Editorial - Tech troubles - and a fun competition!


I've been wrestling over the last few days with various ideas as to how we might tackle the multitude of new electronic devices that seem to be arriving ever faster on the market. A few years ago it was the iPod and not much else, but today we have all sorts of new gadgets, mobile and home-based, all of which people are using to play music and also as alternatives to their regular desktop or laptop computers and CD or DVD players.

About a year ago I bought myself a Samsung netbook computer. If you're not familiar with this kind of thing, it's like a smaller version of a laptop PC, complete with Windows 7, wi-fi reception, a half-decent keyboard and a smallish screen. There's no CD-ROM player but it'll happily play music and videos both from its internal player and via wi-fi or wired network. The latter means it'll not only hook up to my own home server for music and video, but it'll also let me listen to PADA online wherever I can find a suitable wi-fi connection.

The latter experience led me to change the shape, size and layout of the PADA player. It turned out that it was simply too tall for the new, smaller generation of netbook screens, where vertical resolution was chopped from a more usual 1024 pixels to a rather skinny 600. All too often this left vital controls stuck somewhere beyond the bottom of the screen, out of reach. So as well as having a useful device for my own daily use, it fed usefully into the way a part of Pristine Classical's website works.

Since then the Apple iPad has taken the world by storm, or so I'm told. Out here in rural France I've yet to see anyone using one, though I did manage a quick test of one in the Apple store in Bordeaux. But how many of Pristine's customers or visitors are arriving on our website on an iPad, I wonder? Those that do may well find it a pretty frustrating experience - all of our musical examples are supplied in MP3 format using Flash-based music players, and Apple have decreed that this type of online software will not run on their iPads (or iPhones), potentially leaving some visitors with a music site that plays no music.

Furthermore, as far as I can tell, there's no easy way to stream MP3 music via a little player widget of any kind using an iPad. I'm almost certainly wrong about this, but without an iPad to play with and test I'm not about to find out. Could we develop a version of PADA for iPad users? I don't know. If we could, would there be enough interest in it to make it worthwhile? Well unless I get an avalanche of mail following this editorial saying "yes please, I'd like PADA on my iPad" I don't really know.  Given that PADA is only a small part of our site, should I spend a lot of time and money redeveloping it for a tiny number of potential users?

Then I ask myself what to do about Android? If you're scratching your head wondering what I'm going on about now, I really don't blame you! Android is a new operating system that isn't Windows or Mac OSX, developed by Google and appearing on a zillion portable alternatives to Apple's iPads and iPhones right now, from companies you have heard of, like HP and Samsung, to new ones you may know nothing of, like HTC. I've never tried one of these and know nothing of how they work beyond what I've read - but I do know they're outselling Apple in some major markets. And I have no idea how Pristine's offerings come across on an Android device beyond a rather hazy belief that they're probably more welcoming than Apple to our kind of website. I guess (and hope) that something like PADA would work on an Android-powered tablet computer, but a bit like my experience with my netbook, I don't know whether we ought to be adjusting the whole interface to make it work any better, or if it's fine as it is, let alone whether any of our visitors are using Android to visit Pristine.

Elsewhere we have Logitech's Squeezebox and Philips' Streamium, amongst others - devices for the home that use wi-fi and/or hard drives as an alternative to CD playback. They can also double up as online players, and every so often I get an e-mail from someone asking whether they can use one of these with PADA. Usually I have to simply scratch my head and say, well probably not, but you almost certainly already know more about Device X than I do, and each one seems to have its own protocols and own ideas about how it should connect.

I'm still working on how we might figure out all of this kind of thing. I need to avoid spending a fortune on a device that is simply never going to work, or locking myself into a 24-month contract to use mobile services on a piece of technology that I'll use for a week or two. As a non-commuter I simply don't have the need for a smart-phone nor, I suspect, an iPad - my needs are already met with a very simple, cheap cell phone and the aforementioned netbook PC. If, on the other hand, I discovered that we had hundreds or thousands of frustrated users of these products who'd like our website to run better on them then I might find that spending hundreds to buy one, even if I only use it for a week, makes business sense.

But it is a costly business and, I fear, promises to be a very wasteful one - new gadgets are coming along so thick and fast it's almost impossible to keep up! We do have some ideas (I wonder whether "Win an (almost-new) iPad" might have more people enthusiastically reading this newsletter?), and I suspect I can't afford to ignore all of these innovations. It's just a matter of knowing which horses to back, so to speak: I don't want to end up with the 8-track cartridges and DCC players of the 21st century gathering dust here at Pristine testing HQ!


Ambient Stereo for MP3 downloads

As you may have noticed, towards the end of 2010 we started offering our 24-bit FLAC downloads in Ambient Stereo rather than mono. I received one complaint about this, but otherwise more people do seem to be exploring the 24-bit options, and I've had e-mails asking if and when our older recordings might appear in 24-bit Ambient Stereo, to which the reply is not right now, but possibly one day.

This week however an e-mail regarding the other end of the download spectrum, our MP3s, prompted some serious thinking. Until now all our MP3s have been mono only, unless they're true stereo. But one eminent musician wrote to me to complain that his Casals MP3 download sounded poor by comparison to the MP3 sample he'd downloaded from this newsletter last week - he felt somewhat "cheated" by this, and I think he had a point. (It's also not often that one receives an e-mail from a someone  who's actually played and studied with Casals either, something which perhaps made me sit up and pay proper attention!)

Anyway, as of this week's releases - barring a major outcry - our MP3s will now be in Ambient Stereo format instead of mono. As with our 24-bit FLACs, there's no current plan to make this retrospective. I'd also stress that we have no plans to withdraw straight mono (where applicable) as an option, though now it will be restricted to CD purchases, 16-bit FLAC purchases, and certain mono recordings where there is a specific reason not to offer Ambient Stereo (Mark Obert-Thorn allows the encoding of his LP transfers to Ambient Stereo but not his 78rpm transfers, for example).

In taking this decision I emphasise that I'm following customer demand - 16-bit Ambient Stereo FLAC has long outsold all our other download formats combined. People like it! Some curmudgeonly reviewers don't, but I suspect that this is often because they're unwilling to listen to it (one reviewer refused point blank and flicked the mono switch on his amplifier, not wished to be contaminated!) or prefer to spout their long-held prejudices against "fake stereo". I suspect that the vast majority of Ambient Stereo purchasers don't need me to tell them of the differences between our process and old-fashioned fake stereo - suffice to say that when I describe other releases of Heifetz's solo Bach as "vile" in the sleevenotes I'm thinking, amongst other things, of RCA's really vile fake stereo - and I can understand why it's been unwanted by so many in the past.

If you're unclear about Ambient Stereo, here's an explanatory paragraph I wrote recently for an Italian music reviews magazine which may help:

"Old-style fake stereo used a variety of techniques - some exceptionally crude, some slightly more clever, to 'smear' a mono signal across the stereo field. This usually involved a variety of filters - at the very simplest level, for example, one might hear most of the bass in one channel and most of the treble in the other; more advanced systems worked on similar principles, using a series of "comb" filters to put alternating frequency bands left and right, possibly with some added echo to try and smooth out the effect. The problem with this is its inherent unnaturalness - very few musical sounds are perceived as arriving at the ears in such an unfocussed, smeared manner. What Ambient Stereo does is to leave the primary source alone, positioned as with the original mono in the centre of the soundstage, whilst extracting from the audio signal just the ambience - the sound of the room if you like - and opening this into the stereo space, allowing the engineer control over the width, depth and balance of this space in relation to the direct signal. Thus Ambient Stereo retains the direct sound of an instrument or ensemble whilst offering a subtly multi-dimensional sense of the room or hall in which they were playing - the ambience becomes 'stereo' whilst the direct sound remains intact and faithful to the original mono recording. Furthermore, unlike fake stereo recordings, these recordings remain mono compatible - if you have a mono switch on your amplifier, then switching from stereo to mono will entirely cancel out the effect and return the listener to the mono original with no loss or phase cancellation as is almost always the case with fake stereo."

Ultimately I suppose it's all about what sounds best to you - I'm not about to force anyone to listen to our recordings in Ambient Stereo, but for me this is the most pleasant way of hearing them, and it seems a high proportion of our regular buyers think the same way. I hope those who chose our MP3s will be pleasantly surprised by what they get in new releases from this week on.


Competition - win a free download every week! (Possibly...)

It seems that almost every week a small error slips into these newsletters, as my sharper-eyed correspondents like to let me know! Last week the MP3 downloads were incorrectly titled, the previous week the wrong photo accompanied the PADA Exclusives selection, and so on...

Now I'd like to point out that none of these are deliberate! The newsletter is assembled at the end of what is usually a long day of website updates, note-writing, picture editing and so forth, and it has a habit of looking OK even when superficial slip-ups creep in. That's my excuse anyway.

So to make it a little more fun, if you spot a glaring error in one of these newsletters (spelling mistakes excluded) - and furthermore, if you're the first to e-mail me and tell me about it - I'll send you a free download of your choice.

Just send an e-mail with the title "Whoops - you did it again" to me at andrew@pristineaudio.com detailing the slip up, and the first e-mail to arrive pointing out any specific error will receive the download of your choice. Let me know what download you want in your e-mail and if you're the first you'll get it in your in-box within a few days.

I should point out that I don't intend to put any errors into this or any other  e-mail deliberately - but that won't mean they're not there! Good hunting - naturally there are no mistakes this week...


Andrew Rose, February 18th, 2011