Society of Sound favourite, Full Time Hobby, have a vinyl sale in their online shop. Everything from White Denim and School of Seven Bells to Malcolm Middleton and The Accidental. All albums £4.00 and all orders receive a lucky dip 7″ test pressing from their roster. What’s not to like…

Wu-Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Music On Vinyl/RCA

LP

By Paul Rigby

During the mid-90s, it seemed that hip hop had already reached a pivotal moment in its history as Dr Dre’s G-funk made its mark but then the Wu-Tang Clan appeared on the scene. Their entry into the music business had the insidious air of a well planned strategic plan. Falling from no-where as a collective force of nine individual MCs, almost like a mutual support group akin to the AA (“Hello, my name is Ghostface Killah…and I’m an MC [sounds of supportive applause]), the Wu-Tang take on the music business was to make as big a splash as possible with a superb album (check), then split up and make individual albums (check), then make as much money as possible (check…and mate).

Like all the best and most talented of creative artists, the Wu-Tang collective saw themselves as multi-faceted individuals with the potential to apply themselves in varying ways. Hence, each project demanded a new pseudonym. However, the most familiar names for the group included:

RZA, GZA, Ol’Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Raekwon the Chef, the aforementioned Ghostface Killah, U-God, Inspectah Deck, and Masta Killah.

The link, the spindle around which the black wax outfit rotated, the one man who held the creative force together, was RZA. Not only is his work on this album strong, it’s his production values which dominate Enter The Wu-Tang. In fact, it’s his production values that ooze out of most of the spin-off, solo projects, adding strength to his credentials as a productive force. He gave this album, which was released in 1993, an unreal yet threatening air. At the same time, however, there is plenty of space, a restricted minimalist take on the genre, that lets the song breath. Variety is the essence of the album packed, as it is, with martial arts references, pop culture, lots of violence and even more humour.

Yet, when it was released, it was not the big splash that the collective expected. It took a while to take off but, once it did, the album spread throughout the hip hop community like a virus, influencing every single artist to come. In fact, you can hear the Clan sound in every contemporary hip hop release, a sound that’s infused with the Wu-Tang collective.

Stand-out track: Protect Ya Neck

This was the very first single release by the Clan which brought so much underground attention and major record labels sniffing around. It’s full of energy, verve and passion with a bare production that is dominated by a soft-edged pulsing bass. But it’s your speaker’s ability to separate the vocal melange that will dominate this track in hi-fi terms.

Stand-out track: C.R.E.A.M.

C.R.E.A.M., like many other tracks on this album, is dominated by the vocal message – in this case a lament to poverty. This is not about guitar solos or complex drum fills, it’s all about the spoken word and so midrange performance will be paramount if your speaker is to get the best from this track.

Tracklisting

Bring da Ruckus  

Shame on a Nigga

Clan in da Front

Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber  

Can It Be All So Simple

Protect Ya Neck

Da Mystery of Chessboxin’

Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit

C.R.E.A.M.

Method Man  

Tearz  

Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber – Part II

Conclusion

The recordings from the first Accidental Powercut gig in July are now available. Full members and P5 product registrants will be able to download all the tracks using the Download Manager or you can sign up for a free trial and download one track.

Accidental Powercut is a series of  gigs which are being recorded binaurally allowing the atmosphere of the music to be recorded for perfect playback on headphones. The recordings will be donated to the audio collection at the British Library.

You can find out more about the history of binaural recording here.

The artists involved in the first concert were Jono McCleery:

“the binaural recordings definitely bring the listener a step closer to experiencing a live performance without being there. It’s nice to get a greater feel for the atmosphere as well as the performance.”

Polarbear:

“walkin’ through London at night with the binaural recording in my phones I was transported to the gig, not in my memory but to the live experience.”

Speakers Corner Quartet:

“I’m currently listening to the binaural recordings, some amazing stuff…really does sound stunning….proper dope vibes”

GetCape.WearCape.Fly:

The second Accidental Powercut gig will be on Thursday, August 5th and will feature Sound of Rum, Ghostpoet and Fiona Bevan

‘Binaural’ simply means ‘relating to two ears’, and it’s only an accident of history that we don’t use the word instead of ‘stereo’ (which actually means ‘solid’).

As it is, binaural recordings are basically recordings made specifically for listening to on headphones rather than loudspeakers.

There’s one very important difference between headphones and speakers: the left earpiece of a pair of headphones is only audible to the left ear, whereas the left loudspeaker of a conventional stereo pair is audible to both ears, with a slight time delay and loudness difference between them. Good, convincing stereo sound is possible in both cases but for optimal results the recording must have been made, or mastered, specifically for one of the other.

The basic concept of binaural is simplicity itself: to capture the sounds that should be heard by the left ear, put a microphone where the left ear would be in the performing/recording space, then do the same for the right ear. With a few nips and tucks (baffles, or a dummy head, between the microphones), that’s how binaural recordings have always been made. It’s an obvious idea and it was first used as far back as 1881, just about the time when the concept of sound recording was dreamed up and only five years after the first electrical transmission of a sound signal (the first telephone was demonstrated experimentally in 1876).

In fact the inspiration for this first stereo sound experiment appears to have been the stereoscope, the then-popular trick of printing side-by-side photographs taken with cameras separated like two eyes. This binaural transmission was demonstrated by inventor Clement Ader, who used pairs of microphones in front of the stage of the Paris Opera, sending signals to left and right earpieces of listeners elsewhere in the city. Note ‘pairs’, plural: this was in the days of single-point-to-single-point telephone, before multicasting. In fact the electronic amplifier hadn’t yet been invented, so a telephone circuit consisted of a battery, a carbon microphone, an electromagnetic earpiece, and a lot of wire. Having a telephone was a very exclusive luxury at that time: having two (left and right) made the whole thing effectively a millionaire’s plaything, but it proved the point. There’s no evidence that anyone tried, or even thought of trying, to record these signals for posterity.

Not surprisingly, binaural didn’t catch on at once. The telephone remains to this day resolutely mono, and recordings were invariably mono for many decades. There were, however, some early experiments with binaural radio transmission. In the 1920s, a few American radio stations set up crude but effective systems with each microphone feeding a separate AM transmitter, each tuned to different frequencies. The listener at home needed two receivers, one tuned to each radio frequency, with one earpiece fed from each. Loudspeakers were in their infancy at this time and most people still used earpieces, so the concept of headphone stereo was an easy one to grasp.

The most famous name in stereo history is certainly that of Alan Dower Blumlein, the man who is credited with ‘inventing stereo’. In fact his original patent on the subject, rather blandly titled ‘Improvements in and relating to Sound-transmission, Sound-recording and Sound-reproducing Systems’, acknowledges as a well-known fact the possibility of conveying a stereo soundstage using what we now call binaural techniques. Rather confusingly, he uses ‘binaural’ in the way we now use ‘stereo’, that is, meaning any two-channel system that gives an impression of lateral sound placement. But the actual invention he describes is loudspeaker stereo, the system most often used ever since and which replaced true binaural as the default two-channel system. Ironically, his original method of obtaining loudspeaker stereo was to process the two channels of a binaural microphone system, and indeed one can convert between binaural (headphone) and loudspeaker stereo with a suitable signal processing chain.

Although Blumlein showed conclusively that the correct way to record stereo for loudspeaker replay was using either ‘coincident’ (realistically, very close) directional microphones or head-spaced microphones with suitable signal processing, plenty of engineers over the years have used other techniques that are more or less closely related to binaural.

Recordings made deliberately for binaural usually use omnidirection microphones, which pick up sound equally from any direction, though obviously if these are mounted in a dummy head their spatial response is modified a bit.

The frustrating thing for the lover of binaural – which, once heard in full flow, is a very addictive thing – is that it’s usually impossible to know in advance which recordings were made with suitable microphone techniques. Practically no LPs or CDs give information on microphone placement, unless they happen to include a session photograph of sufficient clarity, and even knowing the name of the recording engineer or producer doesn’t help because most recording folks have plenty of different tricks to choose from depending on recording venue, how many musicians are in the recording, and what mood they’re in as they set up for the session.

Just occasionally, recordings are actively trumpeted as binaural – recordings and, perhaps more often, radio broadcasts. The most consistent advocated of binaural on the airwaves has been American broadcaster John Sunier, who from 1985 until 1998 hosted a programme called ‘Audiophile Audition’ on national public radio. A web-based magazine grew out of the programme and continues to fly the flag for binaural, though its remit is very much wider than that. Another website, The Binaural Source,  features more information and even some demos, though as they are all MP3 their quality is somewhat limited.

The BBC has also broadcast binaural material, rather inconsistently. Broadcasters are generally reluctant to use any stereo technique other than straight ‘intensity stereo’ (i.e. Blumlein coincident-pair, or panpot stereo) because so many people listen in mono and straight downmixing of binaural can give some rather odd ‘comb filter’ effects, but Radio 4 has an honourable history of binaural drama, going back certainly to the 1970s when some Sherlock Holmes-based dramas were put out in binaural. A noted recent success was the drama ‘The Dark House’, which was broadcast in 2007, and the technique continues to be used for special projects.

Most of the above assumes simple microphone techniques, basically a pair of microphones, one per channel. But what about the recordings – the vast majority from the last 40 years – which have been made with numerous microphones either recorded to multitrack and mixed subsequently or mixed down ‘live’? It would be perfectly possible to mix these for binaural listening but it’s practically never done. Conventional ‘panpot’ stereo mixing gives perfect Blumlein-style stereo which is not particularly well suited to headphone listening. Yes another reason to hate multimic recordings?

When all’s said and done, it can be perfectly pleasant, and often surprisingly convincing, to listen to Blumlein stereo on headphones, and indeed binaural recordings on loudspeakers. The real thrill comes when one hears a well-made binaural recording over good headphones: now that’s imaging!

Bowers & Wilkins is attending Vintage at Goodwood, and would love for you to join us. Together with the world-famous Abbey Road Studios, we are representing the very best that Britain has to offer in terms of sound recording and reproduction.

This innovative festival of music, design and fashion celebrates all that is great about British popular culture. The festival takes place in the wonderful surroundings of the Goodwood Estate on the 13, 14, 15^th of August.

To mark the event, we are extremely happy to be able to offer you the chance to win tickets to the festival. First prize is a glamorous Hotel Bell Tent for four people for the festival weekend, while five runners up can win a pair of tickets for a day of their choice.

To enter, simply post a comment below telling us your favourite decade for British music and why. And we will pick the winners from our favourite answers.

This competition is now closed, and the winners have been notified by email. Thank you to everyone who entered.

Since its launch in October 2001, the Apple iPod has been responsible for a revolution in the way we enjoy music – and that’s not hyperbole. Where our portable music was once limited by how many CDs, cassettes or MiniDiscs we could carry around with, the iPod’s huge amount of built-in storage meant that you could walk around with thousands of songs in your pocket.
Maybe even your entire music collection.

Today’s iPods offer up to 160GB of storage, which Apple claims is enough for 40,000 songs in 128kbps AAC format. And the fact that space is so cheap (the 160GB iPod classic currently costs a reasonable £193) means that, should you want to load an iPod with higher quality digital music, you can still fit a huge amount of audiophile grade songs on a relatively affordable device.

So why not rip your music collection as large, high quality files and fill your iPod with a huge library of great-sounding music? We’ve put together a guide to getting the best sound out of your iPod, so read on for all you need to know.

The first thing you need to consider is which type of iPod you’ll be using. Apple’s current range starts with the tiny iPod shuffle (from £46), which certainly isn’t aimed at the audiophile crowd: with just 2GB or 4GB of storage space available, it lacks the sort of capacity you need for large music files – you can cram in about 1,000 128kbps AAC tracks, but only a relative handful of AIFF, WAV or Apple Lossless files (more on these later). There’s also no LCD display, which makes picking out your favourite tunes tricky. It’s ideal for joggers, perhaps, but not much use for the discerning music aficionado on the move.

Next in the range is the iPod nano (from £118), Apple’s pocket-friendly, video camera equipped mini model. While it features a very crisp screen for browsing your collection and playlists, its 8GB and 16GB capacities may still prove a touch restrictive for the audiophile listener.

Then there’s the iPod touch (from £153), available in 8GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities. The crisp 3.5-inch touchscreen with its CoverFlow interface is great for browsing through your record collection at the flick of a finger, and the larger capacity models have enough space for a decent number of lossless or uncompressed music files. And while not necessarily related to music listening, the touch’s ability to run software from the iTunes App Store means you can use it for a huge host of other purposes.

So the touch is a fine choice, but it’s the iPod classic (£193) that’s the best fit for audiophiles. While it lacks the touchscreen and app capabilities of the iPod touch, it has one thing the touch can’t deliver: a cavernous 160GB hard disk drive. That’s a huge amount of room, even if your music collection is ripped solely as AIFF, Apple Lossless or WAV files.

Finally we should mention the iPhone, which features an iPod function and, essentially, works just like an iPod touch. It comes in 16GB and 32GB capacities.

Easy wins – simple ways to improve your iPod’s audio performance

When it comes to improving the sound quality you get from your iPod, there are a number of simple (but not necessarily cheap) ways to get started.

Firstly (and we think this is a real no brainer): invest in a better set of headphones. The cheap, plasticky headphones bundled with iPods lack the dynamics and imaging to do lossless music justice, so a pair of high quality in-ear or on-ear ‘phones is a must.

Even an affordable pair of earbuds will offer a noticeable boost in sound quality over the standard Apple in-ear headphones, but going further and hooking up a premium pair of “ear goggles”, such as Bowers & Wilkins’ own P5 will offer a listening experience fit to impress even the most discerning pair of ears.

If you’re listening at home, a similar rule applies to your hi-fi. If you have a good quality hi-fi system already set up in your living room (and the fact that you’re reading this suggests you most likely have), you can either connect the iPod to it via a standard stereo audio cable or splash out on a standalone docking station. The latter usually connects to your hi-fi’s stereo phono inputs, but some hi-fi makers fit their amplifiers with proprietary digital inputs for their own (optional) iPod docks – this way, your amp is fed a pure digital signal direct from the iPod and that should mean higher quality sound.

Alternatively, if you’re looking to dock your iPod to an all-in-one solution, there are a wide range of speaker dock models available. The majority of the cheaper models, while handy for casual listening, lack the power and precision to really impress. However, in recent years we’ve seen the emergence of a number of top class speaker docks aimed at the more demanding music fan. These models, including the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin boast powerful drivers, subwoofers and compact but capable amplifiers, allowing them to deliver sound that’s nuanced, textured and also powerful enough to fill a room.

The compact nature of speaker docks means that they can struggle to provide the clear stereo imaging you might expect from a “proper” hi-fi, but that’s a trade-off it could be worth making for the sake of simplicity and user-friendliness – and even the pricier speaker docks should work out significantly cheaper than a good quality hi-fi consisting of separates.

Finally, one straightforward way to ensure superior sound quality is to rip your CDs into iTunes in a different format to the highly compressed likes of MP3 and AAC. iTunes offers three options if you decide to go down this route: AIFF; Apple Lossless; and WAV. There are a few differences between the three, but all offer sound quality that is essentially indistinguishable from the original CD source.

Those codecs, and how to use them

AIFF

Audio Interchange File Format was co-developed by Apple, and stores audio data in an uncompressed state. It uses a lot of data (around 10MB per minute of music), but isn’t at all lossy – i.e. none of the original audio data is lost in the importing process.

Apple Lossless

Apple Lossless is a compressed but lossless MP4 format. Apple claims it requires around half the storage space of an equivalent uncompressed file, making it ideal for iPods with less storage – the nano or touch, for example.

WAV

Short for WaveForm Audio File Format, WAV is an uncompressed format fairly similar to AIFF, although it was developed by Apple’s great rival Microsoft. Like AIFF, the files it produces are theoretically indistinguishable from the original CD. The only real advantage WAV holds over AIFF is that it’s compatible with more products (outside of iPods, with which both work perfectly).

To make the most of these improved codecs, it’s imperative when importing your CDs into iTunes you take a few steps beforehand to ensure the music is ripped at the highest possible quality. Open up the iTunes preferences window and select “Import Settings”. After choosing your preferred format, tick the “Use error correction when reading Audio CDs” box: this makes importing take a little longer, but also means you won’t get any glitches (caused by scratches on CDs) affecting the imported files. You should also open the “Playback” tab and uncheck the “sound enhancer” and “Sound Check” boxes, as these alter your music from the original files to “widen” the stereo effect and normalise the volume respectively – things that music purists would do well to avoid.

What about FLAC?

You may remember our recent blog about FLAC (aka the Free Lossless Audio Codec), which can come in superb high quality 24-bit form – actually closer to the studio master than 16-bit CD. 24-bit FLAC is the highest quality format in which we offer music downloads to our Society of Sound members, but sadly older iPods are not able to play back 24-bit files, and no iPods can play 24-bit files with a sampling rate of over 48k.

In order to play these files on your iPod you’ll need to convert them to Apple Lossless using an outside program such as Max for Mac OS X or dBpoweramp for Windows, then importing them into iTunes. Using this won’t lose you too much discernible audio quality, and will allow you to play your FLAC files on your iPod, but we’re still hoping for a ‘proper’ 24-bit capable iPod before too long.

What about music that’s already been ripped/downloaded?

If you’ve already got a substantial digital music collection stored on a hard disk or computer, importing this into iTunes is easy – provided the music is in an iTunes-friendly format (iTunes won’t, for instance, play Windows Media Audio music files).

All you need to do is transfer the files on to your Mac or PC, then copy and paste (or drag) them into the iTunes library window. This should copy them across, with tags and track names intact.

All of this may seem like a lot of effort, but as any audiophile will tell you, the differences are in the details, and the more little improvements you make to the way you listen to your iPod and the music stored on it, the more enjoyable your listening experience.

If you have any other tips for getting the best out of your iPod, please let us know below.

The Bowers & Wilkins car has been re-branded as a Hot Wheels car for the the current Indy 500 race.

It looks great and there will be actual Hot Wheels cars with our logo  in the stores for Christmas.

For more information on how Tagliani and Junqueira and the car are doing, you can check the Fazzt website, there are lots of pictures and information on how they place for each race.

We also thought we’d share these pictures that Dave Baker, one of our West Coast reps,  took of the lego models he made with his kids which we love.

In September’s edition of What Hi-Fi? Sound & Vision the Zeppelin Mini iPod speaker system comes out top in a four way test beating highly-rated competition from Bose, Creative and GenevaSound.

The reviewers credit the Zeppelin Mini with “greater details and dynamics” than its closest rival. They also note that “refinement is high on the agenda, but this dock also has enough punch to make it the life and soul of the party”, concluding that it is able to “pick up details that aren’t acknowledged by lesser systems.”

The UK’s most ambitious music prize is the PRS for Music Foundation New Music Award which carries a £50,000 prize.

This year, for the first time, they are opening the voting to the public. The voting will close on 12th September and the public vote will count as one vote on the judging panel. The winner will be awarded a £50,000 prize at a glittering ceremony in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion on 16th September and their winning new musical work will premiere in 2011.

Let us know at the bottom of this blog which piece you think deserves to win and why, then vote here. The best answer will win a Zeppelin Mini and an iPod loaded with the five short listed films plus a half-hour SkyArts documentary.

The five shortlisted ideas cover the widest possible range of musical genres from electronic and site specific to acoustic and African-inspired beats, and the PRS for Music Foundation has comissioned a short film for each of the entries.

The five entries are:

aroundNorth – a stellar orchestra based on the rotation of stars around the Celestial North Pole

Automata Musica – combines the skills of composer and craftsman to make “automatic instruments” which audience members can play

The Battle of the Wordsmiths - recreates African musical instruments through beatboxing which introduces western audiences to the ancient traditions to Yoruba culture

The Organ of Corti - recycles existing sounds to create new ways of listening

SATSYMPH – a “satellite symphony” delivered through an iPhone app

The films will also be screened free from 26th July to 5th September. Venues include the ICA, London, Watershed in Bristol, the Black Box in Belfast, Sage Gateshead, Cornerhouse in Manchester, Cardiff Chapter Arts Centre, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, Liverpool Bluecoat Arts Centre, Nottingham Broadway Media Centre and the Roundhouse, London.

Let us know at the bottom of this blog which piece you think deserves to win and why, then vote here. The best answer will win a Zeppelin Mini and an iPod loaded with the 5 short listed films plus a half-hour SkyArts documentary.

Massive Attack – Heligoland

Vinyl Factory/Virgin

Vinyl

By Paul Rigby

Any new album by Massive Attack is worthy of note and Heligoland is no exception, not least for the additional personalities that always congregate. Amongst the luminaries on this release is Blur’s Damon Albarn, Elbow’s Guy Garvey, Portishead’s Adrian Utley plus vocalists Horace Andy and Mazzy Star. This is the band’s fifth studio album and it’s a corker. Their best for years. Okay, it’s been seven since the last one, but you know what I mean. Yes, they continue to utilise their collaborators in a creative manner: never ‘bolt ons’, Massive Attack collaborators always discover something new about themselves when they appear with the Bristol collective, it’s more than that, though. This new Massive Attack album returns to the band’s roots. Maybe it’s the return to the fold of Grant “Daddy G” Marshall – a black man who brings a black soul to the white man, 3D’s, fripperies seen in the last outing 100^th Window. That album saw Massive Attack reduced to 3D and 3D alone. Now, Daddy G brings…an extra dimension to the music. So we get dubby bass in Paradise Circus, reflective soul in Saturday Come Slow and a tingling sensation in your tummy with Flat Of The Blade.

Although the album itself is worthy of attention, this limited edition version also deserves some close examination because its production values are top notch. The album arrives on two LPs pressed onto 180gm vinyl but you also get an extra disc, an additional 12 featuring four bonus tracks. For those fond of the digital interpretation, there’s also the CD version for the album included, housed in a black pochette, with a black-glitter coated cover and a 28-page booklet with plenty of new photographs. That lot is featured in a triple gatefold sleeve with a black-glitter coated cover artwork by Robert Del Naja, also known as Massive Attack’s 3D.

There’s an enticing gloom about Heligoland that is fleshed out by hip grinding grooves and a great deal of texture. It’s like getting your fingers stuck into a shag pile carpet, you can almost feel your brain becoming clogged with a close knit conglomeration of forms and structures which means that Heligoland is a great ‘repeat listen’ album. You hear something new in it every time.

Stand-out track: Flat Of The Blade

A complex creation that demands a lot from your hi-fi and forces it to work hard, separating the electronic melange and interwoven bass. A poor system will present an aural blob, a top notch hi-fi will provide a hypnotic, sonic assault.

Stand-out track: Girl I Love You

Bass fans will love the rolling lower frequencies from this track that demands that you move to the beat. A difficult track to remain sitting to, therefore. If your speakers can control this subtly powerful bass signal, you’ll have a find ol’time.

Tracklisting

Pray for Rain

Babel

Splitting the Atom

Girl I Love You

Psyche

Flat of the Blade

Paradise Circus

Rush Minute

Saturday Come Slow

Atlas Air