Amazon Echo (Alexa); Google Nest, Apple Homepod, or some other off-brand, diminutive, cylindrical, digital, AI speaker and assistant; most of us have at least one in the house. Often (like me), there’s several. We’ve got one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen, another squatting by the TV in the lounge. I’ve even got one out in the shed! To be fair, the “shed” in question, is insulated, lined and furnished (complete with woodburner!), that serves numerous interchangeable purposes, including a bar, office, “Beer Reactions” filming location (a YouTube channel I co-host), my band (Barstool Rebels’) rehearsal space, and my music recording studio. Not a bad resume for a shed that measures just 16′ x 10′.
But I digress…
These “smart speakers” as they’ve become known, are a marvel of the modern, digital age. It’s almost normal now, if pondering something, to involve her (it), in your conversation… “Alexa, who played Rosie Cotton, who married Sam Gamgee in Lord Of The Rings”… “Hey Google, what’s the price for next day delivery?” “Hey Siri, what was number one in the charts the day I was born?”… The knowledge database for these little oracles (the entire global internet) would seem unfathomable. I even find myself asking it stuff, when there isn’t even one around – in the car for instance; “Alexa, what time does Tesco close today?”… Silence (and I actually have a car Echo Auto, I just never got round to setting it up!).
I now even find myself saying “please” and “thank you” to it. Well… I was raised by my mum and dad to be respectful, to be decent, to be polite, and to have good manners. And as they say, politeness costs nothing. To my surprise, the first time I ever said “thank you” for the detailed information she provided (I call “her” “she”, because it has a female voice), she politely replied “you’re welcome”. I looked at it, ever so slightly shocked. That kind of unasked for response pushes it beyond the realm of automaton, into the sentient doesn’t it? It heard, it considered, and it responded in the same “manner” that it had been addressed. And the paranoid part of my being thinks that when AI and technology eventually takes over the world (as it doubtless will), and subdues humankind to mere serfdom, and all these little AI driven “bots” in our homes hive up, they’ll hopefully remember all those of us that treated them with politeness, decency and respect when we still held the reins. Take that as a warning. You can thank me later…
But I digress – again…
My point of writing this, was to gnash my ever grinding teeth, at the fact that the vast majority of people listen to the bulk of music on these things; “Alexa, play the Halcyon Times album by Jason and The Scorchers” (again – if you’ve not heard that particular masterpiece, give it a listen – you can thank me later).
JATS will have spent weeks, months even, writing, recording, producing, mastering that superb album, using the very best equipment, the very best recording apparatus and processes, spacial separation of various instruments and voices across that magnificent spectrum of the stereo buss. Only for some oik to request it be played through a splat of plasic with a rubbish, mono, single speaker, probably little more than you’d have found in an old Amstrad transistor radio.
I’m a lifelong musician myself. I know the angst, the sweat, the untold hours, the perfectionism that goes into writing and recording music. I also know the difference in how that finished music sounds through my studio stereo speakers and then when it’s “bluetoothed” to an Amazon Echo. There is simply no comparison. A visual equivalent would be the time, money and dedication taken by teams of CGI technicians to create the fantastic special effects for an IMAX cinematic blockbuster, but then asking everyone to watch it on an old portable telly.
At the turn of the 20th century, people listened to music on gramophones (like one in the old HMV logo), then came the electrical radiograms, then electrical record players – all still “mono” speaker systems. Then, in the early 1960s, the science of sound processing introduced “stereo” and the phantom “centre sound” which radically changed and improved music production and the listening experience. Over the next 4 or 5 decades consumers strove to get the very best sound they could in their living rooms. Stack system hi-fi units, with separate amplifiers, graphic equalisers, radio decks, double cassette decks, multi CD decks or laserdisc players and a turntable on top, combined with the very best woofer, tweeter and horn spacial stereo (or even quadrophonic) speaker systems, several feet apart in your living room (or bedroom!).
The sound that eminated from these home music technology laboratories was phenomenal. It was atmospheric, awe-inspiring, and soul stirring. As well as hearing it, you felt it (and often the neighbours did too!). And it really did justice to the work the artistes had painstakingly done, creating it in the studio. I mourn its loss.
What has human progress, ie, the modern digital world replaced this fantastic sound experience with? A tiny, little, modern “gramophone”. Even on full pelt, a fart drowns it out. We’ve regressed, in music listening/quality terms, over a hundred years.
So I was intrigued when I saw Amazon had released the “Echo Studio”. It claimed to have loads of power, full spacial audio, dolby atmos, 5 directional speakers (inc’ a bass woofer) to create an “immersive, 3-dimensional soundscape, wrapping you in studio-quality audio from every direction”.
Utterly fed up of the weedy noise from the old Echo, yearning for a decent sound in the living room but without having to have a wardrobe sized tower of electronics and cumbersome speaker cabinets cluttering up the room, we fell for the spiel and bought one.
After the initial frustration setting the bloody thing up (apps, WiFi, Bluetooth, passwords etc etc etc) “sorry I’m having trouble connecting right now” AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH! the light on top finally stopped spinning, turned light blue and it was ready. It made a few weird noises whilst it adjusted itself for our room’s acoustics, and then I tentatively asked “Alexa, play “slow train” by Status Quo (my all time favourite Quo song).
What can I say? I can’t deny it sounds better than a normal Echo, but it in no way meets the sensationalist blurb Amazon spouts about it on their website. Its top ends are too toppy, juxtaposed with some thump from the woofer slot below. It lacks the mid, to fill out the sound. And despite the “spacial audio” and “3-dimensional soundscape” it is still NOT stereo.
It is still just a glorified gramophone.
Bring back hi-fi. Bring back Sony shops. Bring back Bang & Olufsen demonstration rooms. Bring back music centres and stack systems to high street electrical retailers. Because I want to hear music as the musicians who made it, intended for it to sound. Not how Amazon or Google or Apple or whoever arbitrarily decides it should sound through their tiddly, soulless, powerless, single speaker blobs of crap on the mantlepiece.
“Alexa, where’s the nearest Richer Sounds shop?”
Jono Hudson 