Malcolm Steward: audio journalist

This interview was one of the first I produced for Hi-Fi Choice back in 2006. Mr Qvortrup was, as always, very opinionated and thoroughly entertaining.

The last time I interviewed Peter Qvortrup, the head man at AudioNote, was many years ago and we conducted our chat then in the tranquil surroundings of his home and in one of Brighton’s most prestigious hotels. When I visited him more recently to get his current opinions on the state of the audio nation, we met at his office where he played, continually and much to my surprise, modern heavy metal while we spoke.  It transpired that while he remains an ardent fan of – and very well informed about – classical music, he finds rock music more stimulating while he works.

In between discussing the musical structure of various selections that he played me – from Aphex Twin to operatic heavy metal – drinking cups of excellent espresso from his local supplier and watching to ensure that Brighton’s eager traffic wardens didn’t slap a ticket on my windscreen, I garnered his opinions of today’s audio scene from the perspective of a music-loving valve equipment manufacturer.

Malcolm Steward: I guess I really ought to begin by getting your thought about the industry’s apparent obsession with iPods and MP3 players.

Peter Qvortrup: I think iPods are good in one sense but they’re bad in a major way: they, like MP3 and other compressed formats, turn music into a consumable, have and throw-away item. But that started with CD. I mean just look at a CD: it looks disposable, doesn’t it, whereas an LP looks like something that you ought to look after and that you might be proud to own? That aspect of digital sound has really served our industry badly – and I don’t simply mean in terms of the reproduction side but more generally. You might be able to get music very quickly now but that has caused the consumer to lose respect for it.

… we don’t have USB [connections]. We’ve experimented with them and I really don’t like the sound.

MS: There have been problems with DRM recently where people who had bought music from a website that subsequently went off-air realised that they couldn’t easily transfer their recordings to another player or computer because they hadn’t actually bought the music but instead had just acquired  the rights to store it on one machine. They’d spent their money on a license that was, in effect, now useless.

PQ: That’s just one of the problems with such systems in my view, these ‘virtual’ recordings that only exist on a disk somewhere. What happens if that disk is lost or damaged? Well, that’s tough. Your music is gone. A friend of mine had 7,000 songs on his computer and his basement flooded. He had all the security and doubled disks then discovered that none of that helps when your computer is underneath four feet of water.

Coming back to the iPod, the advantage is that it allows youngsters to listen to a much broader range of music but, unfortunately, that’s not what they tend to do. If they like heavy metal, that’s what they’ll listen to: they don’t tend to explore other genres. And because there’s so much of it coming out all the time, and it’s so disposable, very little of it lasts. Having said that, my teenage son listens to a fairly broad range of music – from Stravinsky and Prokofiev to very heavy metal and noise-metal: bands like The Locust and Melt-Banana and all sorts of weird shit. Come to that, I like Aphex Twin and I find the way they generate music fascinating. And their music works very well on our systems

MS: So do AudioNote amplifiers now have iPod inputs?

PQ: No. And we don’t have USBs. We’ve experimented with them and I really don’t like the sound. People often say to me that it sounds good but in our sonic environment, if you want to call it that, USB doesn’t work: you can hear that it does something, and what it’s doing is not attractive.

Digital sound, though, is still inferior to analogue – as you would expect. I would be hugely surprised if digital – no matter what the sampling rate – ever comes near to challenging what can be done with analogue. And, of course, the best that can be done with analogue is largely what was done in the 1950s and’60s. And most of the finest recordings are in the mono catalogue: early Blue Notes and Columbias; one-mic jobs. You listen to those recordings of Bing Crosby, Harry Belafonte and Louis Armstrong and they’re staggeringly superior to anything that’s been made since. It makes you wonder why they didn’t just stop there instead of inventing stereo and confusing things further.

MS: I was once told that corporate Japan needs a new format every ten or fifteen years to keep its product cycle churning over comfortably.

PQ: Yeah, and that has created a rod for this industry’s back. The hardware manufacturers are now completely in the pockets of the computer industry. As an example, multi-disk players use a CD-ROM mechanism that’s churned out by the billion in factories in China. And those mechanisms aren’t particularly good at reading CDs. It’s something to do with the reading angle and the width of the laser: if it can read a multi-layer disc, the mechanism isn’t that good at getting the information off a CD, which then puts the job back on the error correction system. And that explains why so many of the universal players don’t sound that good with traditional CDs. I’ve not heard anything good from a multi-reader. And then you can compare SACD to normal discs and that’s even worse.

MS: How does AudioNote view new formats such as SACD and DVD-A? As genuinely advancing the art of music reproduction..?

PQ: No. I think they are all, without exception, steps backwards sonically. And I think they are major contributors to the broad lack of interest in classical music, which is really in its death throes. That is something I find extraordinarily depressing.  It’s not unlike the situation with books. Human history creates these artefacts and we don’t protect them even though they are an integral part of our humanity and the thought processes that have created what we are now. It’s not the same with our architecture: we have societies and laws that protect old buildings but we don’t protect our recorded heritage. That is left to commercial entities who can do with it what they like. And now they’re going to make that even worse by extending the copyright from 50 to 75 years, which will make it even more difficult for individuals who are interested in releasing recordings from probably the greatest era of all time – the repertoire that is on 78s. Most of the great jazz and classical works and most of the truly great musicians that came into the 20th Century are on 78s.

We have the National Library and all sorts of art galleries and they are all protected. In some countries it’s a criminal offence to damage their cultural heritage: you can buy a painting and hide it away in your home but if you burn it, you go to jail. And you can’t add a conservatory on your Grade A listed building in the UK.  It makes absolutely no sense that music isn’t considered as important as books, paintings and architecture.

Coming back to your original question, though, the problem with these new formats is that their higher sampling rates are achieved by cheating: they over-sample one-bit converters, which might work when you look at the output on a Fast Fourier analyser but that won’t show you the detrimental effect that has on the signal, which sounds bleached, vapid, and lacking in dynamic contrast and energy.

And the recordings that sound the worst are invariably those of un-amplified instruments, and that again leaves classical music in a very bad shape. When the music goes from the analogue into the digital domain, as my friend and colleague, Andy always says, what you have is one bit and a lot of guesses. Occasionally you’ll get all the right guesses in the right sequence – and they’re what turns into examples of how wonderful this new technology is, while  the 999, 999 whose sound varies from not very wonderful to downright mediocre, get passed off as “poor original recordings.”

MS: It intrigues me that you’re still running a successful and profitable business selling equipment that is based on a technology that’s nearly a century old.

PQ: We currently have a very full order book: there are more people prepared to buy what I make than I am actually able to produce. Look at the proliferation of companies now making single-ended products, like the Ongaku, that we started pushing in the late ‘80s. An Italian magazine did a survey and found that over 40 per cent of amplifiers over a certain price sold in the country were valve designs. What that survey didn’t say was that you can only make valve amplifiers over ‘that certain price’: you can’t make a £299 valve amplifier. Well, you can but you can’t make any money on it.

MS: Isn’t there a problem for valve amplifier manufacturers in that there aren’t really any new bandwagons onto which they can jump?

PQ: There aren’t any bandwagons for transistor amplifier manufacturers either: they’ve all long since passed. What it comes down to now with either design is to try to simplify the circuits as much as possible and to try to use the best components available and to optimise the price/performance ratio. There are no quantum leaps being made in either camp and there haven’t been for eons – at least not since the ‘70s.

MS: We were told years ago that valves were essentially moribund and the inference was that you should start hoarding them because you weren’t going to be able to get them forever.

PQ: It’s not that clear cut: the audio industry’s consumption of valves is puny compared to, say, the professional audio industry. Guitar amplifiers and all sorts of stage equipment use valves.

As far as supplies of currently manufactured valves are concerned, the Russians are still big producers. The Svetlana factory produces some 300,000 each month –  and that’s a serious quantity – many of which, more than 90 per cent of them, end up in guitar amps. And the Chinese are still manufacturing a lot – 300Bs and their derivatives along with some really old triodes, which are highly desirable.

Inevitably our discussion turned to music and I expressed what I imagined would be most people’s reaction to Peter’s choices to listen to while we chatted. Why does he so enjoy extreme examples of the rock canon (and yes, he really does listen to Rammstein) when most would picture him listening to sweeter, more hi-fi-friendly classical selections?

PQ: Think about it – most guitar and bass amplifiers are valve powered. There are very few decent transistor amplifiers used in that arena and one has to ask oneself why valve amplifiers shouldn’t be the obvious choice for someone wanting to listen to rock. I think that a good single-ended triode has much better, what I call, density and grip than any alternative. They’re almost as good as they are live… and I do go to a lot of concerts, so I know what rock and heavy metal sound like live.

MS: So how do you see the hi-fi market developing?

PQ: What’s happening, essentially, is it’s moving backwards towards the 1950s and 1960s, when the market consisted of people who had a real interest in music. People like that will continue to buy hi-fi but a large proportion of them will also build their own. I saw this early on when I started selling components in 1991, and from then on I watched a large number of people  world-wide  begin building their own equipment. There has been an enormous increase in the D-I-Y sector, which I truly welcome because I’d much rather deal with informed, intelligent customers. That element is still growing – and at a reasonable rate.

If you look at the way the retail sector has behaved over the past 15 years or so, it has served what it has perceived as being its short-term advantage and squandered its long-term. In a strange way it has gotten what it deserves. I look around the world and see some dealers who have very happily carried on selling two-channel, focussed on maintaining their customer base, focussed on selling the best products for the price and have continued to do very well. That’s partly because people come into stores that are full of AV and they wonder if they’re actually in a place that wants to sell them a stereo. In effect, those stores are chasing the music lover away.

Happily we are able to conclude our discussion by agreeing that the market, although perhaps diminishing, is still looking healthy for good, old-fashioned stereo, and that, thankfully, my car has escaped the attention of the town’s ever vigilant traffic wardens.