Knowing how to spell "Mississippi", and knowing when to stop!

When we talk, our vocal cords make air wiggle. When we hit a drum with a stick, or hit a string with a stick, or pluck a string with our finger, or blow over the top of a hole, we make air wiggle.

Most of us can hear slow wiggles and fast wiggles with our ears. Some of us only can feel very slow wiggles with our bodies, and our ears don't help out. As we all age, our ears will become less sensitive to fast wiggles.

Whenever we make air wiggle, there is one really loud wiggle, and then some quieter wiggles that are faster than this loudest wiggle. These wiggle at multiples of the speed of that core, fundamental wiggle. These are called "harmonics" of the "fundamental" wiggle. Harmonics are a big part what make two different musical instruments sound different when they play the same musical note. They are also a big part of what make electronic instruments sound different from acoustic instruments, which work as mentioned above - by being hit with a stick or a hammer, or plucked by a finger, or blown into.

When I was a kid, one of my neighbor friends had some science kits (his dad worked for the phone company, and Bell used to make science kits to get us kids interested in technology). I clearly remember the vocoder kit. It could make very, very, very rudimentary vocal sounds. It didn't sound like a human voice, but it sounded similar to a human voice, I guess. It couldn't deliver nearly as slow of a wiggle as our voices can, and it couldn't deliver the harmonics of a fundamental wiggle the way our voices do. You can see a picture off of the internet of one of these kits, which were apparently produced in the later 1960's (I would have played with them in the mid-1970's).

You made different sounds come out of the vocoder kit with different capacitors and resistors and inductors on the cardboard circuit board pictured above.

Today, we don't use through-hole components much - and of course all of this sort of thing is performed in the digital domain - but the difference between what sounds real and what sounds artificial is still a part of my life.

"High fidelity" used to differentiate sound gear that could recreate very slow and very fast wiggles from sound gear that couldn't. This was the beginning of an industry which caters to those who care about the quality of reproduced sound. Since then, we've improved the quality of the recording technology, we've improved the quality of the storage technology, we've improved the quality of the speaker technology. What hasn't changed nearly enough is how well we who occupy this category understand how it works.

When I started, I remember a few leaders in this field who wanted everyone to understand how a transistor works. I never saw the value in it at the time, and I still don't.

I had some people who wanted everyone to understand how digital playback works. Again, while I have a basic understanding of the principles involved, I've never found the difference between a basic ladder DAC and a delta-sigma DAC to be relevant to me.

However, learning about what makes the biggest differences to our ears? That's something I never learned much about until relatively recently (and much of what I did learn turns out to be wrong).

I see several young people who want to make their name in "spatial audio", because that looks new and stereo looks old to them. I've even heard some of them refer to stereo as a 2-dimensional technology. Well, it's apparent they've not heard a good recording on a good stereo system - but most folks haven't, and they may never get the chance.

Stereo can sound amazing. It only requires two channels of recording, so it's easier to stream and easier to transport files than multichannel recording. Many of the stereo-to-multichannel translations are done with automated processes which will never approach the results attained by master record producers.

I recently got to listen to a presentation by Grammy Award-winning recording engineer Bob Katz. He mentioned that the way he learned to distinguish different sounds was by listening to music through a 1/3-octave equalizer, and adding and subtracting energy at each frequency until he could tell each of them apart. He did this as a teenager!

I've never done this, and I don't know if I ever will. At this point, measurement equipment is awfully inexpensive. Measurement equipment brings its own challenges, though. For many years, we've been able to measure air wiggling, and researchers have determined that there are some differences between different sets of air wiggles which we just don't discern or notice.

The challenge for music recording, storage, and reproduction for the last 40 years has been, what is the practical difference between what we hear and what we don't? What matters and what doesn't? When do we stop spelling Mississippi?

Well, ask someone with a Master's in Business, and they are going to err on the side of making music easier to store and easier to transfer. Fidelity isn't their primary value.

Ask someone who wants to attain the pinnacle of two-channel sound - or win a trophy in sound-quality competitions - and they are likely to go off the superstitious deep end, chasing ghosts for what seems like forever.

Today, older music technology - records and record players - has become trendy. I think this has more to do with the feeling of owning a recording as a physical item than anything else, but the flaws inherent in making and playing a vinyl sound recording haven't vanished. They just don't prevent emotional enjoyment of music for many people.

I wish that more occupants in my category had a chance to learn more about what's important, and what isn't, in music playback. The more I learn about what's important, the better systems I can deliver, and the better I can do earning my pay. After all, we should make money by adding value, and making air wiggle because someone hit a drum with a stick at some time in the past - what's more valuable than that?

I've heard Russ Kunkel play with Rickie Lee Jones and Lyle Lovett. I've heard him play on many albums, from Jackson Browne and James Taylor to Diana Ross and Spinal Tap. His discography reads like a satire of a fictional character. I actually had no idea initially that I'd heard him in so many different instances.

When I listen to a recording with Russ Kunkel on drums, I don't want to listen to the equipment, and I don't want to listen to the tune. I want to enjoy Russ Kunkel playing drums. I want to hear air wiggle, and be amazed.

Learn to share that with your customers.