Two new hi-res music systems that make you feel you’re where the action is.
The Scottish gentleman began with a description of our earliest vertebrate ancestor, a deaf, mute and blind “pressure-sensitive organism”, and how it evolved its senses, eventually, to include sight and sound. And how the latter was exploited by ear canals to interpret the vibrations of air molecules, and how language with its myriad vocal inflexions inevitably led to the creation of that wonderful, emotive pastime, music.
It was an amazingly eccentric oration at a swanky evening put on by the British High Commission, in honour of the speaker, Ivor Tiefenbrun, MBE, founder of Scottish hi-fi company Linn, which supplies the royals with their hi-fidelity requirements. Whatever that means.
But really, it’s all about the biggest event in Linn history, the best part of $100k worth of speaker that the British High Commissioner to New Zealand, Vicki Treadell, couldn’t resist making a few ribald cracks about. Not surprising, really: the speaker system is called Klimax Exakt. Ha ha.
It’s so much more than just a speaker, though. The Linn Klimax Exakt (pictured above left) is designed to be the whole system, a music hub, with no requirement for external amplifier or other peripherals, because all that stuff is packed away, inside.
The only extra is a network music player, which streams all kinds of files to the speaker. Each driver in the cabinet has its own dedicated amplifier, and what’s really clever is that the Klimax Exakt knows where it is in the room, and will tell its owner where it should be placed for the best sound.
It’s the kind of speaker that the phrase “game-changing” should be kept for. It’s also a speaker that carries with it the expectation that its proud owner will be listening to high-resolution music files. Linn has been offering these from its own record label over the internet since the Stone Age (well, 2007), and services such as HDtracks and New Zealand’s own HDmusic will inevitably create a new paradigm where audiences will expect music to sound as good as when the musicians performed it in the studio.
Tiefenbrun isn’t the only wizened, grizzled music troubadour pushing his own high-res music maker. Mr Neil “better to burn out than fade away” Young raised the cash for his portable hi-res music player via Kickstarter.
Bizarrely named Pono (sounding like a mutant cross between “porno” and that classic Miyazaki children’s animation Ponyo), Young’s creation is the end of a long battle by the old trooper to see better-quality sound reach the end user.
For many years, Young refused to let his albums be released on compact disc, claiming that the low sampling rates compromised the sound quality; the successive proliferation of low-quality MP3 files just fuelled his ire.
Pono is Young’s attempt to create a portable hi-res device that will transform music appreciation by demonstrating the lifelike thrill of a file that hasn’t been processed and compressed and flattened out.
Pono is proving controversial with hi-fi freaks and normal punters alike, however. For every believer, there’s someone else claiming that in blindfold tests, so-called hi-fi buffs can’t tell the difference between the average MP3 music file and a hi-res music file.
The cost ($US400), the relatively low 64GB of onboard storage (plus 64GB through a memory card) and the odd shape have all been called into question, but as with the Linn system, and a plethora of other HD-ready audio gear flooding the market, Pono potentially offers a path for both the music industry and music consumers.
Hi-res music files aren’t cheap, and they hog memory, but unlike conventional download services like iTunes, Pono offers files that are sans DRM (Digital Rights Management) software, allowing consumers to use it however they want.
Since the dawn of recorded music, we’ve been at the mercy of the gear we have to play it on. For the first time, it feels like we’re close to hearing it the way it sounded the moment it was made.
Ironically, neither Tiefenbrun nor Young (both 68 years old) is likely to really benefit from the revolution: as with our other senses, from middle age, ears just don’t hear as well.