The HiFi Hobbyist Podcast

HiFi Heroes: Peter Walker of QUAD

This is the first in an occasional series of podcasts devoted to some of my Hi-Fi heroes. This podcast is dedicated to Peter Walker, founder of QUAD. These days, QUAD is owned by the International Audio Group and many of its products form part of the current fashion for retro products.
However, during the first fifty years of its life, under the ownership of Peter Walker it was arguably the most innovative of British HiFi companies.
Peter Walker was a keen musician as well as engineer, and he favoured classical music, so we have chosen Handel’s Water Music to accompany this podcast, performed by  The Jean-Francois Paillard Chamber Orchestra, in a recording from 1961, available from the Internet Archive under a Usage Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Creative Commons Licence.

Journeys: an experiment in AI and Music Part 2

This is the second part of the Hi-Fi Hobbyist Podcast on AI and Music. In this part we present the second side of the virtual album “Journeys”. Side 2 is made up of songs based upon real-life journeys undertaken by ancestors of the HiFi Hobbyist, or other people known to him. These journeys were often undertaken willingly in search of new opportunities and generally have positive outcomes. The music reflects the more positive stories on side 2 of the virtual vinyl album.
Following the music, there is a discussion of the issues around AI and music to conclude the podcast.
If you enjoy the music, please access the full release with lyrics and images at the main Hi-Fi hobbyist website

Journeys: an experiment in AI and Music Part 1

This week’s podcast is in two parts. It is a departure from the usual pattern, looking at the use of AI in the generation of music. There are legal and ethical issues, especially in the area of creativity and intellectual property, and we shall return to these at the end of Part 2 of the Podcast. This podcast is built around Journeys, a music and AI project developed by the Hi-Fi Hobbyist., featured in full on the  main website at Hi-Fi Hobbyist dot net, as a virtual vinyl album with two sides, a cover and an album booklet with lyrics and further images. Within the “Journeys” project, the Hi-Fi Hobbyist acts as human creator, sets creative direction and has overall control, and views the use of AI as an instrument to achieve the desired outcomes in words, music, and images. The song lyrics are based upon ideas researched from historical and personal sources by the human creator. He maps out the narratives, then turns them into lyrics that fit the structure and meter, with the help of AI.The music is generated by the Mureka AI tool in response to detailed instructions provided by the human creator. Typically, Mureka generates four options, and then human creator then selects the most suitable version.   Part 1 of the podcast presents Side 1 of the virtual vinyl album. Side 1 is made up of a series of songs about journeys based upon the historical events of the Highland clearances. It contrasts the journeys through life of those clearing and those being cleared. The music is in a Celtic style and draws upon the message and musical style of 7:84 Theatre Company's iconic The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil. Each song is linked to a historical event from the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century, although some artistic licence is employed. 

How Chinese brands are no longer merely imitating Western brands

In a previous podcast, we looked at Chi-Fi, Chinese-manufactured Hi-Fi, which is gaining increasing recognition in the international Hi-Fi market. In this podcast, we will look in more detail at how this industry has developed from a low-cost manufacturing centre to an innovation and R&D hub, and how Chinese brands are now building products based on their own innovations that can match or outperform traditional rivals from the West. In the first part, we look at the historical development of the industry before moving on to policy and economic drivers. After that, we will consider examples of technological innovations originating in China and the Hi-Fi products developed from them. The podcast concludes by considering potential future directions and trends. The accompanying music is by Frédéric Sylvestre and hosted at pixabay.com, and is used under a Pixabay content licence.

The AI debate about how to deal with your room acoustics

Last week's podcast looked at the issue of room acoustics and room treatment. This week, we hand over the topic to AI protagonists for a debate about whether specialist room treatments are required in a domestic setting, or whether simpler pragmatic adjustments to room decor with the potential addition of digital signal processing can suffice. As always, the purpose of deploying AI is to provide an alternative view of the issue. 
The accompanying music this week is from the Planet Suite by Gustav Holst, played by the USAF Heritage of America Band and supplied by musopen.org, and available in the public domain. 
I hope you enjoy the debate!

The elephant is in the room and its called acoustics

 Recent opinion pieces on the HiFi Hobbyist website have reported on differing views from online commentators on the importance of room acoustics and room treatments.
In this podcast, we will look in more detail at the underlying scientific theory and seek our own conclusions on the topic. 
Part 1 of the podcast outlines the basic acoustics theory, Part 2 looks at the implications of the Schroder frequency and the need to handle upper and lower frequencies differently and then Part 3 looks at treatments designed to alleviate problems caused by reflections and reverberations, before a final conclusion. The accompanying music consists of two concertos in the Baroque style, created by the HiFi Hobbyist with the help of Mureka software.

AI takes a deeper look at how the recording quality of live albums improved over the 1970s

This week's podcast is a generated discusison take a deeper look into how the recording quality of live albums improved over the 1970s. The discussion is not limited to the five albums I discussed last week, and the discussion has a more U.S-centric feel which may balance things for those who think my choices last week were too UK-biased. Once again, I have generated accompanying music to show how AI thinks live rock music from this period sounds .

My favourite double live albums from the 1970s

For me, the 1970s were a golden age of the double live album. Of course, these were the days of vinyl, so we’re talking about four sides, giving a total playing time of up to about 90 minutes.
Speaking personally, this was how I got to know some of my favourite bands of this era. In this podcast, I will seek to identify my five favourite live albums from the period and discover how they were recorded.
What are your favourite live albums from the era? What memories do they evoke?
I hope you enjoy the podcast
 

The AI discussion about 100 years of recordings of Beethoven Symphonies

This week’s podcast is the last in a cycle of four. Using the same sources as the Hi-Fi Hobbyist did last week, our AI protagonists discuss the significance of the key recordings of Beethoven’s 9 Symphonies. 
This week’s music accompanying the podcast are selections from an early recording of Arturo Toscanini conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F major, Opus 68, the ‘Pastorale' at the Queen's Hall, London in 1937, first released in 1943 and now in the public domain and available at Wikimedia Commons. Listen for the genuine surface noise of a 78 rpm shellac record faithfully reproduced on the digital transcription! I hope you enjoy the discussion and want to listen to more podcasts from the HiFi Hobbyist, including the last three about the Beethoven Symphonies, if you have arrived at this one first! 

100 years of recordings of Beethoven’s Symphonic Cycle

This week’s podcast is the third of a four-week cycle. This week will review recordings of Beethoven’s nine symphonies from the last one hundred years. This will be followed next week by letting our AI protagonists discuss the most significant recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies. The podcasts are all accompanied by extracts from the Symphonies. This week’s recordings of the Eroica Symphony are performed by The Czech National Symphony Orchestra and published by the Musopen Kickstarter Project under a Creative Commons PDM 1.0 Licence and hosted at classicals.deI hope you enjoy this week’s podcast, and if you do, please come back next week for the last podcast in the cycle, or if you have not done so, catch up with the previous podcasts.