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Romy the Cat
Boston, MA
Posts 10,485
Joined on 05-28-2004
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Post #:
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38
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Post ID:
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29839
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Reply to:
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29838
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A Review of a Book I Haven't Read.
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Thank you very much, Amir. I just published the review on this book and I do not know if Amazon will approve my flamboyant language, so I'm posting it below as well.
------------------ Review -------------------
This is probably the most ridiculous book review you have ever encountered. I am going to recommend a book I have not read. Not even opened.
You see, I have reached a point in my life when I stopped reading books and began writing them. So allow me to do what I apparently do best: express a strong opinion about something I am completely unfamiliar with.
Around twenty-five years ago, I began developing an idea proposed by a little-known Russian fellow, A. Polakov, which eventually became my article *About the Dead Points of Live Sound*. The phenomenon I was investigating was astonishing. In every listening room, there appeared to be certain very specific positions, measurable with millimeter precision, where placing loudspeakers produced profound changes in sound reproduction. A similar effect appeared when microphones were positioned at these points, revealing a remarkably different acoustic signature of the same room.
For years, I tried to find somebody who could give me a reasonable scientific explanation for what I had experienced practically. Nobody did.
A few years ago, however, I had an opportunity to speak with a gentleman named Stirling Trayle. And I encountered perhaps the most interesting brain I have ever met in the field of loudspeaker placement. His thinking impressed me enormously. Not merely its sophistication, but its methodological discipline, its extraordinary attention to the relationship between a loudspeaker and a listening room, and, most importantly, its remarkable freedom from the manufacturing ego that has contaminated so much of high-end audio.
I found his approach more intellectually compelling than the Wilson Audio Setup Procedure, the Sumiko Master Set, and many other methodologies familiar to me.
Now, here is my conclusion about the book Mr. Trayle has written with his collaborator, Todd Binnix. I have absolutely no idea what they wrote. Nevertheless, I believe that anybody seriously interested in loudspeaker placement should spend some time wandering around inside Stirling Trayle's brain.
I intend to do precisely that. Not immediately, of course. I am too busy writing my own books. But I would purchase this one and place it on a very particular bookshelf.
This is not an ordinary bookshelf. These are books I deeply revere. But what I seek is not merely the wisdom their authors left behind. I want to experience the moment that wisdom was born. The book is the trace. I want the discovery.
There sits Bjørn Kolbrek and Thomas Dunker's enormous *High Quality Horn Loudspeaker Systems*. Nearby are the three volumes of *The Feynman Lectures on Physics*. Carl Jung's *Red Book*. The Indian *Upanishads*. Lao Tzu's *Tao Te Ching*. The ancient writings that never entered the biblical canon. Nietzsche. Petrarch. And the ideas of my beloved Roger Penrose.
I say *ideas* deliberately. I have not read Penrose's technical books. I lack the mathematical equipment to engage his arguments at their proper level. But I have watched his interviews and lectures, returned to his thinking countless times, and found that almost every encounter leaves me with something new to write. His thinking hypnotizes me.
This is the company in which I would place *Precision Sound*.
And that brings me to its price. The book is currently listed on Amazon at **40% off its original price**. I find that discount philosophically offensive.
Somewhere in the machinery of modern commerce, there is an algorithm that regards this book as merchandise. If it is not selling quickly enough, lower the price. Stimulate demand. Move inventory. What a magnificent misunderstanding of what a book can be.
If I were advising Mr. Trayle and Mr. Binnix, I would tell them to maintain the original price. Or better still, increase it to three hundred dollars. I am perfectly serious.
This is not, in my view, a book intended to be purchased by the thousands, consumed, and forgotten. I suspect it contains ideas that may require an audiophile to spend years confronting everything he thought he knew about sound reproduction. And that is precisely why I want it.
I do not want another solution for placing loudspeakers. I have spent decades developing my own understanding of audio. I have reached a point where my most interesting questions are no longer entirely technical.
One of them became an episode in my first novel, *Yesterday Starts Tomorrow Morning*. Klaus, the old German audiophile, is an autobiographical character. He spends a lifetime pursuing sound reproduction with almost religious seriousness. And then, one evening, a damping pad moves half a centimeter. Half a centimeter!
The recorded performance has not changed. The singer has not changed. The electrical signal is not the essential question. Yet Klaus's experience of the performance changes so profoundly that his understanding of fidelity itself begins to collapse.
This is the problem that has fascinated me throughout my involvement with high-end audio. How can half a centimeter of movement change not merely what I hear, but what I believe I am hearing? And ultimately, what I believe high fidelity *is*?
For me, this becomes an epistemological question. Eventually, an ontological one. And, perhaps most unexpectedly, a Jungian one.
Because genuinely high-end audio—not the expensive bullshit that an industry built upon manufacturing and selling myths has taught us to worship—is ultimately concerned with the relationship between an external physical event and the human being experiencing it.
We do not merely position loudspeakers. We bring our expectations, convictions, memories, aesthetic judgments, and personal mythologies into a room, and then we move two wooden boxes around, occasionally by a fraction of an inch, hoping to discover something we did not know about ourselves.
I suspect Stirling Trayle understands something important about this peculiar activity. I cannot tell you whether his book explains it. I have not read the damn thing. But I know enough about the mind of one of its authors to want to find out.
And perhaps that is my real recommendation. Do not buy this book because I am promising that it will solve your loudspeaker problems. I cannot promise that.
Buy it because there are people whose thinking is worth encountering even before you know whether you agree with them. Stirling Trayle is, in my experience, one of those people.
So here it is: my enthusiastic recommendation of a book I have not read, about a subject I have spent much of my life trying to understand.
"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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