Today, audiophilia can seem retrograde and even a bit pathetic. The historical exclusion of women and people of color from engineering roles in the hallowed halls of music production. The sonic dominance of shared domestic space through its male-coded technology (in contrast to television, often culturally positioned as a low-brow medium for kids and soap-opera watching housewives). Yes, that sounds a bit creepy, especially given American audiophilia’s documented historical association with wealthy, white patriarchy: The hi-fi system’s place of pride in the postwar bachelor pad or man cave, with its wet bar and mood lighting. To paraphrase Sontag, in place of hermeneutics, the audiophile obsesses and frets over an erotics of art. The audiophile answers Susan Sontag’s call to put sense over semiotics. This is why the value of a song is not exhausted when we think we’ve interpreted its meaning. Musical reproduction involves more than the capture of vibrations in one space and their recreation in another, more than the transmission of a message from point A to B. When audiophiles invest in 180-gram vinyl or a better digital-to-analog converter, they invest in faithfulness to people, and sensory intentions, further up the signal chain.
However, hints of the stakes of audiophilia can be found in fidelity’s primary meaning, of faithfulness to other people or to an ideal, not to mention its secondary meaning of sexual faithfulness. Like his would-be customers, Burnett is an audiophile, that is, “a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity (‘hi-fi’) sound reproduction.” The fidelity referred to here is a tertiary meaning of the word: “the degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced.” This hardly sounds like a worthy object of enthusiasm, or anxiety.
But more than anything - and as the company’s name suggests - the format is the newest response to an anxiety as old as the music recording industry itself: fidelity angst. Like music NFTs and the $2 million Wu-Tang one-off purchased by “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, Ionic Originals are meant to restore a sense of scarcity and value in a musical economy of digital abundance. Case in point: NeoFidelity’s first commercial offering, a rerecording of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” recently sold at auction for $1.7 million. Like Neil Young’s now-deceased PonoPlayer, the Ionic Original might be uncharitably characterized as a hi-fi medium created by and for high-wealth, old white dudes. The audiophile obsesses and frets over an erotics of art Burnett’s company, NeoFidelity, developed a new lacquer coating “something like 90 atoms thick,” to create what might be the ultimate analog format - a needle-wear resistant, CD-silent acetate said to exceed the warmth and liveliness of vinyl. Playing one only a few times wears away at the surface, degrading the sound. “I’ve heard that hundreds of times.” But acetates are exceedingly delicate. “Artists have always lamented that the vinyl copies of their records don’t sound as good as the acetates,” Burnett told reporter Clive Young. In contrast, the vinyl records consumers play are stamped copies of a copy of a copy of a copy of the acetate. Using a recording lathe, engineers cut the master signal into a blank disc in real time, producing an original artifact of the utmost fidelity. These are the fragile, one-of-a-kind discs that artists and mastering engineers listen to in the vinyl production process. In an interview with music production magazine Mix, Burnett clarified that the new format would be a modified “acetate” (also known as a “lacquer” or “dubplate”). This painting, however, has the additional quality of containing that music, which can be heard by putting a stylus into the spiral and spinning it. It is lacquer painted onto an aluminum disc, with a spiral etched into it by music. Not only is an Ionic Original the equivalent of a painting, it is a painting.
The reports tended to lean heavily on Burnett’s description in the press release, as it was far from clear what he was actually describing:Īn Ionic Original is the pinnacle of recorded sound.
The end of April saw a brief flurry of news articles on a mysterious new audio format called the Ionic Original, created by T Bone Burnett, the former Bob Dylan guitarist who rose to fame as the producer of contemporary Americana masterworks such as Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s Raising Sand and the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.
0 kommentar(er)
