John Harris in the Guardian:

One of my albums of the year has just arrived, and it pains me to say it's by the Rolling Stones.

At Jazz Chronicles, James Hale remembers a characteristic performance apotheosis from Paul Motian, who played with Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, and many others; who was a member of Arlo Guthrie's band in the 60's and backed up the singer at Woodstock; who recorded three dozen albums as a leader; and who died yesterday at the age of 80:

I remember one long, contemplative piece where his accompaniment during one passage consisted of exactly one cymbal strike... and it was perfectly placed. He watched, listened, waiting, and touched the cymbal just once. That was all that was needed, and he knew it; and he had the lack of musical ego to not go beyond that realization.

Motian's ECM album Lost in a Dream, recorded live at the Village Vanguard in 2009 with pianist Jason Moran and saxophonist Chris Potter, is fresh and simply wonderful.

Above: Joe Lovano, Paul Motian, and Bill Frisell, by Marco Tambara

I DETEST SODIUM-VAPOR STREETLIGHTS, whose yellowish glow now colors the night and stains metropolitan horizons everywhere. When I was growing up in suburban California in the 1960s and ’70s, the world after dark was lit by warm incandescence and whitish mercury-vapor street light. Although the latter had a spectral signature with vampiric overtones, turning reds to black and casting a blood-drained pallor on white skin, it still approximated something akin to plain white light.

But after the energy shocks of the 1970s, high-pressure sodium lights gradually took over the night. Following the economic imperative to use the most cost-effective lighting—high-pressure sodium lights consume half as much energy as mercury-vapor lamps and can last up to 16,000 hours longer—transportation departments and cities embraced sodium light. It was as though someone said “Fiat lux sulfurea—“Let there be light from hell.” The relentless spread of sodium streetlights is documented in NASA night photographs from space: New York City and Los Angeles are circuit boards of glowing orange, and Long Beach, one of the world’s busiest ports, is a flare of tarnished gold. It’s even worse in the United Kingdom, where 85 percent of streetlights use sodium. The jaundiced weirdness of sodium light has become a vexing challenge to photographers (one filmmaker, Tenolian Bell, called it “the ugliest light known to the cinematographer”); movie cameras simulate its color by using a gel filter named Bastard Amber. Significantly, retailers have avoided inflicting the unpleasantness of sodium lights on their customers—most commercial parking lots and shopping malls use the costlier white metal halide lights.

Our forced acceptance of sodium light’s ghoulish tint, an accident caused by the electrical vaporization of sodium metal in a gas-filled tube, makes outdoor lighting an example of a “bossy technology,” to borrow a term from Kevin Kelly’s recent book, What Technology Wants. Even worse than this inherent bossiness is the larger problem of light pollution. “Mankind is proceeding to envelop itself in a luminous fog,” wrote the authors of a paper on artificial night-sky brightness in 2001. This “perennial moonlight” that we’ve created enhances our safety and security, but it also dims our view of 10,000 stars and destroys the dance of light and dark.

But now we have a chance to bid good riddance to sodium vapor, and perhaps even resist the heedless trend of adding more and more light. The color of night is changing again.

In the next decade, a large percentage of America’s 37 million streetlights will be equipped with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, and other kinds of solid-state lighting. Once again, energy-saving is the driving force. “We’re still at the front end of the wave,” says Mark S. Rea, the director of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, “but LEDs are inevitable as a replacement technology.” He predicts that LEDs, which are already 10 to 20 percent more energy-efficient than high-pressure sodium lights, will have a 40 percent advantage within a year or two.

Large-scale streetlight-upgrade programs have already begun in New York, Anchorage, San Jose, Pittsburgh, and many other cities. In Los Angeles, a $57 million project backed by the city’s Department of Water and Power and the Clinton Climate Initiative will replace 140,000 of the city’s 209,000 streetlights. Michael Siminovitch, the director of the California Lighting Technology Center at UC Davis, argues that the true potential and savings of the new lighting are less a matter of the source than of digital “adaptive controls.” Unlike sodium lights, LEDs and other next-generation lights can be tuned to various colors, easily dimmed, arranged into luminous surfaces and shapes, and turned on and off instantly.

Will this versatility translate into self-restraint? “We have the technology to make beautiful, modest night lighting,” says Jane Brox, the author of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light. “But our relationship to light is not rational. To ask people to live with less light, even if it’s well designed—a lot of people feel like that’s going backward.”

We’ve learned to be that neighbor who leaves a yellow porch light glaring all night long. Perhaps we can now learn, in the words of the lighting designer Rogier van der Heide, “why light needs darkness.”

[This article originally appeared in the July-August 2011 issue of The Atlantic.]

All print journalism now trails an Internet shadow: the digital version, a Platonic reflection consisting of what might have been if you could have elaborated, footnoted, and linked far beyond the margins of the lines on the page.

On paper, the limits of space — of word counts and ad/edit ratios and the cost of printing and distribution — exist in an inverse relationship to the extensibility of online prose. In broadcast media, where the limiting factor is time, you encounter a similar kind of extensibility whenever Jon Stewart winds up a Daily Show interview segment with a frustrated unwillingness to stop, announcing that the conversation will continue off the air and “we’ll throw the whole thing up on the Internet.”

Information in general wants to be free, but online text, with a nominal distribution cost approaching zero, really is free, and every time I commit my professional words to paper these days, I immediately begin scheming to scoop up the words and ideas and connections that were left on the cutting-room floor, and reconstitute them online.

For the March issue of The Atlantic, I contributed a report on startling innovations in 3D audio as developed by Edgar Choueiri, a professor of applied physics at Princeton University. (Read “What Perfection Sounds Like.”) In this post, I’d like to unpack the Internet shadow of this particular article of mine by presenting a few notes on useful background information and context that travels in the slipstream of the finished product, along with some deleted scenes from my encounter with Professor Choueiri.



My dispatch on a very specific something new under the hi-fi sun points toward overarching questions about the general state of audio innovation, and this assignment sent me into the heart of those fascinating inquiries. My experience, ears, judgment, and research convince me that Edgar Choueiri’s 3D audio algorithms and playback system represent a dramatic improvement in the spatial realism and virtual sound-staging of stereo. It’s an achievement whose novelty and pleasurable impact justifies the hyperbole of the article’s title. (Ideally, his sound filter requires recordings of an actual soundstage and ambiance; it doesn’t work at all with mono recording, although it provides surprising enhancements even for typical stereo pop concoctions, where the spatial location of voices and instrumentals is simulated at a mixing board by a technique called “pan-potted mono.”)

It’s important, however, to stipulate that Choueiri’s Pure Stereo is a culmination of research on crosstalk cancellation conducted by a far-flung community of engineers over many years. Science is never wholly original. One of the trickiest challenges of science and technology journalism is how to accurately characterize innovative achievement in a clear and distinctive light, while giving due consideration to the wider range of work in the field. Putting one guy’s beautiful solution in bold relief risks obscuring the surrounding network of colleagues (and competitors) along with the deep bibliography of research that stands behind any truly significant breakthrough.

One crucial predecessor of Choueiri’s is Ralph Glasgal, whose earlier work on crosstalk cancellation and ambiance simulation has proceeded under the rubric of Ambiophonics. Glasgal’s website is an illuminating resource. Bob Carver, an ingenious and storied pioneer of audio design, made a somewhat Ahab-like stab at an analog solution to 3D audio some 40 years ago, and dubbed his technology Sonic Holography. (Choueiri has a vintage Carver Sonic Holography Generator Model C-9 in his gear rack at his Princeton lab.) Another hotspot in audio science is the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the U.K.’s University of Southhampton. Choueiri’s decision to focus on 2-channel stereo 3D was based in part on the Southhampton lab’s successful implementation of crosstalk cancellation with six speakers.

The recent and increasingly chastened hysteria over visual 3D movies and TV has its counterpart in a parallel gold rush to commercialize 3D audio. Princeton’s 3D audio technology will doubtless become available to consumers soon, but it’s just one player in a proliferating 3D sound multiverse. The industry sent out an important signal last year with the establishment of the 3D Audio Alliance (3DAA), a trade group devoted to pooling knowledge and creating technical standards. (This episode of TWiT’s Home Theater Geeks podcast is devoted to the 3DAA launch, featuring Alan Kraemer of SRS Labs, Inc., a leading purveyor of “advanced audio enhancement.”) Hearing Choueiri’s 3D audio demo was even more exciting for me than the sometimes thrilling cinema 3D of Avatar. It might be worth betting that 3D audio has a better prospect for success in the near future than a thousand James Camerons breaking the fourth wall on screens everywhere.

One of the reasons you don’t hear much about genuine audio innovation is that the audiophile press practices a blatant silo journalism, narrowly focused on refinement rather than advancement. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with refinement; in the right circumstances it creates a valuable and highly significant species of progress. Gadgets like the brilliant HRT iStreamer mean that iPhones and iPads can now become uncompromising high-end audio source components. Cheap digital storage removes any practical barrier to playing uncompressed high-definition audio files. The vinyl resurgence is not a purely nostalgic exercise: improvements in cartridges, turntables, and phono amps lets us hear the full sonic potential of old LPs that vintage gear could never reveal. A well-designed 21st century amplifier with mid-20th century vacuum tubes can seduce the ear for perfectly up-to-date reasons.

But refinement is for connoisseurs, not pioneers and creators. Nothing puts the baroque artisanal excesses of hi-fi in perspective faster than spending time with hard-headed audio engineers in the recording industry or researchers at university audio labs, where experiment and the scientific method trump silly gold-plated luxe. Reading about high-quality audio would be much more fun if news from these scruffy studio boffins, pro gear vendors, and bleeding-edge psychoacoustic academicians became a steady part of the conversation.

The relatively primitive level of spatial music reproduction has been a blind spot in audio journalism, despite never-ending hype about hi-fi that sounds like the real thing. Now engineers and physicists like Choueiri, who can harness the mathematics of wave theory and write powerful audio software algorithms, are about to give us all wonderful new sonic gifts. While we wait for Choueiri’s Pure Stereo to arrive, a closely related and equally mind-boggling digital signal-processing technology is already available from Smyth Research. Rather than 3D audio through loudspeakers, Smyth’s Realiser A8 system provides headphone listeners with sound that is indistinguishable from playback through loudspeakers. The system’s ability to emulate exact room and speaker configurations is said to be uncanny, defeating everything that seems unnatural about listening. Stereophile’s Kal Rubenstein was suitably agog. “I couldn’t believe it,” he wrote in a detailed review. “For the first time in my life, headphone listening was not only convincing but enjoyable.”

When I left Choueiri in Princeton, he was immersed in the next stage of his research. For true stereo (including his Pure Stereo), you have to listen in a delimited “sweet spot” between the two speakers. Choueiri is now working on an extension of his 3D filter that will work with a multi-speaker array to produce what he calls “the holy grail — multiple sweet spots.” Meaning two, three, four or more listeners in a room could hear the same spatially realistic sound at the same time -- a profound boon for social listening and home theater watching with a group.

UPDATE: Choueri announced that on January 25th, 2011 he successfully produced three distinct sweet spots “using a special non-conventional loudspeaker technology in combination with my optimized XTC filters.” He added, “The extension to more sweet spots is relatively trivial.”

Finally, a few notes about Choueiri himself, a fascinating character worthy of an in-depth profile.

Born in Lebanon in 1961, Choueiri was an Apollo-age science and audio geek, the only 13-year-old in the country with a quadrophonic sound system. He sketched rooms with walls made of loudspeakers, and tape-recorded a message admonishing his future 30-year-old self to be devoting his life to the science of space exploration. When civil war broke out in 1975, he went abroad to study in France and the U.S. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and stayed on to become a full professor and director* of the university’s Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory. (In 2009, Choueiri wrote an excellent article for Scientific American, “New Dawn for Electric Rockets” [PDF link], about the history, state of the art, and cutting edge of plasma and electric rockets. The magazine also posted an accompanying video produced by Space Channel France.)

Choueiri is a seriously committed audiophile, and his home setup features a vintage Studer master reel-to-reel tape recorder/player, a monster VPI turntable, and a home-brewed version of his Pure Stereo filter. His ability to produce, in his listening room, a just slightly less amazing quality of 3D audio than his laboratory setup is a testament to the promise of universal accessibility his work offers. (You can even get a serious inkling of that sound via this video posted at the Princeton 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics Laboratory website.)

His remarkable music collection includes hundreds of vintage classical and jazz releases (including the very first commercially available stereo recording of a major performance, a pair of March 1954 sessions with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony playing Also Sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben), and a fantastic archive of second-generation master tapes. He played one of those masters, from an unreleased Bob Dylan session in March 1970: it was astonishingly vivid, especially with the help of the Pure Stereo filter.

Choueiri’s intensive work on 3D audio has had one slightly melancholy outcome. Audio used to be his hobby, a way to relax, now it’s come to be a part of his professional life. So he’s now learning magic.

[This post originally appeared on The Atlantic’s Technology website.)

Above, Apple's anechoic chamber in Cupertino, Califonria.

I’M STANDING IN the confined space of a custom-built anechoic chamber at Princeton University’s 3-D Audio and Applied Acoustics Lab, bathed in green light and surrounded on all sides by wedges of melamine acoustic foam. I’m facing a pair of Ascend Acoustics speakers set on tall stands about a foot and a half apart. And I’m considering the advice that professor Edgar Choueiri has just offered, in a voice curiously deadened by a total absence of room reflections.

“You may want to close your eyes,” he said. “If you clear out the visual cues, you get even more realism.”

I’m about to hear a demonstration of Choueiri’s Pure Stereo filter, which promises “truly 3-D reproduction of a recorded soundfield.” Only a handful of people have heard his 3-D demo, but it’s already spawned awestruck hype, as well as preemptive rumblings of audiophile skepticism.

Choueiri leaves. A few seconds later, the sound of flowing water fades in and rises in both volume and presence. I have the uncanny sensation of standing neck-deep in a river, with its plashing surface spreading around me. Next, a buzzing fly circles my head. Then an aural nightscape of crickets and the loud croaks of a frog, precisely over there. An excited crowd, children shouting. A train chugs in from the right and comes to a halt across the platform.

Musical selections follow—an a cappella choir in some vast reverberant space, a New Orleans street band, a quartet of classical guitars—featuring shockingly expansive soundstaging, exact source positioning, and vivid ambience. Then Choueiri’s virtual voice is speaking in my left ear, my right ear, behind my head, and lastly he’s simulating giving me a haircut, with scissors snipping sides, top, and back.

Choueiri reappears at the door. “That was absolutely fantastic,” I tell him.

Spatial hearing in three dimensions depends on subtle differences in timing, sound level, and the shape of our heads and ears, among other factors. Binaural and even conventional stereo recording incorporates rich 3-D information. But “crosstalk” collapses the 3-D illusion: during playback, the left ear hears not only sound from the left speaker, but also some of the right-speaker sound, and the right ear likewise hears spillover sound from the left speaker.

A technique called crosstalk cancellation—processing the audio signal so that the left ear hears sound from only the left speaker, and the right, from only the right—can reveal the inherent 3-D sound in stereo. But crosstalk cancellation has always introduced audible spectral coloration. It’s this problem, applied to two-speaker playback, that Choueiri says he’s licked. He wrote a fiendishly abstruse 24-page technical paper explaining his theoretical work, and then spent several years coding and designing his Pure Stereo filter.

Manufacturers and producers sense enormous profits looming in 3-D audio for TV, cinema, and gaming. Compared with 3-D, the sales pitch goes, surround-sound systems are unwieldy and offer crude spatial definition. Princeton is now negotiating with various consumer companies to license Pure Stereo, and Choueiri also hopes to improve on hearing aids, which currently are not very good at pinpointing where sound is coming from.

In a sense, Choueiri’s adventures in audio represent a hobby that’s spun out of control. His real job is teaching applied physics at Princeton and developing plasma rockets for spacecraft propulsion. Visiting Europe to attend a conference in 2003, Choueiri decided on a whim to detour to Amsterdam and crash a meeting of the Audio Engineering Society, where several sessions explored the technical challenges of 3-D audio. “Within a few weeks, I read pretty much every paper in the field,” Choueiri recalls. Funding for his 3-D audio lab came from Project X, an initiative to encourage unconventional engineering research at Princeton.

Later during my visit, Choueiri invites me to his restored 1834 home near campus, where we spend hours sampling his enormous collection of vinyl LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, and high-definition audio files. Choueiri has a Jerry Garcia beard, a high forehead topped with stray tendrils of disorderly hair, and the dark-circled eyes of a nocturnalist. He puffs on a pipe while he roams the shelves.

“The most tiring part of stereo is the fact that the image spatially doesn’t correspond to anything that you ordinarily hear,” Choueiri tells me. “That’s what drove me to create this thing. Your brain is getting the right cues, and you relax. Your brain stops trying to re-create reality.”

[This article originally appeared (as “What Perfection Sounds Like”) in the March 2011 issue of The Atlantic.)

In recent years, the best place to take the measure of the American high-end audio industry and to hear what's new has been the annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest (RMAF), a show that draws several thousand hi-fi enthusiasts, dealers, and manufacturers to a nondescript Marriott hotel in Denver for three days each fall. Compared to the colossal, roaring Woodstock that is CES — the International Consumer Electronics Show — the RMAF is a homespun revival meeting, an infinitesimal upstart that began only seven years ago. But with the venerable hi-fi sector now reduced to a tiny, shrinking percentage of the $182 billion U.S. consumer-electronics marketplace, high-end audio has been lost amid the din at CES. The community devoted to the cutting edge of refined sound now prefers to circle the wagons and celebrate its survival each October in Colorado.

I briefly visited the RMAF in 2005 and 2009, but this year I decided to take in the whole show, from midday Friday until the last subwoofer boomed sometime late Sunday afternoon. My first stop in the Marriott lobby was the Colorado Audio Society's table, where a garrulous house restorer and avid stereo hobbyist named Rick Turner (“Society member number two”) walked me through the tale of his lifelong engagement with hi-fi, starting with a Silvertone record player in 1957. The Colorado Audio Society itself, which co-sponsors the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, was founded three decades ago and has about 100 active members, including a handful of women — “maybe three or four,” Turner said. Al Stiefel, a hi-fi distributor, gear designer, and CAS stalwart, launched the RMAF in 2004, but he died not long after the jam-packed 2008 show confirmed the event's preeminence and profitability. His wife, Marjorie Baumert, now runs it with the help of a corps of Colorado Audio Society volunteers and friends.

With local hi-fi dealers disappearing in droves, the RMAF is one of the best remaining ways to hear a wide range of new gear. The heart of the experience is a trek from one hotel room to the next, where tens of thousands of dollars worth of glowing components and looming speakers, hooked up with thick, snaking, overbuilt cables, are arrayed, altar-like, at the far end of the space. Walking down the hallways with muffled music leaking out of every door summoned up a Proustian re-imagining of my 1970s college dorm, with Springsteen and Boston replaced by lots and lots of acoustic jazz, often featuring female vocalists, from Ella to Norah Jones. Classical showpieces (“Trittico,” “The Pines of Rome”) are also popular.

It's an oft-cited truism is that a low-ceilinged hotel suite stripped of furniture, supplied with an overtaxed supply of AC power, and as crowded as a Marx Brothers stateroom can be a terrible place for a great hi-fi to get a fair audition. Exhibitors resort to acoustic room treatments and hulking power conditioners, yet it's surprising how many rooms full of dazzling, astronomically expensive components fail to come together in a coherent, musically satisfying way. But then, serendipitously, you find yourself in the middle of an epiphany, as an overwhelmingly convincing simulacrum of Nat King Cole or Johnny Cash or Avi Buffalo materializes before you in some dim recess of the Marriott, and you leave planning the bank robbery you'll have to pull off to bring that sound home. In rooms with gear from Musical Fidelity, PSB, Classic Audio, VAC Instruments and KingSound, Zu, Bamberg Audio, PS Audio, and deHavilland, I was transported.



Outside the listening rooms, the story of this year's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest traced the mood-swings and anxieties that buoy and beset the retro-futuristic world of high-end audio. Within, the RMAF is a burgeoning microcosm that mixes backward-looking analog antiquarianism with hopes for a hi-fi resurgence based on the promise of lossless and hi-res computer audio, on the development of newfangled home-server systems like Sonos and Sooloos, and on upbeat if vague notions of luring the lost generations of young music fans raised on MP3 back into the fold. (The preponderance of men over 50 at the show was impossible to miss.) A squadron of bloggers from Stereophile covered the hell out of the show's 400 exhibitors, spread across 180 rooms, and the magazine posted more than 150 brief online reports on new products and other offerings at the RMAF — “evidence, I hope, of a strong and growing community,” wrote Stephen Mejias, Stereophile's young-gun blogger.

Looking beyond the Audio Fest, however, such strenuous boosterism might be criticized as a slightly evasive strategy of enumerating every tree to avoid essaying any overview of the forest. Elsewhere, I heard strong doses of bracing realism. Several well-attended seminars at the RMAF took on the flavor of a support-group confessional as the macrocosmic facts of high-end audio's dire trend lines were confronted head-on. A how-to session devoted to “High-End Digital on a Budget” quickly veered into this darker territory. Several regional electronics chains have gone out of business (including MyerEmco in the D.C. area and Ken Crane in Los Angeles), and metropolitan areas that once had five to 10 audio retailers have few or none left. “Our cheese is being severely moved,” said David Solomon of Peachtree Audio.

Another session, “Are We There Yet?: The Past, Present, and Future of High-End Audio,” was even more brutal about hi-fi's “shrinking demographic” and “negative growth.” Phil Murray, the manager of e-commerce and marketing for ListenUp, a savvy and forward-looking Colorado retailer, noted that last year, headphone sales in the U.S. ($690 million) surpassed loudspeaker sales ($640 million) for the first time ever — a stark measure of the Apple-driven gadgetization of audio. Murray added that his own two kids, both in their early 20s, are representative of their peers in that they never spend time in their dad's sensational listening room. “People just don’t aspire to great sound,” he said. “I’ve got this great hi-fi. They don't care about it.”

Richard Schram, the CEO and president of Parasound, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of high-end audio gear used by many Hollywood studios and recording companies, was equally blunt. “Just walking around the show and looking at some of the spectacular equipment that's here,” he said, “it’s not equipment that the majority of the population would ever tolerate having in their homes, much less be able to afford. We've indulged in that. We've made ourselves a target of ridicule in many ways.... High-end audio has had a love-hate relationship with commerce.”

There was plenty of spinning vinyl and luminous vacuum-tube amplifiers at the RMAF, but the brightest inklings of futurity were components like Wadia's Series 9 Decoding Computer, PS Audio's PerfectWave DAC, Benchmark's DAC1 HDR, and Peachtree's Nova — all of them high-end bridges to fantastic sound quality via disembodied digital files that make a mockery of today's lossy MP3s. (High-resolution 24-bit/192 kHz files provide a degree of resolution and detail profoundly greater than standard 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio CDs.) Blackfire Research, a San Fransisco company, broke new ground by showing how to wirelessly stream this super high-res audio. Of course, such innovation still tends to come with a sobering price tag in a realm where “budget” often means a cool grand or higher, and a “bargain” could make a stockbroker blanch.

The room where the conundrums of contemporary high-end audio ” "handmade art vs. a computer chip,” as I heard one show-goer remark — seemed most acute was up in 9022, where Berkeley-based Magico displayed its Q5 speakers ($58,000 a pair) in a setting obsessively tweaked and refined by a range of no-holds-barred acoustic diagnostics gear. Solo piano via the Magicos gave the Steinway grand down in the lobby, played during several live recitals by Canadian virtuoso Robert Silverman, a run for its money. On Sunday morning I attended a demo in 9022 of Meridian's $7500 Sooloos Control 15 music server system, featuring a touch-screen tablet interface that lets you “swim” effortlessly through a 12,000-album collection and play it across an unlimited number of rooms. It was like a next-century dream of an iTunes portal to audiophile nirvana.

For now, it's a vision that has yet to find a realistic market iteration, but the prospect of somehow grabbing the attention of 179 million iTunes customers emerged as the only way forward at the RMAF. Lee Weiland, a digital cable designer at Locus Design Group, distilled it well at a seminar on “Embracing the Industry's Future.”

“The way the industry is going, pretty soon there's not going to be any vinyl, there's not going to be any CDs,” Weiland said. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years. This is the biggest opportunity for change I’ve ever seen. It is what it is. We all love vinyl, we all love CDs. But how long do we want to fight over the same 300 customers that are left in ten years? We just can’t do it. We've got to expand our base. We've got to get the young people who are interested in good sound and are interested in the new music, somehow we've got to infect them with the disease. Computer downloading and music playback from computer are the wave of the future.”

Or, as another attendee put it, “Everything that's all-analog is obsolete.”

This post was originally published on the Atlantic’s Technology website on November 15, 2010. Photograph courtesy of United Home Audio.

Paul Mawhinney, a retired Pittsburgh paper salesman and record-store proprietor with a lifelong mania for collecting records, owns a million vinyl albums and more than a million and a half singles. The Library of Congress did an inventory of his archive and concluded that only 17% of the music he owns that was released between 1948 and 1966 is available on CD. Various schemes have been undertaken to preserve or sell his records, including the establishment of a non-profit organization and an eBay sale, which produced a winning bid of $3 million that turned out to be fraudulent. Since this video was made two years ago, he still hasn't been able to find a buyer for his collection.

Despite his melancholy predicament, Mawhinney remains defiant about digital and eloquent about “the open sound that you get with a record, with the basses and the highs and the fullness in the middle.”

Above: The Archive, by Sean Dunne on Vimeo

Via Andrew Sullivan (“Death as Metamorphosis”), a previously unpublished interview in which John Updike talks about death in Vladimir Nabokov’s writing and says, “I take dying to be for a lepidopterist like him a kind of entry into immortality, just the way a butterfly on its pin becomes deathless, in a sense, and is preserved.”

I’m not sure whether the reassurance that Updike found in a lepidopterist’s metamorphic rather than terminal vision of death has much of a real basis in Nabokov’s work, but I’ve always found a very different kind of comfort regarding mortality in the writing of the Russian master, especially in this passage from the opening of Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence... But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

The first time I read this, I realized I’d never feared “the prenatal abyss” in the same way I instinctively dreaded the possibility of permanent extinction after this life. If there is a God, I thought, then the Creator who cared enough to bring me into being out of an eternal and untroubled preexistence might have something equally benign and purposeful in store after I’m dead. And it is Nabokov’s smiling imaginative eloquence, rather than the Gothic spookiness of that empty baby carriage, that has stayed with me.

My report from the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is online at the Atlantic's Technology website. I'll post it here in a few days.

Live in the studio with probably my favorite new band of 2010