Quotidian Chatter: 2012-04-15

19 April 2012

How to choose a turntable

Enjoying Turntables Without Obsessing

Clockwise from top left: the Oracle Audio Delphi MK VI, the VPI Industries Classic 3, the Audio Technica AT-LP120-USB Direct-Drive Professional and the Music Hall mmf-2.2le turntables.

By ROY FURCHGOTT

Published: April 18, 2012

Buying records is easy. You can find them by the milk crate at yard sales, for a few dollars apiece in used record stores, and there are new, special pressings by contemporary musicians like Shelby Lynne, whose “Just a Little Lovin’” album, at $30, is a top seller. But buying the instrument needed to listen to them, a turntable, is a different matter.

“Young people didn’t grow up with turntables,” said Kenny Bowers, manager at Needle Doctor, a Minnesota store specializing in turntables. “It seems mysterious and complicated because you don’t just push a button and have it play for you.”

There are advantages to old-fashioned analog music, according to some audiophiles. “There is a fuller sound to it, and more depth to the sound,” said Ryan Holiday, the New Orleans-based marketing director for American Apparel. He’s a new devotee of jazz and David Bowie, thanks to LPs. (For the youngsters, that stands for long playing, as in long-playing record; there were also small records called 45s). “I could hear hands going up and down the frets, and stuff that they probably didn’t want you to hear. Which is a nice little surprise,” he said.

Mr. Holiday is not alone in his appreciation. Record sales have climbed for five years. Now turntable sales are growing. They were up 50 percent in January over January last year.

Hi-fi elitists may debate competing technologies of moving coil versus moving magnet cartridges as if Middle East peace depended on the answer, but turntables are really simple machines. It doesn’t cost a great deal to get a good one, and today’s turntables give you more for your money than they did when vinyl ruled. The celebrated Thorens 125 MKII, with tonearm, cost about $500 in 1975. (That’s about $2,000 in today’s dollars.) A comparable one in performance today, like the Music Hall MMF-2.2 or the Pro-Ject Debut III Esprit, costs $300 to $500.

Nevertheless, some turntables, like the Clearaudio Master Reference at $28,000, cost as much as a Toyota Camry hybrid.

You are paying for two things, precision and craftsmanship. So here’s a guide to some of the costs. (It was just as confusing back in the 1960s, kids.) A turntable is basically three assemblies: the revolving platform the record sits on, called the platter, and the motor and drive; the tonearm, which moves across the record as it plays; and the cartridge and needle, which sit on the end of the tonearm and pick up the vibrations recorded in a record’s grooves.

Turntables are machines that read vibrations, but they often can’t distinguish a good vibration from a Beach Boys album and a bad one from your stomping across the room. A good turntable is designed to isolate it from the real world.

The motor needs to provide noiseless, consistent speed. A heavy platter helps to keep the speed from varying. But it’s an engineering game of Whac-A-Mole. Heavier platters need bigger motors, which may be noisier (and they cost more). Light platters can more easily transmit vibrations that can cause a ringing sound. The rule of thumb is make sure the table weighs at least 10 pounds. “If not, it’s made of plastic compound. It will sing along with music,” said Harry Weisfeld, the owner of the turntable maker VPI, based in Cliffwood, N.J. He advocates metal platters.

You can also buy mats and special feet to isolate the turntable from outside vibrations.

The kind of motor is even more hotly debated. One way the motor drives the platter is with a belt; the other is to mount the platter directly on the motor. Direct-drive mounting is preferred by some people because there is less chance the speed will vary. Rubber belts can stretch and loosen over time. But a direct-drive turntable is more likely to transmit noise, whereas rubber belts absorb motor vibrations.

The crazy thing is that the least and most expensive turntables tend to be belt-driven. It’s really a personal preference. Trust your ears. The tonearm needs to keep the needle where it picks the most vibrations from the record without so much pressure that it damages the grooves. “The main thing is the weight,” said Scott Shaw, audio solutions specialist for Audio-Technica, an audio equipment maker. “Lighter tracking forces tend to provide better audio quality,” he said.

With some exceptions, the better tonearms are machined in one piece of lightweight steel, not cast or pressed. There are more exotic tonearms of carbon fiber, composites, even wood, but you are going to find that only on turntables that cost more than $1,000, said Mr. Shaw.

The cartridge is mounted on the end of the tonearm and holds the stylus, or needle. “The stylus is where everything happens,” said Michael Pettersen, director of applications engineering for Shure, which makes cartridges. “When you buy a $100 cartridge,” he said, “the needle is $90 of the cost.”

Needles are either elliptical or spherical, with no significant price difference. Elliptical tends to be better at reproducing high-pitched sounds, said Mr. Pettersen. Spherical does a better job riding over flaws in vinyl, though, and may be better for 45s and worn records. (An even older form of record, the 78, require a special, larger stylus.) “If I have a very nasty record, I’ll use the spherical," Mr. Shaw said.

There are also two kinds of cartridges, moving magnet and moving coil. Most cartridges are moving magnet. While they tend to be heavier than moving coil, you can change the stylus yourself, which you may want to do to adjust to the condition of your vinyl or change the sound you get.

Moving coil is the type often favored by audiophiles because it has less weight, but changing a stylus requires a trip to the manufacturer. Both types typically wear out in 600 to 800 hours of use.

Although the sky is the limit on price, a very good cartridge costs $75 to $100, said Mr. Pettersen.

Getting the most from a turntable requires careful setup, although maybe not as careful as people who sell calibration equipment would have you believe. “Setting up the turntable doesn’t have to be as complicated as they make it,” said Mr. Shaw. There can be leeway from the exact specifications, he said, adding, “Set it up fairly close, it will be fine. My point is, don’t obsess.”

One additional piece of gear Mr. Shaw recommends is a stylus gauge to measure the weight the cartridge is putting on the record. “Don’t rely on the little numbers on the back of the tonearm,” he said. “They are very inaccurate.” Mr. Bowers of Needle Doctor recommends the Shure scale, the SFG-2, available online for $20 to $40.

It may also be worthwhile to buy a tool to make sure the cartridge is lined up properly. Mr. Bowers recommended the Mobile Fidelity Geo-Disc, which is $50 to $80.

Finally, you can check some of your work with a test record, like the Cardas Frequency Sweep and Burn-In Record ($15 to $30), which plays tones that help confirm that the setup is correct.

You may find that what sounds best is not the recommended settings, or what the gauges and protractors dictate. In the end, it’s as much art as science.

And isn’t that the beauty of analog?

16 April 2012

Daniel Boorstin described the culture's shift from valuing the genuine to celebrating pseudo-reality.

Daniel Boorstin got it right in 'The Image'

The historian wrote 50 years ago that U.S. culture was moving away from substance toward sensationalism in an era of mass media. And so postmodernism was born.

By Neal Gabler, Special to the Los Angeles Times
April 15, 2012

Long before there were "real" housewives on television, actor-politicians and even potential celebrity politicians like Donald Trump, theme restaurants, virtual online vacations and Kim Kardashian, who makes her living by being Kim Kardashian, there was "The Image," historian Daniel Boorstin's prescient examination of a nation in transition, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its publication this year. When "The Image" first appeared, one critic predicted that it would join William Whyte's "The Organization Man" and John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" as one of those seminal books that not only capture the zeitgeist but change the American mind-set. He was right.

Even now on its golden anniversary, there may be no single book that has so shaped ideas about the country's cultural transformation in the era of mass media, no single book that has so well framed how the American consciousness was reformed from one that seemed to value the genuine to one that preferred the fake. In many ways, "The Image" invented what would later become known as postmodernism — the odd cultural Moebius strip by which so many elements of our lives become imitations of themselves.

Boorstin, who taught at the University of Chicago for 25 years, won the Pulitzer Prize and became the librarian of Congress (he died in 2004), was writing at a time when traditional culture was under assault from mass culture, and he didn't much like it. He believed in unalterable truths that had withstood the test of eons — things like heroism, art, primary experiences and high ideals. These were prima facie good. He also believed that anything that drew us away from these truths harmed ourselves and our culture. And he lamented that that was exactly what mass culture was doing to the country. It was substituting the false for the true, the dark arts of public relations and self-aggrandizement for the higher purposes of human existence.

Everywhere Boorstin looked, and he looked everywhere — at journalism, at heroism, at travel, at art, even at human aspiration — he believed that the eternal verities that had once governed life had given way to something cheap and phony: a facsimile of life. Of journalism, he would say, "More and more news events become dramatic performances in which 'men in the news' simply act out more or less well their prepared script." Of heroism, he would say that it had been replaced by celebrity, which he famously described as "a person who is known for his well-knownness." Of travel, he would say that tourists increasingly demanded experiences that would "become bland and unsurprising reproductions of what the image-flooded tourist knew was there all the time."

Of art and literature, he would say that if they were "to be made accessible to all, they had to be made intelligible (and inoffensive) to all," and he carped about what photography, movies and condensed books did to art, which was flatten it. And, finally, of human aspiration, he lamented that "like no generation before us," we believe that "we can make our very ideals" rather than respect preordained ideals that we have to live up to.

Clearly, Boorstin was a scold and a culturally conservative one at that. He detested the manufactured, the contrived and the confected, and he coined a term that was so widely embraced it would become the subtitle of the book's paperback edition: "A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America." The pseudo-event was a "happening" that was not spontaneous but that was designed precisely to be reported or reproduced. A news conference, a photo-op, a movie premiere, an award ceremony, even a presidential debate — all these are staged, in his analysis, simply to get media attention or, in postmodernist terms, to get attention for attention's sake. They have no intrinsic value or at least not the intrinsic value they purport to have. Similarly, a celebrity is a "human pseudo-event" — a personality who is devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.

Boorstin's chief example was aviator Charles Lindbergh, who, Boorstin wrote, "performed singlehanded one of the heroic deeds of this century" but who "became degraded into a celebrity" by media coverage that had nothing to do with his deed, only with the new narratives of his life, like his marriage to an heiress or the abduction and murder of his baby.

Boorstin wasn't oblivious to the lure of the pseudo. He understood that the entire society seemed in thrall to its own illusions and to its ability to entertain itself with distractions instead of having to engage in the actual mess of life. He knew that the pseudo could be more exciting, more dramatic, more accessible, more fun and less taxing than the real. He just didn't think it was worth the price, which was to sacrifice living in the real world with real issues, real emotions, real challenges, real experiences and real values — in effect, to give up the true for the gratifying, the exalted for the illusory.

What is impressive even now about "The Image" is its sweep. There is nothing timid about it. It is epic social history in which Boorstin hoped to provide a unified field theory of cultural decline. Where he led, almost every serious observer of popular culture has followed, from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to American social critic Neil Postman, to the point where today almost everyone acknowledges what Boorstin so persuasively presented: the emptiness of much of our culture. Whether we share his anger or not, we all know we live in a world of images, a world where everything seems planned for effect rather than substance, and Boorstin no doubt would have had a field day dissecting "reality" shows that have nothing to do with reality beyond the description. They are practically designed to the specifications of Boorstin's thesis.

Still, there are limitations to "The Image." For one thing, Boorstin was partly undone by his ambition. By putting things as disparate as news, art and travel into his gunnysack, he wrote a book that is less unified field theory than collage. You get a lot of ideas about cultural demise, but they don't always form a coherent whole. As one scholar once told me, " 'The Image' is the best book Daniel Boorstin didn't write." And for another, Boorstin didn't appreciate the adaptability of culture to circumstance. The fetish for images is not necessarily a blight on the world. It is its own thing — different from, not less than. Sometimes people don't want the original. Sometimes they want the imitation, not because they are culturally brain dead but because they want release from the heavy hand of reality that Boorstin so revered.

Boorstin may not have been able to admit that because he knew too much about humankind. He knew that you couldn't keep 'em down in reality once they had seen the image. We have been living out that observation for at least the 50 years since Boorstin first made it. Boorstin didn't invent Kim Kardashian, but he knew she was coming, and he knew what she would displace.

Gabler is a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC and is writing a biography of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.