Trumpeter’s Perspective: The Modern Audio Experience
The Modern Audio Experience:
The End of an Era, or a New Beginning?
By John-Thomas Burson
A small farmhouse-style building sits quietly in 1945 Wedemark, Germany. On the door, a sign from the United States Army displays a harsh notice stating any activities formerly taking place in the building must cease. A young German engineer, barely over 30, is undeterred by the placard. The innovation happening behind this door would set the course of engineering for decades to come.
Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, along with a team of six, created a small electronics company in this building, dubbed “Laboratorium Wennebostel.” Though Dr. Sennheiser passed in 2010, the now worldwide technology trendsetter employs thousands and reported annual returns in 2015 of over half a billion.
A Transitioning Germany
WWII-era Germany provided no shortage of highly trained and highly skilled engineers. Dr. Sennheiser and his contemporaries such as Georg Neumann were no exception. From an early age Sennheiser was fascinated by the radio, a passion which led him to pursue a Ph.D. at Berlin’s Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications. According to his 2010 New York Times obituary, Sennheiser landed a position sending coded radio transmissions for the German Army in the years between completing his education and when he founded his own company.
Years surrounding the War ushered in numerous German electronics companies, with Neumann’s founding in 1928, Sennheiser in 1945, and Schoeps in 1948. Neumann and Sennheiser are both presently owned by the Sennheiser Group.
Sennheiser found initial success as a company by selling a voltmeter to the Berlin-based electronics giant, Siemens. But it was in the 1950s that the company began a series of truly revolutionary products. Fritz Sennheiser is credited for inventing the shotgun microphone, a piece of equipment nearly every film production uses today. Additionally, Sennheiser was the first to remove the backplate on headphones, leaving an “open screen” on each side which eliminates the standing wave inherent in closed-back headphones. While headphones like these cannot be used within a musician’s recording space due to sound bleeding into live microphones, they can be used for more precise mixing and editing while using headphones. Most professional sound engineers at that time opted to use a series of stereo speakers arranged in a workspace, but the open-back headphones offered an equally authentic aural representation, giving rise to editors using headphones over speakers in the editing room.
The Unseen Innovation
Sennheiser, along with German and American contemporaries, was extensively using vacuum tube technology at the time. Use of tubes in radio and industrial processes was common beginning around the turn of the century. Today, few remnants of this era remain available to the consumer, with the exception of the microwave, high power broadcast transmitters, and some vintage equipment.
The vacuum tube functioned as an integral piece within amplifiers and microphones. With the dawn of the digital age, most tubes were replaced with solid-state circuitry, leading to products which could more easily reach the mass market. Regardless, Sennheiser, Neumann, and Schoeps were all producing ribbon microphones with vacuum tubes within amplifiers. The essential goal in this analog system was to limit distortion. Distortion, even in modern digital systems, is amplified and thus recorded, especially when it originates deep within a system (like within the microphone).
In the United States, RCA had a vested interest in developing similar high-quality technology. Using vacuum tubes, the company produced a series of microphones in the 1950s specifically designed for the film industry in California. The KU-3, or the “Grammy Maker” as some sound engineers affectionately call it, was designed and built in California with, of course, all organic materials including the rubber bands on its shock mount. The clarity in this microphone became a favorite for music legends, notably Miles Davis, Barbra Streisand, and numerous other CBS, MGM, and RCA Records artists. Leonard Bernstein’s Mass and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, recorded at 30th Street Records, both used this microphone.
I have recorded trumpet extensively on a number of these microphones, notably on the RCA KU-3 microphone. Within a scoring stage, a matched pair of Schoeps tube microphones combined with various Neumann microphones may capture the true acoustics of the space. One engineer spoke with me about using almost entirely vacuum tube analog equipment to limit distortion throughout the system. When distortion is low, one may listen to the recording at a great decibel level without risk of hearing loss. This phenomenon may be demonstrated when a microphone is held to a PA speaker; the feedback loop almost immediately creates a harmful level of distortion which causes one to react with alarm. Without this distortion on a smaller scale, the quality is maintained all the way from recording booth to home listener.
Did Digital Kill the Age of Tubes?
Digital suddenly presented the possibility of copying and sending files thousands of times, in contrast to tape which slowly distorts when “copies of copies” are made (as Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” shows). But digital depends on the speed of processors. One sound engineer I work with still records to tape. The risk of interference or equipment malfunction is much higher when comparing an analog recording system to modern digital equipment, the latter in which most Los Angeles studios use without hesitation.
But the benefit of using solely analog equipment can be huge. One of my colleagues in a recent project notes that digital on a large scale has yet to surpass analog. Evidence of this may be found in major feature films choosing to record to tape and photographers (like Platon) continuing to use film. A photograph, for example, may need to be enlarged many times beyond the true size of the negative. If there is pixelation as there is in digital, there are limits. But enlarging a piece of film only reveals blurred bits of light when zooming in— no square pixels. The same is true when listening to a piece of tape.
Major electronics companies began retiring vacuum tubes for various reasons, but most notably due to the difficulties of mass production that the market demanded. A solid-state amplifier or music player (like an iPod) can be reproduced millions of times with small margins of error, especially when digital files, with no duplication limit, may be provided by CD or downloaded directly onto the device. Analog tape and equipment is extremely susceptible to interference, however. Power supplies and magnets easily cause distortion, especially with sub-par cables which poorly isolate electric charge (one company, Cardas, produces high-end cables which attempt to block all electromagnetic interference from outside the cable).
There’s also a more practical reason vacuum tubes fell out of most mass produced audio equipment. Tubes, like incandescent light bulbs, contain filaments which are extremely fragile. When heated, notably when heated indirectly, the tubes require time to heat up and cool down. Moving immediately after use can destroy them. In short, a high quality tube amplifier cannot be moved around like one might do with an iPod or any other digital interface. Another downside pertains to energy lost within the system; the tubes emit far more heat (energy) than is actually used to power the circuit (at times, up to 80 percent of power is lost as heat).
Looking Forward
Numerous studios and artists cling to recording with tube microphones. But in the modern market, finding such equipment is difficult and expensive. Recording engineers depend on vintage equipment which is quickly losing life. In a recent project, the microphones recording my trumpet are from the 1950s, where they were used to record to tape.
The listening experience with tubes today is perhaps more attainable— to a point. So-called “audiophiles” collect both vintage and custom amplifiers and headphones, built with technology from over 70 years ago. Beautifully, this equipment might be used to listen to recordings from the vacuum tube era, bringing back the studio-to-home experience that once was normal before mass-market iPods and CD players.
Achieving a high fidelity recording and listening experience remains a priority for companies like Sennheiser, but regrettably having such a focus prevents their products from becoming available to most. Lack of scalable production quantities inflates cost. Other companies, like Bose and Shure, tend to make minor sacrifices in quality in order to reach more affordability in the market. While I was completing my research for this piece, Shure announced it will no longer carry phono equipment— putting perhaps another nail in the coffin of early recording technology.
This isn’t to say that phenomenal listening isn’t possible. One of Sennheiser’s flagship products was the Orpheus. The Orpheus ran in limited-production and included a tube amplifier and open-back headphones. The first edition Orpheus, released decades ago, provided a few lucky owners with a listening system flaunting very high fidelity. In 2015, just a few years after Dr. Fritz Sennheiser’s passing, the company unveiled a second edition Orpheus, now made with the same style of vacuum tubes from the 1950s. The electrostatic headphones feature a vaporized platinum transducer, offering more clarity and frequency response than what is normally possible with copper diaphragm dynamic headphones. While Sennheiser is not limiting the number of units shipped, most people will never touch the Orpheus due to the $50,000 pricetag. And yes, that’s just for one pair of headphones and an amplifier.
Perhaps the mass market did kill high quality audio. It’s not that the modern customer isn’t demanding the best. They are. But they are also demanding quality immediately, at reduced cost, and compact enough to travel. Bose, “Beats by Dr. Dre,” and Shure find huge success reaching the millennial user who seems to unapologetically avoid any product which is stationary or isn’t readily available.
I believe the best years of great music are yet to come, but one must wait for a cultural shift back to loving the full listening experience, from musician to home.
References
Editors. “AES Presents Prof. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser with Gold Medal Award.” Mixonline, 15 May 2002, www.mixonline.com/recording/aes-presents-prof-dr-fritz-sennheiser-gold-medal-award-375005.
Fox, Margalit. “Fritz Sennheiser, 98, Electronics Executive, Dies.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 May 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/technology/26sennheiser.html.
Linus Tech, director. Sennheiser Orpheus $50,000 Headphones. YouTube, Linus Tech Reviews, Jan. 2016.
NAMM. “Professor Fritz Sennheiser.” NAMM.org, 14 July 2005, www.namm.org/library/oral-history/professor-fritz-sennheiser.
