Hiroyasu Kondo (Kondo/Audio Note Japan), um "alfaiate" do som

Part 1 (written early summer, 1999)

Particles and Wave Motion

Albert Einstein said that motion is energy. I believe that motion is sound. I am all the more convinced of my belief when I listen to the swelling mass of sound in the mildle of Wagner's Tannhauser overture. Especially so when listening to the same music performed by the great maestro, Arturo Toscanini at his last concert of April 4,1954. which sounds as if the particles of the sound were colliding with one another and whirling in a thunderous march. It seems to me that those particles made unimaginable movements. I can easily put myself in that scene where the 87-year-old maestro was giving everything he could to his farewell performance and the orchestra was responding to its fullest capacity.

Sound is said to be propagated as wave motion. This is only true in a large room with no obstruction. In reality, however, sound waves move in much more complicated way, colliding and jostling here and there, sometimes in a whirl. We audio engineers should try to visualize in our head how the sound waves are behaving, which cannot be explained by electrical theory. There seem to be still countless unknown factors challenging audio engineers. The more you think about audio, the deeper it appears to become.


Solemn Sound

Two hundred Zen monks begin prayer at five o'clock every morning at the Soji-ji, the head temple of Zen Buddhism. The monks sitting in the left and right files serenely recite sutra-chanting. What a solemn tone! This daily ritual invites people to the world of nirvana. What should I do if I am requested to express this solemnity with the sound reproduction equipment?

First off, I must think of how to collect the sound. According to the current recording method, a number of microphones would be placed in various locations like chessmen. But I am skeptical about this method, primarily because the more microphones are used, the more emphatically the original sound near the microphones is recorded, thus disturbing the sound wave harmony that most counts. Just imagine the noise emitted from a twin-engine plane. It may sound like "Brrr...", which is produced by subtle differences in frequency. Most musical instrumients or vocal congregations always produce "difference tone". It seems to me that this gentle trembling vibrates harmonics, further producing chords and as the result, a beautiful tone. If you want to produce a beautiful tone, you must first think of the mechanism in which it is produced.


Analog Sound Is Digital Sound

The analog disk does not always mean to have analog sound, nor the digital disk digital sound. To me the audio systems now available on market sound like digital even in their analog-processing stage. Each note sounds as sharp and acute as the square wave. It is Iike digital photo prints showing every detail of the object so clearty. Its first impression is superb and its resolution is of first rate, yet I wonder if this is the royal road to audio.

The kind of sound that I want to produce is such that its individual particles might have correlation. It is easy to produce so-caled "mellow" sound by choosing proper parts and circuits, but this "melow" property is tricky. It is a technique to gradate boundary lines. Vacuum tubes of 30 years ago happened to produce such a sound and this trend still continues. If any change ever occurred, it can be said that digital-like sound has been added. I cannot agree to this trend. I want to produce a sound in which its individual particles may radiate energy into the ambient space just like the sun and fuse into one. After all, I think I must go back to the stage of picking up sound.


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