I keep hearing the same lament from every corner of the high end: “Where are all the young guys who used to be into hi-fi?” The answer, of course, is that all the young guys who used to be into hi-fi are now middle-aged guys who are into hi-fi. Look around, and the plain simple truth is you just don’t see nearly as many young audiophiles as you did 10 years ago.
But you know what? You’re just looking in the wrong place. Young guys today are just as into audio gear as they ever were—maybe even more so. They’re just not hanging out at the local hi-fi hut yakkin’ about cables and cartridges, and they’re not joining up with the local audiophile club to swap tales of Magnepan lust and other schoolboy crushes.
Because today’s audiophile isn’t an audiophile at all. He’s a project- studio geek!
Maybe you spent all your time and money on your hi-fi rig when you were in your 20s, but these days, audio-fascinated 20- and 30-some- things are spending their time and money on their project studios— basement digital-audio recording rigs that are to these guys what a hi fi system is to an audiophile: a toy, a great complicated electronic assemblage of parts and components and cables that will not only play music, but also let you dick around with it in every possible dimension. Young amateur recordists are picking up where audiophiles have left off. And all it takes is a few hours spent with these kids to see that gear-head audiophilia is alive and well. It’s boys and their toys, just like before, but this time around it’s all about making music as well as listening to it.
The engine fueling the project-studio boom is the sudden affordability of professional-quality digital multi- track recording gear. You can now go down to a music store and take home an eight-track digital recording deck for just a couple grand. Think about that—eight tracks of CD-quality dig ital recording on a videocassette for less than what some middle-aged audio dorks spend on a pair of speaker cables. These modular digital multi- tracks (aka MDMs), such as the Ale sis ADAT and Tascam’s DA-38, are what most of the serious project-studio geeks base their rigs on. But if you’ve got a fast Pentium II rig and a nice, fat hard drive, PC-based recording— where you can forgo tape altogether and in stead just re cord your eight, 16, or however many tracks you wish right onto your PC’s hard drive as digital WAV files—is another way to skin the cat that’s fast catching up to MDMs in popularity.
I don’t really consider myself that old, but what kids today have at their disposal is just astounding to me. When I was 15, I felt like the luckiest guy alive because I had the first Tascam Portastudio four-track cassette mixer/recorder. Even with Dolby, it hissed like a steam engine and had no high end above 8 kHz, but man, was I in love with that thing! I cut my teeth on the Portastudio, learning how to flip the tape over and do backwards guitar solos, plus mix and bounce tracks . . . you name it. (Mixing and bouncing means consolidating a bunch of tracks and dubbing them to a stereo mix, thus freeing up the other two tracks for more recording—the way George Martin recorded Sgt. Pepper, back before studios had mega-track capability.) I’d record massive guitar armies by overdubbing four, five, twenty guitar tracks all screaming in different directions. I know, it’s not quite the same white-knuckled joyride as listening to purist-miked dulcimer music on a pair of Wilsons, but hey, I was young.
That Portastudio was a great learning tool, but no way in hell did it ever sound even remotely like a professional recording. It sounded like what it was—a crappy cassette deck. But these Tascam and Alesis MDMs don’t just come close to the quality of real professional studios, they’re the same quality. With one of these jobs hitched up to a cheap Mackie mixer, a couple of mikes, and a $300 CD-R recorder, you can record, mix, and manufacture your own finished music CDs for a couple bucks a pop! And you wonder why kids are into project studios these days instead of braying with their pals like a couple of Francis the Talking Mules about whether Yugo or NOS 6DJ8s sound better in the input stage of an Audio Research.
Still, the parallels between the project- studio geeks of today and the audio dorks of yesteryear are startling. Just as you and your audiophile buddies spent all your hard-earned bread on turntables, preamps, and speakers, project-studio geeks blow their paychecks on boutique “prosumer” microphones, mike preamps, and monitor speakers. And you should hear these guys argue about which mike preamp sounds the best with which microphone and whether or not the Alesis ADAT digital multitrack recorder sounds more “digital” than the Tascam DA-38.
I even heard one guy talking about his discovery that changing the preamp’s input loading of a microphone changes the sound, just as audiophiles discovered the same thing years ago with phono preamps and cartridges.
It is the same thing—it’s déjà vu all over again. The refreshing difference, though, is that instead of a bunch of creepy loners get ting all hissy about things like midrange bloom and detail, project-studio geeks are, for the most part, less about BS and more about music. And while most audiophiles I know just chase their own tails when it comes to system upgrading, project-studio geeks generally enjoy a pretty steady up ward trajectory as they acquire new gear and learn how better to use it all. The project-studio scene is definitely where the action is for today’s young audio gear-heads.
The trouble is that while quite a few home-recording mags have sprung up in the last few years to review this gear, none of them really do a good job describing the gear from an audiophile’s perspective. They give good features info, but I read these reviews and think, “Yeah, but what’s it sound like?” And I know many project-studio geeks scan the hi-fi mags like Audio to get hipped to hardware they can appropriate for their own use, such as NHT’s SuperOne and Paradigm’s Active/20 speakers, which have gone on to become popular monitor speakers among the project-studio cognoscenti.
I’m really into this. So in addition to coverage of high-end audio and home theater gear, expect to see some further exploration of the project-studio scene in this space. My own studio is currently doing double duty as a test bed for future reviews of such products as Mackie’s new powered monitor speakers, which look like serious competitors to the Paradigm Active/20s; Event’s $499 Gina sound card, which turns a PC into a 20-bit multitrack digital audio recorder; and a hot new $200 compressor from a small company in Austin, Tex., that just may be the best-sounding studio processor I’ve ever heard. I’ll tell you all about it next month.
Adapted from 1998 Audio magazine article. Classic Audio and Audio Engineering magazine issues are available for free download at the Internet Archive (archive.org, aka The Wayback Machine)