From Clark Johnsen’s Diary: The Art of Knowing, The Craft of Listening
Clark Johnsen

In a way really it was a blessing that early digital sound sucked. Without that impetus the enormous progress seen in audio during the past decade and a half might never have happened, or surely would have occurred more slowly. For out of that bleak, despairing era of rapid digital expansion, when any improvement in its frozen-in-amber numerics seemed an impossibility, several realizations arose that might otherwise have eluded us: The glory of the LP; the fine art of playback; the fallibility of audio "professionals" and academics; and our own susceptibility to delivered opinion.

The phrase "Perfect Sound Forever", granted, was a brainchild of marketeers, but it was espoused by the vast majority of AES members, all mass-market makers and the newsstand press. Us fortunate consumers, if one might believe, had been given a music delivery system far superior to LP, indestructible and with myriad convenience features as well. Not only that, but CDs sounded just like master tapes!

Our gratitude should be infinite, we were told.

Nevertheless, depression set in throughout "the high end" shortly after CD’s introduction. For further insult, we who protested were relegated to the status of Luddite. [Disclaimer: I led a "Boston D Party" in 1983, where some eighty braves tossed CDs into the harbor.] Then when the tube renaissance hit a few years later, Neanderthal was added to the list of descriptors. While propagandists always attempt to marginalize and demonize their opponents, in our case the smear campaign was conducted by a crowd of true believers in the wonders of digital audio.

To deny digital, was veritable heresy. Sternly we were lectured on its theoretical benefits from pulpits at MIT, the AES and elsewhere, because no academic today wishes to appear heretical. Heresy is not published by the major houses, nor by any university press. Academics can not advance or even sustain their careers without publishing, hence none may commit heresy and survive.

Moreover, academics and professionals alike, by nature scorn whatever the academy does not sanction. Their repeated failures in this regard may be observed by citing names such as Koch, Pasteur and Semmelweis, all called cranks at the time but later recognized as geniuses. More recently, had you suggested "continental drift" to any geologist a mere forty years ago, you’d have been laughed at out loud, even though several continents on the globe appear to have an almost jigsaw-puzzle-like fit. Truly, no one’s mind is harder to change, than his who has taught in error. [See sidebar]

Handmaiden to the academy is the press, who labor under similar constraints of "political correctness", a catchall term but serviceable. One need only read their derivative pronunciamentos, to discern what excites their masters. In every sphere reporters’ attention has been diverted from reporting the facts, towards reshaping public opinion. Today we have journalists on a mission, a mission (as some 85% of Columbia School of Journalism students thoughtfully agreed in a survey) to change the world. That is, realign the readership to their own way of thinking. And as usual most readers (and TV news listeners) fall for it, never having been taught how to detect the insidious devices of propaganda.

"How could I have known? Peter Jennings never told me!"

So there we were, stranded in 1984 with Big Brother Nyquist sampling our strength away, our ragtag resistance crew led unofficially by Harry Pearson. (J. Gordon Holt at Stereophile, as I once unkindly wrote, seemed to be bending over forwards to accept it.) And eventually our side regained, not the mainland, but a Taiwan island of business independence, where even now we are being strafed by a newer, larger enemy with immense forces arrayed behind him. Who is he, and how may he be defeated?

To answer the second question first, victory shall be attained as before: By steadfastly refusing to accept the opinions of alleged experts and adhering instead to what we hear. We, the careful listeners, are the true connoisseurs of sound, the real adepts of music reproduction. We are they who first asserted the edginess and unreality of CDs, examined the situation with our skeptical ears and improvised some cures. With few "pros" on our side (Ed Meitner one notable exception), by spending time rather than just money, we attained a level of sonic distinction still not available in the latest gear, whether from Panasonic or from Krell. And in so doing, unearthed a new field of audio endeavor which I hereby dub, Diagnostic Listening.

Audio, like few other amateur pursuits, commands three distinct aspects, each of them equally valid: An enhancement of the home musical experience; a fascinating hands-on hobby (beats stamp collecting, I always say); and finally, a voyage of discovery through an uncharted realm. Each aspect, however, is fraught with difficulties.

As to the first, the music, naturally, of course; but many use the music as an excuse to avoid learning about sound. "I spend my spare time listening to music, not fiddling around with wires," a huffy Dan d’Agostino was quoted in 1988. That response, from him, constitutes a gross dereliction of duty.

Secondly, many may have what they call a hobby, but are entranced instead by a need to audition new equipment, the more buzz surrounding it the better, whether brand, model, circuit or price. Especially prone to this weakness are audio reviewers, actually clever junkies who have found a surefire way to maintain a constant injection of new product into their systems. And most manufacturers gladly support the habit: An item may be kept for a year, then returned, but a good review has been written and the addicted reviewer may safely expect the MarkIV version to arrive soon on his doorstep.

No money transacted; not one red cent of payola. I love this town.

But inform your readers that a new $3000 Audio Research preamp sounds rather poor until it’s hooked up with a $500 ESP power cord, and then it sounds great — well, like teaching a pig to dance, you just get dirty and it annoys the readers. (A true story from Fi, recounted earlier in these pages.) So you don’t see much of that sort of thing any more. Most audio reviewers and purchasers alike focus on the Ding an sich, the black metal box that comes packed inside the light brown cardboard box unloaded from the dark brown van. Just hook it up with the wires provided and man, you’re in virtual heaven!

The only exception to the official rule of no messing around on your own, concerns loudspeaker placement within a room, which all agree must be regarded as an experimental variable.

Thirdly we have those tormented souls who spend their evenings minutely adjusting cables, vertical tracking angles, surface charge, mains voltage, head position... It is tempting to think that they too miss the boat, but that would be unwise; people who obsess over details can be valuable to any field, precisely because of their extreme self-denial of (in this case) immediate musical pleasure. In fact I would argue that such persons comprise our vanguard, and alone truly experience the joy of discovery.

A fourth category, as yet unmentioned, is bent on pursuing the rigor-mortis-laden but academy-approved double-blind-test regimen. I ask, has anyone ever shown that such a procedure can indeed resolve the small but vital differences heard by trained listeners? Until such day as its efficacy in this regard has been proven, the man-years consumed and the largely null results obtained thus far must be adjudged a total waste of time.

Diagnostic Listening transcends the self-absorbed enjoyment of recorded music, the simplistic evaluation of new gear, neurotic attention to detail and the imposition of questionable science. Rather, Diagnostic Listening admits that future development in audio resides in both the grand overview and in the details, with music as our research partner. What’s been missing until now has been a systematic approach.

Diagnostic Listening moreover is not an individual effort, but a team one, in a game with no competition and no scorekeeper. The goal is Knowledge and the ball is always in play. The only rules state that goalposts be reasonably set and that they be gained only after exhaustive play, and only then may we drink and be merry and (as Steve Rochlin says) enjoy the music.

It can happen like this because audio, at least perfectionist audio, as distinguished from consumer audio, is wide open territory, in a sense the last frontier of basic science, and no one knows how far it can go. We are nowhere yet close to realistic reproduction. Therein lies the intellectual thrill, especially since most of the "pros" and the press proclaimed the sound already perfect back in 1983.

A story: Some thirty-five years ago Tony Lauck was teaching me the hi-fi knowledge he had acquired at Philips Exeter (from, among others, Peter Moncrieff). We would hook up the latest electronics or loudspeaker array and then let ourselves get swept away by a new Mahler symphony recording or a live Boston Symphony broadcast. But afterwards, bucking our audiophiliac tendency towards self-applause, Tony would always utter the words that have since become my reality-check: "Just remember, Clark, it all still sounds like shit."

Back in those days, however, we were largely unacquainted with the notion that one could improve sound with simple home remedies, i.e. "tweaking", or better, fine tuning. To the emergence of that phenomenon, not yet twenty years ago, and to the subsequent throng of enthusiasts, we owe our current celebration of the LP and the shattering of that clay idol, Perfect Sound Forever. And the probable defeat too of the measurements mentality which typically points to the low peak distortion figure on CD and says Aha! (never minding the much higher distortion from "bit strangulation" at low levels); and which further asserts that all like-measuring equipment sounds alike. As well say that all women who measure the same, are alike.

But the enemy with the most immense forces, always, is, and now his name may be spoken, Reductionism. We shall treat this menace later, in an essay to be based on Rene Guenon’s 1945 epic, The Reign of Quantity (and Signs of the Times), Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, and the great Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Meanwhile let’s take a break, then return with an admittedly anecdotal account of a qualitative science expedition.

But just to give a hint: Reductionism is a popular philosophy which holds that everything that can be known, pretty much already is and can best be described numerically. This hyper-analytic obsession with measurement sprang from seventeenth-century Rationalism, the doctrine that reason alone is the sole source of knowledge and stands independent from experience. Who dares disagree?

Upon an unsuspecting world the German nation has launched the most expensive device yet, to make CD sound better by doctoring each disc individually. This writer has reported on such treatments since 1992, when in Stereophile he revealed that waving a tape degausser over CDs could greatly reduce their unpleasant edginess. This jarring information was received by the press with their usual equanimity, so for years the news never got very far. Soon, however, numerous mats and fluids arrived on the scene, surprising us by their variety and intensity of effect on this (one had thought) frozen-in-numbers digital encoding scheme.

Since then even more such have appeared, often accompanied by rather dubious explanations. Truth is, almost everything works to some extent, but few can say why, exactly. That deficiency goads academics and professionals alike into their usual jeerleading, skirts hiked up to distract us from the fact that they can not explain it either, and furthermore refuse to listen!

What a revoltin’ development this is, as Riley used to exclaim. Huge numbers of attentive listeners contradict the approved thinking, yet earn little credibility even in the high-end press, where so-called "tweaks" are commonly disregarded. (The Benjamin degausser sent gratis to Stereophile was unused three years later; I know because the editor manfully apologized in print. But that does not excuse him!) Often have I argued, that such tweaks belie the presumed expertise of our digital designers, besides illustrating that the current 16/44 system possibly may not require replacement, since we know neither what we already have, nor how it actually works.

That said, here is a device, the Audio Desk Systeme, that astonishes even myself. A finely-contrived, solidly-built, even overbuilt mechanism, it consists of a tightly belt-driven 4-inch turntable on which the CD is firmly clamped, then a sharp cutting tool applied by hand through a pivoted horizontal lever. The result: A perfectly true disc with a 30° beveled edge on which an ink film may be applied. Then when you listen, Omigod!

Of course any improvement depends upon your transport’s sensitivity to off-centered mass, stray light, etc. although in every case tested so far, well, like I said... Omigod! And here I thought I knew everything already.

The Audio Desk Systeme (O horrible name; were it from a certain American genius, it might be called the Carver CD Carver) does not come cheap, however: $495. The standard blade lasts for 400 CDs, another $55 buys the extra-sharp good for 2000. But share the unit around and you might find the capital cost dropping to pennies per disc. Believe me, it’s worth more, much more. Plus, imagine the joy of glancing at your friends’ innocent faces as they watch you open this weird contraption, clamp a helpless disc down, switch the powerful motor on (with variable speed control), then grin wickedly while slowly engaging the keen-edged cutter. What an angry flurry of white burr suddenly arises! And if you have a shop-vac nearby to suck it out through a hose stuck into the Systeme’s exit port, and you can simultaneously click this on with your foot, well, what an excellent, noisy show!

Just remember, a myriad of CD treatments exists and I have told you before that whichever one gets applied first generally seems the most effective. From there on down, results diminish almost irrespective of where one begins, but all are useful. The Audio Desk Systeme is an exception; even applied at the end, it’s great! Afterwards the music sounds more natural, more expressive, fuller, less edgy; and the musicians seem to be breathing easier. This applies not only to CDs, but to DVDs too, with clearer video!

Here be perhaps the one single indispensible CD band-aid, with the further advantage that once a disc is done, it stays done.

The Bedini Brothers, John and Gary, over twenty years ago landed in Audio Territory from someplace else; starting out straight (with electronics), they soon got weirder and weirder. Especially John. (Don’t ask.) Approximately the same time as the news broke about CD "degaussing", the Bedinis introduced a hand-held battery-driven unit that replicated the phenomenon. Only, the effect lasted for only a few minutes and John claimed it wasn’t just about magnets anyway.

Something to do with... other radiation...

Subsequent versions improved on the initial concept and today the Bedini Dual-Beam Ultraclarifier presents an excellent remedy for the sonic ills of CD, albeit one that must be applied before each play and takes 20 seconds out of your day every time (not unlike waiting to download a Java-laden website).

All comments about the Systeme apply, although to a lesser extent. Then again, at one-third the price... well...

See how easy we can be?

Several of these have been covered in this space before, but for new readers they are always worth repeating:

Benjamin Tape Eraser ($36), the original handheld device for cassettes and damn effective on CDs. Yes we know there is nothing ferric in a CD, thanks for pointing that out.

Just try it, or the lesser but still serviceable Shack model. After waving the thing for 10 or 15 seconds closely over the disc, you will hear much less harshness and more articulate bass. Ask the experts why.

Nordost Eco-3 ($40), an 8-oz. spray-can that accomplishes essentially the same as above. Eco takes slightly more effort to apply (labelside only, please) but requires no electricity and raises fewer eyebrows, which could be a plus or a minus. No toxicity or penetrating hydrocarbons. (See my complete report in Vo1.8, #2.)

Optrix ($18), a polish for the business side of a disc, dramatically increases low-level resolution. With old analogue originals the hiss level rises, always a good sign. Products such as Esoteric Mist and TM-16 and others do the trick too.

Blacklight ($40) and Aurex ($30) mats, the one luminous, the other dark, in their painless ease of application occupy the time-value price point of CD enhancement. The Aurex, ultra-thin and lightweight, works in every player, the other does not. Results may vary otherwise as well.

Not to forget previous reports that digital gear can be greatly improved by proper filtering on the AC supply and/or by specialty power cords. No minor matter, this, either.

While all the above serve to ameliorate the clattery, punishing aspect of CD audio, no one — credentialed academic, famous designer, prominent reviewer, experienced retailer nor myself — can say why. No one has the faintest notion. Isn’t that interesting?

Think what improvements might be effected in the present system if only it were better understood! Sonically-obvious electrical, mechanical and optical errors might be corrected in the vaunted, oh-so-powerful (we are told) digital domain, without extra effort.

If only... But today it appears unlikely that such an event will ever come to pass. Instead we will be given a "hot-rodded" 44/16, called 96/24, to overcome certain limitations, and no one will ever be the wiser that they may have had it all, already.

Who knows?

Up at Bill Gaw’s major installation in New Hampshire, where things are rightly heard, at least during some times of the day, he and I recently undertook to compare 96/24 to 44/16, vs. each done up our special way. The experience was instructive.

Make a long story short? A fully tweaked and beveled 44/16 disc can sound quite like a 96/24; and while both are still clearly digital, that’s now not so much a complaint as a simple observation.

But there was more...

For comparison we selected Ravels grandly scored La Valse (Shall we dance?), the Minnesota Orchestra recording by the acclaimed Aubort/Nickrenz team, the duo issued by Vox in the old format and by Classic in the new. Yes, those are different masterings, but what can you do? The industry never makes legitimate comparison discs available. At least the Vox, we both had always thought, was an exceptional-sounding CD.

Preliminary trials found the two discs in opposite polarity, a malady that regularly confuses printed evaluations of various issues of any recording. Get it straight, guys! Wrong polarity means muffled sound, except over those ubiquitous phase-incoherent loudspeakers, in which case no difference can be told at all and you have no business writing about audio.

With rectified polarity the 96/24 sounded immediately more transparent and musical. Oh, did I say we also had to use two different converters? (Sigh.) For one, an EAD Signature, for the other the internal DAC in a Pioneer DV-09. At least that arrangement favored the older format, a fair handicap we decided. Besides that, Bill is a scrupulous assembler, with all equipment lodged on Vibraplanes and Valid Points, Electraglide AC cables and Allen Wright-style silver-foil wires throughout. A Walker Proscenium turntable graces center stage. Electronics are a gorgeous Allen Wright preamp and 2A3ed Paraglows by Dan Schmalle; loudspeakers are massive three-tier Edgarhorns supplemented below 50Hz with VMPS Large Subwoofers driven by bridged Plinius Class-A SA-50s.

For our first experiment we rang the changes on CD: Degaussing, polishing, matting (but not yet applying the Audio Desk Systeme). As expected, stridency nearly vanished, hiss level mildly rose (that good sign again), hall reverb emerged and the stage became more precisely occupied. And no longer did it sound like one of those sorry "Perfect Sound" discs adored by so many useful fools (old Marxist term) back in the Eighties. Next we played it on the Pioneer, just to see, and found the result more rounded, not agressive but somewhat less suave in every department.

Switching then to the Classic 96/24, we discerned a sinuous subtlety in soft passages with solo instruments, but otherwise not much difference. Back to the CD, we beveled it and, omigosh! Both the audio and musical content excelled the 96/24. Damn! Is this what _we are being "upgraded" to? Same old, same old?

Does that make 96/24 a total fake, a glitzy-numerics impostor? Who knows? Time to put it to the tweak test, too. Dutifully we Bedinied and Optrixed and Ecoed and Blacklighted and... got more of that enticing sinuous subtlety, but not too much else. Yet anyone who listens to classical would surely choose 96/24 for its expressivity in the soft passages, which constitute the greater part of that fine music — some would even say, the better part.

Only one thing left to do: Carve the Classic.

Two measures into La Valse, The Waltz (odd, how the French commandeered that Viennese domain name), and already, Geez! For the first time, helplessly awestruck, we listened all the way through to the end. Here indeed, was the Dance.

Finally, just to tie everything up, we directed the DV-09’s 96/24 output into the EAD to be down-converted to 48/20, then decoded. Strangely this proved to sound even better! More breath on the flutes, droller chalumeau on the clarinets, bosser burbling in the bassoons and for audio listeners, a wider soundstage. But by that time Bill and I had gotten tired of waltzing The Waltz. To conclude our lengthy exercise we shifted briefly back to the CD, which still had good dynamics and decent sound but now, sad to say, in comparison, altogether lacked musical vitality.

To summarize: Neither disc to start sounded great. Both got better, however, after applying treatments, the 96/24 the more so. Keeping all the variables in mind, three conclusions would seem inescapable: Higher numbers do not ipso facto guarantee better sound; apart from that, serious hidden problems exist in PCM digital audio; and no one can explain how they arise or how to deal with them. It could be an optical thing, or a mechanical, or an electrical, or an electro-magnetic thing. Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine.

One might further wonder — since a fully-doctored 16/44 roughly equals a plain 96/24 — where does the even newer SACD stand with respect to a treated 96/24? Who knows?

Also: How much does anyone know?

Time, of course, will tell...

While such questions may never (by their very nature) be fully answered, devout testimonials to SACD (aka. DSD) have already erupted, not least from this magazine’s masthead (not to mention Stereophile and TAS). Senior Editors everywhere have gone ape over it, beating their chests that here for real is perfect recording. Except, to my knowledge these worthies have never heard a fully-tweaked and beveled CD or DVD-A (aka. 96/24). Nevertheless...

Ed Meitner and Jerry Ozment, two highly-respected designers in the professional arena, also are DSD proponents; Ed even assisted Sony in later design stages. According to Jerry (whose company manufactures a $4950 converter, the AudioLogic 2400, which for years I have ranked at the top), and Ed I’m certain would agree, the biggest problem with CD has been the PCM part. PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) compels awkward calculations, with audible artifacts an unhappy, if unintended consequence.

For mitigation, PCM datastreams often get changed to "single-bit", then decoded. In DSD/SACD that nasty PCM step is eliminated altogether; recordings are made originally in a format so similar to single-bit, that several converters, including Jerry’s, can handle it already by just bypassing the PCM circuits.

The new method possesses an inherent beauty: As with analogue, waveforms are reconstructed without resort to messy algorithms and steep filters. The new disc, so smooth yet detailed, Jerry calls — a memorable phrase — optical vinyl.

By the time this report appears, Sony will have two multi-$K early-adopter players available, but Sharp (!) reportedly will have a transport capable of outputting into ready converters.1 Competition kicks! Pity only some 40 SACDs (horrible name!) are available (as opposed to some 35 DVDAs -hah!) although Sony promise another ten per month and even Water Lily and Mobile Fidelity have signed on.2

Make no mistake about it: Whoever hears, is convinced. Even 30ips people. Best believe on faith, even as I do — remembering, however, that only "tweaking" — the venerable practice of spending time, not just money, on one’s hobby — can reveal the total truth.

Pray that DSD/SACD (or equivalent) succeeds; but the route will not be easy, the journey slow. Our main hope lies in the acute discomfort manufacturers will feel in providing a single path (that would be PCM DVD-A) for future sales; for without a doubt, CD has been willed extinct within five years. It remains for the public to demand the better of two competing futures. All manufacturers know this; with luck their motto in the meantime will be CYA: Cover Your Ass.

In TAS #120 Harry Pearson wondered, "How long will it take to get the ‘bugs’ out of the new technology?" Harry, the answer is, just as long as it has taken for every old technology.

Meaning, possibly forever.

Who knows?

Time will tell.

The other day my buddy Nicky telephones. New flavor concentrates have arrived and my assistance would be appreciated. So I drive out to Lizzy’s, his imaginative modern ice cream parlor, carrying Iggy’s best crusty white underarm to wipe the palate clean between samples.

This town, Boston, has great bakeries and also, with the highest per-capita ice cream consumption in America, the best frozen stuff in the world outside Florence, Italy, in my opinion. But Nicky has developed several innovative angles that catapult him over Firenze, so I am ever eager to heed his call.

Today finds us seated at a back table, old friends lingering over espresso late in the afternoon, European style, while Avi mans the counter and we confront, before our tasting session begins, the pressing political issues of the day. On hand are sixteen varieties of jarred and sealed compote supplied by Perigord, to be stirred into stock vanilla ice cream and evaluated. Eventually Avi produces bowls and spoons and I line the entrants up by fruit category: Apricot, black cherry, raisin, plum and currant. Variations on each include various ground nuts, sherry and brandy.

The trials commence.

Regrettably, no entrant tastes desirable in ice cream. Only two or three are even good to spread on bread. The nuts are gritty, the brandy is volatile, the sherry, well, cheap...

"How do you know?" the silent-until-now, self-appointed guardians of correctness demand; "How can you possibly justify those statements?" They disdainfully add, "Mr. Johnsen, we are not aware of any properly-conducted double-blind tests published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, that support your conclusions."

Well, if that isn’t... totally true!

How indeed do I know?

I’ll have to think about that. Meanwhile, why should audio, the reproduction of fine music, for Heaven’s sake, be stuck with straightjacket specs when non-auditory senses are allowed to operate freely?

For instance, to continue:

Everyone recognizes Hershey and Nestle as mainstays of the candy counter, but who can name a really superior brand?

Lindt, you say?

Sorry. Just good Swiss PR, in my opinion. Try again.

Godiva?

Better, but...

Let me introduce you to Valrhona, maison fondée 1925. Valrhona, she do the trick! Whether unsweetened bricks for bakers or gold-foil-clad bars and wafers for upscale consumers, here be a high-percent-cocoa-butter peak of the chocolate-makers’ art. Unfortunately Valrhona remains obscure to all but a few "chocophiles". (Their opposites, the infamous "chocoholics", are more addicted actually to sugar. Indeed, ‘holics as a rule maintain their habits at very low levels of quality. Rye whiskey, anyone? Only whoever stays unaddicted, moves onwards or upwards.)

Yes, you can get decent stuff from van Houten and Cadbury, Lindt and Tobler — but they pale beside Valrhona. Still, those are all mere brand names. Beyond the NADs and Boses of chocolate, lie the shadowy zones of nationalities — Ghana, Venezuela, Indonesia — and within them, regions and estates and, most significantly, varietals.

In the last three decades wine enthusiasts in America (and everywhere) have become acquainted with cabernet sauvignon, merlot, zinfandel, pinot noir, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc. Yet who can name one single variety of chocolate bean?

Or one estate?

Isn’t that an almost shocking fact, in this day and age of yuppie food-and-beverage connoisseurs? How could such an embarrassment du pauverte, so to speak, have arisen? Could it be, that our chocolate suppliers have us so firmly under thumb, they know we have no need to know, so why rock the boat?

Unsurprisingly, Theobroma cacao varietals, while difficult to obtain, possess attributes wholly absent from the processed product. (That word! As in "processed cheese" and "digitally processed".) They exude overtones of raspberry, cherry, cinnamon, melon... True chocolate need never be mixed with additives like milk powder, liquor, nuts or raisins, to achieve flavor complexity. Some names to look for: Criolla, carenero and trinitario; but good luck finding them, and don’t come crying to me, just because I turned you on first and now you find the stuff is unavailable.

But here’s a place to start: El Rey Chocolates (maison fondée 1927), out of Fredericksburg, Texas. All beans are grown in Venezuela on historic estates. Each batch of bars, while unlabeled as such, reputedly represents a different harvest or locale. And each such bar therefore potentially possesses a different character. Not long after discovering El Rey, I called up an acquaintance at a local gourmet store. His reaction? "Yeah, we’ve had this stuff, but you know what the problem was? Every bar’s different! The customers, they want a certain thing in their chocolate. What that might be I never know, but once they find it, they like to stay there. Bitter, sweet, milk, almond... who can tell?"

Even better is Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate, the only chocolate grown in America and possibly the only vintage product available anywhere. Some batches are further designated by locale, and like fine wine, everything is aged before "bottling."

"How do you know it’s so good?" the pontificators sneer. "I am not aware of any studies that prove your claims. Have you conducted proper tests?"

That bulletin on chocolate may have been fresh news, but regarding coffee, who has not heard of Costa Rica, Java and Brazil as countries of origin? Or of arabica and robusta as varieties? Coffee enjoys multitudes of informed consumers and tastes the better for it (recent depredations by Starbucks aside). None of the measurements forces can question the stature of taste-differentiable coffees. In a real sense, familiarity breeds legitimacy.

Where they might draw the line, however, is with the vastly more "romantic" coffee roasters. In Coffeetalk (once a fine magazine, now defunct) for May 1996, in a column entitled "Coffee Roasting and the Importance of Being an Individual", Mauro Cipolla observed:

What does it mean when people or companies speak about "the art of coffee roasting"? Does the phrase actually have meaning to most people? Or is "the art of coffee roasting" simply a cliche, good marketing?

Naturally the answer to whether art in coffee roasting exists or not is subjective... The challenge in today’s superficial and image-oriented world is to rise above generalizing. Worst of all would be to standardize the art of roasting in an effort to enshrine a single brand name or marketing concept.

It should be the individual diversity and creativity of each roaster, that constitutes the essence of the roasting art, and the consumer should make choices by taste and taste only, no matter what brand name is on the label.

"By taste and taste only." Substitute "ear" for "taste" and shudder to a halt, ye lynch-mob. Hang your rigid specs and futile procedures on that limb!

Cipolla concludes:

We have to make room for more passionate, caring artists, with their resulting creative flavors and coffee characters. More pleasure to more people will be delivered by tastes that are varied and individual rather than homogeneous.

No argument from this quarter. But just try to tell that to the brand-addicted public! As for coffee’s arch-rival hot beverage: Hey, what’s wrong with Liptons?

Highly exotic stuff, this, the flushed, dried leaves from a puny shrub, Thea sinensis. But before today’s learned speaker steps up: Prices on "high-end audio" gear, and on obligatory accessories, have become a laughingstock in the dominant media. "Laughing" puts it mildly; scorn, derision, and contempt are heaped upon anyone who claims that such... chimera! may be worthwhile, since measurements reveal no advantage. The most commonly-ascribed motive for its purchase, given lack of documented proof, among the genus scientista, is... customer self-delusion.

That would be, you and me.

And so, without further ado, I present, the Upton Tea Quarterly (Vo1.4, No.3) from Upton, Massachusetts:

Prices for Orthodox process Indian teas set new records again this year. Which came as no surprise to tea buyers. Demand for top quality Orthodox teas has been growing steadily but for two years in a row production has been substantially below normal.

The price of tea is usually determined at auction and it is entirely possible for hysteria to take control on the floor. Two years ago a lot of Darjeeling fetched a record price of 13,001 rupees ($550) per kilo! That’s $62.50 for a quarter-pound, $1.25 per cup based on the auction price! The ultimate price to the consumer is unknown. We can assume that the tea was good, even spectacular.

To put the price in perspective, consider that a cup of coffee in an average shop in Tokyo costs $5. What price could be tagged to a cup of record-breaking Darjeeling tea? One can assume the tea was not sold at a loss. The high bidder for the 13,001 rupee Darjeeling may have had sweaty palms for a few moments, but it was not because he feared he paid too much for this particular tea. Had the bidding continued he likely would have paid more; we can safely assume that the objective was to obtain the best tea produced that year, regardless of cost.

Hmm! "The best tea." Imagine that! The Upton Tea Quarterly also includes ads for leaf available to plebians such as ourselves. One example:

Castleton Estate Second Flush FTGFOPI: Our best offering in second harvest Darjeeling. This is a tea wholly worthy of the praise heaped upon the name Castleton. Remarkable flavor and aroma. 125g: $25.00

Lord God! And they say that high-end audio is expensive! Imagine spending $1.50 just to brew a morning cup of tea! When Lipton’s Pekoe and Orange Pekoe goes for only $3.79/lb.

"Mr. Johnsen," the trailing posse parchedly croak, "We are not aware... of any studies..."

Fish trades for $4.99 to 10.99/lb. over the counter. Beyond that retail level are two amazingly-higher specialist price-points: Domestic shashimi, and Japanese. Shashimi: raw fish in the dinner pail. Veteran buyers haunt local piers seeking primo catch, which on the table in Tokyo can fetch $50/oz.

What justifies such extravagance? Shouldn’t these foolish gourmets be required to get help?

Butter sells for $3/lb. and its dull sameness (at least in the USA) never varies, apart from salted or unsalted. Interestingly, the government allows the former to include return stock from the perishable latter. Thus "salted" butter tastes actually rancid, although to most people, that _is the flavor of butter. (For a home experiment... mix fine salt into unsalted butter, wait a day for the two to meld, then see how much the result tastes like store-bought "salted".)

Moreover, nearly all butter sold in America is "sweet cream" style, made from ultra-pasteurized cream that already has no taste. Artisan butters, those with actual flavor, are churned from specially-soured, unpasteurized cream. Many such have appeared since Slow Food, a traditionalist movement founded in Italy that promotes a return to pre-industrial methods, migrated to these shores. Still, I personally favor Burro Occelli from the Piedmont region of Italy. Is it worth the relatively high price? Damn! Where are the published test results to help guide my choice?

The joke here is on our dear meter-readers: This far superior spread retails for a mere $5.95/2508. So just try it, willya? Have an experience!

Speaking of soured cream, back in ‘74 I was hitching from San Francisco over to Berkeley and got this ride in a Chez Panisse van heading back from SFO. The driver had just picked up a shipment of sour cream flown in from Russia. Unexpectedly finding me aware of flavor (while skeptical of the need to import sour cream), he swung off the Bay Bridge onto Yerba Buena Island, pulled to a halt, proudly broke open a container and offered me a spoon. I dipped in and shortly uttered a single-word critique: "God!"

Replied he, likewise monosyllabically, "Yes."

Vinegar can be had for $1.09/qt, why spend more? Well, because stuff that cheap tastes rather nasty. Instead we prefer the category "wine vinegar", widely considered better, and indeed it is — up to a point. Meanwhile many Americans have acquired the Balsamic habit, forking out up to, oh, $4-5 for 8 ounces, even occasionally splurging $8 on 6 ounces from some Modeno, Italy, bottler who wraps it in silver.

Surely everyone by now has gotten the drift of this tirade, but it remains to reveal something entirely different, and its price. By which I mean, the unsuspected existence of the real Balsamic, an intense red-brown liqueur made not from wine directly as most suppose, but from a fermented wine-grape reduction aged in old oak. Ordinary "Balsamic" constitutes an outright fraud concocted from regular wine vinegar and food coloring, acidic junk by comparison. While this writer must admit that the authentic Balsamic experience has so far eluded him, at least he knows it is never used on salads, rather drizzled very lightly on meats and vegetables, its unique, highly complex sweet-and-sourness enhancing even the finest presentations of both.

So, the envelope please.

Hmm! Sorry to tell you this, but good things don’t always come cheap. Williams-Sonoma lists the 12-year-old Malpighi for $89 and the 25-year-old for $174, in bottles of three and a half ounces.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from my happy home in Jamaica Plain, Boston, a repugnant society squats on the People’s Republic land. These men are of the "liberal democrat" persuasion, who profess political oneness with the working class, but who every day manifest a great disdain for it. This conflict is limned by the glaring social gap between Globe subscribers — my state’s liberal suburban elite -think Kennedy, Kerrey and Barney Frank — and the actual working class: Bus drivers, day laborers, policemen and firemen, every blue-collar wretch of whom prefers to read the despised, conservative Herald and its funnier, punchier writers.

In a one-paper town you might never notice the difference.

And the women are even worse! Encountering them over in Cambridge, it’s to choke. Their mean, faux-aristocratic treatment of store clerks, baby sitters and others ought to stagger the imagination of any truly-democratic American. For example, here I am one day in Formaggio Kitchen, jewel of West-End Cambridge’s shopping district, a fine store nonetheless, although rarely do I visit because I find the clientele so unpleasant. And sure enough, a lady with an East-mid-Atlantic accent is facing-off against a helpless clerk. Behind her, a woman with tot in backpack, dark hair tightly drawn, long dress, frowns at me angrily, Lord knows why, might be my uncouth Indian Motorcycles T-shirt (sent by Gizmo).

Welcome to Harvard Square World and liberal class angst.

After those two difficult customers leave, I step up to the glass and mention my own wants: Neals Yard artisan cheeses from England, which I had just read about in Corby Kummer’s highly irregular food and beverage column in Atlantic Monthly. These unique creations were said by him to represent the pinnacle of the rennet art and I am eager to learn, although not so happy to display my ignorance.

I strike a nonchalant pose. "I hear you have Neals Yard..." A bright-eyed fellow named Matt (I later learn) notices the low ego factor, and a dreamlike cheese tasting ensues. We proceed from a $7.95 onwards to $11.95, thence to $13.95, $14.95 and two incomparable $19.95s. Thus I splurge thirty dollars on five types, money like I’ve never spent before on cheese. Only a quarter-pound or so each, but the stuff lasts forever and I get to treat friends and family to a unique sensation.

"The trick is," Corby writes, "when something has real flavor, it takes only a small amount to satisfy you."

"How do you know... real flavor?..." the cheerless vigilantes sniff, now in a forlorn, even famished tone. "We.. are... not... aware... of...

Back at Nicky’s place I always enjoy reading the food industry trades he has in the office. Real insider stuff, like how to microwave your frozen entrees yet (unlike the airlines) keep the vegetables crisp. Peruse these rags and you soon realize that hardly a dish served in any but the finest restaurants bears any resemblance to live-cooked food, meaning made on the premises and more-or-less from scratch.

How the newsstand press manages to conceal this veritable scandal, speaks volumes about the control they exert over our daily lives. Indeed, as the old saw goes, "the press never tells you what to think — only what to think about." Or, not about. In audio too, one must wonder, why does even the vaunted Times Post Journal cover only the carefully-measured, microwavable concoctions served up by mass-market industry? And why do they deny the existence of a vital high-end segment and characterize every new reductionist audio scheme with that gloomy, unwitting oxymoron, "CD quality sound"?

But you probably know the answers already.

In tune with the present holiday season I recollect an unusual, very merry Christmas Eve experienced through audio. It was 1985 and I was under the thrall of Professor Judith Reilly, whom Neil Levenson, the otherwise sober audio editor of Fanfare, had toasted repeatedly for her exertions against the digital menace.

In fact he had gotten quite drunk on her.

Those were the early days of CD and anyone with ears to hear knew that something was rotten in Perfect-Sound-Forever Land. Two years earlier I had led a troop of braves to dump CDs into Boston Harbor: the Boston D Party. Down Congress Street we marched with placards, straight to the waterfront. DUNK THE JUNK! SINK THE TELARC! PROCESSED SOUND = PROCESSED CHEESE! NO DIGITIZATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION! UP YER AES WITH DIGITAL! I made a crazy speech, we shouted our slogans and dunked the junk, then returned to The Listening Studio nearby to watch the video rushes and guzzle mulled wine on that cool December Sixteenth, 210th anniversary of the actual Boston Tea Party.

To everyone in our early-Eighties counter-revolutionary movement, nothing digital could be any good, although I myself always added that the jury, strictly speaking, was still out — that the case hadn’t in fact been tried. Not that I entertained any real hope, but I did maintain some scientific detachment however much the sonics offended. But then along came Dr. Judy to woo me with a thesis so glamorous, so bold and so perverse, how could any boy resist? Plus it arrived with full academic credentials.

To wit, playing digital LPs debilitated turntables and Professor Reilly had the proof.

Without at all understanding the precise mechanism involved, but taking it on face value, I was convinced by her reams of data. She had traversed New England, measuring turntables before-and-after playing digitally-recorded LPs, and the visible results were not pleasant. Such records apparently inoculated turntables with a virus that caused permanent damage to the bearing, manifested as higher flutter. Statistical analysis proved it!

So persuasive was this erudite, good-looking, well-dressed lady, I readily succumbed. As she gradually gained respectability in the audio community, I accompanied her on sorties to measure turntables and gather further data. Eagerly too I offered suggestions for improvement to her rather primitive experimental apparatus, which were ignored. Oh, well. Then she mentioned to me an article submitted to TAS, which they ultimately rejected, but she refused to let me see it. Hmm!

We continued on our heroic quest to disparage digital, but something was amiss. I drew her attention to certain anomalies, but was again rebuffed. I explained that while the data did seem to indicate degradations, no one had actually heard them. She protested, but not too much. Our frequent telephone conversations grew wearisome, however, at least on my end.

Through all that time I stayed in touch with editor Levenson, who assured me she was completely on the up-and-up. But who is Neil Levenson? I began to consider the conundrum. Here was a writer I highly respected, whom I had never met, who was promoting Professor Reilly, whom he had never met, although I had, and now I was beginning not to trust her! And those frequent phone calls were getting ever longer and more exhortative.

In an uncommon flash of insight I asked myself: Clark, could all this be wishful thinking? Destruction of turntables by digital records? Or even, outright fraud? Good Lord!

At that juncture I received, from a source inside TAS, a galley proof of the rejected article, about which I breathed not a hint to her. And therein I learned how playing digital records also apparently destroyed cartridges and loudspeakers! Not only that, but Professor Reilly further asserted that digital music coming over one loudspeaker can destroy another one standing silently nearby! Why hadn’t she told me this?

Well, bravo TAS! For rejecting such lunacy. This threw a whole new light on Judith. Much to my chagrin, I had probably been hoodwinked by a clever con lady. I summoned an impartial scientist-friend, Tony Lauck, to do our own independent turntable experiments; with a calibrated stroboscope and elementary PC routine, we obtained nil results. Reilly’s own "results" were simply, just as I had tried to tell her, aliasing artifacts from an unsteady apparatus and a questionable procedure that she refused (aha!) to modify.

I did not immediately talk about this, either to her or to Neil, but our relationship had already become strained before I fully investigated the folly. Consequently the farce played on well into 1986, with repercussions to be felt at many distant locations. J. Gordon Holt himself and Stereophile were drawn into the fray by this powerful lady, and Fanfare printed several adamant letters; but the ultimate refutation of her loony thesis (I must admit, in retrospect) came from yours truly and finally got published in Stereophile, December 1986, Neil Levenson’s Fanfare having declined it. Nothing since has been heard from Professor Reilly.

But this be a seasonal, therefore upbeat story, remember? So let the earlier narrative resume! On Christmas Eve, my most cherished holiday, I was detained at work just before 3:30 PM closing time by another lengthy call from Judith promoting her latest angle. Calmly, politely I humored her, the better to extract further evidence. But our lopsided conversation grated on my spirit, so abruptly I said good-bye, packed up and left.

Those days I was carless and rode the "T", which operates cheaply and efficiently; heading home, I could choose among two Trains, two Trolleys and one T-bus. On that fateful dark late afternoon I selected the usually quickest route, the Harvard Line to Park Street. One minute down the tunnel from South Station the train halted, the electricals flickered and dimmed, and riders regarded each other quizzically or stared farther down into their newspapers and magazines.

And there we stayed as minutes passed, no announcement forthcoming. It was five-fifteen PM, Christmas Eve, 1985.

Three young swains had boarded the train behind me — ruddy faced, convivial, reeking of (alcoholic) good cheer. I had paid them scant attention until now. While the power misbehaved in our stranded capsule eighty feet below the surface, these sires fired tipsy glances and grins at each other... and started singing, then conducting us, the rapid transit public, in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. O Come! All Ye Faithful. Good King Wencelas. I, normally a silent member of the congregation, joined in, raising my voice high. Most of our fellow passengers, too, submitted to that spiritual, lusty, Godly power in music. O Holy Night! Delivered here by forces beyond ken or control, we experienced Christmas epiphany on the subway.

Travel soon resumed, but had it not been for that darn professor I might never have heard myself sing so loudly and clearly, led by those three sweet guys. Thank you, Judy, and thank you, Lord, for that oddly precise timing. Now to all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year Two Thousand!

Audio Desk Systeme (Ultrasystems)
800-724-3305
www.fatbrain.com

AudioLogic
203-966-1732

Aurex
614-457-5714

Benjamin
561-533-0064

Blacklight (Audioprism)
425-869-8482
www.audioprism.com

El Rey
800-357-3999
www.chocolates-elrey.com

Formaggio Kitchen Mail Order Catalog
617-354-4750

Hawaiian Vintage Chocolat
www.hawaiianchocolate.com

Lizzy’s Ice Cream
Waltham MA
781-893-6677

Nordost Eco
508-879-1242
www.nordost.com

Optrix (Compact Dynamics)
440-946-0438

Slow Food
877-SLOWFOOD
www.slowfood.com

Upton Tea Quarterly
800-234-8327
www.uptontea.com

Valrhona
718-842-8700

Williams-Sonoma
800-840-2591
www.williams-sonoma.com

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