mobanmarketIn my As We See It column in the January 2021 Stereophile, I wrote about stories we tell ourselves to make our lives and music better—personal stories like the one about my relationship to my Thorens TD-124 turntable, or about hanging out with your dad (or mom) listening to records. Also hi-fi stories like the ones about the types of audio components we prefer—analog, digital, tubed, solid state—and how they sound. “Stories deepen our relationships,” I wrote, “including our relationships with our audio systems and the music they make.”
Stories are useful like that, but such stories, while they may be based in fact, are never 100% true. At best they’re oversimplified attempts to make sense of a complex world—of real, complex experiences. That’s their virtue. They make sense—some sense at least—of a complicated world.
The ink on that piece was scarcely dry when I came across an interview in the New York Times with Rhiannon Giddens, focusing on her plans for the Silk Road Ensemble, which she took over as artistic director last July. As many of you know, that ensemble’s original artistic director—for 16 years until 2017—was Yo-Yo Ma (footnote 1).
I adore that transition, from one of the best classical musicians who ever lived to a singer, fiddler, and banjo player for the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Giddens, of course, is more than that. She’s a MacArthur Award–winning music scholar focused on cultural collision and the American vernacular. She’s also a brilliant musician.
Giddens told Brian Seibert in the interview, “I’ve always been interested in the stories we do and don’t tell about the railroad, about African-Americans and native populations.” There it is: the stories we tell ourselves and others.
“There’s a ballad about the Cumberland Gap that’s been sung in white communities forever,” Giddens said in the interview. (I remember singing that song in school as a child, far from Appalachia.) “Then these folks did this amazing research and found out it was actually about Black railroad workers. But that was erased, and a whole group of people were forgotten, and it added to the myth of a pure white Appalachia. You know, any time the story is simple, it’s probably wrong.”
Any time a story is simple, it’s probably wrong. Reading that, I felt chastised. I knew Giddens was right.
Last month’s AWSI was a defense of stories in hi-fi, even stories that aren’t completely true. I’m safe, in that as I wrote, in hi-fi there aren’t many victims: At worst, some undeserving businessman gets our money. In, say, history, and medicine, the stakes are much higher. Still, even in hi-fi, Giddens’s message is a good reminder that we’re better off getting things right.
“The more I dig, the more complicated it gets,” Giddens continued. “And that’s the beauty of it.” More complicated stories—complicated, that is, by real research, knowledge, and experience—are more likely to be true. They’re also better stories.
A few months back, I read The Chitlin’ Circuit: And the Road to Rock’n’Roll, by Preston Lauterbach, about the impact of a network of African-American performance venues on the creation of that music. But then that’s kind of an old story: Everyone knows that almost all of America’s native music—blues, jazz, rock’n’roll—is largely African-American music. Don’t they?
Giddens and other scholars have shown that even country music was shaped by African-American influences: Giddens’s beloved banjo is descended from a West African lute made from a gourd. Woodie Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” was originally an African-American hymn (footnote 2). Cultural intersections like this make for much better stories than too-simple stories like the one that says Elvis invented rock’n’roll.
That’s in music—what about audio? I can think of at least a dozen stories many of us embrace that, while not untrue, could use fixing up. “Tubes are soulful.” “Digital is soulless.” “Vinyl is more human.” “Digital is mechanical.” Horn speakers sound—well, a certain way. None of these claims is totally wrong, but they’re not totally right, either. A story that’s too simple, with too little evidence to support it, is a prejudice. It makes sense to enrich our stories with new knowledge, new experience.
Is there anybody out there who still thinks the output from a CD player or DAC consists of jagged little stairsteps? Well, if so, they aren’t totally wrong: The output of a DAC that doesn’t have a reconstruction filter does look like stairsteps. Irony of ironies: NOS DACs, so commonly embraced by vinyl fans as the most analog-sounding DACs, are the most digital of digital sources from this point of view. That’s a better story.
Get past the oversimplified clichés, because in audio, the main victim of oversimplified clichés is us. If oversimplified stories guide our choices, our sound won’t be as good as it could be.
In my sidebar to Mikey’s review of the PS Audio Stellar M1200 monoblock amplifier, also in the January issue, I relayed a point about class-D amplification from class-D master Bruno Putzeys. Is class-D, sometimes called “digital amplification,” really digital?
A class-D amplifier involves high-frequency fluctuations between two states: That’s digital. Class-D amplifiers have distortion, an intrinsically analog problem requiring an analog solution. So, it’s both. It’s neither. It’s complicated. That’s a better story, and it gives us a reason to take another look at class-D.
Stories help connect us to our music. Embrace your stories but listen and learn. Reject conventional wisdom and audiophile clichés. Seek nuance. Complicate your stories with new experiences, new ideas, new perceptions, new information. Embrace new stories. Assess. Revise. Learn.—Jim Austin
Footnote 1: For three years, Silk Road’s artistic direction was provided by a collaboration of three of the ensemble’s members.
Footnote 2: Credit for these insights goes to Ken Burns, in his excellent series, Country Music.
Click Here: georgia rugby jersey