Editorial October 2024

October 2024

Part of this learning journey is learning new things. Learning from a master about how little you know about a subject that you count yourself lucky to be immersed in not once, but twice in short succession is a learning event that humbles and inspires at the same time. Sitting with Sean Brokensha and doing our first two podcasts together shows me how far we have yet to come in understanding lyrics in songs and their meanings with our chats in between takes.

Then finding the podcast How Music Does That was equally a game changer and I genuinely was both moved by and fell in love with it. I urge and encourage anyone who has an interest in music to take a listen to it – it is yet another definition of doing what I cannot and a true internet joy.

There’s more. We’ve touched on car audio in the past and there is more coming. It drives home, pun intended, the diversity of the joys of music.

It led me to a thought I had when viewing an electron microscope picture of a CD with the dashes grooved into the face of it. That a laser picks up what in essence is digital on and off at a rate fast enough to recreate a wave form pattern that we hear as sound even today boggles the mind. I think we’re just so used to the concept that it’s old hat and unimpressive but the engineering tolerances that are in play at this level are so fine and exacting that if they’re even slightly off we’ll pick it up with our monstrously enormous (by comparison) physical ears and audio nerve translation networks within our brains.

How we are able to reproduce sound at all, with so much that can go wrong between source signal and ear, with any degree of credibility whatsoever is a thoroughly modern concept that spans a mere few decades, and it leads me to wonder what it is that our kids are going to experience in the next few… In the meantime I will sit, in wonder, and listen and ponder on how any of it does that for me. And why.

Shout out to Andrew. You da man!

William Kelly

Publisher