Having just returned from another adventure in Taipei, this time to visit the Taiwan Audio Association Hi-End Audio Exhibition, I’m happy to report that the arcane and eclectic hobby for rich people known as Hi-End Audio is alive and well. And mostly made in Taiwan these days although there was a fair representation of some European manufacturers, most of whom I’ve never heard of. There were a few firms from the USA, most notably JBL, who had a nice setup with a record turntable that looked like something that came out of the space shuttle. And therein lies the main appeal of Hi End audio. It’s the same appeal that makes people spend $80,000 on a watch that tells the time the same as a $400 watch. I’ve never seen so much snake oil and fairy dust in one place before!
More evidence that Hi-End audio is not really about audio is the fact that vinyl records are being made once again. Quite a few companies were offering turnables, and pretty fancy ones at that. Almost 40 years ago I visited the Audio Technica factory in Takayama, Japan, where they were making moving coil phonograph cartridges at the time. I saw a new one in that turntable in the JBL booth. It was probably made on the same equipment in the same factory, knowing how they do things in Japan. But that’s still nuts. When CD’s came out 43 years ago digital audio was a lifetime dream of mine come true. Finally we were able to record audio faithfully to 100dB signal to noise ratio, and eliminate all the other distortions associated with vinyl and tape: surface noise, hiss, wow and flutter, rumble, and get flat frequency response out to at least 18KHz.
Then there were all the tube amplifiers. Where did they get this stuff? I haven’t seen a 5Y4 rectifier tube in 50 years and most of the tube amps were using them. Bog standard old circuits for the most part: a 12AU7 dual triode for the preamp, a variety of different parts for the split load phase inverter stage, and the outputs, ECC34 (Europe), KT120 (Russian) or 6L6GC (USA). One amp even had Western Electric W300’s, talk about old (and expensive!!!). But I’ve heard that someone in the USA is making tubes again. And the way they build them, just old fashioned point to point wiring, like looking inside the chassis of a 1950’s TV set. Must cost a fortune. But I do love the way tubes sound, just that they are so fiddly. They age. Cathode bias currents in the push pull output stages need periodic tweaking to keep harmonic distortion at a minimum.
Another appeal of this hobby is the search for the elusive “perfect” sound. Of course everyone’s definition of “perfect” is different. While these shows aren’t the greatest places to listen to demos, the folks showing Mkintosh gear (oh, those famous blue meters, haha) at least had some decent acoustic treatments in their conference room and were streaming a high definition source. That was probably the most expensive setup that actually sounded good. But one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money to get a system that sounds good, at least to my ears. Forget those crazy looking speakers with the odd shapes and multiple drivers, you don’t need that to get good sound. A simple 2 way or 3 way design with all the driving elements properly aligned (that is, in the same vertical plane) will typically have a cleaner sound, especially at the high end. The British are really good at making these kinds of speakers, those guys do an amazing job, especially at the lower end. The bass in British audio setups is really tight. Some of the most expensive systems had bass that sounded horrible, that “tubby” sound as we call it. The British company Marshall had a nice display there. If you’ve ever wondered why those Bluetooth speakers of theirs sound so good (and are so expensive) that’s the way they do things in England.
And while the tube amplifiers do sound nice, it is possible to make good sounding solid state amplifiers. Early transistor power amplifiers sounded horrible due to non-linearities introduced by the capacitors used for interstage coupling. Also transistors when they overload generate massive amounts of high order harmonic distortion whereas tubes just kind of softly fall over. Heathkit dealt with this problem in the early 1970’s by designing a 75W power amplifier that was direct coupled from input to the speaker terminals. The AR1500A amplifier was the first solid state amplifier that I heard that sounded as good as a tube power amplifier. These days the most efficient way, in terms of circuitry and power supply design, is to make amplifiers using a modified Class D topology. With the sampling rate high enough and enough time and effort invested in filtering the output these can provide quite good performance very efficiently, especially with these new Gallium Nitride FETs. Of course there are the religious arguments over class A, class AB, class D (class C is for RF only) topologies, and all can be made to sound good if properly designed and constructed, and used in the right way. But I found it quite comical that systems costing in the 5 figures were being demo’d with vinyl records as source material. No system, regardless of the money spent, is going to sound its best if the source material is not up to snuff. That also goes for lousy digital source material too. But this is a difficult market to play in. Marketing is everything, there’s little innovation on the engineering side as evidenced by all the tube players out there. Regardless of all the snake oil surrounding those crazy fancy cable designs for speaker cables and power cords at the root it’s just wire. Just use the right gauge, no need to spend $1000 just to plumb up your speakers. Most companies in this space are small and come and go rapidly just like restaurants in Taiwan. But looking at the prices of some of those vinyl records, I’m sure glad I didn’t toss my vinyl collection 40 years ago when I switched to CD’s. Just like it says in Ecclesiastes 1:9-10: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us.”