Finding your groove: getting into vinyl with Audio-Technica
I’d like to think that I could’ve been friends with the late Hideo Matsushita, founder of Japanese Hi-Fi powerhouse Audio-Technica. If I could, I’d travel back in time to 1960’s Tokyo, where a young Matsushita curated “vinyl listening sessions” at the Bridgestone Museum of Arts, exposing visitors to the sounds and possibilities of high end audio and the warmth of vinyl records. I imagine sitting with him in a mod coffee shop, listening to the stories of what he witnessed in those sessions, the conversations he had with visitors, and what ultimately motivated him to head back to his small apartment above a ramen restaurant and start an audio company of his own. In the histories I’ve read regarding AT’s humble beginnings, Matsushita’s motives seem clear. Produce high end audio at affordable prices, bringing audio excellence into spaces and to customers that simply didn’t have access to it before. His first two products, the AT-1 and AT-3 phono cartridges did exactly that, and...
Dec 6, 2023
Toro y Moi - So Many Details @3:33 All the instruments used in the song are playing at the same time with additional percussion and a boosted bassline. This is a great benchmark to test headphones' ability to articulate all frequencies with a very thick and almost overwhelming swell in the low frequencies. Most headphones fail this test and start to sound muddled. Great headphones are able to separate instruments without being distorted at moderate listening volume. This part of the song was poorly mixed, and if your headphones can resolve it, keep those headphones.
Herbert - The Audience This test is mostly subjective, but once it passes the first two tests above, I use this song to gauge the potential of how much I may be able to enjoy my new headphones. The majority of the song is monotone with no key changes. It just has a straight driving rhythm that psychologically, your brain syncs up to. At the instant the key changes at the bridge of the song, it evokes emotion. The emotion is hard to quantify, but if the headphones make me smile, it's doing something new or exciting that's different from my other headphones to a track that I've heard a million times before. It also says something about the experience with new headphones, if the headphones help get me through the first 3 minutes of the song that was composed to be drab.
Danger - 6.24 This track I use to gauge imaging fidelity. There's a lot going on with this track. There are plenty of effects, acoustic and digital percussion, synths, nuances that try the driver's resolution. The high frequencies in this track have a sparkle only a handful of headphones can render. It's a great track to check out how isolated your headphone's stereo separation is and how wide its sound stage is. Trivial but, this is also the track that helped me discover silver cables actually do make a difference, albeit not justified by their price.
Other tracks for burn-in: Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata Claude Debussy - Clair Delune Yoko Shimomura - Valse di Fantastica Anything that Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote Hanz Zimmer - Flight