Crank the Fokkers!
This column came from a high-end supplement produced back in the early ’90s by a rather straight-laced magazine and edited, I suspect, by a dear pal who was then imbibing and cultivating a trademark 1000-yard stare… Oh the fun we had in those boozy, herby days… especially when they let us loose in Japan
“In the year of our Lord 992 The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu set sail in their longboats on a voyage to rediscover the lost continent. After many months on perilous stormy seas, their search was fruitless. Just when all seemed lost they discovered… America! The music you are about to experience is a celebration of the 1000th anniversary of their founding of this great nation.”
So begins The KLF’s “America: What Time is Love” (uncensored mix) a disc I discovered long ago but whose enchanted nature was only revealed to me on a recent trip to the land of the rising Yen.
Let me put this mystical slice of the JAM’s oeuvre into the appropriate hi-fi context. If you read the American hi-fi press – the left-field mags as opposed to the rubber stamp offerings – you’ve doubtless seen references to compact discs that claim to work magic on your system, sprinkling audiophile gris gris over your components and bringing forth a more wondrous performance from them. If you’re like me you doubtless nearly convulsed off the Royal Doulton at the thought. How could there be a magical combination of test tones that would give your system any more of a boost than playing Rage Against The Machine’s “Bullet In The Head” through it at levels that attract the immediate attention of the local Environmental Health department’s hit squad?
Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint – it seems, there’s a chance that such discs might work as claimed. However, given the choice between blasting my system with the product of some propeller head’s tinkering with a frequency generator or The K Foundation’s Philosan-charged samples I know to which I’d rather listen.
The discovery of the therapeutic properties of “America: What Time Is Love” came about while I was in Japan with friend, colleague and fellow KLF aficionado, Andrew Everard doing the rounds of Pioneer’s various plants and listening to the company’s latest products. At one factory we were shown a pair of impressive looking monitor speakers and given a demonstration of their prowess with the sort of music that Japanese manufacturers use to demonstrate the prowess of their impressive looking monitor speakers. After several pleasantly tinkly tracks, they asked if we had any discs with which we were familiar that we’d like to hear. We duly handed over Holly Cole’s “Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday”, a musically rewarding disc whose sonic quality is on a par with the most awful of pristine sounding “audiophile reference” discs. Sadly, much was lacking. The horn-loaded speakers sounded obviously horn-loaded, and there was a readily discernible sense of the music being compressed both dynamically and in terms of its sound staging. All the activity was taking place in a small area between the two speakers, Ms. Cole’s voice lacked expression, and the double bass accompanying her sounded miniaturised and gutless.
Could we try another track? How loud would these seemingly languid monitors go? 126dB – that’ll do nicely. Give them some b*ll*cks and crank this one up, we asked, handing over The KLF. The first few bars of “America: What Time Is Love” weren’t exactly mellifluous – the combination of what sounded like speakers that weren’t fully run-in and the K-boys’ subtlety-free approach to the mixing desk didn’t make for a cosmetically appealing sound. But they indicated that something dramatic was happening to the system. As the track progressed the sense of compression began to diminish. By the end of the song the soundstage had expanded sideways, forwards, backwards, and upwards. As the final seconds of music played out we were listening to a sound that seemed to be working its way inch by inch round the room, filling every nook and cranny. What’s more, as it became louder it remained easy – well, relatively so – on the ear.
We returned to Holly Cole and found that on the second playing, after the system had been America‘d, her album sounded remarkably more palatable. Her voice had a much stronger sense of humanity and naturalness, the room in which the recording was made had grown out of its initial Lilliputian proportions, and the bass player’s instrument displayed the sort of power and sonority one expects from a double bass. Furthermore, the music itself made more sense: its rhythmic structure, dynamics and general feel had become more vivid and coherent.
We wondered if this was a one-off. Had we simply shaken off the shackles that were binding a speaker that hadn’t been allowed to run close to its limits? That seemed unlikely because we’d played other stuff at realistic SPLs and that had not had a similar effect. Repeating the exercise a couple of days later with another pair of identical speakers, which we were assured had seen plenty of action, we experienced just the same results. Where there had previously been a claustrophobic sound-stage there was now a sense of wide-openness; dynamic restraint gave way to flexibility and ease; where there had been artificiality there was now naturalness and emotional impact.
On my return to the UK I was visited – on separate occasions – by two loudspeaker manufacturers, each of whom was delivering speakers for review. I asked them if they’d be interested to hear this “experiment” with their speakers and they agreed. On both occasions the results were identical. Having established that their speakers were warmed up and performing as they would expect them to, I subjected them to America. Then we returned to tracks we’d been auditioning previously. Both times, the transformations in the speakers’ performances clearly surprised the designers.
Having heard his speakers JAMmed, one visitor, Henry Azima, Mission’s loudspeaker guru, suggested that the disc might contain some particularly “vicious” highs – probably 18kHz or 19 kHz at very high levels – that are unusually effective at loosening up the tweeter’s innards, and that freeing this driver was having knock-on effects throughout the speaker’s bandwidth. He also suspected that America could be unusual in containing very high levels throughout its entire spectrum: rather than having certain bands that are louder than others, everything is cranked up and red-lining.
The thought of finding a technical explanation why this disc is so effective has got me fascinated. Hey, blame it on my middle-aged hormones, I’m not normally so swattish. Anyway, I’m taking the disc to his lab and we’re going to run it through the FFT and pore over its contents. If anything interesting emerges I’ll let you know. Till then, Stand By The Jams, buy this disc (Coma CD 7024), and see what your system can do when you slacken its reins.
