John Bamford
John Bamford is an old mate and in the couple of decades that I’ve known him he has been the editor of Hi-Fi Answers, the editor of Hi-Fi Choice, and, when I interviewed him here for the BAJ in February 2003, he had ‘crossed the fence’ and was working for Japanese manufacturer, Pioneer. Nowadays (2009), after a brief sojourn with Meridian, he is back among the press and is working with Hi-Fi News magazine.
Malcolm Steward: Whenever I speak to you you’re banging the drum for multi-channel music. That surprises me: you and I are about the same age and we both have substantial ‘working’ vinyl collections. Given that, I wouldn’t have imagined that you would have made the move so readily to embrace this new-fangled stuff.
John Bamford: I just kind of just fell into this industry: hi-fi was a hobby until the day I saw an advertisement from Haymarket Publishing who were looking for a hi-fi writer. My girlfriend at the time, who’s now my wife, told me: “You know everything about hi-fi – apply for the job.” I did and found myself working on Hi-Fi Answers: suddenly my hobby had become my job and I was like a kid in a candy store. Like most people in this industry I grew up with stereo but I still remember the transition from mono. If you talk to some of the old boys, such as John Borwick and Geoffrey Horn – the guys from Gramophone and Wireless World – I’m sure they’ll remember it more vividly and will tell you that when stereo arrived all the hi-fi buffs thought it was just a gimmick.
MS: Less of the ‘old boys’, if you don’t mind – I still remember buying mono LPs. I still listen to some of them.
JB: I think hi-fi buffs at that time were stereotypical suburbanites: hi-fi was for the privileged – it was an elitist hobby because there was no such thing as cheap hi-fi. Your typical enthusiast lived in a semi in suburbia and sat in his cardigan and slippers, smoking his pipe, reading Wireless World and building his own kit amplifier, big horn loudspeakers and bolting an SME onto his Garrard or Thorens turntable. I’m sure those guys thought that stereo was a pure gimmick that would never catch on. I have to assume that history is repeating itself because we’re now going from stereo to multi-channel sound and hi-fi buffs think it’s a gimmick – something that’s alright for movie soundtracks but has nothing to do with music.
No one’s trying to force multi-channel on hi-fi buffs. You can still listen to DVD-Audio discs and Super Audio CDs in stereo if that’s what you want. However, I have to say that whenever I demonstrate multi-channel music the only people who aren’t blown away by it are hi-fi buffs. Young people – people in their 20s who seem to love what multi-channel does – look at me as if I’m stupid when I tell them that some people prefer the stereo version.
MS: There’s more than one kind of ‘hi-fi buff’ – and I think you’re referring to the type that doesn’t approach hi-fi with the same agenda as that of a music fan who buys hi-fi solely to get the most from recordings.
JB: You’re right. There are certainly people who are into hi-fi for hi-fi’s sake.
MS: I think they would argue that young people appreciate multi-channel because they ‘don’t know what to listen for’.
JB: That’s a redundant, elitist attitude: hi-fi isn’t just for the privileged few any more.
When I was with Haymarket, it published What Hi-Fi? along with Hi-Fi Answers and Popular Hi-Fi, which were all hugely profitable because it was the boom time for hi-fi. Then came the explosion of cheap hi-fi from the Far East. Suddenly, Mr and Mrs Average could afford to have quite a tasty music system. It wasn’t the ultimate in quality hi-fi but it was far better than what the mass market had been able to buy before. As a result, interest in hi-fi grew and that one publishing house had three magazines jammed full of advertising. And don’t forget there was also Practical Hi-Fi, Hi-Fi for Pleasure, Hi-Fi News and perhaps others I’ve missed. Times have changed now and nearly all those titles have disappeared: Haymarket only has What Hi-Fi?, which is still very successful, but it clearly demonstrates how the market has diminished.
MS: Why do you think the market shrank?
JB: When I joined Hi-Fi Answers in 1981 we had manual typewriters on our desks – computers were things that only NASA had. There were no mobiles phones – I’m not sure if even James Bond had one then. There were fewer ‘luxuries’ for the average person – especially young people – to buy so they spent their money on hi-fi. Nowadays the youngsters who would have bought hi-fi are buying mobile phones, computers, MP3 portables, ICE for their cars… Hi-fi as we knew it just isn’t that important to people today.
MS: What made you quit journalism and get a real job? And how severe was the culture shock?
JB: It was a huge culture shock. I joke about this even today to journalists who are complaining about their monthly deadline. It took me a long time to shake that out of my system – your diary being ruled by that monthly cycle of getting a magazine out. I was at Haymarket for nearly nine years as Keith Howard’s deputy on Hi-Fi Answers. I knew that I wouldn’t become the editor unless he retired, and he was nowhere near old enough for that. Then Dennis Publishing decided to turn Hi-Fi Choice magazine, which was a quarterly publication, into a monthly. Paul Messenger was helping to get it together but didn’t want the job of full time editor, which would have commuting into London from Kent every day. So I left Haymarket and became the Editor of Hi-Fi Choice. Strangely, that’s how most people in this industry remember me: what they don’t realise is I only ever did 30 editions – I was only there for two-and-a-half years.
The problem was where I could progress from there. I never aspired to being a publisher and I never aspired to being a journalist. I was only the editor of a hi-fi magazine because I was passionately interested in hi-fi so I had no desire to be the editor of anything else. I certainly didn’t harbour fantasies about editing anything grand such as the Observer colour supplement. As an aside, I think that is the problem with a lot of the hi-fi magazines today – they’re staffed by career journalists, who are hoping to get a promotion onto a more prestigious title. I’m sure a lot of hi-fi journalists fantasise about being the editor of What Car or some such prestigious title; and beyond that, well, there’s the TV – joining the BBC and becoming a really serious professional journalist.
Though I’ve never planned my life out, I guess it was always inevitable that I would end up working for a hi-fi manufacturer. When I decided I wanted to leave Hi-Fi Choice, a product manager at Pioneer had moved on leaving a vacancy. I knew some of the guys working at Pioneer GB and when I had visited Pioneer in Japan the company had made a huge impression on me. Like a lot British hi-fi journalists, I’d thought that real hi-fi was invented in the UK and that Japanese manufacturers didn’t care about sound – that all they wanted to do was make as many products and as much money as possible. When I visited Pioneer in Japan I discovered that this wasn’t true at all – those guys were deeply interested in sound quality.
I was really shocked to discover that, like me, Pioneer’s engineers disliked the sound of CD – I could sense some kind of bonding going on there. Then I met the guys who were trying to improve CD and that convinced me that I’d like to contribute as well. I made some kind of quip to the management at Pioneer – “Maybe you should employ somebody like me.” One thing led to another, a deal was struck, and I became product manager for Pioneer GB. I’ve never looked back in the 11 years I’ve been here.
Another aspect of the culture shock was that as a journalist I was only really interested in products that interested me. I was focused in my own hi-fi system, my own satisfaction, and getting the best possible sound that I could. Working for Pioneer has greatly expanded my horizons; it has changed my life. I’m still deeply interested in hi-fi – more so than I’ve ever been – but I now have other professional interests as well. For example, I now find it fascinating why consumers buy whatever it is they choose to buy. We do a lot of focus group work and it’s fascinating to listen to ordinary consumers talking about your products. Knowing why people choose to buy particular products was never of any interest to me when I was a hi-fi journalist.
MS: That’s peculiar. I always saw reviewing as being someone who acted on behalf of the consumer and being able to take an impersonal view of products that didn’t appeal to me. If a product wasn’t the sort of thing I would want or it wouldn’t suit my system, I tried to visualise the person to whom it would appeal and decide from that respect whether it was good, bad or indifferent.
JB: Well, I put it to you that you were probably not very good at it. I don’t think I was… and when I look at the magazines today I know that none of them are.
MS: You’re not very impressed with reviewers?
JB: I could bitch and moan for hours and hours about the state of the British hi-fi press and perhaps I will, but I don’t want it to be taken the wrong way: having been at Pioneer for a long time I can appreciate that I actually wasn’t very good as the editor of a hi-fi magazine. I was so self-centred and focussed on me and a bunch of like-minded mates. I had this clear vision of who I thought my readers were and, in retrospect, it wasn’t realistic. Working at Pioneer has changed my view of the world dramatically.
It’s been a privilege working at Pioneer, and many people don’t understand why I think that. Journalists and others in the industry still ask me, “Don’t you miss being on a magazine? Don’t you miss being able to play with all that hi-fi?” My stock answer is that now that I work here I get to play with things before they come to market: I’ve been toying with DVD players, DVD-Audio players and DVD recorders for years. I’m so fortunate to be involved in the development of cutting edge technology and working with what consumers will be buying next year and the year after.
The people at Pioneer – and I’m not saying this because I work for the company – seem to have their heart in the right place. The engineers who were trying to improve the sound of CD are a prime example. I can show you the evidence of everything that Pioneer has done to prove my point. For instance, Wadia made gorgeous, megabucks CD players with very deep and complicated digital filters in them – which ended up with a rather misleading name like time delay filtering – so Pioneer looked at it, liked it, and designed it all onto a cheap and cheerful microchip so that ordinary CD players could have filters that would – without mincing my words – make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and make CD more enjoyable to listen to.
Pioneer also developed those radical DAT recorders that ran at double speed. It was thrilling to demonstrate these at hi-fi shows in the early to mid 90s where I could say: “See? We told you that CD wasn’t good enough. When you’ve got a sampling rate that’s twice as high as CD it sounds more real. And it makes digital sound less digital.”
MS: I can sympathise with reviewers today because many of them are too young to have gained any real experience, they’re overworked and faced with fast-moving technology that’s a lot harder to grasp than the stuff we were writing about.
JB: Absolutely.
MS: Working out how a needle wiggling in a groove generates a signal doesn’t require any strenuous exercising of the imagination, but writing authoritatively about, say, DVD technology is much more challenging.
JB: We are probably facing the most enormous technological revolution in our lives. A lot of what is happening today is close to science fiction and I think that most reviewers have not kept up with it. It’s been easy for me to stay in touch because I’m totally wrapped up in it at work. I’m in this privileged position of being at the sharp end, getting all the latest gossip about what’s happening in technology, and being involved in Pioneer developing all kinds of kit. But I still have to read a lot. I can’t make excuses for journalists, though, because bookshops, libraries, newsagents and the Internet are available to them. You can find out anything you want to know – if you look.
For example, when I was the editor of Hi-Fi Choice I had to commute on the tube for 45 minutes every day. I used to pass the time reading other magazines to see what my competitors were writing about. I talk to journalists today and it’s plainly obvious to me that none of them read the other magazines, which I find astonishing. I can’t make excuses for them. They should be reading; they should be scouring the Internet. They can’t say, “Oh, I didn’t know about this.” I do. I’m not an engineer and I’m not a bloody genius. I just make it my business to find out about things. Journalists are supposed to find out about things. It appears to me that they don’t.
MS: When we were talking earlier you mentioned something about reviewers ‘leaving a trail’: I’m intrigued to hear more about that and I’m sure the parties concerned will be equally interested.
JB: If I have one major criticism of magazines today it revolves around the question of what purpose they serve. I believe that magazines should give sensible purchasing advice and educate consumers so that they can make wise decisions. I see no evidence of them doing that. I don’t necessarily blame the journalists: I lay more blame on the magazine publishers who are so demanding now. Magazines are understaffed and the editor and writers are under pressure to produce as many pages as possible to make the magazine fat and attractive. They’ll proudly proclaim, “Over 100 products tested this month!” and I think, “What – by five guys in 20 working days? Those reviews must be thorough!”
When I worked on magazines I’d probably play with a product for a couple of months. And I had a respectable budget so that I could employ freelancers to review stuff. I don’t think I ever asked a reviewer to look at more than one or two pieces of kit in a month. At Hi-Fi Choice, for example, I might have commissioned Paul Messenger to test a dozen loudspeakers, but would be a three-month project for him. That meant he could play with them for hours and days; he could try them with different amplifiers; with a different source; position them differently in a room. Then there were the blind listening sessions. I knew that products were well tested. How can five guys test 100 products in a month? Simple answer: They can’t.
MS: So what about this ‘trail’?
JB: Now, of course, life is more complicated. Reviewing an integrated stereo amp is relatively simple but today’s multi-channel amplifiers and AV receivers need scrupulous setting-up to hear them at their best. You need to study the instruction manual and, to get a really good surround sound, you can’t just hook them up to five speakers willy nilly – you have to calibrate them, get the time alignment correct and so on.
It’s the set-up facilities in these amplifiers and receivers that leave the trail. If I loan an AV receiver to a reviewer, it comes back with his ‘footprints’. I can see whether he has set it up or has just used the factory defaults. I can see whether he’s altered it since I’d set it up for my listening room at Pioneer. So many come back with all the settings exactly as I left them. That has taught me which magazines are testing things properly and which magazines aren’t. I wonder, quite frankly, how some reviewers manage to sleep at night.
MS: We’re laughing as we speak but, as you argue, reviewers have a responsibility to guide people who don’t have any technical knowledge, and who would be effectively buying blind without ‘authoritative’ assistance. It’s an appalling state of affairs.
JB: I remember reading an interview you did with James Roth of Harman UK in The BAJ. I sympathised with a lot of what he said because reading between the lines I could see exactly where he was coming from. So many of the magazines today regard words as just something to fill the gaps between the photographs. I read an article about plasma screens in one just last week – one of these new-stylee-home-interior-custom-install type magazines. I was killing myself laughing because it said how a particular model was rather special because its speakers were “NICAM quality.” What the hell are “NICAM quality” speakers? And this is not a one-off – my filing cabinet is full of nonsense like this. I strongly suspect that the journalist who wrote this article was just regurgitating press releases, and that neither he nor anyone who saw the copy before it was published had a clue what he was writing about.
Even some of the more specialist magazines today aren’t really coming to terms with the technology of plasma screens: they’re not differentiating between models beyond saying, “this one is bigger than that one.” They argue, “This is better because it’s got a 3000:1 contrast ratio.” Yeah! Sure. I believe that! And that £200 mini system really can deliver 500 Watts!
I find this frustrating because, while the impression of musicians performing in your front room that hi-fi creates is subjective, there are scientific measurements that that will tell you if a hi-fi system has any chance of being good or whether you should just forget it. At the same time, I’m the first to admit that you can’t judge a hi-fi simply by measuring it: we still haven’t learnt how to measure sound quality. But television and plasma… How difficult is it to blow up a test chart and check the geometry and colour purity properly? All the test materials for that exist and it’s hardly rocket science.
If a display is supposed to have a 3000:1 contrast ratio, it’s easy to check whether that’s bullshit. All you have to do is rig up a computer and throw signals at the display. But what do magazines do? They hook up the plasma, connect a DVD player to it and say ‘This one’s better than that one.’ How can they be sure? It’s not exactly scientific is it? There are better ways than subjective testing alone. If you check a display solely by watching a movie on DVD you’re at the mercy of too many variables – the DVD player and the DVD, not to mention the original filming and processing.
I think it’s nothing less than shabby – consumers are being ill served by the press today.
What qualifies anybody to be a hi-fi journalist today? What qualifications did I have? Absolutely bloody none. But, back then it was much simpler once you got your head around a few basics. With today’s technology it’s very different… God, if you’re going to be any use you need to understand – and be able to explain – PCM, Direct Stream Digital, sampling-rates, digital interfacing, the differences between codecs, MP3, WMA, Dolby Digital, Pro Logic 2, DTS 5.1, 6.1, 6.1 discrete, THX post processing, decorrolation, time alignment, 24/96 DTS, DVD-Audio, encryption technology – you need to be up to speed on all these and more.
DVD recording is one subject that has yet to be explained satisfactorily by any magazine. They all delight in throwing their hands up in horror and saying that everybody’s confused. In truth, tens of thousands of people all around the world have bought DVD recorders and are happy using them. Magazines ought to research it properly and straighten out the ‘confusion’. That would be better than simply advising consumers not to buy a DVD recorder at the moment.
MS: What’s your take on multi-channel audio formats? Is Super Audio CD the format of the future or is it DVD-A? Opinion seems divided, and there’s clearly a lot of politics involved.
JB: I’m very excited about what is happening with multi-channel. Now, for the first time in my life, as a consumer I can hear music like I have never heard it before. Although it’s unfashionable to talk about dinosaurs of progressive rock recordings, when I’m playing that old Emerson, Lake and Palmer album or that old Yes album transferred to DVD-Audio, it’s like having a mate in the recording studio sneak the original master tapes round to your house. As a hi-fi nut, hi-res material is the ultimate ecstasy.
DVD-Audio versus SACD is a conundrum, and one that’s resulted in consumers and hi-fi buffs – the early adopters of new technology – remaining undecided. They won’t buy a DVD-Audio player because SACD might catch on. And they won’t buy a SACD player because DVD-Audio might ‘win’. It’s such a shame. I can’t believe for a minute that Sony and Philips have been selling hundreds of thousands of SACD players, because I know that Pioneer, Toshiba, Sony, Denon, Yamaha and all the other companies haven’t been selling hundreds of thousands of DVD-Audio players. That’s purely because consumers are terrified of buying ‘the wrong one’. They’ve happily bought DVD players: that they might play SACD or DVD-A is a secondary consideration because they’ve all been bought to play movies.
Twelve months ago, we caused a bit of controversy when we released the first player that could play everything – DVD video, DVD-Audio and SACD. We’ve had a good response to that because anyone who wanted to try out any of this high resolution stuff didn’t have to worry that they might be buying a pup. But following on from that £900 machine, which was bought primarily by early adopters, we introduced last summer a machine at £399. As we have an open distribution policy, consumers can shop around and probably buy it for less. It has really captured people’s imaginations. The press must like it as well because that particular model, the DV656A, has been an award-winner in every magazine. We’ve been 100 per cent oversold on it, which is fantastic.
As for which format is going to catch on, let’s talk first about which is best – SACD or DVD? As a hi-fi enthusiast, I am deeply interested because I want the best. The more you dig into the question, the more you realise that it’s very complicated: if you find one scientist, academic, or professor of audio engineering who says that Sony’s DSD system is manna from heaven, you’ll find another who’ll disagree. Greater minds than ours – and certainly greater minds than reviewers working on magazines – cannot agree, so what chance do we have?
I’ve done a lot of reading about it. I’m not an engineer or a top scientist, just a well informed hobbyist but if you ask me which is best – DSD or PCM – I would be inclined to say PCM. I don’t have any axe to grind because Pioneer has machines that play both. I simply believe that DSD is not as good as some people say it is.
Those early SACD players that Sony, Marantz and so forth brought out were gorgeous bits of engineering – fabulous machines – but they had that little filter switch on the back: if you were outputting the full bandwidth signal it upset some amplifiers – they didn’t like all the ultrasonic noise and garbage.
Although I’m inclined to believe, with my limited knowledge, that DSD isn’t all that it claims to be, it does provide – a bit like CD did 20 years ago – the ability to produce more affordable products for the masses that will actually give good sound. But for high fidelity – and let’s check our dictionaries here because I think it means the ultimate truth – I’m inclined to believe that PCM is the way forward, even though it’s complicated and expensive to do.
In reality it’s all of no consequence. Offer the man on the Clapham omnibus the choice between a regular CD and a SACD and he’ll ask what the difference is. Tell him that the SACD gives better sound and you’ll discover what history shows us: that trying to sell something that just has better sound is damn difficult. Ordinary consumers have never cared about sound quality. The success of compact disc had little to do with better sound – it was down to remote control, instant access, and no more clicks, pops and scratches.
.
MS: And you could spread jam on it, of course…
JB: And wipe it off with a damp cloth and it’d still work.
Offer him the choice between the regular CD and a DVD-Audio disc and it’s much easier. He knows about DVD. All his friends have a DVD player. He might know that DVD is in the Guinness book of records as being the most outrageously successful product of all time. You can tell him that DVD will soon be in 60 per cent of consumers’ living rooms throughout the economically developed world.
MS: Even in our little village, which almost qualifies as part of the economically developed world, you can now rent DVDs.
JB: Of course. It’s official – DVD is taking over!
So, you tell our man on the bus that the DVD-Audio disc, regardless of whether he cares, does sound better than the CD, especially if he has his DVD player connected to a hi-fi system. If he has a little home cinema system then the DVD-Audio disc will blow his socks off compared with CD – even if the system is cheap and cheerful with little Mickey Mouse speakers hooked up with bell wire. Then you tell him about the added-value material on DVD-A – lyrics, photo galleries, documentary videos and so on.
… it’s a no brainer: ask me whether SACD or DVD-A is most likely to succeed and I would stick £100 on the table and say DVD-Audio
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a no brainer: ask me whether SACD or DVD-A is most likely to succeed in the market place and, even though I’m not a gambling man, I would stick £100 on the table and say DVD-Audio because it’s a DVD and because of the content.
MS: I admit that SACD doesn’t strike me as having the same mass market appeal.
JB: I know that SACD protagonists dwell on its backwards-compatibility, which I regard as a little bit naughty. Of all the currently available SACD titles only a small number are backwards-compatible. I don’t know what that figure is but I’d guess that only about 20 per cent of them will play in an ordinary CD player. To play most of them you have to upgrade to a Super Audio player. The real question, though, is what are consumers buying today – CD players or DVD players? The answer is that for the last three or four years they’ve been buying DVD players. So the thing about DVD-Audio is that while it might not be backwards-compatible, it is forwards-compatible.
The latest news is that the DVD forum has changed the specification so that software manufacturers can make hybrid DVD-Audio discs with a CD layer on them. I heard of one record label that is making such a disc as we speak. So that will be a DVD-Audio disc that will also play on a CD player. I would question whether that’s actually necessary because I suspect that whereas the world has been based around compact discs for the last 20 years, for the next 20 years it’ll be based around DVDs.
MS: While we were talking about mass market consumers, you played me your little system with ‘Mickey Mouse’ speakers, which did seem to prove your point about multi-channel DVD-Audio outperforming CD on low-cost equipment. You also mentioned that not every journalist appreciated the relevance of that.
JB: I said earlier that the hi-fi magazines have not, in my opinion, been serving the consumer adequately. DVD-Audio and SACD have been very badly – and quite inaccurately – reported. And they’ve been reported on by some journalists who clearly have very strong opinions: but that’s all they are – opinions. For example, more than one journalist has thrown his hands up in despair about high-resolution audio and said words to the effect of, “of course it’s never going to catch on because Mr and Mrs Average think that CD is good enough. Show me a consumer who is dissatisfied with CD. They all think it sounds fabulous – it’s only hi-fi buffs that care about sound anyway – so SACD, DVD-Audio, 24bits 96kHz sampling… nobody can hear the difference unless they’re a hi-fi nut with a super system.” After a couple of years experimenting, and living and breathing DVD-Audio, I’ve found that the reverse is true.
Let’s remind ourselves what was happening in the early 80s. CD came along and we – hi-fi buffs – were throwing our hands up in horror. The sound of recorded music in homes was never going to be the same again because now the sound of real musicians was going to be computerised, chopped up into 16-bit samples. We were warning readers, “Hey, you may think this is bloody clever – which of course it is – but to kid yourself that it could sound better than analogue… There’s no way it can be analogous to the real thing. It’s a computerised playback of what used to be the real thing. Spend what you like on your hi-fi but you’ll always hit a brick wall – the performance will always be limited by the resolution of that digital code.”
The music industry must have hated us at the time because Compact Disc was its new baby and all of us at the hi-fi magazines were saying we didn’t like it. Nonetheless, we were stuck with it. Today, however, none of us can deny that what CD really did was bring a better quality of sound into the living rooms of ordinary people – not hi-fi buffs but ordinary people who didn’t spend very much money on hi-fi systems.
I treasure my vinyl collection, and I still enjoy playing records, but I’m one of those privileged few who have an absurdly expensive record player. Ordinary people played records on appalling record players so they never knew how good vinyl could be. Compact Disc for them was a Godsend and so it brought better sound to the masses. Ironically – whatever hi-fi buffs may think about it – DVD-Audio will also bring better sound to the masses. As, indeed, could SACD.
My point is that with a cheap and cheerful five-channel system playing high-resolution material you can get far better results than anyone would predict. It won’t rival a ‘proper’ hi-fi but it will sound miles better than any cheap and cheerful two-channel set-up.
MS: So what does the cheap and cheerful system you played me cost?
JB: It’s not really a cheap system: it’s what’s termed a luxury mini system and costs around £1000 – but that’s less than the price of a reasonable audiophile cartridge. It’s still shocking what this system – which no hi-fi buff would regard as ‘serious’ – can do. At a simplistic level I suppose it’s because there are five amplifiers and loudspeakers spreading the load, cruising along doing the work that in a stereo system two amplifiers and loudspeakers have to do.
This also seems to be true for more expensive systems. A friend of mine has a 5.1 system that’s worth about £3,000 at retail. If you play CDs on it it’s really not very impressive. Any hi-fi buff would tell him that he could have bought a far better sounding two-channel system for the money. However, play a DVD movie, and the system sounds sensational. Play a DVD-Audio disc and it’s wholly transformed: it sounds amazing.
Several journalists have heard me talk about this system and I’ve begged them to come and hear it. I wanted to show them how you could spend £3,000 on a really tasty stereo or spend it the way this guy has – and how fantastic it sounds when it’s playing a DVD-Audio disc. Not one of them has bothered, which tells me everything I need to know. It tells me how interested they are in doing some investigative journalism. I really want them to hear how this multi-channel audio trick, as I call it, enables you to get away with murder: how when you have five channels the system doesn’t have to be that expensive to make a fantastic impression.
Were I an editor today, I’d be jumping up and down saying ‘you’ve got to hear this. You’ve never heard music like this before. Go to a hi-fi shop and check it out.’ But I’ve not seen one magazine come even close to suggesting that. Consequently, hi-fi buffs aren’t banging on the doors of hi-fi shops asking to hear multi-channel music. Consequently, hi-fi shops are saying that business wasn’t very good last year.
It’s a sad, vicious circle. Why aren’t those dealers who are already demonstrating home cinema systems showing how they can also be used to provide music reproduction beyond customers’ wildest dreams? They’re selling home cinema but they’re not selling DVD-Audio or SACD. And, if they were… they’d have such an easy time. There’s a few out there who are doing it and they have the market to themselves… and they’re having a party.
MS: Does this relate to the point you made earlier about the schism between hi-fi and home cinema and how they’re regarded as two, entirely separate disciplines?
JB: Yes. The press has created a mindset in which DVD is just about movies, which makes people think that multi-channel audio is solely for creating that ‘surround sound cinema experience in your living room’. It most definitely is not.
I always joke when I play my system at Pioneer that, “It’s not bad for a home cinema system, is it?” In truth it’s fantastic – it’s not far short of recording studio monitor quality. Who wouldn’t want that in their living rooms? To say that multi-channel is only good for home cinema is laughable.
You hear people saying, “I’m lucky: because I have a nice big house, I can have a room for my stereo and a separate room for movies.” In my book that’s not necessary. Why can’t the same system do both? My system here does. I fail to understand why more hi-fi dealers aren’t promoting this – because it’s so easy to demonstrate.
It’s not easy to sell a consumer up from, say, a £500 CD player to a £1500 CD player. You are talking about small differences to the sound that are only of any interest to serious hi-fi enthusiasts. Mr and Mrs Average can hear a difference, but it’s no big deal to them. And they’re right: it’s not a big deal. Demonstrating to ordinary people the fundamental, ‘Oh My God!’, blow your socks off differences between music on CD and DVD-Audio takes about 15 seconds. I don’t think there’s one consumer in the universe that wouldn’t hear and appreciate them.
As I say, there are a few dealers who currently have the market to themselves while others just seem to be struggling along refusing to accept that multi-channel home cinema systems can be any good for music. They refuse to accept it, which I find very strange. It might be because hi-fi magazines aren’t driving consumers into the shops to hear multi-channel music. I know this isn’t happening because every magazine under the sun is damning it with faint praise.
Admittedly there are only about 400 or 500 DVD-Audio discs available at the moment so you can’t expect to find a load of discs that match your particular tastes. One of the first releases was a Corrs album. I’m no great fan of the band but millions of people are, so it made perfect sense for the record company to release it. The typical hi-fi reviewer’s reaction was: “DVD-Audio is here and I’ve been sent a recording of the Corrs – and it’s rubbish.” Such comments merely reflect his taste in music, which has nothing to do with the medium. Then he’d criticise the sound and decide that DVD-Audio isn’t exciting or wonderful. He wouldn’t, of course, bother to compare the DVD-A with the same album on CD and discover that neither was that exciting or wonderful. He wouldn’t figure out that it that the original recording wasn’t up to much.
Not one bloody magazine has done that comparison. It is cretinous.
MS: I remember when CD arrived, reviewers delighted in comparing CD releases to their vinyl counterparts.
JB: You would hope that people would still realise that any replay system can only perform as well as the recording on the disc allows. I don’t know of any magazine that has reviewed that Corrs disc and not said it didn’t sound very good. As a consumer I want to know how it compares with the CD, because if I want to buy that album I’d like to know which version sounds the best. It really isn’t rocket science, and it’s pathetic how badly consumers are being served.
DVD-Audio has had bad press over the last couple of years. SACD has fared slightly better but not so well that hi-fi buffs are dashing to the hi-fi shops to upgrade. But the press has been slightly more positive about it than DVD-Audio. My spin on why that’s the case is twofold.
A lot of the stuff that has been released on SACD has been gorgeous – fabulous recordings. They were fabulous on vinyl; they weren’t quite as fabulous but they were still good on CD; and now they’re even more fabulous on SACD. If a critic gets his hands on one of these he reports that it sounds sublime, which is was you’d expect because it was a good recording in the first place. The journalist’s conclusion, therefore, is that SACD is better than DVD-Audio.
Making the first recordings available on DVD-Audio wasn’t carefully managed. Rather than being given gorgeous, classic, important recordings we got material that was currently popular. And popular rarely equates to super high fidelity recordings. Modern rock and pop is usually mixed to sound hard and punchy on a car radio or a trannie. Nine times out of ten with mass market discs your hi-fi is better than the recording. Thankfully you can now find some DVD-Audio discs that sound sublime.
Another criticism of these new formats – DVD-Audio in particular – is that so many of the early releases were old hippy stuff that modern, happening, street-credible guys on magazines regard as boring. So again we see them bringing musical taste into the equation: “Who needs Fleetwood Mac? Deep Purple – who’s interested in them?” That simply demonstrates arrogance and ignorance: it suggests that the top record company management who decided what would be released are stupid. They’re not: they have monstrous salaries that they have to justify! They’ve cleverly targeted baby boomers, like me, because all this boring old hippy stuff is what we grew up with and now we can hear it as we’ve never heard it before. Of course, my teenage son won’t be interested – but my teenage son couldn’t afford to buy it anyway. What’s more, he doesn’t have a tasty hi-fi or surround sound system yet.
All this hippy stuff might be passé to trendies, but to the typical early adopter it’s spot on. I read a review some months ago that described Queen’s A Night at The Opera on DVD-Audio as “absolutely pathetic.” What the reviewer clearly didn’t know was that the record company sold tens and tens of thousands of copies. They had to re-press the disc three bloody times. You might not like Queen but there’s no argument that the band is – commercially – way up there in the stratosphere.
MS: Why on earth should the writer allow the facts to get in the way of a good rant?
JB: Yeah. I don’t like it so why should you? Where’s Eminem? Where’s Limp Biskit? Where’s Radiohead?
Whatever their taste in music happens to be, people want it all and they want it now. More material will come through but it’s going to take time. When DVD Video was launched in the UK there were only about six titles in the Virgin Megastore and HMV on Oxford Street. Some pundits were sure it would never catch on. Some said it would catch on but only if it were recordable. They were all wrong. I always knew it would catch on but, even so, I’ve still been taken aback by how successful it’s been.
Do you remember when the VCR came out? The first machines were around £700, which is about £2500 at today’s price. Initially only affluent people bought them and used them for recording – for time shifting programmes. Look how that situation has changed: nowadays everyone has a VCR, and virtually no-one uses one for its original purpose. Instead, the technology spawned two new industries – video rental and video retail. The technology that was designed for recording has spent most of its life replaying packaged media.
MS: Getting back to listening to DVD-Audio, I have to say that I find the difference in perspective unsettling. I’m used to music coming towards me from the front: being surrounded by it seems unnatural.
JB: It’s an enormous paradigm shift going from stereo to having speakers all around you. To appreciate the benefits you need recordings that have been mixed appropriately. The listener is completely at the mercy of the recording engineer. If he’s used the surround channels to recreate the ambience of the venue then a multi-track recording can really make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. The system can really transport you into the concert hall.
As far as most studio recordings are concerned, there’s no ‘reality’: an engineer creates an illusory stereo image at the mixing desk by panning mono instruments from left to right. Now that engineer can go back to the multi-track tape and place those instruments anywhere in a 360-degree space. For some people that’s going to sound alien: that’s why Meridian’s Bob Stuart says we might have to ‘unlearn’ listening in stereo before we can to come to terms with multi-channel.
after around three years of listening to multi-channel music, I am now a convert. Maybe I have ‘unlearned’ stereo.
I’m not inclined to force opinions down people’s throats: if you hear a multi-channel mix of a disc you know and you don’t like what you hear, it’s simple – don’t listen to it. But, after around three years of listening to multi-channel music, I am now a convert. Maybe I have ‘unlearned’ stereo. However, I doubt there’s a hi-fi buff on this planet who, after hearing some of the best live classical concerts in multi-channel that I’ve heard, wouldn’t be amazed and delighted.
MS: A noted record producer once played me a multi-channel re-mix of a well-known album and I nearly fell off my chair when the band’s horn section – who I seem to remember used to play on the stage with the rest of the band – leapt out from the rear speakers. I asked why he’d put the horns in the rear channels and he told me… ‘Well, I had five channels and I wanted to use them all.” I found that more than a little worrying. It might work for House and Garage, but it doesn’t cut it with eighties’ rock.
JB: I think producers and engineers are obviously on a steep learning curve. There’ll be good mixes and there’ll be bad mixes; there’ll be guys who are using multi-channel sympathetically, sensibly and creatively, and there’ll be guys who are just showing off. It’s no different to those early ping-pong stereo records.
MS: Perhaps someone should write a multi-channel Bible for recording engineers – Thou shalt not direct horn sections to the rear channels.
JB: It’s a totally artistic thing. We’ll all throw up our hands in horror if we’re listening to something familiar that’s been messed around with. But with modern rock or pop – and especially dance music – I find that sounds all around you are perfectly acceptable. As I said, I’ll never argue with the guy who says he doesn’t like listening to multi-channel. All I will say is that young people who haven’t spent their lives listening to high quality stereo tend to love it.
That’s really as far as I can go– it really is an emotive subject. Some people prefer to ignore the resolution and all the other possibilities that DVD-Audio offers, and highlight what they perceive as negative aspects: they don’t like this or that mix; the discs have pictures and lyrics on them; they’re hard to navigate if you don’t have a TV connected; how do you play them on a stereo?; the discs have watermarking on them; it could be wonderful but you’re stuck with listening to the quality of the D/A converters in the player because you have to have a multi-channel analogue output and there’s no digital output. (Which is no longer true.) It’s all negatives for some people.
MS: Most multi-channel systems are based around single-box amplifiers or receivers. Do you think that makes hi-fi enthusiasts view them with suspicion, even if they perform well? Is there an element of snobbishness here – a serious system needs a rack full of boxes?
JB: Maybe. But that’s only a question of how much money you want to spend. To ordinary people our top-of-the-range AV amplifier seems outrageously expensive because it costs £3,000. Hi-fi buffs, however, always ask if we make ‘something better’ – assuming that a separate-boxes combination would be better. If that’s what you’re into then there are plenty of companies who will sell you as many boxes as you want. Pioneer just happens to be a company that doesn’t make megabucks products.
That’s one thing that frustrates me. Some friends and acquaintances imagine that I have a thankless job because I work for a Japanese manufacturer who makes sensibly priced products for the ordinary consumer. And, as a consequence, hi-fi buffs tend not to take our more luxurious products seriously. I know that’s unfair because I get to see the really tasty stuff that’s goes under the bonnet of our top products.
Our top-of-the-range DVD player, which I think costs way too little, and our top-of-the-range amplifier are probably some of the most advanced kit available on the planet right now. One of those negatives I was talking about a moment ago was the lack of digital outputs: well Pioneer consumers can have a digital output. We were the first company to put an IEEE1394 interface on a DVD player. We were the first with a ‘universal’ player, the DV747a: its replacement, the DV757ai – the ‘i’ suffix indicating that it has the digital interface – means it’s the first DVD player that you can use as a transport. Of course, an output is of no use without a matching input – and the Pioneer ‘Air Studios’ amplifier has one. That does away with the rat’s nest of cables needed for an analogue DVD-Audio or SACD connection. One lead does it all and, even better, it makes the system so simple that your grandmother could operate it. The amplifier senses what sort of disc is in the player and configures itself automatically. And when you get into bass management and trying to tune the sound to suit DVD Video, DVD-Audio and SACD, there’s no more sleepless nights spent worrying about playing around with a signal that’s swapping in and out of analogue: you’re sorting it all out in the digital domain.
All we need to complete the scene is an interface – probably HDMI – which will give us a straight digital path for the video, taking all the A/D and D/A conversion out of the chain. Then we’ll start waiting for higher definition – maybe from regular DVDs, Blue Ray discs or the Toshiba/NEC advanced optical disc. Who knows what it will be – but it can’t come soon enough for me.
