It’s true that earbuds and Alexa speakers get the headlines. It’s also true that many of the stereo shops of a decade or two ago have gone the way of the dodo, and too many of those that remain seem to specialize in multi-channel systems optimized to produce the sounds of car chases, laser weapons, and earthquakes. But quietly, behind the scenes, we have entered a true Golden Age of High Fidelity sound reproduction. And you, my friend, are the beneficiary.
 
So what do I mean by a “Golden Age?” Just this: audio equipment has evolved to a point at which:
 
· it is easy to obtain music sources – and the equipment to play those sources – that would have provoked awe just a few years ago; and
· doing so requires less specialized knowledge, effort, and commitment than ever before; and
· those sources and equipment are available at extraordinarily low cost, affordable to those with even moderate incomes.
 
Let’s take these in order, starting with the sources and equipment. Incredibly, the CD standard, developed back in 1980, has turned out to be capable of music reproduction that is rarely surpassed. Perhaps some people do hear small differences between CD and “high resolution” audio, although evidence beyond mere assertion is spotty, but the real point is that the plain old CD standard is remarkably robust and satisfying.
 
Moreover, a little listening should convince you that recording processes and techniques now routinely deliver superb results – not perfect, and of course some recordings are better than others, but a high percentage of contemporary recordings sound very good. Yes, some (a few) older recordings still hold their own, but the batting average seems much higher these days, and the best of today surely equals or even – oh heresy! – surpasses those fabled recorded masterpieces of yesteryear.
 
Meanwhile, even the best recordings need to be played back through a good sound system. Here again, the technological progress has been astounding. CD players, digital-to-audio converters (DACs), music streaming devices, preamplifiers and amplifiers now boast specifications and performance so good that it is difficult to find measurable or demonstrable audible differences among them. Yes, I know that the previous sentence invites derision and flaming comments from those convinced otherwise by the incessant advertising that passes for audio reviewing in some quarters. But even bastions of audio perfection like The Absolute Sound seem to admit, albeit sometimes reluctantly and only between the lines, that many humble components are really, really good. Meanwhile, the more objectively oriented world, as represented by sites like audiosciencereview.com, produce both measurements and listening results that indicate staggeringly good performance over and over. The point is not that “everything sounds the same,” but rather that excellence is readily available.
 
Turning to my second point above, the mere availability of first-rate components isn’t much help if you need to spend months or years learning enough to identify them, more months looking for them, and a lifetime learning to adjust and tweak them to optimize their performance. Who has time for that?
 

But, in fact, high quality components are easy to find. As the quality of even entry level components has skyrocketed, the problem of finding good stuff has decreased proportionally: if many components are now pretty good, your odds of finding satisfactory ones are high. We have not reached that state of audio nirvana in which components are indistinguishable commodities, but consider the contrast with even the recent past. Back in the earlier supposed golden ages, say the 1970s, the typical audiophile might haunt electronics shops weekend after weekend, searching for that elusive combination of components that would work well together, the strengths of each offsetting the weaknesses of the other. And let’s not even get started on craziness like adjusting tube bias or figuring out which transformer tap worked best with which speakers. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky.) In the more recent past, the search may have been easier, but one at least needed to identify multiple types of components, learn the function of each and how to connect them, and assemble complementary units into a working system. Now consider something like the NAD C 658 unit that I reviewed some months back: it’s one box. That’s it. Oh wait, you need an amplifier; if that’s too complicated, you can purchase a similar unit that combines most or all of this same functionality plus the amp into one box. But wait, don’t you need a CD player? Not even that. Instead, you can use streaming to pull music out of thin air, so to speak, at CD or higher resolution.
 
And that brings us to the third point: low cost. Let’s build a simple, low cost system; I’ll refer to a few brands as examples, but please understand that there are plenty of choices that would be highly satisfactory.
 
First, we’ll use a streaming unit. You could get something like the Bluesound PowerNode, which combines streaming with an integrated amplifier for just under $1,000 (less for a perfectly good used unit), or any of a number of similar units, or even separate streamers and amplifiers, for not much more. For that price, you get competent audio streaming at high resolution and sufficient power to drive some decent speakers.
 
The contrast with previous alleged Golden Ages is stark. Oh sure, those lovely Marantz tube units back in the 1960’s were only hundreds of dollars – but in real dollars, i.e., accounting for inflation, prices for high quality audio equipment that have never been lower. (And remember, in those halcyon days of yore, you needed both a preamp and power amp, along with a turntable with tonearm and cartridge.) Moreover, those old tube units required periodic and often expensive maintenance and adjustment: replacing tubes was a periodic ritual. In addition, those of us of a certain age remember when every small town had at least one electronics repair shop, needed because those old electronics broke with distressing regularity. Modern solid-state stuff, not so much.
 
You still need speakers, and again it is technology to the rescue. Advances in science and engineering have made formerly exotic materials available and usable at low prices, and advances in computation have made formerly onerous and time-consuming design work much easier and faster. The result is a generation of widely available, reasonably priced, high-performance speakers. Of course, you can spend a lot on speakers, and expensive speakers often (though not always) yield better performance, but you can get into the game with very good speakers at very low prices. Let’s start you out with speakers at $1,000: they won’t shake the room with thunderous bass or wake up the dog with ultra-high frequencies, but they can sound quite credible in a basic system.
 
Our total allocation so far is around $2,000 brand new, full retail. (Lest you think such a number totally outrageous, just consider that a high-end television can easily be more.) Not pocket change, but as a long-term investment, not eye-watering either. If you find used equipment, subtract some more. Will you be satisfied forever? Maybe; if not, you can improve things incrementally, again at low cost, in one or more of the following ways.
 
· Upgrade the speakers. This is the obvious place to start: the possibilities – and the price levels – are endless. At our introductory cost level, even small increments in price will buy you significant upgrades in sound.
· Add room correction: This can produce major gains; one easy option is a $400 – 500 standalone unit from the likes of miniDSP. Alternatively, spend a little more up front and some streaming units include room correction for free.
· Add a CD player: as the streaming device likely has a digital input, you can get away with a cheap or used player functioning only as a transport. $100 - 200?
· Add a subwoofer: There are plenty of competent choices starting well under $1,000.
 
Finally, there’s the music. You can have high-quality audio streaming for a dirt cheap $10-15 per month. Even if that price doubles or triples (to better support the musicians), it’s still cheap, especially considering that the monthly fee buys you access to a library of hundreds of thousands of albums – audio nirvana indeed.
 
Does all this make our own time the Golden Age of Audio? There are those who say no, who lament the fact that it’s too easy; who long for the days when, by golly, you really had to work to put together your audio system; who whine that it doesn’t count if you don’t have to spend endless hours getting it right (or even getting it working at all). It’s the same syndrome as with the golden age of cars: those Jaguars, MGs, Triumphs, early Corvettes were so beautiful, so fun, symbolizing the freedom of the open road. I understand that nostalgia, and I, too, feel the appeal of those early cars – until I want to go somewhere. By any objective measure, today’s cars are better than those vehicles of yesteryear: more reliable, faster, mostly better handling, more economical, safer, etc. Similarly, we can understand the appeal of glowing tubes, monster amps, giant but inefficient speakers – until we just want to listen to music. Is the audio hobby in a golden age? Maybe not, but audio is.
 
A final note:
There are supposed audio gurus who will tell you that putting together a decent audio system condemns you to spending hours and hours tweaking this and that, putting little gizmos that rely on effects unknown to physics on top of and under your components, endlessly comparing freaking wires – and that you most certainly need to subscribe to their YouTube channels and haunt their websites so that they can guide you through this foreign landscape. Forget all that, at least for now. Get the basics under control. If you are inclined to mess around with such things, do so later. (Personally, I recommend that you continue in your blissful ignorance and spend your time listening to music.)
 
Even more annoyingly, there will be those who sneer that you can’t possibly appreciate the nuances of good music because you haven’t spent their threshold amount, whether that’s $10K or $100K, or you haven’t performed the proper rituals or penances of tweaking and fiddling. If that happens, just smile politely, go home, turn on the music, and enjoy your time in the Golden Age of High Fidelity.
 
BH