About the detail
That is, about the importance of small things

I CAN BET that if one were to ask any audiophile what he or she associates Japan with in an audio context, he or she would say something like: “with accuracy,” ‘with precision’ or” with perfection.” For it is the case that the country has gone from being a pariah, copying electronics from the West, to very quickly becoming a leader in the development of modern technology, as well as one of the places where the most committed, most polished and most purist products associated with perfectionist audio have been created - both in terms of discs and devices. And while today a similar introduction could be attributed, for example, to Korea, Japan is still synonymous with “precision” and “perfection,” sharing this space with products developed in Switzerland.

“The PWN Dictionary of the Polish Language defines the word 'detail' as “a minor component of some matter, some event” or “a minor element of some thing.” “Minor” in the audio world, however, does not mean ‘unimportant’ and ‘negligible’. I'll say more - it is precisely this minor 'something', and it doesn't matter what we're talking about, that lies often at the root of success or is the cause of failure. Which, in the case of an audiophile, means only that either the sound is of high quality and he can experience the music in its fullness, or the equipment 'doesn't play', which completely deprives him of the pleasure of listening to it.

I write about this from time to time, and a particular effort to draw your attention to the importance of seemingly minor actions in audio was served by a series of three articles I once prepared: Micro-distortion. That is, we set up speakers (more → HERE), Micro-distortion. That is, it's time for electronics (more → HERE), and Micro-distortion. That is, time for cables (more → HERE). Nothing I shared with you at the time was new, nor was it invented by me. It was only up to me to collect these principles and relate them to practice.

But this is not always the case. On the Car Cosmetics forum - just what Google threw up for me - you'll find a passage about how “peculiarity is one of the symptoms of our disease - what makes us different from others.” One might add: distinguishes us from normals. After all, every industry has its perfectionist corner, and so does audio. We also celebrate particularism. At least if we want to be fair to the products we bought.

And this is not a disease or an aberration. Experience has shown that this is the only way to achieve something truly special (where 'detail' equals uniqueness), the only way to reach the limits of the basic components of an audio system. And there are no exceptions to this rule. Even if sometimes, but only sometimes, we manage to reach something in the first attempt, it is an exception. In addition, it shows that, however, there is something more there, which we do not perceive flooded by a euphoric stream of endorphins.

And it is no coincidence that in many areas it was the Japanese who came to unprecedented things. And I'm not talking about consumer electronics from the broad audio spectrum, although, after all, both Sony, and Sansui, and Pioneer, and Technics and many other popular brands of the time were excellent at what they did. I'm talking about masters like Kondo, 47 Labs, Miyajima Labs and others who took simple things to a level unattainable by others. Precisely thanks to attention to the smallest things, details. Something, that many other manufacturers don't even notice.

There is more to it than superficial detail, because one can approach it anyway. If one were to assume that an audio product has an architecture, both ideological - that is, an electrical scheme - and substantive - that is, what we see - one could echo something Janusz Sepioł said. He is an architect and art historian, politician, currently Chief Architect of the City of Krakow, and author of the essay Architecture and Morality. In it he says that architecture is an image of the world of values, a manifestation of a certain morality. He continues, “A synthetic formulation of the thesis of this type of literature could be: “we shape buildings, and they shape us” (p. 5).

Too grandiloquent? Too philosophical? Probably not, though. Although we are used to thinking of audio as something mundane, which is only a vehicle for the “real value”, i.e. music, the matter has a second bottom. Tons of volumes have been written about the inextricable connection between what we do and the world of real value, in addition to the many different fields related to the work of human hands. I won't repeat it, I'll just recapitulate: everything that surrounds us has an effect on us, so it's worthwhile for us to surround ourselves with good things (beautiful, but in the original sense).

Reference to architecture in this context is extremely handy for me. For one, it is a visual art, but also a technical one, and two, by extension, it has a lot to do with what goes on in perfectionist audio. With the feeling of beauty. Bogdan Frymorgen, a curator and publisher, author of photo albums and exhibitions, but also a sound engineer who worked in BBC studios for many years, and - this is how I read his memoirs - an audiophile, writes about this kind of experience: “I realized that it was God speaking to me through the needle of the turntable and in the overtime for the Mass” (Goldberg Variations, p. 20, sub. ed.).

So if the products of our hands affect us, how much more do products of dual use affect us, that is, not only having their own qualities, but also being a vehicle for something more. Like architecture, which is an expression of strength, power, transcendence, longings, dreams and so on. Therefore, perhaps we need to start treating mediocre audio products as defective? As something that does not meet the basic condition of the Vitruvian triad firmitas, utilitas, venustas (durability, utility, beauty). Am I being grandiloquent again? Let me repeat: I don't think so.

Has it never puzzled you that the vast majority of phono cartridge manufacturers come from Japan? And even those that list other places on the globe in their company address go for needles made there, and sometimes entire generators that are the basis of the cartridge? The phono cartridge is, after all, the perfect vehicle of the idea in question, where the end result depends on the smallest details. Every change in the parameters of the coil, the magnets, their placement, the material of the cantilever, the body, and even the electrical pins, affects the sound. The Japanese have mastered this skill perfectly precisely because of their attention to detail. The same is true of any audio device of your choice, although recognizing it is not always intuitive.

So is it still the case that if a product is inherently “underdeveloped,” it is a defective product? This question is just a bit pointless. It may not be mechanically translatable into our experience, but if we take everything I've written about at face value, it may turn out to be a key question. You don't need to invoke “big” figures for this, just focus on something that seems absolutely “transparent” (sorry, I couldn't resist using that word), for example, a Compact Disc case.

Measuring 142 x 125 x 10 mm and made on injection molding machines from polystyrene, it is the work of Peter Doodson, an employee of Philips Design. It consists of three pieces, with a non-transparent one in the middle, one that holds the disc, and with space for the cover, a back section with tray card, and a front section with a cover that slides into it. It was intended to be an archival packaging.

According to Robert Barry, author of the monograph Compact Disc, published by Bloomsbury in 2000, he was made aware of this by Fraçois Dierckx, who at the time of the CD format's inception was acting director of the audio department at Philips. As he says, it was one of the things the marketing department wanted to emphasize. As we read, the idea was that people with a large CD collection could easily read the artist and title from a wide enough “spine” (p. 119). And this, in turn, was supposed to distinguish the new and - supposedly - better medium from the “older” one, i.e. LPs with poorly readable titles on the spines.

Although it seems obvious to us today, finding the right form for the CD case was a huge challenge. In a history of this medium titled The history of the CD - The 'Jewel Case', which can be found on the official website of the Eindhoven-based manufacturer, we read that the problem was “consumer acceptance” and that while some designs initially looked promising, they ultimately proved useless, mainly because of problems with mass production (more → HERE).

I don't know if you have dealt with early CDs, back in 1982-83, but if you have, you know that they were more robust than later ones. In the early days, CD boxes weighed 100 grams, had thick walls and did not bend. As we read in the mentioned article, due to strong competition, manufacturers reduced its weight to 68 grams. And nowadays they are even lighter, and consequently their walls are even thinner.

As a result of these actions, the case, which was proudly named Jewel Case by its creators, easily cracked and scratched. Its impermanence, one might say - flimsiness, became synonymous with CD packaging as such. And it didn't even help that after the introduction of the DVD format, which required a different central gripping element, Philips decided to completely redesign the Jewel Case and called it the Super Jewel Box. The Super Jewel Box is now mainly used to sell SACD discs. These are the boxes that are larger in size and have rounded corners.

However, the problem with the CD box is even deeper. Arguably, I am no exception - a sizable portion of discs in plastic boxes arrive to me already damaged. Usually it's a scratch indicating a breakage of the front part, but even more often it's broken „teeth” that hold the disc in the middle of the case. Which shows that the designers did not foresee how often the disc would be removed from the box and how many years the CDs would be used. By the way, Wikipedia refers to the pieces of plastic holding the disc “teeth” or “lock”.

Initially all CD cases looked the same there, and they also had the same “teeth” holding the disc. They were quite wide and fit into the disc opening - I'm just looking at the original release of ABBA's The Visitors, one of the first two titles released on CD - there are eight of them in there. Over time, boxes appeared with a slightly different arrangement of teeth, smaller, connected by an additional rim and others. However, they shared the basic disadvantage of the first solution - they broke easily, and the disc had to be bent to pull it out.

Does this mean that the entire case was a design flawed by design from the beginning? That just such details uncovered its incompleteness? There's something to it, I think, at least if we take at face value what we wrote earlier about the relationship between the detail and the final result. This, by the way, also applies to the modification of the CD box, proposed in the mid-1990s by the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. label, and making it easier to remove the disc from the case.

A German forum dedicated to the work of Pink Floyd, aptly named Pink Floyd Forum, in a document entitled MFSL Releases in Japan, dedicated to the company's releases made in Japan, recalls that the mechanism was called Lift-Lock (or “lift system”) and that the company patented the solution. Instead of a center piece of the box into which the disc was “clipped,” it used a lever that, when opened, automatically lifted the disc from the tray, allowing the user to remove the disc by its edge. This mechanism also locked the disc when the box was closed.

But even this solution was not ideal. I have in my collection several discs released in this way, and they all share the same problem - the mechanism in question after some time begins to jam. The reason is the material from which it was made - a rather soft plastic. And this is due to the massiveness of this solution - you do not need to design the cover from scratch each time, and you can produce thousands of boxes. That is, it would be something like the “original sin” of the whole idea (mass production). Although it was a better solution than classic boxes it did not become popular and I do not know of any other company that would use it.

I reached for such a small music-related detail as a CD case to show you that everything matters. While it doesn't affect the sound, something we care about, it does affect how we feel and - secondarily - how we perceive music. It is part of the experience of listening to CDs and, we should add, SACDs. Like the never-solved method of unwrapping a CD from its foil, which doesn't work very well even when it uses a strip of stronger plastic to break off part of the packaging, the underdeveloped mechanism for securing the CD in the case indicates an unnamed problem.

Let's add that the medieval principle of pars pro toto (“part for the whole”), a rhetorical figure that involves replacing the whole with the name of its part or a description of the part and in place of the whole, is also part of the world I'm talking about - the world of values encapsulated even in the smallest detail. It assumed the ideological coherence of the whole premise and the support of its components. In audio it is similar, hence the details say a lot about the whole (or maybe even everything).

I'm not sure what the issue is with the CD case, but perhaps it's just that the marketing department had too much involvement in the creation of this format, in my opinion the best music consumer format ever. Maybe this problem is “sewn” into it. Finally, it is perhaps the case that it is our problem as an industry. For although forty-three years have passed since the Compact Disc format was announced, the perfectionist industry still has not found its solution. It's as if it has a blind spot in its place.

But it could also be about something else, which would tie in with the topic of this editorial and what I wrote about the relationship between object and subject: perhaps the thing is in the assumption of the “archive” function that I mentioned. Viewed in this way, the format broke with the utilitarian and at the same time aesthetic aspect of the LP cover. So it would be a change in the perception of the medium itself as well. And perhaps it was this “mistake” (neglect) that made the Japanese return to “cardboard” covers so readily and with such artistry.

It was there that the concept of a cover rendering in the smallest detail, along with the method of gluing (!) the first releases of a given title on vinyl was created. Called “mini LPs,” they are particularly desirable to music lovers, including audiophiles. Let me repeat: even those who had no idea of the motives behind the CD case seem to be disgusted by it. That's why, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the CD world is albums issued in the form of 7“ mini LPs, i.e. in cardboard covers having the size of a 7” single.

When thinking about this, however, let's remember that it's not about perfection. The point is about being honest. After all, even the Japanese celebrate imperfection. One of the most interesting manifestations of the country's art is Kintsugi (金継継ぎ), the art of repairing broken pottery by joining fragments together with gold. Gold highlights the uniqueness and beauty of the damage. That's why the presence of a plastic ring with teeth holding the disc on a cardboard circle in the 7” mini LP editions is such a smear of gold to me. ●

WOJCIECH PACUŁA
Chief editor