The Verdicts: First, the Panasonic SL-850 turntable: This turntable uses the first version of quadraphonic sound, CD-4, which means the turntable outputs four distinct, individual channels directly to 4 separate speakers. Though it’s a form of surround sound, in my test track, “Musicione” by The Guess Who, the differences between stereo and quadraphonic weren’t quite as obvious as, say, between stereo and a 5.1 surround sound mix. There’s very little of that gimmicky “moving sound” that flits between each channel that’s sometimes emphasised in 5.1, but there’s definitely a noticeable difference between quad and stereo.

In the chorus of the quad version of “Musicione,” each background vocal track gets its own channel, which is reduced to a mere two-way split in the sad stereo mix. Also in quad, there’s a treble/bass split between the front and rear, even going so far as to split the drum set components (high hat and snare in the front, floor tom and bass drum in the rear), while the left/right split is saved for the band’s two main instruments (piano left, guitar right). It’s pretty subtle, and no doubt some of the subtlety was exacerbated by the questionable quality of my speakers, but a stereo version of the same song definitely felt flat in comparison.

The turntable also features an automatic start and stop, a welcome addition, as well as the standard 33/45/78 RPM modes. It’s the only automatic turntable I’ve ever used—instead of lifting the needle and placing it on the record (crazy! I’ll go to the gym if I’m gonna work out, you know what I mean?), you just flip a switch and the Panasonic does it for you. My particular model is missing the centre pin that holds the record in place—in the past, I’ve filed down a wood pencil as a replacement, though the drill bit I found amongst my dad’s tools (pictured) works nicely as well.

The downsides to quadraphonic? The needle, technically called the “Shibata stylus,” is a specialised type. When the time comes for replacement, you can bet it’ll cost more and be harder to find than a standard needle. Plus, there are comparatively few quadraphonic records out there—my dad’s copy of The Who’s Quadrophenia was actually only in two channel. While the SL-850 plays stereo like a champ, you’re not buying it for mere two-channel audio.

The GE 4-Channel Receiver is an even more interesting beast. Its most striking feature is the built-in 8-track cassette player, though to my deep, deep disappointment, it refused to play the only two 8-tracks in my possession, a Motown compilation and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. No amount of NES-style blowing into the cassettes or the player would yield any sound, so I suppose it must be busted.

But the receiver itself is a powerhouse—it’s got both four-channel and simple stereo modes, a stylish AM/FM tuner, and a sweet balance joystick that lets you control which of the four channels (L/R front and back) gets the most emphasis. It was able to push my four speakers (a pair of giant Pioneer cabinets and a pair of slightly smaller Sonys, one of which was mysteriously and unsettlingly sticky) with a ton of power and pretty decent bass/treble control, thanks to a pair of sliders. Unfortunately, it’s packing only a single audio input, so it might require an external A/V switcher if I wanted to line in more than just the turntable.

The GE unit is also a handsome-looking deck, with wood paneling all around accompanied by a chrome and black plastic front. The AM/FM tuner lights up in fluorescent green and has this great squiggly grid design, and it’s very clear what every toggle and switch does. If it weren’t for the busted 8-track deck, it’d be a winner.

Turntable:
Quadraphonic audio recordings sound great

Plays stereo and quad perfectly

Automatic start/stop is a welcome feature

Rare needle could be expensive and/or difficult to replace

Not the best-looking turntable we’ve ever seen

Receiver:
Powerful, customizable sound (joystick especially is great)

Stylish design

Single input necessitates external A/V switcher

8-track player doesn’t work

Heavy as hell

Special thanks to my dad for hoarding all this ancient gear in our basement.

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.

We’re not sure how the music would be outputted—would there be a transmitter in the red sphere? It’s probably not worth worrying about that kind of minor issue as we’re pretty sure the entire idea is impossible, but it’s also creative and great to look at, and would almost certainly blow your parents’ minds. [Design Boom]

Artsick’s kit comes with a hands-only clock mechanism and a series of decals that you can use to set up your wall in any way you see fit. Naturally, it also allows you to customise the look on a whim. It’s like a functional, design-oriented magnetic poetry for the new millennium. [Artsick via Unplggd]

This is Spinning Vinyl, an application that changes the speed of an MP3 song as you twist an iPod touch. It works like a turntable, changing the speed depending on the revolutions-per-minute.

However, it will only work right in the iPod touch. According to its Theo Watson—its creator—only the curvature of the iPod touch second generation allows it to work right. I wish it could also scratch the album, like a real vinyl. Then I would buy it, if it ever gets released in the app store. [Spinning Vinyl via Hack a Day via Nerdcore]
best buy
Theodore Watson has created a program to play a song as if it’s in a turntable,

According to the New York Post, Best Buy is thinking about selling vinyl records again in their stores. I had to read that twice too. I would find “Nixon Returns From Grave” easier to believe.

The reason: Vinyl albums’ sales are growing. As much as 15 percent up in 2007 and a whooping 89% more in 2008. The 2009 forecast is better. The numbers are so good that Best Buy started a pilot program in 100 stores. The results were so good that the third largest music seller after iTunes and Wal-Mart is thinking about using as much as eight square feet in each of its 1,020 stores to sell vinyl records.

While sales of vinyl discs are not as big as CDs, the latter numbers have dropped 20%. Apparently, vinyl are becoming a cult object, with an audience seeking the appeal of the physical format and the special sound of analogue (which in the case of the classics, could be more attractive than the digital productions). The interest, although minimal considering the rest of the industry, is big enough that big labels are re-releasing old records in vinyl. One example: In September 2008 EMI started to a new line called “From the Capitol Vaults,” which included The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Band of Gypsies,” and Radiohead’s “OK Computer.” [New York Post]

For full resolution, click here.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that mass-produced recordings were available to the average person—the concept of buying music is amazingly new. (Or to some, ooooooold.) Just a century ago, the first records began to do for music what the Gutenberg press did for words. Before them, music was handed crudely from person to person; after, it could reach millions, untouched and unspoiled.

If we couldn’t record music, the Beatles would have never left Liverpool. By the same token the Jonas Brothers would have never left Georgia or Disney World or the Old Testament or wherever the hell they came from. Talk about progress! There may be no accounting for taste, but you can thank these reproducible formats for the very existence of the notion of pop music.

Listening Test: It’s music tech week at Gizmodo.

As a gift for my fifth birthday, my cousin Kylie dubbed five cassettes which would influence my taste in music forever: Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, Van Halen’s 5150, Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms, Icehouse’s Man of Colours and John Farnham’s Whispering Jack. But the first album I ever purchased with my own money is so embarrassing I actually contemplated lying to you all just to avoid admitting it – even to myself. That album was “In God We Trust” by Christian rock band Stryper. What’s worse is that I still have it.It was all a part of my fascination with hair metal at the time. Maybe I was making up for the fact that I grew up with a crew cut. Who knows? But the list of artists was as impressive as it was tragic: Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Def Leppard, Poison, Motley Crue, Skid Row… need I go on? I saw a TV advertisement for the Stryper album, and without knowing that they were Christian rock, decided that was the album I was going to spend my cash on.

The fascination, fortunately, didn’t extend beyond that album. Although I do remember nailing some wood together in the rough shape of a guitar when my age was still in single digits and painting it Stryper’s signature yellow and black. Sad, I know, but still one of the many happy memories I have of listening to hair bands in my youth. Hell, I still love listening to it when the mood strikes me, and the scary part is that I still know most of the words to the songs, even without hearing them for almost 20 years.

The record itself is still in pretty good condition - I haven’t played it (or any of my other vinyl recordings) in a long time because I don’t actually own a turntable. And why would I? I was part of the generation that moved from vinyl to cassette to CD, all within a matter of years.

And though the thought of hearing that familiar hiss and crackle of the Stryper album fills me with a mixture of fear and shame, the thought of throwing away my first album is even worse.

For Gizmodo’s week-long Listening Test (a tribute to all things audio), each writer will be sharing his/her first album. In other words, there will be many more to come.

Fremer, if you have yet to decipher this, is an audiophile of the highest calibre. Literally millions of dollars of premium audio equipment have passed through his listening room under review for Stereophile magazine, and he’s been obsessing about vinyl since he was four years old, memorising the labels of his parents’ 78s. A man who, when digital recording and reproduction methods began to surface culminating in the compact disc’s takeover as the predominant music format, became a figurehead for the vinyl superiority movement, staunchly advocating its greater tonal resolution over a CD’s 44.1 kHz max. (See this MTV clip for Fremer in action, circa 1993.)

In short, a species of human I had never known prior to hanging out with him in his New Jersey basement listening room last week, and a species, frankly, I was sceptical of in just about every possible way.

Upon getting picked up by Fremer at the train station near his home, my fears immediately began to feel all too real. It was but a minute or two into our car ride from the station that a rant on Walt Mossberg’s inferior review of the Airport Express, Apple’s music-streaming mini-router that Fremer and I both enjoy in our home systems, begins in earnest:

“If he’s not going to tell people how it sounds, then what’s the fucking point? Don’t step into my world, Walt!” And so on, referencing multiple emails of complaint he actually sent to Walt. I am definitely thinking “uh oh” at this point.

But then, settled into the lone leather chaise in Fremer’s basement audio temple, nestled right in the sweetspot of his $US65,000 Wilson MAXX3 speakers, I hear the needle drop on Air’s “Run” from Talkie Walkie. It’s a song I’ve never heard (kind of fell off Air after overusing Moon Safari considerably), but one that I’m now listening to all the time. Because, with all honesty, I have never heard anything like that song played on that stereo system at that moment. Ever.

The song ends, and after emerging from an opiate-like haze, I hear a hiss. And yes, while the record was playing, I heard a pop, a crackle or two. Isn’t this as high-end an audiophile system as they come? Shouldn’t the sound be of such purity so as to sustain life in lieu of water for days on end?

I mention this slight—very slight, but noticeable—hiss to Fremer, and it’s probably a frequency that 50 plus years of rocking have eliminated from his spectrum. He doesn’t even care. This is when I start to understand.

After hearing I’m a Bowie fan, Fremer drops into his near limitless stacks and spins a pressing of “Heroes” with part of the title track’s chorus in German. I’m giggling with pleasure at the frankly obscene level of detail I hear (Ich! Ich werde König!), but of course, I’m hearing the pops and crackles that a 30+ year-old record is likely to have. Shouldn’t a $US350,000 stereo system be completely free of such impurities?

“It’s like when you go to the symphony, and the old men are coughing—same thing,” Fremer says. Necessary impurities. Reminders of being in the real world.

We play my solid 256kbps VBR MP3 of “Heroes” off my iPod; it sounds like shit. Free of pops and crackles, yes, but completely lifeless, flat in every way. This is the detail that matters: Audiophiles are basically synesthesiacs. They “see” music in three-dimensional visual space. You close your eyes in Fremer’s chair, and you can perceive a detailed 3D matrix of sound, with each element occupying its own special space in the air. It’s crazy and I’ve never experienced anything like it.

It is within this 3D space where the audiophile lives and operates, and spends all his money. Fremer himself is the first to admit that it would only take $US3,000 to $US5,000 to build a system that will be deeply satisfying to most music fans. On a scale of 1 to 100 completely of my own devising, let’s put this system at around 85. Now, imagine that you’ve tasted 85, and you want to go higher; you want Bowie’s cries of kissing by the wall to inhabit the most perfect point in your system’s matrix, and Brian Ferry’s back-up fly girls on “Avalon” to flank him just beautifully. That, friends, is where you might end up paying hundreds of thousands.

Our little scale, unfortunately, is logarithmic, in that going from zero to 85 doesn’t take a lot of effort or money, but going from 98.6 to 99.1 by swapping out a $US2,600 AC power cable for a $US4,000 one becomes a justifiable end. We did exactly that, and I strained to hear any difference at all (more impressions of our test will follow later in the week), but to Fremer, the difference was abundantly clear—not necessarily better with the more expensive cable, but different, a warmer, fuller sound, as Fremer described it.

The point is, people like Fremer can not only hear the difference, they crave it. I walked into his listening room expecting to discern absolutely zero difference in the comparison tests we had planned, swapping out speaker cables that cost as much as a meal at the best restaurant in New York for another set that cost as much as a year of undergrad at Harvard. I actually did hear a tiny difference. But to people like Fremer, that tiny difference becomes a mind-boggling disparity, and it’s worth paying for if it means a few decimal points closer to perfection. Unfortunately, the logarithmic curve is asymptotic: There is no ceiling. Fremer will be the first to admit that this type of dragon chasing is not and should not be for everyone.

This obsession with tiny differences explains Fremer’s fevered defence of analogue music sources over digital. Two anecdotes from the past are particularly illuminative:

The first is his memories of rushing to the record store in 1979 to pick up Ry Cooder’s Bop ‘Til You Drop, the first mainstream rock release to be recorded using an all-digital process, which at the time was being lauded as the next big thing. But upon getting it home and dropping it into his high-end system, the results were not good:

“It made me feel horrible!” he remembers. Even though it was played on vinyl, Fremer could already detect some missing elements in the 3D audiophile space that just weren’t there. “And it’s not like I was a digiphobe at this point—I had no reason to be. I was as excited as anyone to hear this.”

The second was the first public playing of a compact disc, to a room full of expectant audiophiles a few years later. While they breathlessly applauded the first track played from the then refrigerator-sized device, Fremer was horrified. He heard the same flatness and lack of detail in the 3D audio world he loved to inhabit. “I felt…weird. My hands were shaking. All I could think, then, was WE’RE FUCKED!” A few days later, a new, custom-printed bumper sticker was slapped on Fremer’s car: “COMPACT DISCS SUCK.”

And thus began a long battle, and thankfully, it seems to have ended happily. Both with the advent of SACDs—which Fremer is a great fan of, proving that he’s not hung up on nostalgia; it’s all about sound resolution, maintaining all the peaks and valleys of recording—still a viable format among audio junkies, and the greater acceptance and continued life of vinyl, Fremer is a happy man these days. “I’m on top of the world right now. I set out to save vinyl, and we did it.”

Because the thing is, Fremer loves music first and foremost. The audiophile I had feared was one who cares far more about the overpriced gadgetry than the actual music. This is not who I ended up meeting. This man listens to music and makes sure it was recorded with the best fidelity, that the intents of the artist have been preserved. And thank God he does, because we certainly don’t.

I listen to most of my music on downloaded, compressed, lossy MP3s, and so do you. But even if you can’t hear the sound quality, we need someone like Fremer up on that wall, a preservationist of archival recordings and an ombudsman for new recordi
ng techniques, because one day you’ll want to hear it, and it’ll be there because of audiophiles.

These guardians in and outside of the recording industry ensure that, whether it’s in a movie theatre tomorrow or in your own home listening room on some far off future date, you’ll be able always get back to a recording that expresses every frequency, every ounce of warmth and life, of the original performance. Because if you can hear, it, if you ever get to live in that 3D space, you’ll be glad Fremer helped defend it.

Entries close 5pm next Monday (Feb 2, 2009) and winners will be announced on the Tuesday (Feb 3).

[T&Cs]

Previously, we told you about the LP2Flash turntable that converted your vinyl records, to MP3 files, onto a flash drive. Similarly—if CD’s aren’t your thing—what’s cool about the LP2CD player is that you can connect it to your computer using a simple USB cable, and transfer your music directly into iTunes. However, for about $US490, I’m sure some of you will stick to updating your music through torrents… shhh. [I Want One of Those]